Through shedding light on traditional Pentecostalism in Brazil this article reveals how middle-class people in São Paulo, Brazil, manage disappointment relating to current socio-economic conditions. Ethnographic research on Brazil's oldest Pentecostal church, which preserves an anachronistic style of practice, shows how people embrace a marginal identity and thereby critique social conditions in the country. In stark contrast to newer forms of Pentecostalism, people featured in this paper respond to an ‘anti-prosperity gospel’, in which failures and setbacks are construed as signs of spiritual purity and development. In a country where a ‘new middle class’ is supposedly finding prosperity, this study shows a religiously-oriented way in which people confront the disappointing gap between the promises of neoliberalism and the realities of jobless growth.

In 1845, Argentine statesman Domingo Sarmiento predicted that ‘what took 20 years to occur in North America, i.e. the emergence almost by magic of numerous cities, provinces and states in what was once uninhabited terrain, will occur in Argentina in the same span of time’. Forty years later, however, French writer Emile Daireaux observed that ‘the commercial development of Buenos Aires is that of a satellite which orbits Europe's sphere of attraction; Argentina's other cities and towns are in turn satellites of Buenos Aires’. A half-century later still, Ezequiel Martínez Estrada could complain that ‘the country's progress will come only when…we care for the health of the entire body and not only the euphoria of its decapitated head’. The imagery of Daireaux and Martínez Estrada portrays Buenos Aires' comprehensive domination of the Argentine city system, a city system quite unlike the replica of the US model envisaged by an optimistic Sarmiento.

Practices of denunciation are at once ubiquitous and marginalised in literature on the Guatemalan armed conflict. Meanwhile, ordinary Guatemalans who spontaneously denounced neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers have largely escaped scrutiny in scholarly work on low-level perpetrators. Departing from untapped confidential documents in the Historical Archive of the National Police, this article provides the first archival study of denunciatory behaviour during the Guatemalan Civil War, specifically at the height of the conflict (1970–85). This contribution reveals both the strategic considerations that spurred state intelligence apparatuses to elicit civilian information as well as the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that drove civilians to denounce. The case study questions scholarly consensus on the spontaneous and voluntary character of denunciation by arguing that besides providing novel pathways for opportunistic action, denunciations also opened up new strategies for survival in the face of a civil war that structured available choices.

The formulation of foreign policy is at best an inchoate process. The very term implies an orthodoxy of identification, pursuit and maintenance of perceived interests which is often patently lacking in reality. When a nation is beset by a declining capacity to exert influence in a particular region as a result both of competition from other powers and of incipient assertiveness on the part of local interests, the foreign-policy process may be reduced to one of administering ad hoc responses to particular developments which appear to lack any overall rationale.

By the late 1820s, Puerto Rico and Cuba had become Spain's only remaining colonies in the Americas and its major source of colonial returns. A decade later, however, the slave-based plantation system in Puerto Rico was beginning to show signs of stagnation due to the convergence of a number of domestic and international forces. In the late 1840s the Iberian colonial bureaucracy initiated a series of proposals to stimulate Puerto Rico's transformation into an agriculturally modern, diversified, free-labour economy. This initiative failed due to an adverse economic environment, administrative confusion and rivalries, and the failure of officials on the island to enlist the support either of local planters or those at the lower levels of society. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in detail.

Why are the patterns of race relations in Latin America and Anglo-America today so different, particularly those between ‘Blacks’ and ‘Whites’? Is the explanation to be found, primarily, in the differences between the previously existing ‘systems of slavery’? Ever since Frank Tannenbaum, in 1947, made his famous statement on the ‘benign’ nature of ‘Latin American slavery’ as opposed to the ‘harsh’ nature of that in North America, these two issues have triggered a most lively debate, largely historical in nature but attracting representatives of other disciplines as well.1