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 first half of the seventeenth century the Spanish crown framed a series of administrative reforms for the Indies aimed at raising additional revenue for the overextended royal treasury. Military defeats in Flanders, Italy, and Germany between 1625 and 1650 undermined Spanish power and forced authorities in Madrid to look for new sources of revenue in their American empire. The deteriorating economic, political, and military position of Spain did not produce an attitude of ‘benign neglect’ towards the empire, but induced an intense level of government activity in Madrid to force greater financial contributions from the Indies to the beleaguered metropolis. The most successful of die new tax levies imposed in the viceroyalty of Peru was the sale of juros or state-supported annuities.

On January 28, 1808, the ports of Brazil, hitherto restricted to Portuguese vessels, were thrown open to direct trade with all friendly nations. Two months later, the ban on manufacturing in the colony was lifted. In October the Banco do Brasil was authorized as a bank of issue designed to supply the government's credit needs and to foster internal and external trade. The most urgent financial needs of the Portuguese government, which in November 1807 had fled to its American colony in order to escape the invading forces of Napoleon I, were met by negotiating a loan in London, the leading market for capital in the Atlantic economy. Two years later, in 1810, the Portuguese government signed a treaty with Great Britain admitting British goods into Brazil at a standard duty of 17 per cent for the next fifteen years.

It has been traditional for students of the Hispanic world in the eighteenth century to identify the introduction of ‘free trade’ between Spain and her American empire as the cornerstone of the Bourbon programme of economic reform. The reasons which they cite are subsumed with admirable clarity by the preamble to the famous Regiamento para el comercio libre of October 12, 1778 itself: the king was convinced, it explained, that ‘only a free and protected Commerce between European and American Spaniards can restore Agriculture, Industry, and Population in my Dominions to their former vigour.

The crisis of 1889 has long been seen as a turning point in Brazilian history. Because historians have often examined the Second Empire to defend or attack its successor, they have neglected certain aspects of the crisis. Their explanations have stressed that leaders of the minuscule and divided Republican Party took advantage of long standing grievances between senior officers and civilian politicians when they urged an ailing general to depose the monarchy on the 15th of November. They have, therefore, emphasized the role of the army in creating the conditions for a coup d'etat, and its preeminence in the Republic until 1889. In doing so, they have underestimated the powerful economic forces which underpinned the Imperial government. They have also overestimated those which supported the republican leaders of São Paulo, the self-confessed beneficiaries of the coup. Since they have also understated the fluidity of political allegiances in this period, its history has become too narrow and too deterministic, with the army depicted as the engine of ‘a change from Ancien Régime to a bourgeois society’.

Historians of U.S.-Mexican relations are confronted by a conundrum in the Punitive Expedition of 1916–1917. Ostensibly motivated by the attack of General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa upon Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916, the expedition traditionally has been evaluated in terms of its supposed mission. The puzzle lies in the fact that President Woodrow Wilson publicly told the American and Mexican people one thing and privately told his field commander, John J. Pershing, quite another. Wilson's press release on the morning of March 10, 1916 announced: ‘An adequate force will be sent at once in pursuit of Villa with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays’.

A late-comer in the privileged corporate structure of New Spain, the army struggled to wrest a position and to gain recognition. Other jurisdictions such as the merchant consulados, the Acordada, the Mining Guild, and the jealous creole-dominated ayuntamientos, contested military pretensions and triggered numerous judicial and jurisdictional disputes over how far the military could extend its legal powers. Representatives of the reformed Bourbon civil administration, unsure in some instances of the limits of their own authority, did not welcome a dynamic and grasping presence. For their own part, the army officers dispatched to command Mexican regular and militia units often represented the aggressively haughty airs of the European Spaniard – attitudes that rasped at the deep-rooted inferiority of the creoles and left them enraged. Little wonder that there was a constant stream of disputes, misunderstandings, and challenges directed against the army and the fucro militar.1

In the 1940s Bolivia's mineworkers achieved a major impact in national elections. The electoral system was favourable to them (far more so than after the 1952 National Revolution); they acquired a unified and effective national leadership, with extensive back-up organization in all the main mining camps; they, therefore, began casting their votes as a single block, an expression of mineworkers' exceptional degree of solidarity in various parts of the world; and the political parties that courted their votes were constrained by the demands of their electorate, not only to adopt intransigent language but actually to become more radical in their programmes, recruitment and commitments.

This article draws attention to the importance of institutional structures to the stability opf demoratic regimes through an examination of the failure of democracy in the case of Argentina between 1912 and 1930. The analysis of a single case does not make a theory. but it seems clear that a focus on the Argentine case does force one to look at institutional factors that have largely been neglected in recent research.

The Eastern Border Region (EBR) of Paraguay (defined as the present-day administrative Departments of Amambay, Canendiyú and Alto Paraná) is one of the few remaining frontier zones suitable for intensive agricultural development in the southern cone of Latin America. Comprising 35 percent (about 5.4 million has.) of the area of eastern Paraguay, its natural resources remained largely unexploited until the mid-1960s, itself a reflection of the very poor growth performance of the Paraguayan economy throughout most of the 20th century in comparison with neighbouring countries.

Founded in 1922, the Partido Comunista de Chile (PCCh) had a somewhat chequered career before the mid-1930s.1 Although the prestige of its founder, Luis Emilio Recabarren, and its close ties with organized labour gave the party an early significance, its progress towards becoming an important force in Chilean politics halted abruptly when General Carlos Ibáñez came to power in 1927. Forced into clandestinity by Ibáñez, the party emerged on his downfall in 1931 with its membership vastly reduced, its trade union arm, the Federación Obrera de Chile (FOCH), moribund, and its remaining activists deeply divided by ideological, tactical and personal differences.

At the end of its first year, the revolutionary process in Nicaragua must be considered a success from several different perspectives. The war-torn economy has been stabilized, a progressive agrarian reform program initiated, a large state sector formed on the basis of expropriated Somocista property, an independent foreign policy adopted, and a massive literacy campaign launched throughout the country. Most important, however, has been the imposition of a high degree of political stability coupled with, and partially growing out of, the consolidation of power in the hands of a cohesive revolutionary vanguard. The ability of the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN) to establish its hegemony in post-Somoza Nicaragua has permitted the government to move decisively on a number of critical fronts and to escape power-sharing formulas that could have turned the policymaking process into a protracted struggle against entrenched interests. The foundation of Sandinista control over the government is simple: as Comandante Humberto Ortega explained, ‘We took power by arms, and it should be clear who has power in Nicaragua today.’

Elisabeth Jelin, in an important recent work, has criticized the overconcern in studies of the Latin American working class with the structural determinants of class relations and class activity. As she pointed out, this has tended to lead to a deterministic approach on the part of the social sciences, emphasizing the lack of autonomy of the working class in terms of its failure to construct a comprehensive, radical challenge to the dominant system on the political level and its domination by, and acceptance of, demobilizing, bureaucratic leaderships on the trade union level.