A prominent feature of Spain's response to the rebellions of its Latin American colonies, both during the constitutional régime of 1810–1814 and the absolutist system of Ferdinand VII from 1814–1820, was wide-spread bureaucratic confusion. When José García de Léon y Pizarro became Secretary of State in 1816, he found the whole question of the pacification of America in a deplorable state which had reached ‘un punto de exasperación increíble’1 In a Council of State session of December 1816, the Navy Minister, José Vázquez de Figueroa, angrily denounced the red tape and inefficient administrative system in which decisions were lost in ‘una verdadera lucha de papeles’.2

During the 1960s, the Cuban government attempted to play a leadership role within the Latin American Left. In the process Cuban leaders departed from Marxist−Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the developing nations of the Global South. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualisation of the role of the Marxist−Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the established leftist parties and party politics in general. The Cuban/North Korean theory of the party had a tangible influence in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, Bolivia and Nicaragua, as revolutionary groups in these societies took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.

This article examines the origins of national electrification in Chile, situating its technocratic promoters within a broad trend – unfolding across Latin America – toward the ‘rational’ management and conservation of natural resources by the state. It surveys the early history of Chilean electrification (1890s–1940s) to show how conservationist thinking flowed through discussions and debates among engineers about the proper uses of the country's waters. These ideas eventually shaped the 1943 national electrification plan, which focused on hydropower. The article sheds new light on the history of Chile's technocracy, the relationship between perceptions of the environment and development planning, and the political and economic debates over national electrification. It also shows how the conservationist dilemma of using versus preserving natural resources operated within a utilitarian and highly technical framework for thinking about nature's bounty. The article thus contributes to recent historical scholarship on conservation and environmental technocrats in Latin America.

In May 2010, Julián Miranda, an Indigenous Asháninka shaman, died hours after killing a jaguar-shaman. Despite knowing that it could kill him, he killed a jaguar-shaman to protect his cows, an investment to support the much-desired progreso (‘progress’) of his children and grandchildren through education. Julián's choice was one of personal sacrifice driven by the hardships he experienced in the degraded forests of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the Peruvian Amazon. My examination of his decision to kill the jaguar-shaman engages with the multi-disciplinary literature on how local peoples engage with the expanding extractive frontier in Latin America. The emphasis most literature places on social movements and – to a lesser extent – on the ontological characteristics of these conflicts needs to be counterbalanced by individual experiences like Julián's for a deeper understanding of the multiple local experiences of large-scale resource extraction and the different strategies through which people pursue their desired futures.

Henry George Ward's Mexico in 1827 (published in 1828) is one of the most exhaustive accounts of Mexico and its mining activities in the years following its independence from Spain. Written with a meticulous attention to detail, it provided a unique first-hand interpretation both of Mexico's early governments’ achievements and of the not insignificant problems they had as yet to overcome. It highlighted the risks and opportunities Mexico presented to potential British investors and emphasised the benefits of free trade, the need for patience, and how important it was to become meaningfully acquainted with the country before investing in one or several ventures there. This study provides for the first time an analysis of Ward's two-volume survey-cum-travelogue. It shows how Ward's cautiously optimistic appraisal faithfully reflected the short-lived hopes of Guadalupe Victoria's 1824–9 government and provides a sympathetic account of the young republic that would prove anything but common in subsequent British representations of Mexico, as the country's inability to service the London debt and its ensuing instability went on to hinder British–Mexican relations for the greater part of the nineteenth century.

In 2019, thousands of women took to the streets in Mexico City to protest gender-based violence. The demonstrations were characterised by the defacement of iconic monuments, which was widely condemned. But the protests also ignited widespread political mobilisation, including by a group of women restorers who, despite being designated to clean the monuments, refused to perform their work and publicly defended the protesters. By withholding their labour and their ostensible duty to the state and to the nation, the restorers’ actions helped to transform narratives around feminism, protest and the meaning of national heritage. Based on a case study of this previously depoliticised group of art restorers who went on to become one of the most important faces of Mexico's feminist movement, this article argues that political mobilisation can be rooted in and directly linked to people's labour and professional expertise.

Without question, Cuba's most successful ‘export’ from the very beginning of the Castro period has not been revolution, but the physical removal of its domestic enemies. For whatever reason individual Cubans came to reject the new order, the decision to part physically from their homeland was made by enough people to develop into what is probably the greatest mass migration in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Latest estimates provided by the Department of State indicate that approximately 560,000 persons have left Cuba since 1959 to settle in other countries—all but 50,000 in the continental United States or Puerto Rico