Drawing upon 40 life-history interviews with gang members in Medellín, Colombia, this paper argues that many young men join gangs to emulate and reproduce ‘successful’ local male identities. The accumulation by the gang of ‘masculine capital’, the material and symbolic signifiers of manhood, and the accompanying stylistic and timely displays of this capital, means that youths often perceive gangs to be spaces of male success. This drives the social reproduction of gangs. Once in the gang, the youths become increasingly ‘bad’, using violence to defend the gang's interests in exchange for masculine capital. Gang leaders, colloquially known as duros or ‘hard men’, tend to be the más malos, the ‘baddest’. The ‘ganging process’ should not be understood in terms of aberrant youth behaviour; rather there is practical logic to joining the gang as a site of identity formation for aspirational young men who are coming of age when conditions of structural exclusion conspire against them.

This article examines, from a comparative perspective, those electoral practices labelled as ‘corrupt’ in Latin America between 1830 and 1930, in order to gain a fuller appreciation of the significant role played by elections in the history of the region. The article starts by using the term ‘electoral corruption’ in its general sense, as often used by contemporaries themselves when referring to the various practices that, in their view, distorted the vote, and therefore the meaning of suffrage. From this general definition, the article moves on to distinguish between the different types of corrupt practice, with the aim of identifying the extent to which they affected electoral competition. By offering a revision of the assumptions that have hitherto served to undermine the historical meaning of the suffrage, this article aims to encourage the study of electoral history in the region. The examination of electoral corruption is therefore preceded by a brief survey of the historiography of Latin American elections.

Under the Chávez government, the incorporation and participation of popular sectors, which is the essence of ‘social-based democracy’, has been quantitatively and qualitatively different from socialist government and welfare-state strategies of the past. Venezuela's social-based democracy focuses on education, job skills, ideology, transformation of values and empowerment, achievements which Chavista leaders consider to be imperatives for socialist development. However, Chavista social programmes have been undermined by institutional weakness, are sometimes not cost-effective, and are politicised. Conflicting views among the Chavistas on the role of the state hinge on the issue of whether initiatives from above in favour of social-based democracy represent a viable strategy for far-reaching change. The Venezuelan government's changing priorities after 2007 have detracted from the primacy of social programmes.

In the archive of the now disbanded jefatura política of Tetela de Ocampo is an account of the funeral ceremony of the Puebla State deputy and school teacher, Ciudadano Miguel Méndez, only son of General Juan Nepomuceno Méndez, caudillo máximo of the State of Puebla between 1857 and 1884. The Velada Fúnebre was held in 1888 in the cabecera of Xochiapulco (alias ‘La Villa del Cinco de Mayo’), a municipio of nahuatl speakers on the southern edge of Mexico's Sierra Madre Oriental, adjoining the cereal producing plateaux of San Juan de los Llanos. The ceremony took place in the ‘Netzahualcoyotl’ municipal school room and was organised by the municipality's Society of Teachers. The description of the elaborately decorated room and baroque ceremony fills several pages.1 The teachers had decked the school room (normally adorned by ‘sixty-two great charts of natural history, twenty Industrial diagrams, large maps of Universal Geography, and diverse statistical charts and many engravings related to education’) with military banners and weapons, masonic trophies, candelabra, floral crowns and yards of white and black ribbon. In the centre of the room stood the coffin on an altar, itself raised upon a platform, guarded by four National Guard sentries and attended by the philharmonic corps of Xochiapulco and all the public officials of the cabecera and its dependent barrios. For nine days preceding the ceremony this band had played funeral marches, between six and eight in the evening, on the plaza, in front of the house of the deceased. The service was taken by Mr Byron Hyde, a Methodist minister from the United States. Accompanied by his wife at a piano, Hyde gave renderings (in English) of three Wesleyan hymns.2 There followed three eulogies of Miguel Méndez, extolling his services to the Liberal cause and on behalf of the ‘desgraciada nación azteca’. These speeches were infused with extreme anticlerical and anti-Conservative sentiments, a martial patriotic liberalism, a reverence for the principles of the French Revolution, an admiration for Garibaldi and Hidalgo (in that order), and an obsession with the importance of education as the only means for emancipating the indigenous population from clerical subjection.

The transnational indigenous peoples' movement (TIPM) can convey important political leverage to local indigenous movements. Yet this study exposes a more problematic impact: the political authority gained by funding organisations who interpolate TIPM norms into new discourses regarding indigeneity, and deploy that discourse in local ethnic contests. In El Salvador the TIPM has encouraged the state to recognise the indigenous communities and has opened a political wedge for indigenous activism. Yet TIPM-inspired programmes by the European Union and UNESCO to support indigenous activism paradoxically weakened the Salvadorean movement by aggravating outside impressions that Salvadorean indigenous communities are ‘not truly Indian’.

This essay seeks to clarify the particular blend of sociohistorical elements that created a distinct form of authoritarian domination in El Salvador, Guatemala and, to a lesser extent, Nicaragua. Situations of ‘enclave’ versus ‘national control’, the consequences of export agriculture, the impact of the commodity cycle, and relations between the oligarchy and other social actors are examined in a comparative perspective to distil commonalities and differences. The emergence of a distinct variety of the capitalist state of exception followed the crisis of oligarchy brought about by the Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. State power became public at the time and the traditional oligarchies no longer ruled directly, although they were able to weave a relatively complex alliance. This is identified as a ‘reactionary coalition’ capable of resisting any change in the model of export agriculture, ‘unreformed’ capitalism, and political authoritarianism. This model is identified as ‘reactionary despotism’, and the contemporary crises of El Salvador, and Nicaragua are related to the deterioration of this form of political domination

Andrew Thompson's review of the long-running debate on informal empire will be welcomed both by specialists, who need to be reminded from time to time that many trees do sometimes make a forest, and by teachers, who need help in guiding their students through both. The comments that follow are therefore offered in a constructive spirit that is wholly in accord with Thompson's purpose in trying to take hold of a notoriously slippery concept. My aim in citing his work is to identify the batch of established arguments that his essay faithfully represents. The intention is to move the debate forward: the temptation to readvertise familiar positions will be avoided as far as is possible; the risk of drowning the argument in an excess of detail is removed by limitations of space.

The scandal involving President Fernando Collor de Mello, leading to his last-minute resignation on 29 December 1992, provoked understandable heart-searching in Brazil. This was clearly evident in a series of research interviews, which I held from August to October, when the political crisis was fast coming to a head, and already was reflected in published analyses of the P. C. Farias/Collor affair.

Several accounts of the Baring crisis, 1890–7, are available.1 Among these is my own, chapter xiv of Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), based upon the Foreign Office papers in the Public Record Office, contemporary periodical literature and secondary works such as the now little-noticed classic, J. H. Williams, Argentine International Trade under Inconvertible Paper Money, 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1920). My first purpose in exploring beyond the sources used forty years ago, in the archives of the Bank of England, Baring Brothers & Co., N. M. Rothschild, W. H. Smith and the Marquis of Salisbury, is to correct at least one error in my original work, and this unfortunately repeated by others. My second is to discover whether or not further study of archival material confirms, modifies or denies any of my first conclusions about the role of the Argentine government in the solution of the Baring crisis.

The principal error corrected concerns the form of Barings' involvement in Argentine affairs in the late 1880s. They did not get into difficulties because they underwrote a large loan to the Argentine government for the purpose of expanding the water supply and sewage system of Buenos Aires. The fact is that they promoted a private enterprise which took over the water and sewage system of Buenos Aires, and this failed for a number of reasons set out below.

As to my original conclusions about the Baring crisis, they have been confirmed by the archival material considered. The solution of the Baring crisis was made possible by the policies devised and enforced by the Argentine government.

This essay, part history of ideas and part history of international relations, examines Brazil's relationship with Latin America in historical perspective. For more than a century after independence, neither Spanish American intellectuals nor Spanish American governments considered Brazil part of ‘América Latina’. For their part, Brazilian intellectuals and Brazilian governments only had eyes for Europe and increasingly, after 1889, the United States, except for a strong interest in the Río de la Plata. When, especially during the Cold War, the United States, and by extension the rest of the world, began to regard and treat Brazil as part of ‘Latin America’, Brazilian governments and Brazilian intellectuals, apart from some on the Left, still did not think of Brazil as an integral part of the region. Since the end of the Cold War, however, Brazil has for the first time pursued a policy of engagement with its neighbours – in South America.

The province of La Convención, department of Cuzco, in Peru became familiar to citizens of the outside world in the early 1960s, when it was the scene of the most important peasant movement of that period in Peru, and probably in the whole of South America. This might legitimately attract the attention of the social historian. At the same time La Convención is a special version of a more general phenomenon, which ought also to interest the economic historian. It is ‘frontier territory’ in the American sense of the word, i.e. it belongs to the large zone of undeveloped land on the eastern edge of the Andes (the western edge of the Amazon basin) which has come under settlement and cultivation in recent decades, mainly for the cultivation of cash crops for the world market, but also for other economic purposes. Along the Andean slopes there are a number of such regions, into which, in their different ways, landlords and entrepreneurs penetrate with estates and trade, peasants in search of land and freedom. Mostly they are Indian peasants from the highlands, and the socio-economic background of the sierra and altiplano determines to some extent the forms of the new economy which take shape on the semi-tropical and tropical eastern slopes. These vary considerably, as we can tell by the various available monographs.

It is widely recognised that dependency analysis developed out of two traditions of economic thought, Marxism and Latin American structuralism, associated with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Although structuralism is acknowledged as a progenitor, Marxism is usually viewed, implicitly or explicitly, as the primary tradition from which dependency arose. This is perhaps because dependency per se is so widely perceived as having begun with two books for which Marxist antecedents were claimed. Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (1969), by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, and Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), by Andre Gunder Frank, ‘stood out as the leading theoretical and systematic efforts to construct a dependency perspective for Latin America’, and remain ‘the landmarks to which assessment of dependency perspectives inevitably return’.1

This article discusses the development of social categories and ethnicity in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico, since the Conquest in the sixteenth century. Based on the Yucatec case, it demonstrates that ethnicity is not a ubiquitous form of social organisation, but rather a historical process related to specific techniques of social distinction. It argues that the starting point for the analysis of ethnicity should not be ethnic collectives, but instead the ways in which individuals use ethnic categories in social interaction.

27 February 1989 saw a popular revolt, which was to escalate dramatically, break out in Venezuela. Both Caracas and most of the main and secondary cities of the country were the scene of barricades, road closures, the stoning of shops, shooting and widespread looting. This article describes the events occurring during the Caracazo or Sacudón, as the episode is known, in order to show the key role played by the weakness of a set of social and political institutions in the violent forms of collective action that prevailed. This data, on a comparative basis, may enrich our understanding of other similar uprisings in the region and worldwide.

Although none of the artisan or small merchant groups in colonial Buenos Aires ever achieved complete legal sanction for a guild organization, the silversmiths were more successful than any other group in creating and sustaining an officially endorsed, self-regulating, corporate structure. This structure was not created and implemented systematically. It was evolved slowly and pragmatically as a response to the changing milieu in which the silversmiths worked.

The empirical validity of traditional perspectives on poverty and under-development has been seriously challenged over the past decade. In contrast to emphasis on what were said to be disfunctional characteristics of the poor themselves, attention has been redirected towards economic and ecological factors which reveal much of the cultural repertoire of peasants and urban and rural poor to be a positive or adaptive response to limits imposed on them by the political economy of capitalism.

This paper examines the governance of hydroelectric dam planning in Brazil with a particular focus on two factors: first, governmental institutions that aim to provide participatory mechanisms for civil society, and second, new participatory institutions created by civil society to remedy the lack of meaningful participatory measures. One example of the latter are new collaborative research projects, which have changed dam building policies and governmental thinking about participation. It is argued here that these kinds of collaboration are fundamental to making dam-building policy more accountable to local citizens. The analysis demonstrates that lay/expert collaborations provide pathways through which affected people can contest inaccurate official scientific reports, in turn influencing the policy process. I examine six such participatory projects across the country: four are nationally based and two are international in scope. A four-pronged typology is used to analyse the processes and outcomes of these collaborations. This typology reveals multiple types of knowledge-sharing that constitute concrete means to implement participation in environmental policy, hence advancing the democratisation of environmental governance.

This paper studies the participation of an important group of Mexican postrevolutionary intellectuals, leaders of the cultural-educational project during the early 1930s, in the construction of two closely related concepts: the ‘peasant problem’ and its nucleus, the ‘revolutionary peasant’, both central to the political and ideological consolidation of the new regime. It discusses the approaches that lead them to propose a new ‘peasantness’, suitable for the political and economic interests that dominated the process of formation of the postrevolutionary State. It also considers the struggle that developed within the group between the ‘productivists’, linked to Marxism-Leninism, and the ‘cultural-populists’, more concerned with the cultural survival of the Indo-campesino groups, for the right to define these concepts. The analysis is based on El Maestro Rural, edited by the Secretaría de Educación Pública since 1932.

This article seeks to explain why such a wide range of Cuban cultural producers have opted to remain on the island and work ‘within the revolution’, despite all the notorious problems caused by state censorship, political persecution and material shortages. It accounts for the importance of culture to the legitimacy of the revolutionary government; suggests that the regime has drawn effectively on the long-established significance of culture in Cuba's radical tradition; and illustrates the extent to which the government has backed up its rhetoric of commitment to culture for all with a sustained policy of support for institutions, organisations and events across the island. The main argument is that culture has been a key element – perhaps the only successful element – in the revolution's attempt to implement an alternative model of modernity that was distinctive not only from the Western capitalist version but also from that promoted by the Soviet Union.