Presidents Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales have all sought to reverse the policies of decentralisation that were adopted in the 1990s in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. This article adapts ideational and institutional hypotheses from the earlier literature on decentralisation to explain this recent movement in the opposite direction. At the ideational level, because of the close association of decentralisation with liberalisation in each country, recentralisation emerged as a way for presidents to reverse the legacies of their neoliberal predecessors. Beyond ideology, recentralisation can be explained by paying attention to the territorial distribution of electoral support; presidents used it to weaken the sub-national governments where the opposition had found political shelter, while simultaneously redirecting recentralised resources toward supporters.

Focusing on the first large-scale protests in Chile after the reinstatement of democracy in 1990, this article examines the emergence of the 2006 Pingüino movement and shows how it succeeded in mobilising thousands of secondary school students against the neoliberal education model. It argues that several distinct but intertwined dimensions explain the movement's emergence. In 2006, secondary school student groups merged to form a single organisation and adopted a horizontal and participatory decision-making mechanism. At the same time, shortcomings in the education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s were revealed in terms of quality and equity, creating grievances that were fed into the movement's collective action frame. Finally, President Bachelet's rhetoric of a ‘government of citizens’ as an attempt to counteract the elitist nature of the Concertación's governance formula signified an opening of the structure of political opportunities that the students knew to take advantage of.

Genomic research in Latin America has looked into the African, Amerindian and European ancestry of local populations. This article explores how indigeneity and blackness figure in genomic science in the light of previous and current representations of indigenous and Afro-descendent people. These categories have been cast as ‘other’ in Latin America, but they have occupied different locations in ‘structures of alterity’. I look briefly at these similarities and differences in the colonial and republican periods and in recent multiculturalist reforms. I look at the gendered sexual imagery surrounding each concept, before examining in detail how blackness and indigeneity figure in gendered ways in genomic science research on admixture and ancestry in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. I conclude that, in the context of multiculturalism, genomics works to re-centre imaginaries of the nation around the mestizo and mixture, while casting blackness and indigeneity, in sexualised and gendered ways, as different kinds of others.

After the world food crisis of the early 1970s, food policies became a ‘national priority’ for Colombian development. Colombia was the first country to implement the multi-sectoral approach proposed by international organisations. However, in the past 30 years Colombian governments have presented nutrition as a minor health issue. During the recent world food crisis, the government insisted that Colombia was one of the most food-secure countries in the world. In seemingly similar circumstances, why was food policy made a priority in the 1970s and not in the new millennium? We address this question with the help of securitisation theory. We argue that in the 1970s, the government successfully securitised the food issue in the context of a reduction of external food aid and a failed land reform. Recent national governments (as opposed to some local governments) have had little interest in a securitising move since the related food sovereignty discourses threaten their free market policies.

The Carabineros de Chile played an active role in the repression and leadership of the Pinochet regime, yet today, the police force is one of the most respected institutions in Chile. Few post-authoritarian democracies have been able to restore such esteem for their police as quickly. But what does respect mean? This study analyses the narratives of approximately 50 police experts in Chile. It finds that police experts regard the positive image of the Carabineros as having more to do with fear and an effective communications strategy than police reform. It is important to understand how those Chileans most involved in policy discussions on policing interpret the reasons for respect, as their interpretations can shape the types of policing advocated or practised.

The 2012 presidential election in Mexico is significant for many reasons, not least of which is that it returned the Partido Revolucionario Institucional to power after two Partido Acción Nacional administrations. This essay reviews more than 50 surveys taken before and during the election to determine significant patterns among Mexican voters, comparing the most influential traditional and non-traditional demographic variables, as well as other variables such as partisanship and policy issues in this election, with those of the two previous presidential races. It also analyses other influential variables in the 2012 presidential race, including social media and the application of new electoral legislation. It identifies significant differences and similarities among voters today in contrast to the two prior elections, and suggests long-term patterns among Mexican voters which are likely to influence voting behaviour in future elections, ranging from regionalism and gender to partisanship and social media.

Recent political changes across Latin America that challenge mainstream conceptions of liberal democracy have led to speculation about some kind of post-liberal democracy possibly emerging in the region. Up to now, however, there has been no systematic assessment of this proposition or any explicit conception of post-liberal democracy. This article fills this research gap by proposing a conceptual framework for analysing political change in the direction of post-liberal democracy, in Latin America and beyond, and probes the plausibility of this framework in a case study of Bolivia. It shows that the concept of post-liberal democracy helps us make sense of the contemporary transformation of Bolivian democracy and that it has comparative advantages over alternative conceptual frameworks such as radical populism and defective – that is, illiberal or delegative – democracy.

In Chile and Argentina, indigenous Mapuche intellectuals contend that there is a single Mapuche nation that spans the Chile–Argentina border. When Mapuche people talk about the Mapuche nation and create symbols to represent it, however, they can mean both the Mapuche nation within the Chilean and Argentine state borders and the cross-border Mapuche nation. The dual nature of this project raises important theoretical questions about the nation-building process. In this article, I argue that Mapuche activists are engaging in a multi-scalar geopolitical imagination. They are imagining the geographic, political and cultural elements of the Mapuche nation at two scales simultaneously: within nation-state borders and across them. The overlapping and contested nature of this process means that the nation-building project is full of new tensions and constraints. However, it is also an example of ‘thinking otherwise’ and imagining an alternative sense of national belonging.

This article addresses the various mechanisms by which the religious figure of the Christian martyr became a useful notion in Argentine political discourse. It argues that the process by which the idea of the ‘martyr’ was secularised and politicised was actually initiated by religious agents themselves. The analysis considers how commemoration initiatives devised by religious agents, social movements and political actors have brought ‘Catholic martyrs’ into the pantheon of national symbols. It also deals with the various semantic shifts seen in the public discourses of religious agents themselves, shifts that extend the boundaries of an eminently religious category by associating it with other figures in a more specifically political imaginary, such as that of the hero and the victim. The article shows how the political power of the religious figure of the martyr lay in the way various actors could use it to invoke the image of a legitimate and heroic victim of political violence. It thus allowed those actors to sidestep the vexed public question of whether those being commemorated had had any involvement in armed struggle.

El Salvador has undergone a deep economic transformation over recent decades, from a model based on agro-exports to an open, transnational service-based economy. This transformation has occurred in a context dominated historically by a small group of elite families that formed family-owned diversified business groups (DBGs). This paper studies the leading groups' strategies in confronting transnationalisation. It shows that the DBGs have adapted to the new realities through a combination of sector shifts, internationalisation and the adoption of different kinds of relationships with multinationals. In spite of this, there is little evidence that the DBGs have become less important or subordinate to multinational corporations. Rather, they have, in different ways, exploited their local and regional knowledge and networks to confront competition at home and expand at the regional level.

Many Latin American countries are moving towards increased accountability for past human rights violations, and there is a growing global consensus that international law does not allow some crimes simply to be exempted from prosecution. Uruguay has had a deeply split response to these developments. While the Supreme Court and the political elite increasingly pushed to end impunity, the public actually ratified the 1985 amnesty law protecting the military from prosecution in a 2009 plebiscite. The amnesty law was finally abolished by Parliament in 2011. This article traces the winding road from impunity to accountability in Uruguay in the context of substantial public support for impunity. It argues that, while the lack of judicial independence obstructed the quest for justice for many years, the combination of continued civil society demands for justice met by increasingly human-rights-friendly executives and liberal-minded judges (and lately also prosecutors) explains the recent advance in retributive justice.

Drawing on interviews, published sources and archival documents, this article examines Cuba's policy towards Latin America after Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara's death. It argues that as a result of this event and other setbacks in the region, Cuba reconceptualised its priorities, de-emphasised armed revolution and embraced new revolutionary processes. The results were mixed. By the mid-1970s, Havana was more disillusioned about revolutionary prospects in Latin America than ever before. However, it had also rejoined the inter-American system after more than a decade of isolation. This article asks how, why and with what consequences for Fidel Castro's stated pledge to ‘make revolution’ these shifts in Cuba's Latin American relations took place.

In 1976, the US Congress halted arms sales to Chile. This paper examines the congressional debate over arms sales to Chile and the political and military consequences of the action. Recent scholarship has largely overlooked the embargo and its implications for regional security dynamics in South America. Initially US sanctions increased Chile's diplomatic isolation and military vulnerability, which made regional conflict more likely. However, Chile's ability to surmount the effects of the embargo eventually increased Augusto Pinochet's independence vis-à-vis Washington. When the Reagan administration began pushing for a transition to democracy, it lacked two key instruments for influencing a military government: weapons sales and security assistance.

This paper examines the women's association movement in Buenos Aires between 1920 and 1940, and its connection with the emergence of a social state. Subsidised by the state, associations led by upper-class women provided a significant number of social assistance services to mothers, working women and children, and had a notable impact on the design of social policy. While historiography concurs that by 1930 the significance of this charitably oriented women's movement had started to decline, being replaced by public welfare services, this paper seeks to question such a conclusion by analysing three of the most important women's social welfare associations in the period and showing how, having become the maternal face of the state, they retained a central role in the provision of social assistance until well into the 1930s, thus helping to prevent the state from becoming a ‘colossal bureaucratic machine’.

During the Mexican Revolution, male revolutionaries in Mexico repeatedly tried to suppress confession by invoking the trope of the sexually predatory priest menacing weak, superstitious women. Campaigns against the rite resulted from long-standing gender divisions over the Church, fears of Catholic counter-revolution, and male revolutionaries' drive to modernise marriage as companionate and secular but still patriarchal. Although ultimately unsuccessful as policy, attacks on the confession strengthened radical anticlericalism. By equating masculinity with reason, nation and progress while painting femininity as vulnerable, fanatical and potentially treasonous, the campaigns subtly shaped gender roles and helped to consolidate post-revolutionary patriarchy.

Ecuador has emerged as a good case study of the interactions between diasporas and their countries of origin. The recent enactment of external voting rights has mirrored a novel political discourse which emphasises the positive contribution of ‘emigrant brothers’ and their unbroken allegiance to their homeland. Expatriate reactions to these new political developments are at the core of our article, which heuristically reconstructs the social roots and meanings of expatriate participation in the constitutional referendum held in 2008. Questionnaires were simultaneously administered to Ecuadorean voters in nine cities in seven countries. Based on this innovative convenience sample, the expectations and motivations underlying people's electoral involvement and civic participation are explored against the background of transnational connections and attachments. An understanding of voters' involvement on a terrain of symbolic patriotism, identity reassertion and ‘home re-evocation’ – rather than in strictly electoral terms – is advanced. External voting – whatever its impact on domestic politics – should be appreciated as an institutional opportunity for migrants' national identification and belonging to be represented.

Centred around a May 1970 shooting at the Israeli embassy in Asunción, this article traces a chain of actions and reactions that began with Israel's victory in the Six-Day War in June 1967 and ended after the June 1972 verdict of a Paraguayan court regarding two Palestinians. Situated among Israeli officials, Palestinian refugees and Syrian-Lebanese elites, authoritarian Paraguay was not only encompassed by but also accommodated the post-1967 Arab–Israeli conflict, revealing the connection between the ‘areas’ of South America and the Middle East through ideas about relocating Palestinians as well as their actual displacement.

In the nineteenth century, members of the Rio de Janeiro-based Sociedade Auxiliadora da Industria Nacional promoted the development of new agro-industrial commodities from Brazil's native forests as substitutes for expensive foreign imports. Influenced by late colonial scientists and reformers who followed the political economy of Carl Linnaeus, the society turned a Portuguese imperial project of economic revitalisation into a vision for developing the nation's post-independence economy. For society members, Brazil's ‘industrial forests’ were essential for economic independence and defined the new nation's place in an emerging global capitalist system.

The 60th anniversary of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 led by the MNR provided an opportunity to review a Latin American political experience of disputed importance in the light of the government of the MAS under Evo Morales since 2006. This essay reappraises the historiography of 1952 from the perspective of MNR officialism and from critical positions, particularly those associated with indigenismo or Katarismo. Bolivia hoy, an influential collection of essays edited by René Zavaleta Mercado in 1983, is identified as a key moment in changing interpretations of the 1952 revolution.

This essay examines the shifting conceptions of the state and development through recent waves of Peruvian historiography. The broad structuralist-dependency interpretations of the 1970s and 1980s gave way to a more diffuse and creative ‘political turn’ during and after the 1990s. These changing historical ideas, which still defy synthesis, relate to distinctive global conceptions and phases of economic liberalism, the changing perceived role of states in development, and the integration and social disciplining of a vastly unequal Peruvian nation. Aspects of these Peruvian historical debates may help to shed light on similar controversies through much of the region.