The Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) made visits to Brazil in 1972 and 1974 to advise the government about ‘decompression’ or regime liberalisation. The literature on Brazil's dictatorship references these visits as having had a major causal impact. This article argues that his influence on Brazilian regime change is greatly exaggerated. It also argues that Huntington, who became a leading theorist of democratisation, had an interest in and commitment to democracy that was more recent and circumstantial than is often thought. This helps to explain the current period of democratic ‘deconsolidation’ associated with the rise of authoritarian national populism in Brazil.

This article focuses on the intricate and developing nature of official politics and grassroots activism in post-revolutionary Mexico. It does so by tracing the trajectory of the Pentathlón Deportivo Militar Universitario, a right-wing youth movement that emerged in Mexico in 1938. By locating the group within both the international and domestic emergence of youth movements in the early twentieth century, the article shows how the study of Pentathlón's formation, objectives and later evolution can significantly enrich our understanding of an important phase in Mexico's post-revolutionary history. Within the context of right wing oppositional politics, analysis of the movement provides a fascinating insight into both the emerging Mexican state's ability to appropriate the radical impulses of the younger generation and the Pentathlón's willingness to accommodate such strategies in order to ensure its own survival.

Social scientists make a fundamental assumption about the nature of the relationship between theory and fact. For them, theories are seen, not as guides to individual behaviour, but as tools for the clinical investigation of social processes. The end of this search is a better theory. A theory has most chance of acceptance if it seems elegantly to order a very large number of hitherto unrelated facts.

Scholars have paid considerable attention to the connection between Washington's withdrawal from intervention and the emergence of dictatorship in Central America during the 1930s. The current article seeks to enhance our understanding of those interconnected developments through the investigation of the US Foreign Service and its role in the early 1930s presidential campaigns in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It shows that the dynamic interaction between actors in both Washington and Central America set in motion a process that would produce decades of authoritarian rule in the isthmus.

By the time Evita* died on 26 July 1952, she had become the source of two widely contradictory myths coexisting side by side as if their subject were two different persons. In one, she was the beloved saint who had sacrificed her life for the poor; in the other, the ambitious parvenue who used her power to satisfy her insatiable thirst for revenge.

This article shows how vulnerable communities use Mexico's Day of the Dead for social justice activism. Activists sustain what I call the ‘political afterlives’ of their victims through street altars and dark humour. I analyse this as a ‘necrosocial repertoire of contention’. The Day of the Dead can play an important role in human rights advocacy by insisting that the marginalised dead be honoured and cared for. However, disappeared people pose a challenge to Mexico's horizontal, or popular, ethics of commemoration and illustrate what I call ‘necrotaboos’, with new problems for the nation's inclusive spirit of commemorating the dead.

The Inca ruling elites of ancient Peru based their right to leadership on a claim not only to aristocratic but also to divine blood. They were, they assured their subjects, descendants of Manco Capac, the son of the sun who according to official Inca history had founded the Empire of Tahuantinsuyo (the four corners). For the Incas, therefore, legitimacy rested on charisma, in the sense in which Max Weber used that word: ‘It is the quality which attaches to men and things by virtue of their relations with the “supernatural,” that is, with the nonempirical aspects of reality in so far as they lend theological meaning to men's acts and the events of the world.’

Southern and central regions of Argentina moved from being relatively poor in the sixteenth century to being the richest in the country today. Although there is some evidence of this reversal, the process of regional growth in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century is, in the main, unknown. In this paper, we present an estimation of the GDPs of Argentina's 25 provinces in 1914: this is the first consistent estimation of this variable for any period before the 1950s. Our results confirm that in 1914 the city of Buenos Aires and some districts in Patagonia had the highest per capita GDP, and a comparison with the available data for 1953 shows strong persistence in incomes per capita in this period; sectoral analysis of provincial GDPs suggests that growth in the leading districts was driven by economies of agglomeration in some cases and land abundance in others.

This article draws on an international assemblage of sources to recover the history of the involvement of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United Nations (UN) in the Cuban missile crisis. It argues that, through the mechanisms of the OAS and the UN, Latin American citizens and officials helped shape the peaceful outcome of the crisis. This article challenges dismissive portrayals of both Latin American countries and multilateral organisations and, in so doing, joins the growing literature on how supposedly weak Latin American countries have used international organisations to influence world affairs.

In Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, Jacobo Timerman exposed the anti-Jewish side of the official war against ‘subversion’ in Argentina during the late 1970s. His dramatic testimony is only the latest entry in the lengthy history of twentieth-century Argentine anti-Semitism. Researchers and observers have commonly identified anti-Semitism in that country with rightist factions within the upper strata, including members of such important élites as the military, clergy, and intelligentsia. While only a small minority of the Argentine populace fits into this category, the anti-Semitic right's visibility and fervor have inspired widespread concern and scholarly interest.