The hypothesis of Andre Gunder Frank that Latin America's underdevelopment is partly attributable to unequal exchange in economic relations with the advanced world includes the obverse proposition that Latin America's growth has been most substantial in periods such as wartime when links with the metropolitan countries were weakened. The most explicit statement of this view occurs in the book, Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution: … the satellites experience their greatest economic development and especially their most classically capitalist industrial development if and when their ties to their metropolis are weakest. This hypothesis is almost diametrically opposed to the generally accepted thesis that development in the underdeveloped countries follows from the greatest degree of contact with and diffusion from the metropolitan developed countries.

The agrarian body of law created by government legislators and jurists in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), sought to restore pueblos’ juridical standing by allowing communities to hold land collectively in the form of ejidos. Yet, state efforts to restructure property relations in the countryside often articulated with local alternative territorial projects that challenged the implementation of these redistributive legal measures. During the course of 50 years, cattle ranchers from the community of El Huanal in Nautla, Veracruz, defended private property, resisted land expropriation, and prevented the establishment of an ejido in the community. How did rancheros achieve this? How did they respond to the pressures of ‘peasant’ mobilisation? How did post-revolutionary legal discourse come to frame this struggle over land? What changes did this failed attempt to implement land reform trigger in the region? Looking closely at the conflicts, interactions, negotiations, and everyday practices that unfolded among a variety of actors around the interpretation and the applicability of ‘the law’, this article demonstrates how the agrarian reform, despite never having been implemented, altered both the material landscape and the social configuration of this community of coastal Veracruz.

The activities of the mercantile houses operating in the import–export trade are of primary importance in tracing and analyzing the nature of economic growth in nineteenth-century Latin America. As a necessary corollary to their trade activities, many houses were also involved in shipping and served as conduits for financial transactions of all types, collecting, receiving and remitting funds as well as making local investments, advances and loans. Mercantile houses thus served as the commercial– financial bridgehead between the new republics and the North Atlantic world. Naturally, not all mercantile houses participated in these activities to the same degree, and a distinction should be noted between agents for houses and partners.

This article explores the legal writings of Brazilian sociologist and jurist Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna to reveal the global context that shaped Brazil's corporatist experiment in the 1930s. From the Labour Ministry, Oliveira Vianna was at the forefront of legal and political debates over how to create corporatist laws and institutions. He was often cast as an authoritarian and retrograde thinker, yet this article looks beyond those categories to examine how his engagement with the US New Deal inserted corporatism into global debates over the role of the state in economic recovery and social welfare.

In 1933 the US ambassador to Cuba, Sumner Welles, overthrew President Machado, Cuba's first dictator, with the threat, but not the use, of US force. This diplomatic achievement was unprecedented in Cuban history. Under cover of mediation Welles had encouraged disaffection among politicians and army officers. Machado then succumbed to a popular uprising brought on by a decade of depression and oppression. The insubordination of the officers, however, soon led to a mutiny of the soldiers, whose leader, Fulgencio Batista, eventually seized the presidency and was recognised by the United States.

Until the 1870s, Argentina was principally a pastoral nation totally depenlent upon trade with more advanced nations to provide basic necessities. Yet, within a brief span of about thirty years, it became a major producer of livestock products, cereals and flour for export, and of a wide variety of foodstuffs and other consumer goods for internal consumption. Most of this had been achieved by the application of protective tariffs to nascent industrial activities, and by the importation and use of new machinery and technology to process available raw materials. Thus, unlike other Latin American nations which had not yet begun the arduous process of modernization, Argentina had already embarked on a program of import substitution and State-encouraged industrialization in the late nineteenth century.

What are the conditions underlying successful implementation of participatory security mechanisms? Drawing on the case of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and from the notion of social embeddedness, we argue that participatory security reforms that aim to include citizens in defining security priorities allow for better adoption of reforms in practice. Local level reforms are not implemented in a social vacuum but rather in pre-existing social networks that are key to their adoption in practice by citizens. However, not all social networks are equal, nor do they operate in the same manner. In ‘Neza’, it is through existing clientelistic networks and socially embedded local brokers that the redes vecinales were implemented and adopted by citizens, leading to varied reform adoption patterns at the very local level.

This article examines the division of powers established in a number of constitutional projects presented during the First Mexican Empire (1821–3). The essay rejects the idea, present in much recent historiography, that constitutional debate in Mexico was exclusively shaped by the experience of Spanish government. Instead it argues that the empire's politicians drew on a wide range of theories, ideas and examples from other constitutional systems.

Anthropological analysis elucidates how discourses about agriculture in one North-east Brazilian community reflect relational roles of citizens and the state, the position of farmers in society, and the relationship of individuals to their work. In these discourses, farmers are positioned as moral, hard-working, autonomous citizens, justifying their participation in low-paying activities. The declining numbers of agricultural workers is explained as a result of individual laziness or government irresponsibility. In using these discourses to take stances publicly on agricultural issues, speakers assign responsibilities and moral status to agents. In constructing rural identities, such moral discourses emphasise the symbolic value of subsistence agriculture as its economic value declines.

This article deals with the process of decision-making in the sphere of taxation in Argentina between 1920 and 1945, focusing on the possible influence of the economic elites in that process. Given the central role of decisions over taxation in any fiscal policy and the momentous transformations that occurred in the Argentine system during this period, analysis of this subject can provide a better understanding of the political role that economic elites in Argentina played between the first presidency of Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916–22) and the ascent of Juan Domingo Perón to the presidency in 1946. Drawing on three key episodes in Argentina policy-making – the attempt to introduce an income tax in 1923, the response to the Depression in 1931–32, and the crisis of 1942–43, this article suggests that parliamentary institutions had stronger resilience in Argentina than is usually believed, and corporatist arrangements became rooted in Argentina only with difficulties.

This article offers an analysis of the transnational discursive construction processes informing Latin American security governance in the aftermath of 9/11. It demonstrates that the Global War on Terror provided an opportunity for external and aligned local knowledge producers in the security establishments throughout the Americas to reframe Latin America's security problems through the promotion of a militarised security epistemology, and derived policies, centred on the region's ‘convergent threats’. In tracing the discursive repercussions of this epistemic reframing, the article shows that, by tapping into these discourses, military bureaucracies throughout the Americas were able to overcome their previous institutional marginalisation vis-à-vis civilian agencies. This development contributed to the renaissance of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism discourses and policies in the region, allowing countries such as Colombia and Brazil to reposition themselves globally by exporting their military expertise for confronting post-9/11 threats beyond the region.

The ground covered by recent studies on Brazil between 1930 and 1945 has fallen into two main schools of interest: one has concentrated on the political history of this period; the other on the background to Brazilian industrialization. With the exception of coffee and rice, Brazilian agriculture has remained relatively neglected as an area of research. Yet the importance of Brazilian agriculture both as a source for domestic consumption requirements and also as an export earner has constantly been presented as the explanation for the political evolution of Brazil in these years and the concomitant increased interest shown in the development of Brazilian manufacturing industries. This paper will concentrate on the Brazilian agricultural sector and will consider the nature of Vargas's agricultural autarquias — that is, the semi-autonomous administrative units Vargas established to supervise and direct the activities of selected areas of the economy and of society. It is hoped that, in so doing, it will contribute to a deeper understanding of how Getúlio Vargas governed Brazil between 1930 and 1945.

The nineteenth century was a critical period in the evolution of Puerto Rican society, as the following citation from Fernández Méndez eloquently indicates: The century of Salvador Brau [the noted Puerto Rican social historian] is the century of the forging on Puerto Rican soil of a native bourgeoisie of planters – padres de agrego or señores de ingenio— born in a movement of cultural transformation which converted the preponderant subsistence economy of the eighteenth century into an active agrarian capitalism of sugar and coffee plantations. This system of plantations in the realm of the Spanish Antilles was in its epoch the revolutionary equivalent of the manufacturing system which transformed life in European society in innumerable ways during the nineteenth century.1

The United States reacted to the revolution which brought General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez to power in 1931 by refusing to recognise him under a 1923 treaty. Martínez broke precedent by entrenching himself in the presidency. The State Department first attempted to subvert him. The outbreak of a peasant rebellion, supposedly under communist leadership, then caused Washington to seek a face-saving accommodation. The bargain failed because of the general's duplicity. Eventually the United States was forced to abandon the 1923 treaty and recognise Martínez. This opened the way to habitual recognition of non-communist dictators in Latin America.

When the Venezuelan dictator, Juan Vincente Gómez, died on 17 December 1935, after ruling Venezuela with an iron fist for 27 years, an outburst of popular unrest and nationalistic fervour was unleashed against the foreign oil companies operating on Venezuelan soil. The dominant oil interests in Venezuela at the time were Royal Dutch Shell, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and the Gulf Oil Company. There were several smaller companies such as British Controlled Oilfields, a British state-owned company with a network of Venezuelan affiliates, and the Socony Vacuum Company, a New York-based company which was a significant latecomer. It was the first three aforementioned companies, however, that constituted the Big Three.1 The oil companies were associated in the popular mind with the odious Gómez dictatorship and partly for this reason became the object of the people's wrath. Yet there were also practical economic and social reasons for the popular feeling against the companies. The latter paid low wages, provided miserable housing and social amenities for their workers and discriminated against Venezuelans in their employment practices.2 For more than a year after the dictator's death Venezuela was in the throes of popular unrest.

Every state must maintain constant control of its own development, in order to influence opportunely any situation affecting its growth. Its cultural objectives and its civilization, the increase in national power by way of augmenting the capacity of its citizens, and permanent regard for national security are the bases for harmonious progress of the state; in planning its growth it must be clearly established what is to be accomplished, always considering that every state should aspire to attain the greatest possible extension and capacity.

Between the 1850s and 1880s, Argentina became one of the chief suppliers of wool to the expanding world markets. Most of this wool was grown in the fertile sheep-runs of the richest province in the country, and was sent to Europe through its capital city and port, Buenos Aires.

After the colonial experience of being mainly an entrepôt in the legal and contraband trade between the Viceroyalty of the River Plate and the rest of the world, Buenos Aires had seen its commercial opportunities flourish after Independence, and had found in its rural hinterland the staples to export, hides and salted beef. A mercantile class, at the rise of the century more interested in commercial pursuits than in productive activities related to the rural areas, had, nevertheless, sought in the late colonial era the benefits of cattle-raising, which provided the new staples, first to complement and later to replace the chief export of colonial Buenos Aires, bullion from Potosí.

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

The 1920s remain a relatively neglected period in Brazilian historiography despite a recent boom in the study of contemporary Brazilian history and despite the intrinsic importance of that era.1 The post-war years constituted a watershed in the evolution of Brazilian culture, for example, as poets, novelists, artists and other pensants rejected further imitation of foreign models.2 The effervescence in the cultural sphere found ample resonance in political life; indeed, during the 1920s republican institutions were perhaps more seriously questioned than at any time since the early 1890s. The establishment of the Communist Party (1922) and the phenomenon of tenentismo were the most obvious manifestations of the erosion of the national consensus.3 The absence of an extensive body of scholarly literature on these subjects notwithstanding, their general configuration is at least familiar. One neglected field of inquiry, however, is foreign policy, the subject of this article. The aim of this exploratory probe is not to survey Brazil's diplomatic relations during the period; rather, the central analytical focus here is on the linkage between elite images and foreign policy strategy, the underlying premise being that policy decisions depend upon how policy-makers view their external environment.4

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a large favela of Belo Horizonte, this study argues that there are three logics at play when it comes to regulating violence in poor Brazilian urban areas: that of crime, that of the state, and that of religion. These three logics act as normative regimes which, connected by the shared notion of ‘respect’, form symbolical relationships among themselves alternating between dissonance and coordination. This everyday interaction produces a normative triangle that determines which lives are more and which are less valuable and, therefore, the likeliest target of violence.