By the end of the nineteenth century, railway expansion had led to the formation of a technocratic bureaucracy in Chile and other countries in Latin America. Central to this formation were the engineers who oversaw and regulated both public and private railways. Recently, historians have begun to re-examine engineers’ roles in this period. By employing methods and theoretical framings from the history of technology, this article argues that engineering was an important framework through which state–capital relations evolved, making engineers pivotal actors in the evolution of political economy at the time.

Hundreds of indigenous Mayo ejidatarios became members of the SICAE (Sociedad de Interés Colectivo Agrícola Ejidal) sugarcane cooperative in North-West Mexico in the 1930s, gaining control of irrigated lands and marginalising non-members, called ‘individualists’, by the 1940s. This article focuses on how indigenous individualists of Los Goros and El Teroque ejidos navigated the SICAE's control of water and attempts to annex their lands. Mayo individualists’ resistance to corrupt ejidal leadership and the SICAE cooperative allowed them to influence local water development decisions. These individualist Mayo experiences exemplify how hydraulic social mobilisation became an indigenous people's strategy of survival in mid-twentieth-century Mexico.

Between 2014 and 2018, a period marked by major political and economic upheaval, Brazilian politics shifted sharply to the Right. Presenting qualitative research conducted over 2016–17, this article examines this process from the perspectives of residents of a peripheral São Paulo neighbourhood. Analysis is presented of three broad groups of respondents, each of which mobilised a distinct narrative framework for interpreting the crisis. Based on this, I argue that the rightward turn in urban peripheries embodies not a significant ideological shift, but rather long-term transformations of place and the largely contingent ways these articulate with electoral politics.

This commentary examines the challenge of sustainable development in the Amazon, arguing that global efforts to mitigate climate change and current Amazonian policies are clearly inadequate to prevent global warming and deforestation from tipping the forest into a savanna. It analyses the growing climate pressures jeopardising the Amazon's resilience; the erratic Brazilian, Bolivian, Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian governance of the forest; and the failure of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) to establish long-term forest conservation policies in the region. The research demonstrates that the ‘savannisation hypothesis’ is potentially closer to reality than most debates in the social sciences assume and should be considered seriously. The commentary concludes by suggesting possible pathways for preventing the dieback of the Amazon. These are based on three strategic axes: the strengthening of the ACTO, the promotion of a technological revolution in the forest, and a progressive environmental diplomacy by the Amazonian countries.

In 1905, world-renowned bullfighter Luis Mazzantini arrived in Guatemala City for a number of corridas. Despite the excitement of the urban elite, the matador's fights were poorly attended by the working class due to high ticket prices. This article uses the ‘Mazzantini Season’ as a case study of working-class consumer culture in Guatemala City to trace shifts in Guatemalan political economy through the 1890s and early 1900s, analysing the constraints on popular consumerism such as price inflation, currency deflation, food shortages and other factors affecting working-class urban Guatemalans. It also demonstrates the manner in which responses by the state and coffee planters to economic crises to protect elite interests fundamentally undermined the ability of working-class residents of Guatemala City to participate in consumer culture.

Drawing on archives from the US labour movement, personal papers of transnational labour organisers, Bolivian oral histories and press reports, and government records from four countries, this article explores a web of Cold War relationships forged between Bolivian workers and US government and labour officials. Uncovering a panoply of parallel and sometimes conflicting state-supported trade union development programmes, the article reveals governments’ inability to fully control the exuberance of ideologically-motivated labour activists. Rather than succeed in shoring up a civilian government as intended, US President John F. Kennedy's union-busting programme aggravated fissures in Bolivia's non-Communist Left, ultimately frustrating its attempt to steer a non-aligned posture in Latin America's Cold War. Employing transnational methods to bridge gaps between labour, development and diplomatic history, this article points toward a new imperial studies approach to the multi-sited conflicts that shaped the post-war trajectory of labour movements in Bolivia and throughout the Third World.

When the United States invaded Nicaragua in 1912 the popular reaction in El Salvador was so strong that it completely upended politics. The article argues that this anti-imperialist movement, completely ignored by the current historiography, forced Salvadorean governments to make decisions regarding foreign policy that would have been unthinkable had it not been for the pressure from below. Popular pressures contributed to limit the scope of the final version of the Chamorro–Bryan Treaty between the United States and Nicaragua. The treaty did not include Platt Amendment-like provisions. Moreover, the Wilson administration abandoned the idea of extending a protectorate to all the Central American countries and building a naval base in the Gulf of Fonseca.

The treatment of draft dodgers and miscarriages of justice by Argentine military courts provoked mobilisations by families, communities and the major political parties. An examination of the debates and discussions around these issues reveals a widespread sentiment that rarely questioned neither the right of the armed forces to draft young men nor the legitimacy of the armed forces. By adopting the language of patriotism and civic obligation, individual and community petitioners and politicians who represented them challenged the state's broad claim of power over the bodies of young men from a reformist position. Military justice formed a critical platform through which citizens debated the meaning of citizenship and the place of the armed forces in society.

During the Cold War, Havana symbolised the struggle for national liberation in Latin America. Yet in few other places on the island of Cuba did the Revolution's visions of development materialise as they did in the southern city of Cienfuegos. This article examines why two half-finished nuclear reactors and a decaying ‘nuclear city’ still remain in Cienfuegos. Through a comprehensive spatial and infrastructural transformation of Cuba, the revolutionary government sought to remedy the evils of dependency and unequal exchange. Cienfuegos, and its shifting place in the Cold War political economy, demonstrates how a radical critique of urbanisation merged with the spatiality of centralised energy infrastructure in the pursuit of ultimately-failed nuclear modernity. The history of Cienfuegos draws the academic gaze away from Latin America's major cities to broaden the ‘geographies of theory’ in urban, energy and Latin American studies.

This article takes existing histories of Chilean transnational anti-communist activity in the 1970s beyond Operation Condor (the Latin American military states’ covert transnational anti-communist intelligence and operations system) by asking how the Pinochet dictatorship responded to two key changes in the international system towards the end of that decade: the Carter presidency and introduction of the human rights policy, and the shift of the epicentre of the Cold War in Latin America to Central America. It shows how both Salvadoreans and Chileans understood the Pinochet dictatorship as a distinct model of anti-communist governance, applicable far beyond Chile's own borders. This study of Chilean foreign policy in El Salvador contributes to new histories of the Latin American Extreme Right and to new understandings of the inter-American system and the international history of the conflicts in Central America in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

Economic crises during Chile's civic–military dictatorship (1973–90) forced a growing number of people onto the streets, including women who commuted from peripheral neighbourhoods to beg in downtown Santiago. Under military rule, impoverished women in public spaces became a police problem. Despite their constant presence on the streets throughout the twentieth century, Chile's begging laws were rarely applied to women, except for a brief period under Pinochet, when begging emerged as a female crime in Santiago. This paper examines female begging and the policing of female begging, revealing both to be framed as a defence of the family.

Southern and central regions of Argentina moved from being relatively poor in the sixteenth century to being the richest in the country today. Although there is some evidence of this reversal, the process of regional growth in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century is, in the main, unknown. In this paper, we present an estimation of the GDPs of Argentina's 25 provinces in 1914: this is the first consistent estimation of this variable for any period before the 1950s. Our results confirm that in 1914 the city of Buenos Aires and some districts in Patagonia had the highest per capita GDP, and a comparison with the available data for 1953 shows strong persistence in incomes per capita in this period; sectoral analysis of provincial GDPs suggests that growth in the leading districts was driven by economies of agglomeration in some cases and land abundance in others.

Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City are informal responses to drug use, with these all-male institutions attempting to save drug users from what some Christians call ‘the devil’. Of ethnographic interest is that the mothers, sisters and wives not only pay for the capture and captivity of their loved ones but also volunteer their labour to support these centres. This article, in response, assesses not only the Christian impulse to domesticate sinners but also the extent to which a cult of domesticity organises Guatemala's war on drugs.

The implementation of President George H. W. Bush's 1989 Andean Initiative brought to the fore competing US and Bolivian agendas. While US embassy officials sought to exert control in pursuit of militarised policies, the Bolivian government's ambivalence towards the coca-cocaine economy underpinned opposition to the ‘Colombianisation’ of the country. This article deconstructs prevailing top-down, US-centric analyses of the drug war in Latin America to examine how US power was exercised and resisted in the Bolivian case. Advancing a more historically grounded understanding of the development of the US drug war in Latin America, it reveals the fluidity of US–Bolivian power relations, the contested nature of counter-drug policy at the country level, and the instrumentalisation of the ‘war on drugs’ in distinct US and Bolivian agendas.

Latin America is one of the world's only regions to have witnessed a fall in income inequality during the 2000s. This paper evaluates the role fiscal policy played in this change. Recent scholarship has examined this in individual countries; lacking is a regional perspective. We examine the effects of nine fiscal instruments on income inequality in 17 countries between 1990 and 2014. Fiscal policy had a positive – albeit small – effect in reducing income inequality, especially from 2003, working best at the urban level. Public spending on education, personal income taxes and social contributions were especially instrumental in reducing income inequality.

This article offers an analysis of the transnational discursive construction processes informing Latin American security governance in the aftermath of 9/11. It demonstrates that the Global War on Terror provided an opportunity for external and aligned local knowledge producers in the security establishments throughout the Americas to reframe Latin America's security problems through the promotion of a militarised security epistemology, and derived policies, centred on the region's ‘convergent threats’. In tracing the discursive repercussions of this epistemic reframing, the article shows that, by tapping into these discourses, military bureaucracies throughout the Americas were able to overcome their previous institutional marginalisation vis-à-vis civilian agencies. This development contributed to the renaissance of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism discourses and policies in the region, allowing countries such as Colombia and Brazil to reposition themselves globally by exporting their military expertise for confronting post-9/11 threats beyond the region.

International conventions and domestic laws have been enacted to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women worldwide. However, these progressive policy initiatives have faced opposition in contentious contexts where policy rivals have contested their creation and implementation. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on progressive networks that have led to policy advances, such as violence against women (VAW) policies, while emerging literature has noted their limited impact and implementation. However, there is scant attention paid to one major underlying cause of limited impact and problematic implementation: that there is sustained opposition to these policies by policy rivals that resist and undermine progressive policies. We identify opponents and entrenched opposition to VAW laws in Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1990s and 2010s. We also identify how these opponents leverage ties with the state and utilise ‘family discourse’, framing progressives as anti-family, as strategies and mechanisms for stunting and even reversing VAW laws.

By examining the Manifesto Project data for post-transition Chile, we show growing convergence in the electoral competition strategies between the centre-left and centre-right coalitions. While the former is characterised by inertia, the latter is marked by gradual yet relentless programmatic moderation. To interpret these results, we rely not only on theories of salience and party adaptation, but also on the cartel party thesis. This contribution reinforces the findings of increasing literature on post-transition Chile that reveals growing collusion between the mainstream left-wing and right-wing coalitions, which have increasing difficulties channelling demands emanating from below and therefore providing adequate political representation.

Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's ‘Colombianisation’. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections that make the drug trade, the drug war and their associated economies of violence possible. We do, however, recognise one form of Colombianisation that actually is under way, but it is not the one imagined by security pundits. The real Colombianisation is a convergence of geopolitical and economic interests that have seized upon the geographical realignments of the drug trade to expand the same agroindustrial-military nexus in Central America that proved so ‘successful’ in Colombia.

Scholars interested in labour in Latin America have traditionally paid little attention to trade unions’ legal mobilisation. However, the increasing number of legal complaints filed by workers with labour ministries and/or the courts in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile calls for a more serious debate on the role that trade unions play in this process. This article focuses on the Chilean case. Drawing on various sources, it shows that Chilean unions have turned legal complaints into a weapon to gain more rights and curb employers’ power. This process has involved the strongest and most combative unions, and is due to two historical conditions: (1) the obstacles placed in the way of successful resort to more disruptive tactics; (2) the increase in institutional opportunities to report infringements of the law. Overall, the article challenges the current image of the Chilean unions by foregrounding their agency and their achievements over the last decade.