This article looks at the extent to which Peruvian women have been able to use a legal and institutional framework designed to combat domestic violence, despite its significant defects, in order to transform the authoritarian forms of communication that prevail in their families, organisations, and communities. Using in-depth interviews with women in Lima, Huancavelica and Ayacucho, the article suggests that while democratisation from above may often result in limited transformations in many policy areas, we must be attentive to the way in which democratisation can be appropriated, transformed and reinvigorated from below.

This article analyses the political economy of Henri Lefebvre's concept of ‘state space’ with specific attention directed towards the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City, completed in 1938. The conditions of modernity can be generally related to the spatial ordering of urban landscapes within capital cities conjoining the specifics of national identity with imitative processes. Antonio Gramsci captured such sentiments through his understanding of the condition of ‘passive revolution’. The key contribution of this article is to draw attention to forms of everyday passive revolution, recognising both cosmopolitan and vernacular aspects of modern architecture in relation to the Monument to the Revolution. A focus on the Monument to the Revolution thus reveals specific spatial practices of everyday passive revolution relevant to the codification of architecture and the political economy of modern state formation in Mexico. These issues are revealed, literally, as vital expressions in the architecture of everyday passive revolution in modern Mexico.

This paper analyses two efforts of the Mexican Federal Government to implement a tax reform. The first was made by the Echeverría administration (1970–6). The second is currently taking place under the Salinas government, in office since December 1988.

My aim is to understand what economic, ideological and political conditions give rise to a successful tax reform. I will focus on government relations with business, in particular with big business; and on the nature of the proposed tax reforms (each of which had different distributional costs). The question is how these factors affected the outcome of the two reforms. While Echeverría's progressive reform was subsequently replaced by an increase in tax rates, the second, that of Salinas, has, so far, been successful.

Since Chile returned to democracy in 1990, centre-left governments have tried to reform the provisions on collective bargaining, strikes and unions established by the Pinochet dictatorship. Between 2015 and 2016 President Michelle Bachelet made the latest attempt to reform them. Despite favourable conditions, the changes were modest. This article explains why this is so. Drawing upon the notion of ‘associational power’ and through comparisons with labour reforms in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, this article suggests that the imbalance between workers’ and employers’ collective power is key for explaining why pro-labour reforms fail.

With the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement); the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), and political crisis/reform all posing questions both old and new about Mexican nationalism, this article reconsiders the dimensions of the subject, the issues, and the empirical evidence. After setting out an analytical and theoretical framework for the study of nationalism, it concentrates on the many components of Mexican nationalism, the historic and on-going nationalist debates over the Indian, the American and the state, and the nature of nationalist policies over the years. It then reviews research related to such theoretical issues as the linkages between nationalist sentiments, ideas and policies, the social bases of nationalist ideas and perceptions, and the changes in nationalism. The article aims to place longstanding discussions of Mexican nationalism in a theoretical context and to derive conclusions which indicate appropriate directions for future research.

On 3 June 1915 the state legislature of Oaxaca in southern Mexico issued a decree which proclaimed that the ‘free and sovereign state of Oaxaca reassumes its sovereignty until such time as constitutional order is restored in the republic’ (i.e. in accordance with the Constitution of 1857). Governor José Inés Dávila therefore declared that the executive and legislative branches of the state government would assume control and responsibility over the federal agencies and services within the state. The justification for this dramatic course of action, taken at the height of a period of intense civil war in Mexico, was the decree issued by Venustiano Carranza in December 1914, which had suspended the Constitution in favour of a ‘temporary’ period of pre-constitutional government over which he was personally to retain strict executive control as First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army – thus effectively dissolving the constitutional base of the federation. The immediate casus belli was the occupation of the town of Pochutla on Oaxaca's Pacific coast on 1 May by a detachment of Constitutionalist troops, in what Governor Inés Dávila described as ‘a preconceived plan of attack on the sovereignty of the state’.

When Patricio Aylwin accepted the Chilean presidential sash in March 1990 an era in Latin American politics dominated by authoritarian regimes came to an end. Virtually every country in the region now had to grapple with the complicated task of consolidating fragile democratic regimes. Surprisingly, given what may be the emergence of a new democratic era, one is hardpressed even to begin answering an obvious question: How will years of non-democratic rule affect future efforts to establish democratic political processes in their wake? Despite recent attention to the ways in which different types of transition process affect the prospects for democracy, the impact of authoritarian rule on subsequent political processes remains largely unstudied.

The politics of inflation in Latin America

In recent years inflation has accelerated in Latin America to become a seemingly intractable problem. In many countries, even when high inflation or hyperinflation has been brought down, the inflationary ‘floor’ has remained high, with all the appearance of a series of upward and irreversible steps. The underlying average annual rate of inflation has tended to rise steadily, as can be seen in the table overleaf.

The reasons for persisting high inflation and for the seeming inability of government policy to bring inflation down in a lasting manner are complex and controversial. Moreover, as a number of authors have noted,1 the reasons for the failure of anti-inflationary policy are often, in some measure, political as well as purely economic. For one thing, inflation, and efforts to control inflation, involve a redistributive struggle the political costs of which the government may be unable or unwilling to bear. In addition, the government simply may not have the administrative capacity to implement certain measures effectively. For example, one way of restoring fiscal balance may be to increase taxes on wealth-holders, but this may not be a politically feasible option for many governments. Central governments may have limited control over the spending of regional and local governments, or over state-owned corporations, and may therefore have difficulty in controlling expenditure. Moreover, effective anti-inflationary policy may require political conditions that may simply not be present in many Latin American political systems. For example, in September 1989, towards the end of the Sarney government in Brazil, inflation was running at 38% per month.

Promoting democracy and strengthening good governance have become core components of post-conflict peace-building initiatives of the United Nations (UN). An often overlooked dimension of the analysis of UN peace support operations has been the crucial role played by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at the critical juncture linking peacekeeping to sustainable development. UN peace operations in Central America over the last decade have pioneered the organisation's involvement in the uncharted territory of post-conflict peace building. UNDP's Central American experience was the first step in the organisation's evolution away from providing traditional development assistance, towards playing an active and openly political role in post-conflict democracy building and governance reform. This new role of the UNDP has had dramatic repercussions on its mandate, administrative structures, corporate policies and operational strategies. The current institutional renewal of UNDP has its roots in its endorsement of democratic governance as essential dimensions of its mandate to promote sustainable human development. This article assesses the significance, promises and dilemmas of the governance agenda for UNDP and analyses the scope, nature and institutionalisation of democracy and governance programmes within UNDP, using Central America as a case study. It argues that the future of UNDP democracy assistance will largely depend on how successful it is at resolving the inherent tensions between democracy promotion and national sovereignty, while retaining its multilateral approach to peace and democracy.

This article analyses citizen–police relations in the marginalised Mexico City borough of Iztapalapa. It demonstrates that despite predominantly negative perceptions about and experiences with the police, local residents do not abandon state institutions as security providers. The article claims that as formal and informal access to the legal and coercive powers of the police provides an important resource for local residents needing to resolve individual or collective security problems and conflicts in their favour, local police forces continue to be addressed and imagined by residents as relevant security actors.

This paper sets out to examine the way in which guano was dug and removed from the Chincha islands in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Peruvian trade was in its most buoyant phase. We shall, in fact, be looking at the physical operation of an entire export sector, up to the point at which the commodity left the shores of Peru for the farms of Western Europe and North America.

In recent years an ‘ethno-economic’ interpretation of politics in the coffee state of São Paulo in the early twentieth century, associated particularly with the work of Mauricio Font, has gained widespread acceptance. Its claim that state politics in the period was increasingly shaped by a cleavage between a declining traditional coffee aristocracy on the one hand, and a rising, mostly immigrant, smallholding and industrial economy on the other, is challenged here. It is argued, in part on the basis of a re-examination of the sources used by Font, that ideological rather than economic concerns motivated the Liga Nacional, while at county level, in Araras and elsewhere, personal and clientelistic motives continued to shape political loyalties. Finally, the argument that the Partido Democrático was driven primarily by ‘Big Coffee’ reaction to the PRP is shown to be unfounded.

Latin American military dictatorships of the twentieth century were often right-wing, elitist and violent. A marked exception was the left-wing Peruvian military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado. More exceptional still was the government's use of visual media. Between 1968 and 1970 it produced approximately 20 posters, printed in editions of 50,000 to 200,000, to promote the radical Agrarian Reform Law. These posters provide vibrant representations of the agrarian reform's ideological aspects, which have been under-studied. A detailed exploration of visual communication shows that the government deployed aesthetically sophisticated propaganda and symbols to encourage social participation in the reform.

Political change in Mexico since the crisis of 1994 has been characterised by the breakdown of centralised hierarchies and the dispersion of power across geographical regions. We examine the changing relations between regional officials of the National Solidarity Programme (PRONASOL) and local PRI politicians in four Mexican states: Puebla, Nayarit, Tamaulipas, and Baja California. Although PRONASOL was dismantled after 1994, the influence of anti-poverty bureaucrats has varied across geographic regions, depending on whether they had been authorised to engage in grass-roots mobilisation and/or party politics under Salinas. We emphasise the importance of regional politics in transitions from dominant-party regimes, and the impact of conflicts within the political hierarchies of the old regime.

Elisabeth Jelin, in an important recent work, has criticized the overconcern in studies of the Latin American working class with the structural determinants of class relations and class activity. As she pointed out, this has tended to lead to a deterministic approach on the part of the social sciences, emphasizing the lack of autonomy of the working class in terms of its failure to construct a comprehensive, radical challenge to the dominant system on the political level and its domination by, and acceptance of, demobilizing, bureaucratic leaderships on the trade union level.

The walls of downtown Buenos Aires displayed a new and haunting image in the weeks before the inauguration of President Raúl Alfonsín in December, 1983: black, outlined silhouettes of human beings, each accompanied by a name. The ghost-like figures represented those who had ‘disappeared’ in the military's proclaimed ‘war against subversion’. They testified silently but eloquently to the memory of the victims of that experience in the thoughts of many Argentines, and foreshadowed what was to become one of the most vexing political problems for the new civilian government. Among the many difficulties bequeathed to President Alfonsín by the military juntas who ruled Argentina for the eight preceding years, first among these in ethical exigency was the question of what to do concerning los desaparecidos.

A comprehensive study of the available documents about the Bay of Pigs, including many that have been declassified within the last eighteen months, and extensive interviews with the protagonists in the CIA, the White House and the State Department lead me to conclude that the disastrous operation was launched not simply because Kennedy was poorly served by his young staff and was the captive of his campaign rhetoric, nor simply because of the hubris of the CIA. Rather, the Bay of Pigs was approved because the CIA and the White House assumed they were speaking the same language when, in fact, they were speaking in utterly different tongues.

This article examines transnational connections among anti-communist women in Brazil, Chile and the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. It explores the political beliefs and networks upon which these women drew and built in order to promote their role in the overthrow of João Goulart and Salvador Allende and to encourage other women across the Americas to join them in the fight against communism. This paper shows that these women reversed the flow of ideas, served as models for each other and for anti-communist women, and built gendered transnational networks of female anti-communist activists.

Within Latin America, Chile is distinguished by its stable trade policies and rapid negotiation of trade agreements with countries and regions all over the world. Explanations for these phenomena often point to the stable pro-free trade coalition established in the aftermath of the shock-therapy pursued in the 1970s, and Chile's professional government bureaucracy. Although both of these elements are important, this article shows how the rapid integration of Chile into the world economy has also depended on the existence of business associations with expertise on trade issues. Through the process of integration, a close policy network has evolved between key public officials and business representatives. This is premised on the mutual recognition of expertise in the public and private sectors, and is held together by close personal networks of loyalty and trust across the public-private divide. However, while the development of such a policy network has been highly favourable to the process of negotiating trade agreements, it has also contributed to the de-facto exclusion of societal actors that have less to contribute to trade negotiations than business sectors.

The new trade data used here document the significance of industrialisation in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico after 1870. By 1910 Brazil and Mexico, in particular, led most of the poor periphery in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. While some of this impressive industrialisation was due to fast productivity growth in manufacturing, perhaps yielding some catch-up on their competitors in the United States and Europe, this article argues that there were even more powerful forces at work. Much of the industrialisation that occurred in Latin America was due to a cessation in the seven-decade rise in its net barter terms of trade, trends that reversed the deindustrialisation and ‘Dutch Disease’ forces that had dominated Latin America for almost a century. Equally important for Brazil and Mexico was favourable policy in the form of higher effective rates of protection for manufacturing, and a depreciation of the real exchange rate. These policies were missing in Argentina and Chile, and industrialisation suffered there as a consequence. Changing market conditions and policies seem to have been more important than changing fundamentals in accounting for Latin American industrialisation after 1870.