This article examines the conditions that led the Argentine armed group Montoneros to establish a nursery in Cuba, in 1979, to care for the children of exiled members who had decided to return to the country to fight against a dictatorial regime characterised by the crime of enforced disappearance and supported by continental and global alliances. The analysis focuses on the dilemmas children posed for militants and the organisation and how those concerns were in part addressed by setting up a facility to care for the children. The article then considers how that childcare effort by the Montoneros connected with Cuba's internationalist and refugee policies and with continental struggles, as well as looking at how the children involved experienced it. This reconstruction offers a new approach to thinking about political conflicts in the heated Cold War scenario in Latin America, through the lens of children's history and by exploring how love and politics are intertwined.

This article examines how people gathered and transmitted political information in Colombia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Existing scholarship has predominantly focused on the study of the press in Colombia and Latin America. However, few historians have explored other forms of information, such as telegrams, rumours and letters, or how Colombians combined these. By focusing on how various forms of information circulated through political, familial and commercial networks, this study offers a new dimension to our understanding of communications in Colombia. It argues that this was a period of increasing circulation of information due to social, political and economic change, as well as new links between oral and written practices. Thus, this article illuminates how Colombians circulated political information in a society of restricted literacy in post-colonial Latin America, offering new insights into politics, communications and the interplay between written and oral culture.

The historiography on Uruguay during the Cold War has identified the period 1959–62 as a key juncture in the process of political polarisation that culminated in the fall of democracy in 1973. Based on the analysis of press articles and other documentary sources, I describe the role played by the main fraction of the Partido Colorado (Red Party) led by Luis Batlle Berres in promoting polarisation of the Uruguayan political system in those years. My findings contradict the conventional depiction of Batlle Berres as a moderate who tried to prevent the polarisation provoked by other agents.

This article probes the racially conflictual plotlines of mamulengo, a form of improvised popular puppetry in North-East Brazil. Drawing on a corpus of transcribed shows performed between the 1940s and 1970s, it shows how audacious Black protagonists – often named Baltazar or Benedito – took part in a game of racial ‘acrobatics’. By playing the roles of fools (bobos) and aggressors (desordeiros), these heroes simultaneously reproduced a racist status quo and offered a spirited and violent resistance to its abuses. While mamulengo has never been brought to bear on discussions of race in Brazil, this oft-overlooked form of cultural expression forces us to confront the uncomfortable aspects of race-making and belonging as they are elaborated ‘from below’.

During the height of its power over everyday life, between 1968 and 1993, the Cuban Communist Party outlawed virtually all non-state labour and exchange. Since then, however, its continuity in power has increasingly depended on devolution: shifting responsibility for the provision of basic goods and services from failing state enterprises back to the self-employed. The latter now produce the majority of food and basic products; receive most of the national income from tourism, remittances and foreign investment; and generate most new jobs. Nevertheless, they subsist under a subaltern regime of fragile and conditional freedoms. The article adapts James Scott's consideration for the subaltern's ‘hidden transcripts’ and agencies to contemporary Cuba. It analyses the unavoidability of informal and illegal practices for daily subsistence; their naturalisation in society in contrast with their delegitimisation as opportunistic self-enrichment in party-controlled media; and how the self-employed resist such judgements in favour of more conciliatory civic visions.

This article analyses the abolition of slavery and the transition to free labour in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, seeking to understand the terms and timing of Puerto Rican abolition and the nature of society in its wake. Especially important in Puerto Rico, it argues, was the intertwined nature of slavery and other forms of forced labour as well as the predominance of foreign merchants and planters in the island's economy, which created multi-class alliances between working-class Puerto Ricans and creole elites. These class dynamics interacted with events in the metropole to influence the terms of labour on the island.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in a large favela of Belo Horizonte, this study argues that there are three logics at play when it comes to regulating violence in poor Brazilian urban areas: that of crime, that of the state, and that of religion. These three logics act as normative regimes which, connected by the shared notion of ‘respect’, form symbolical relationships among themselves alternating between dissonance and coordination. This everyday interaction produces a normative triangle that determines which lives are more and which are less valuable and, therefore, the likeliest target of violence.

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 many developing countries where formal institutions fail to guarantee rule of law, criminal organisations have emerged as intermediaries between citizens and the state. In some cases, these armed non-state actors adopt repressive strategies to govern their territories and local populations. This study asks under what circumstances local actors mobilise against criminal governance. Focusing on the case of Michoacán, Mexico, I argue that the emergence of vigilante groups, known as autodefensas, was prompted by the breaching of a social contract – a set of formal and informal agreements and obligations – between organised crime and civil society. As criminal governance spread in Michoacán, so did predatory behaviour against local communities, which gave way to an elite-organised social movement structured by rural inequalities.

The article aims to analyse how the business power of actors in the Argentine automotive industry influenced the foreign trade policies relevant to the sector between 2002 and 2015. The research methods employed combine documentary sources, interviews with key informants and descriptive statistics. The overall findings show how automakers achieved considerable power in the first stage of the period, obtaining clear benefits in terms of foreign trade policy. However, macroeconomic and political changes in Argentina after 2008 had a negative impact on their business power, leading to their enjoying a reduced number of trade policy concessions.

On 4 June 1943, a military coup crushed Argentina's democracy, marking the end of the oligarchic era and ‘planting the seeds’ of Peronism. This case sheds light on how rulers’ mistakes can operate as a key independent variable in producing regime changes. We argue that the former conservative president, Ramón S. Castillo, provoked an otherwise avoidable democratic breakdown. Specifically, Castillo's misguided relationships with regime insiders and outsiders unintentionally eroded political stability and triggered the fall of democracy. Until now, agent-based scholarship has fallen short in tracing incumbents’ mistakes and linking them to regime-change processes. We test the argument by conducting a within-case analysis of Argentina's democratic fall in the early 1940s, scrutinising the president's errors at five critical events. We conclude that critical-event analysis can help disentangle the role of leaders’ mistakes in other episodes of regime change.

This article contributes to migration and livelihood scholarship by reflecting on global and political dimensions of livelihoods and experiences of illegalisation in Central America. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with Nicaraguan families and their migrant family members in Costa Rica, the article adopts a translocal livelihood perspective and uses the notion of everyday politics to explore migrants’ mobility practices and nuance the role and reach of illegalisation in relatively accessible South–South migration. In conclusion, the article reinvigorates the notion of ‘everyday politics of mobility’ to incorporate the multi-sitedness, multi-dimensionality and multi-directionality of translocalising livelihoods, offering a lens for future comparison of illegalisation within and beyond the so-called Global South.

In May 1954, the story broke internationally of Marta Olmos, recipient of the first widely known, male-to-female sex reassignment conducted in Mexico. Her doctor, Rafael Sandoval Camacho, claimed that homosexuality could be cured and that, through transitions, queer Mexicans could be made into ‘socially useful’ citizens. While initially celebrated as a scientific triumph placing Mexico among elite nations, and receiving support from individuals close to the Ruiz Cortines administration, opinions soured as critics – physicians, politicians, cartoonists and clerics – condemned Marta for renouncing manhood through a fraudulent cure that threatened the binary sex/gender order underpinning Mexican nationalism. Sex reassignment, understood through foreigners including Christine Jorgensen and associated with ‘anti-social’ queer Mexicans, thus exemplified misplaced priorities during a period in which the state sought to ‘modernise patriarchy’. While self-affirming for Marta and permitted unofficially through state indifference, sex reassignment became seen as anti-Mexican. Thus, Marta's case illuminated how the state reconciled development with policing its patriarchal order.

The 1970 election of Salvador Allende as president of Chile gained international attention, as a declared Marxist came to power through elections, offering an alternative to Castro's Cuba. In Argentina, governed by a right-wing dictatorship, the initial fear was transformed into a policy of rapprochement. In the midst of the Cold War, the historical Argentine–Brazilian rivalry was stronger than both military regimes' anti-communism. General Alejandro Lanusse decided to support Allende's Chile to balance Brazil's influence, but also as a way to control the domestic repercussions of Allende's victory, especially the rise of revolutionary slogans and the circulation of guerrillas. This article traces the network of national, international and transnational factors that influenced a surprising bilateral relationship.

In this article, we argue that the speeches and policy documents from the later period of Hugo Chávez's presidency exemplify ‘transnational populism’, a form of populist discourse that defies the close association between populism and nationalism that frames the scholarly literatures on both populism and Chávez. We explain why Chávez's populism took this distinctive form by reference to the history of international political thought in Latin America and the political context surrounding the creation of the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, ALBA). We suggest that while transnational populism may actually amplify the threat that other scholars have argued populist leaders pose to democratic institutions, it also offers an important corrective to how scholars think about the relationship between populism, democracy and international politics, suggesting that international institutions capable of restraining powerful states are essential to stabilising democracies in the Global South.

This article explores the impact conservative criticism has had on companies’ behaviour in Brazil. We investigate whether Natura and Boticário − the two largest Brazilian cosmetics companies − have maintained or reversed LGBTQ-oriented marketing and advertising when confronted with criticism from conservative groups. We draw on interviews with stakeholders, company investors and LGBTQ activists, in addition to complaints filed with the Conselho Nacional de Autorregulamentação Publicitária (National Council for Advertising Self-Regulation, CONAR), and companies’ documents on finance and social responsibility. Overall, even when faced with a negative backlash from conservative opinion, companies have persisted in their commitment to diversity issues and LGBTQ inclusion in marketing. However, firms have also employed evasive strategies, such as targeted communication and less controversial forms of retail design, signalling compromises with conservative stakeholders and customers.

Even though a vast literature has addressed perceptions and beliefs on taxes, progressivity and redistribution, few studies have specifically studied the perceptions of economic elites in this regard. This group is relevant for its affluence and influence, and therefore elites’ ideas and preferences have a major impact on tax-policy configuration. This study analyses the perceptions of the economic elite on redistribution and progressivity in Chile. Based on in-depth interviews and historical documents, such notions are examined by mixing concrete evaluations of income tax and value-added tax (VAT) and more general attitudes towards the role of the tax system in economic development. Results show that redistribution is negatively evaluated, which coexists with a strong willingness to contribute to poverty relief through social initiatives outside the state. Additionally, progressivity is sidelined while highlighting growth, tax neutrality, and incentives to entrepreneurship as the main priorities of tax design. The historical analysis shows that although the Chilean tax regime has always been based on indirect taxes and levies on natural resources, neoliberal reforms and ideological renovation during the Pinochet dictatorship narrowed the general framework of tax ideas among business and political sectors and reversed progressive advances in inequality reduction and direct taxation that had been made during the previous decades.

The Brazilian military has recently executed an unexpected return to politics by engaging more actively in domestic policymaking and implementation both before and during the Bolsonaro government, thus jeopardising democratic consolidation. To help understand this development, we examine why the military openly challenges civilian authority over some issues, while remaining silent on others. Whereas prior work emphasises external factors like civilians’ threats to military prerogatives, we argue that contestation of civilian authority stems in no small part from internal military conflict over how to utilise power. The military uses contestation to coordinate prerogatives with civilians and to communicate within the armed forces to increase cohesion. We illustrate this argument with case studies of military contestation surrounding political leadership selection and internal security, using the Army Commander's discourse via Twitter posts and public statements, plus key informant interviews and military publications.

Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this ‘desistance’ process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals’ post-gang trajectories, partly because gang desistance tends to be seen as an event rather than a process. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research carried out in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Nicaragua's capital city Managua, and more specifically a set of ‘archetypal’ gang member life histories that illustrate the occupational options open to former gang members, this article offers a longitudinal perspective on desistance and its consequences, with specific reference to the determinants of individuals’ continued engagement with violence (or not).