Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States and Chile competed for dominance in the Pacific, and their maritime rivalry reemerged in the race to Antarctica during the 1940s. The US Navy was able to circumnavigate the white continent, for the first time ever, while Chile's once great navy no longer posed a threat even to its neighbours. The Chilean government expressed concern about the scope of US exploration since the Antarctic always had been an essential component of its maritime policy with national security ramifications. President Gabriel González Videla seized upon Washington's unsuccessful attempts to determine the legal fate of the Antarctic to gain acceptance for a Chilean proposal that avoided the need to renounce sovereignty claims. In doing so, he secured essentially maritime objectives by diplomatic means. This success was more profound than widely appreciated since it came at a time when US intervention in Chile's domestic affairs had reached an unprecedented level.

This article examines attempts to modernise navigation of the Doce River in Brazil during the early nineteenth century. It focuses primarily on the development of a joint Anglo-Brazilian business venture, The Rio Doce Company (1832–49). The failure of the Rio Doce Company cannot be attributed to a single overarching cause, but reflects numerous barriers to economic development including a cumbersome regulatory bureaucracy, capital scarcity, poor technological integration, challenging topography, and Brazilian political resistance to British investment and corporate oversight. This article contributes to the field of business history in the immediate post-independence era, a topic that has received relatively little scholarly attention.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Brazilian federal government embarked upon an ambitious plan of fast-paced industrialisation aimed at responding to the growing needs of the country's ever more urbanised population. While the plan achieved rapid economic growth, rising levels of discontent defined much of the political behaviour of urban labour in the period. By critically examining some of the main events affecting industrial unions during the so-called ‘developmental decade’ of the 1950s, this article argues that amidst pervasive top-down economic transformations Brazilian workers consistently advanced an alternative position on national development. By investigating how metalworkers in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro understood and responded to the main developmental trends and difficulties of the period, the paper reveals some of the creative strategies articulated by urban workers to promote a more socially inclusive path for the country. By becoming actively involved in ever more assertive cross-professional mobilisations, particularly those aimed at curbing the rising cost of living (a problem known as carestia), industrial workers not only protected their own economic interests but also significantly challenged the very bases of the populist political arrangements that defined post-war Brazilian society.

The historical attachment of the organized labor movement of Chile to revolutionary ideologies has been unique in Latin America. Anarchosyndicalists controlled most labor unions in Santiago and Valparaíso, and the Communists those of the nitrate and coal mining zones during the 1920s. From the late 1930S to the fall of Allende, a majority of Chilean labor unionists manifested their desire for socio-economic change by supporting the Communist and Socialist Parties at the polls and in the streets.

This article studies the relationship between electoral processes, popular mobilisation, and revolutionary movements in Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the revolution of 1880, it is argued that the fraud in favour of General Julio A. Roca, that was perceived to have occurred in the presidential election of that year, resulted in the mobilisation of vast sectors of the Buenos Aires population and the organisation of militias. By analysing the social composition, organisation, and sources of recruitment of these militias, the article claims that although personal allegiance, clientelism and coercion played a role in this mobilisation, these factors are not sufficient to explain the popularity of the movement. The revolution owed its wide and active support to the claims of its leaders, who centred their discourse on defending the purity of suffrage and the rights of citizens to bear arms in order to protect their rights and freedoms.

Among students of Latin America, the existence of sizable Indian communities within the region has provoked a lively debate about the relationship between ethnicity and social class. Such communities have failed to become part of class society, it is often said, because they retain those customs and traditions which arose under colonialism, because in some sense they remain encapsulated to this day within the feudal social order. A few experts even claim that these customs have themselves become the primary agent of economic and political exploitation in various rural areas.1 According to this view, native people have accepted more or less passively a culture which was designed for them by Spanish missionaries and administrators, a culture which emphasized ethnic difference at the expense of class solidarity.2 In contrast to these ideas, contemporary events provide us with many indications that such people did not simply resign themselves to the fate which colonial authorities elected for them, Of primary importance, native uprisings and rebellions, messianic movements and religious heresies occurred in Latin America with astonishing frequency throughout the centuries which preceded Independence. By analyzing these movements, then, and particularly the convictions which moved their participants to action, we may formulate a more coherent view of Spanish colonialism — a view which also helps us to understand the question of ethnicity among Indians today.

One of the most striking features of the study of colonial urbanism and urbanization in Spanish America is the extent to which emphasis has been placed upon the sixteenth-century phase of urban foundations. In many recent works authors have presented details of the formal and functional characteristics of these primary foundations, as well as of the several interrelated processes of Indian resettlement, population change, and the spread of European culture. Though it has been estimated that more than 300 towns were founded in Spanish America between 1492 and 1600, relatively little attention has yet been paid to the changing spatial system of urban centres during the 300 years or more of colonial rule.

This article analyses the history of the military clergy and contrasts its role in the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships on the basis of new, previously inaccessible sources. It is argued here that, in addition to its ideological orientation, two further factors explain differences in the influence of the military clergy on the two regimes: first, the structural position that the Military Vicariates occupied between the Church and the armed forces, and, second, the two dictatorships’ different needs for legitimisation. The analysis provides information relevant to understanding the public role of the Catholic Church and the dimensions of violence during the regimes.

The relations between Church and State in nineteenth-century Chile remained relatively calm when compared with the tumultuous events occurring in Mexico during the same era. While the question of the role of the Church in a secular society divided both nations, it was resolved in Chile without violence or bloodshed. Although President Manuel Montt's assertion of civil authority in the ‘affair of the sacristan’ in 1856 angered the clerical hierarchy, there was little that could be done by a church of less wealth, power and influence than in Mexico. Yet, the slow erosion of colonial fueros was not accepted without clerical resistance, which delayed the constitutional reforms limiting the Church's powers in Chile until the 1880s.

Early in 1869, when the flags of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were unfurled from the turrets of Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, an end to the horrors of the Paraguayan War was at last in sight. The conflict between Paraguay on the one hand, and Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay on the other, had raged for five years, since 1865, destroying human lives and material wealth. The fighting came to an official end with the death of Francisco Solano López, dictator of Paraguay, on 1 March 1870.

‘As far as salaries go, there is chaos all over the country’, Fidel Castro exclaimed in 1986,1 and as he and other revolutionary leaders made clear throughout that year more than salaries was involved. Prices, credit, employment practices, administrative procedures and many other important aspects of the economy could be characterised as ‘chaotic’. It would be wrong, however, to take such characterisations at face value. For underlying this ‘chaos’ was a certain order: patterns of behaviour that this article will seek to disclose and explain.

In the short history of anthropology as an academic discipline, polemics tinged with personal recrimination have been a constant feature. One might even be led to suspect that controversy has become a firm technique, in line with conflict theory, so that in the middle ground between opposing interpretations of social behaviour may be found a more acceptable aspect of the truth. ‘Penetrating analyses’, so the aphorism might run, ‘are tempered in the fire of animosity.’ Some protagonists had a positive genius for attracting thinly-veiled contumely and for polarizing opinion, even after they had ceased to be practising anthropologists. Perhaps the best example of this was Radcliffe-Brown, as a perusal of the journals Oceania in 1955 and the American Anthropologist from 1951 to 1956 will readily disclose. This method of advancing knowledge, if we may call it such, did not die with Radcliffe-Brown; it has been used many times since—and the discipline is the richer, one hastens to add.

This essay maps the transformation of security from a symbol of authoritarian government under the Cold War paradigm of National Security into a public good and a policy field acknowledged as legitimate and democratic by politicians and policy experts. Using present-day Argentina as an example, we show how security ideas gain dominance across the political spectrum, displacing and subordinating democratic politics conceived in terms of rights. As institutions increasingly accept security measures and pre-emptive risk management, a securitising discourse – despite its claims to advocate for the ‘citizen’ – trumps governance and the rule of law. Appealing to citizens’ concerns and rights, the new forms of securitisation may yet undermine democratic life.

In 1868 a cholera epidemic erupted in the north-western Argentine province of Tucumán. Urban-based doctors and politicians argued that fruit cultivated primarily in the south of the province was responsible for the spread of cholera. Hoping to avoid cholera, they advocated the complete prohibition and destruction of fruit in Tucumán as both a prophylactic measure, but also to prepare new land for sugar cultivation. Through a reading of governmental memos, medical journals, and public health reports, this article examines how agriculture, disease, and contagion mediated the interaction between Tucumán's urban minority and rural majority. This article offers a window into grassroots politics and state formation during one of Argentina's most formative periods.

The subject of United States foreign policy towards Argentina in the years during and immediately after World War II continues to hold the attention of scholars. Their interest goes beyond the intrinsic importance which Argentina had then, or now. Rather, interest is fixed because this case provides the first post-War illustration of several serious problems which United States foreign policy in the hemisphere has demonstrated many times since, and currently in its relations with Nicaragua.