Explanations of the Abolitionist movement's success in Brazil (1888) have, since the 1960s and 1970s, emphasised the movement's material context, its class nature, and the agency of the captives. These analyses have misunderstood and gradually ignored the movement's formal political history. Even the central role of urban political mobilisation is generally neglected; when it is addressed, it is crippled by lack of informed analysis of its articulation with formal politics and political history. It is time to recover the relationship between Afro-Brazilian agency and the politics of the elite. In this article this is illustrated by analysing two conjunctures critical to the Abolitionist movement: the rise and fall of the reformist Dantas cabinet in 1884–85, and the relationship between the reactionary Cotegipe cabinet (1885–88), the radicalisation of the movement, and the desperate reformism that led to the Golden Law of 13 May 1888.

The implementation of participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires following the crisis of December 2001 was a highly unlikely event. The different parties involved had competing and contradictory agendas that did not coincide with participatory budgeting's stated aims of extending citizen participation in government, but these interacted in a way that contingently created a space for a viable process to develop. Subsequent political shifts led to the demise of participatory budgeting, but the Buenos Aires case is nevertheless important because it highlights the way in which such processes can emerge in the absence of strong programmatic politics, thereby potentially opening new avenues for the promotion of democratic innovation.

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 mechanisms by which the world economic crisis has been transmitted from developed to developing economies are conditioned by domestic factors that may attenuate or accentuate external economic shocks and their adverse social effects. Cuba is a special case: it is an open economy and hence vulnerable to trade-growth transmission mechanisms, but at the same time, it is a socialist economy with universal social services. This article reviews the literature, summarises Cuba's domestic socio-economic strengths and weaknesses prior to the crisis, evaluates the effects of the crisis on the macro-economic and social services indicators, assesses the government response and suggests alternative socio-economic policies.

This article examines the promotion of Mexico's national image in the Americas during the Cárdenas period, using as a starting point a scandal arising from a 1940 performance of Mexican dancers at a cabaret in Panama. Mexican diplomats found the show objectionable because it clashed with the image of women that they used in their efforts to raise the country's reputation abroad. By investigating these efforts, as well as the career of Eva Pérez Caro, the dance troupe's leader, the article contributes to our understanding of the relationship between gender, cultural performance and nationalism, and the role that they played in Mexico's foreign relations.

This article contributes to recent analyses of gendered violence in Latin America by highlighting the relative neglect of women's experiences of violence in the discussion of ‘new violence’. In Latin America, women are consistently missing from mainstream debates about violence, which concentrate on urban crime, youth gangs and the police. With a focus on urban Brazil, this article argues for a gendered approach to the range of different forms of violence in order to render visible the variety of roles that women play in the context and in specific incidents of urban violence. It also explores the gendered impacts of various forms of violence and the gendered socialisation of violence. The article challenges the un-gendered concept of new violence, questioning its ability to capture the full gamut of violences that men and women experience, and the connections between these various forms. By adjusting the parameters of the debate, this article highlights the complexity of the gendered social relations and processes that reproduce violence, and adds a further dimension to the discussion of violence and security.

In a context of continuing armed conflict, a comprehensive scheme of transitional justice has been developed in Colombia since 2005 through the Law of Justice and Peace, with the aim of achieving peace with one of the armed actors in the conflict, the paramilitary groups. The clear link between the demobilisation of illegal armed groups and the rights of the victims is the main feature of the Colombian process. This article provides a systematic review of the implementation of the law, focusing on the institutions, mechanisms and procedures put in place to fulfil its goals. Emphasis is given to the legal category of ‘victim’, victims' rights and victim reparation measures. By exploring how the scheme works in principle and in practice, we are able to assess the prospects for victims' rights in Colombia today.

How do global rights regimes promote compliance? Can they form the basis for effective advocacy campaigns at the domestic level? In this paper, we address these questions via a case study of the role played by the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Argentinian politics. We argue that ratification of the convention strengthened the coherence and leverage of rights-based domestic activists and ultimately led to the introduction of a new rights-inspired legal code for children. We trace the emergence of a local compliance coalition for children's rights and the subsequent campaign for rights-based reform. Our analysis suggests that global rights conventions can alter the domestic political opportunity for advocacy, strengthen rights-based claims and bring about changes on the ground.

Starting from an understanding that maps of an entire nation-state territory reflect and regulate state projects and expressions of national identity, rather than providing detailed technical information for decision making, this paper examines the national maps of race/ethnicity produced under Ecuador's state-led multiculturalism. Using national-scale cartography as a means to examine contested processes of rearticulating state, citizen and nation, the paper analyses recent transformations in cartography, nation building and geographical knowledge in Ecuador. Directing a critical analysis towards the ways maps of indigenous populations are produced, circulated, authorised and read provides a distinctive lens by which to explore postcolonial questions of belonging, rights and presence. The paper discusses how, despite the emergence of innovative maps, the plurinational project envisaged by indigenous cartographers remains stymied by a series of material, cultural and postcolonial limitations.

Beyond competitive elections, democratisation should include a transformation of the institutions of state and civil society into spaces that recognise the rights of citizens and allow for their participation. This study explores the question of how Mexican labour unions are transformed into institutions with a commitment to the rights and participation of women workers. Drawing on evidence from five unions, the paper shows that compared to their corporatist counterparts, unions with a ‘democratic ethos’ provide a context within which gender equity rights are more readily recognised. However, recognition of gender equity is primarily dependent on feminist activism and union leadership. The paper argues that women's efforts to transform their unions into spaces that reflect and advocate for gender equity rights are critical to strengthening democratic citizenship in Mexico.

The differing perspectives and actions of US government, business and labour towards the Guatemalan government and Guatemalan trade unionists themselves in the half-decade or so following the overthrow of the Arbenz administration in 1954 are the focus of this study. Few areas were more important to the US project for Guatemala following the Castillo Armas invasion than helping the Guatemalans to create a ‘free’ and ‘democratic’ labour movement – and few areas would prove more frustrating. Part of the problem was the intransigent stance of Guatemalan elites. An additional challenge was strong opposition from the major US-based companies operating in Guatemala, most notably the United Fruit Company and its affiliates. This work contests interpretations that regard US policy towards countries like Guatemala at the time as simply beholden to business interests or as seeking domination. Rather, as Washington's interest in the transition diminished, officials in the US embassy and representatives of US labour in Guatemala were left isolated, unable to fulfil their vision for a democratic labour movement in the teeth of such opposition.

This paper examines the production of neoliberal multiculturalism in Chile as well as ideas about race, ethnicity and nation mobilised among local elites in the Chilean South. It argues that the process of creating neoliberal multicultural citizens is not only imposed from above, but also informed by local histories, attitudes and social relationships. Official neoliberal multiculturalism is shaped by transnational and national priorities, and involves constructing some Mapuche as terrorists while simultaneously promoting multicultural policies. Local elites contribute to the shape that neoliberal multiculturalism takes on the ground by actively feeding into the terrorist construction but refusing to consent to multicultural values. Altogether, understanding neoliberal multiculturalism depends on examining the transnational, the national and the local, and discerning the ways in which social forces at each level reinforce, interact with and depart from one another.

By analysing the socially segmented party–voter linkages deployed by the Unión Demócrata Independiente (Independent Democratic Union, UDI), a Chilean conservative party, this article demonstrates the usefulness of combining Kitschelt's party–voter linkage framework with Gibson's conceptual approach to conservative party electoral coalition-making. In Latin America, parties take advantage of social fragmentation and the availability of non-state campaign financing to combine multiple linkage types and thus attract socially diverse constituencies. Although it is an opposition party, UDI's historical trajectory and organisation have enabled it to receive private funds from its traditional and party-identified core constituency (business and conservative sectors), whose programmatic preferences and interests it represents, and then use these resources in a ‘charismatic’ mobilisation approach and particularistic exchanges with a non-core constituency (low-income, non-traditional voters of the radical right), in a segmented, but nationally integrated, electoral strategy.

During the mid- to late 1930s, rural activism surged in the coffee-growing region of southern Chiapas and north-western Guatemala. This article examines the causes and impacts of sustained campesino protests at the grassroots level on the Mexican side of the border. The porous border between the two nations hindered the development of centralised power networks that prevailed in other parts of Chiapas. Campesinos and reformist federal government officials such as teachers and agrarian engineers built alliances that challenged the power of the coffee growers. This article explores the process of negotiation that occurred among campesinos, federal bureaucrats, regional authorities and elite coffee planters in order both to implement and to challenge agrarian reform.

This article is about the role of civil society after violent conflict. It argues that the transformations that civil society organisations (CSOs) make are more ambiguous than supporting donors and NGOs presume. The article analyses how, ten years after the 1996 peace agreements, Guatemalan CSOs deal with agrarian conflict. It discusses in detail the case of a church-related organisation assisting peasants with agrarian conflicts and the challenges it faced in defining its strategies. The article argues that supporting donors and NGOs should stop seeing the difficulties of organisational change in post-conflict situations exclusively in terms of the internal incapacities of civil society. Instead, they should re-politicise their analyses and focus on the importance of broader social and political processes in post-conflict settings for the strategic options open to CSOs.

In studies of the international dimensions of women's suffrage, the role of international organisations has been overlooked. This article examines the suffrage activities of the Pan-American Union (PAU), and in particular those of the Inter-American Commission of Women (IACW), between 1920 and 1945. Attentive to historical context, the examination suggests that international organisations can be both bearers of state interests and platforms for social movement interests. The article also argues that while not independent bureaucracies, the PAU and IACW nevertheless had some importance for suffrage that cannot be attributed either to their state members or to the suffragist movements.

By the late 1820s, Puerto Rico and Cuba had become Spain's only remaining colonies in the Americas and its major source of colonial returns. A decade later, however, the slave-based plantation system in Puerto Rico was beginning to show signs of stagnation due to the convergence of a number of domestic and international forces. In the late 1840s the Iberian colonial bureaucracy initiated a series of proposals to stimulate Puerto Rico's transformation into an agriculturally modern, diversified, free-labour economy. This initiative failed due to an adverse economic environment, administrative confusion and rivalries, and the failure of officials on the island to enlist the support either of local planters or those at the lower levels of society. This paper explores the reasons for this failure in detail.

China's rapid growth and increased integration with the global economy over the past three decades have significant economic impacts and political implications for Latin America. This paper reviews the debate over whether these impacts have on balance been positive or negative for the region. It argues that those who emphasise the positive economic impacts of China have been over-optimistic and underplay some of the negative impacts associated with Chinese competition in manufacturing and increasing Latin American specialisation in primary products. On the other hand, when focusing on the political dimensions, there has been a tendency to exaggerate both the extent of China's influence in the region and the fears to which this gives rise, particularly among US commentators.

Thirty years on from Peru's return to democracy in 1980, the country's record with democratisation has been chequered. Not only was the process of ‘consolidation’ reversed in the 1990s under the Fujimori government, but the degree to which durable linkages have been established between state and society is very limited. More than in most countries of Latin America, the party system has failed to fulfil the representative role allotted to it in the literature, a role that cannot easily be assumed by other sorts of institution. It is therefore an important case study for those concerned with the more structural obstacles to the development of representative politics. The article seeks to look at some key issues affecting party development: the chimera of consolidation, the persistence of clientelism and patrimonialism, the interaction with social movements and the significance of political culture.

This paper focuses on the similarities and differences between contemporary urban organisation and that of the 1960s in Guatemala City and other Latin American cities, mainly using data taken from a re-study of low-income neighbourhoods in Guatemala City. It looks at the impact of sharper patterns of residential segregation, changes in migration patterns, rising levels of crime and violence, and the increase in the relationships of the urban poor with external actors, such as governments and NGOs. Severe inequality persists, but is mediated by an improvement in living standards, by the range of consumer goods accessible to the poor, and by community- and family-based adaptation.