This article reassesses the influence of American business on US foreign policy towards Nicaragua, 1893–1912. It describes three episodes that involved American interests in Nicaragua – the Reyes uprising of 1899, the Emery claim of 1903–1909, and the US & Nicaragua Mining Company claim of 1908–1912 – as evidence for a different interpretation of US policy, one which stresses how the influence and material interests of American ‘men on the spot’ framed the ways in which the State Department came to understand American aims in Nicaragua. Earlier accounts of ‘Dollar Diplomacy’ do not adequately acknowledge the significant political consequences of American merchant activity on the Mosquito Coast.

Within a short time span Brazil became one of the world's largest producers of defence hardware. In 1987, Brazil was the fifth largest exporter of arms worldwide and the second largest arms producer among the newly industrialised countries (NICs). This article argues that the roots of this rapid development of the Brazilian Defence Industry (BDI) lie in the vital role of multinational companies (MNCs) and in the harmonious tripod orchestrated by the Brazilian government. The State, through its interaction with the Brazilian private sector and with subsidiaries of MNCs, brought together the political support, a supply of funds, the manufacturing capability and technology that are vital in any attempt to establish an indigenous defence industry. Above all, the Brazilian government achieved the balanced coordination of these variables essential for maintaining the dynamics of the industry.

This paper makes an empirical contribution to discussion of the optimal exchange rate regime. Using a new dataset for Central American countries, we compare the dynamics of the real exchange rate (RER) between dollarised and non-dollarised countries. Our results show that the two dollarised countries in the region, El Salvador and Panama, are quite different in terms of RER dynamics. In El Salvador the RER spends more time away from its equilibrium level than in the non-dollarised countries in the region, while the contrary is true for Panama. We also find that inflation persistence is similar in El Salvador to the other countries, but smaller in Panama. This leads us to the conclusion that some degree of exchange rate flexibility helps countries to have a more aligned RER. Nevertheless, a long-lived, highly credible dollarised economy, like Panama, can reduce inflation persistence to such an extent that RER misalignments are in fact less frequent than in countries with more flexible exchange rate regimes.

With polling and municipal level data, we analyse the determinants of Salvador Allende's presidential election victory in 1970 and the change in political and electoral support for his government (1970–3). Support for Allende is explained by ideology more than by social class, socio-demographic variables or the economic performance of the country. Allende won in 1970 as an opposition candidate when the outgoing Frei administration enjoyed high approval and the country was experiencing favourable economic conditions. In 1973, when Allende had 49.7% approval, ideology remained the strongest determinant of presidential approval. Economic variables and social class are less important in explaining electoral support for Allende and for his Popular Unity coalition.

The debt crisis has been the dominant feature of Latin American economic and political life since 1982. While the Reagan Administration gave greater priority to Central America, it nevertheless managed the international response to the debt crisis. US management initially seemed logical for several reasons: US hegemony worldwide, the traditionally close relationship between the United States and Latin America, and the leading exposure of US banks in Latin American debt. During the period since 1982, however, two of these three elements have changed. Japan has challenged US hegemony, although it certainly has not displaced the United States, and Japanese banks have caught up with their US counterparts as holders of Latin American debt.2 Despite their lack of traditional relations with Latin America, then, the Japanese are becoming increasingly – although perhaps reluctantly – involved in the region.

This article examines the collective action frames that civil societal actors in Argentina have used while engaging in advocacy. It argues that by devising effective framing strategies, members of civil society organisations increase their chances of participating in the agenda-setting, formulation and adoption phases of policy-making. The relationship between framing and participation is supported by a comparative analysis of two cases of advocacy: the campaign for a freedom of information law and the struggle for child protection legislation. The evidence suggests that civil societal actors often rely on the strength of their ideas and their persuasive power to achieve political relevance, which is analytically distinct from political outcomes.

It is through the organisation of labour that class interests and class antagonisms become manifest. A major problem with recent debates about the informal sector, petty commodity producers or the marginalised labour force is that their structural positions in the economy have not been translated into class analysis, whereby the social position of the sector of the labour force under discussion is clearly identified in relation to other groups in society. As a result, conflicting interests are not fully discussed and the capacity of the urban poor for organising and working towards the amelioration of their condition is ignored.

The central paradox of Mexican liberalism was that ‘the proponents of a massive transformation of property relations refused to sanction a central executive endowed with sufficient power either to implement these aims or to resist the reaction they inevitably provoked. The liberals resolutely refused to will the appropriate means to achieve their desired ends’.1 Contemporary statesmen denounced the constitution of 1857 as impracticable and in 1861 Benito Juárez complained: ‘Under these conditions it is impossible to govern: no-one obeys me and I am not able to oblige anyone to obey’.2 In a subsequent study of this period, Emilio Rabasa pointed out that in practice Juárez governed Mexico in despite of the constitution, obtaining from Congress the grant of ‘extraordinary faculties’ which effectively allowed him to rule as dictator. The recent work of Richard N. Sinkin and Laurens Ballard Perry has confirmed the accuracy of Rabasa's diagnosis.3 During the restored republic, 1867–72, Juárez skilfully deployed the prestige and loyal following he had won by his unyielding resistance to the French Intervention to create a presidential autocracy. Public revenues were used to recruit and maintain a political machine which succeeded in imposing official candidates as congressional deputies, jefes políticos, and even state governors. All attempts to challenge the regime by armed revolt were firmly crushed by the regular army. At the same time, political opposition still continued to find public and often violent expression in the press.

For over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality.

This article gives an account of the developments in the Dominican Republic's economy from the 1990s boom to the crisis of the new millennium, focusing on the monetary and exchange rate dynamics behind that transition. It is argued that the liberalisation of interest rates in the 1990s, together with an appreciated real exchange rate and weak bank supervision, led to the dollarisation of the banking system. These and other structural imbalances exacerbated the impact of a series of adverse shocks on the economy at the beginning of the millennium, including a banking crisis costing approximately 20 per cent of gross domestic product in 2003.

This article analyses Adalberto Tejeda's agrarian experiment in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, during the years 1928–32. This experiment was unique in two respects. First, disregarding the central government's policy, which sought to end agrarian distribution completely, it parcelled out land to the peasants on an unprecedented scale; secondly, it proved, contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the time, that agrarian reform implemented through the full range of channels offered by the 1917 federal constitution could serve as a tool of social justice and equality, and hence as a central factor in the advancement of social welfare and democracy in Mexico. This article seeks to show that the failure of the Veracruz experiment offers an explanation – perhaps a cardinal explanation – for the perceived failure of Mexican agrarian reform in general.

During the period since the Revolution of 1952 and the later agrarian reform a new settlement type has been created in the northern Altiplano and the sub-tropical valleys of the Yungas of La Paz. New nucleated settlements have been built by the rural people, largely spontaneously, and they represent a break with the dispersed pattern of dwellings that was the characteristic form of rural settlement prior to 1952.

Cuba–Soviet relations are examined in the period that Mikhail Gorbachev was leader of the Soviet Union, focusing on the Cuban perception of the effects of the Soviet reforms on the relationship, in the light of the campaign of rectification of errors. It is concluded that the Cuban leadership kept a surprisingly united front in this period; the year 1989 and repercussions of the August 1991 coup were vital; but the Cuban reaction was not more critical due to diplomatic constraints and the hope that a semblance of the relationship could continue, despite the situation within the Soviet Union.

Given the historic role of cities in Latin America as an instrument for appropriating territory and for ordering society, one may wonder why more attention is not paid to the Latin Americans' own vision of the city. We are sometimes asked to believe that only in the 1940s did the urban phenomenon loom in their world and that our knowledge of it comes from foreign demographers and anthropologists. Colonial sources like Solórzano and the Recopilación, however, demonstrate that the IberoCatholic political tradition gives central importance to the organizational and paradigmatic functions of the urban unit. After independence, to be sure, this tradition was eclipsed by the ‘ruralization’ of Latin American societies as urban, bureaucratic structures decayed and power flowed to the agrarian domain. At this time also, intellectual horizons opened to offer release from scholastic constraints, encouraging the intelligentsia to make eclectic, sometimes euphoric assessments of their new nations' future potential. Of these pensadores Sarmiento almost alone dealt directly with the city's role in nation building. Yet his very plea that the city — whether Buenos Aires or a new ‘Argirópolis’ — assume ‘modernizing’ or ‘developmental‘functions reverts to the old Mediterranean notion that the city (civitas) is one with ‘civilization’. For this Alberdi attacked him, reminding Sarmiento that in Argentina town and country, civilization and barbarism, were not disjoined but fused in a single society and polity.

The history of the transition to civilian rule in Chile largely overlooks or marginalizes the role of the armed and confrontational forms of resistance to the dictatorship. This article traces the pre and post-coup history of the Left's engagement with armed forms of struggle and evaluates the effects their incorporation into the struggle against the dictatorship had upon the regime and the Reagan administration. It concludes that armed resistance was a major factor in determining US policy to Chile during the 1980s, and therefore played an important role in the transition as a whole.

This article discusses the colonial encounter of the Welsh and Tehuelche/Mapuche in the Welsh colony (Y Wladfa Gymreig), founded 1865. The Welsh sought to create a Welsh-speaking utopia in the ‘empty’ lands of Patagonia, paradoxically using this colonisation as a way to resist disparagement of the Welsh language and culture by an English-dominated state. The article deploys a ‘coloniality of power’ perspective and explores archive materials that reveal how both the Welsh and the indigenous communities whose land they colonised were caught up in coloniality and expanding capitalist modernity. I conclude that exploring the ambiguous relationship which results from this encounter complicates and deepens our understanding of how the coloniality of power works. Particularly, I argue that stripping away the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and indigenous is vital, not to diminish moments of genuine mutual affinity but rather to show how these are caught up in processes of colonialisation.

Medical developments in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century have received little attention. This study examines the Mexican responses to the success and failures of an important international health campaign of the 1950s: malaria eradication. During the 1950s malaria became the disease of central concern for international and US agencies working in developing countries (as yellow fever and hookworm were for tropical health during the early twentieth century). This article outlines the motivations, design and techniques of the campaign. It concentrates on two local responses: first, the enthusiastic support displayed by personnel working in the field; and, secondly, the reactions against the campaign of a local doctor – who revealed some of the inadequacies of malaria eradication – and of two medical anthropologists, who emphasised the scant attention paid to the cultural and social aspects of the campaign.