In 1799 Dr Juan José de Gamboa, an influential canon of the cathedral chapter in Mexico City, presented a lengthy petition on behalf of the Marquesa of Selva Nevada seeking permission to found a Carmelite convent in Querétaro, a city of some 30,000 inhabitants. Whereas the capital possessed twenty wealthy convents with over nine hundred professed nuns, Querétaro only had two established houses, the Santa Clara and the Capuchines. Marvelling that, whereas in France the Revolution had destroyed convents, in Mexico the Church was still able to found new houses, the crown attorney advised granting the necessary licence. A handsome edifice was subsequently designed and constructed by Manuel Tolsa, the chief proponent of the neo-classic style in New Spain, and in 1803 the Archbishop accompanied the founding sisters on their journey from Mexico to Querétaro.

The development of Central America in recent decades presents a paradox. As measured by the growth of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head, the region's performance compares favourably with the rest of Latin America and other less developed countries (LDCs). At the same time, political convulsions have become more acute, and in no part of the isthmus – not even in Costa Rica – is political stability assured.

This essay seeks to clarify the particular blend of sociohistorical elements that created a distinct form of authoritarian domination in El Salvador, Guatemala and, to a lesser extent, Nicaragua. Situations of ‘enclave’ versus ‘national control’, the consequences of export agriculture, the impact of the commodity cycle, and relations between the oligarchy and other social actors are examined in a comparative perspective to distil commonalities and differences. The emergence of a distinct variety of the capitalist state of exception followed the crisis of oligarchy brought about by the Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s. State power became public at the time and the traditional oligarchies no longer ruled directly, although they were able to weave a relatively complex alliance. This is identified as a ‘reactionary coalition’ capable of resisting any change in the model of export agriculture, ‘unreformed’ capitalism, and political authoritarianism. This model is identified as ‘reactionary despotism’, and the contemporary crises of El Salvador, and Nicaragua are related to the deterioration of this form of political domination

Extreme nationalism and a web of conspiracy theories make it particularly difficult to distinguish history from myth for the experience of foreign finance in Argentina. Julio Irazusta agrees with Raúl Scalabrini Ortíz that the London Loan of 1824 (the Baring Loan) was part of a system of spoliation, on a continental scale, by which Britons and their Government exacted full payment for the recognition of the newly independent Republics. Ortega and Duhalde report a gentleman’s agreement between London bankers in the mid-1802s; Hispanic America was to be partitioned into spheres of influence and Baring Brothers were left with the River Plate. The British loans of the 1820s were intended to tie the new Republics firmly to Britain; default was welcome, since ‘guarantees’ could then be enforced by Britain's armed might. Baring Brothers are condemned for failing to pay up the full proceeds of the 1824 loan to Buenos Aires, for plotting to overthrow Juan Manuel de Rosas, for negotiating a harsh settlement of the debt in 1857, and for intervening in one way or another at every stage in the politics and economics of Argentina, even to the extent of promoting the Paraguayan War.

Why have the Washington authorities under both Democrat and Republican administrations chosen to devote so much time, money, and political capital to the pursuit of a policy in Central America that most international opinion, and a substantial proportion of domestic US opinion, considers to be unwarranted interference? The standard answers to this question fall into two main groups, each with strong ideological connotations. The official American position, most forcefully expressed in speeches by such prominent figures as ex-Secretary of State Alexander Haig, UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and President Ronald Reagan himself, judge events in Central America as yet another example of worldwide Soviet expansionism, in this case channelled through Cuba. On this view, it is not possible for America to stand back from the struggles of this small and apparently unimportant region, for unless the Russian cause is decisively rebuffed there is a real risk of ‘falling dominoes’, to the Panama Canal and beyond in one direction, and even northward into Mexico.

Between the 1850s and 1880s, Argentina became one of the chief suppliers of wool to the expanding world markets. Most of this wool was grown in the fertile sheep-runs of the richest province in the country, and was sent to Europe through its capital city and port, Buenos Aires.

After the colonial experience of being mainly an entrepôt in the legal and contraband trade between the Viceroyalty of the River Plate and the rest of the world, Buenos Aires had seen its commercial opportunities flourish after Independence, and had found in its rural hinterland the staples to export, hides and salted beef. A mercantile class, at the rise of the century more interested in commercial pursuits than in productive activities related to the rural areas, had, nevertheless, sought in the late colonial era the benefits of cattle-raising, which provided the new staples, first to complement and later to replace the chief export of colonial Buenos Aires, bullion from Potosí.

The development of a labor force has become an important focus of recent historical research on 19th-century Puerto Rico. One center of investigation has been slavery and its linkages to sugar culture.1 Until recently historians had consistently stressed the relative insignificance of slave labor in Puerto Rico.2 However, by focusing at the municipal, or even hacienda level, scholars have begun to generate a more analytical view of 19th-century Puerto Rican slavery. It has been shown that slaves were critical for Puerto Rican planters during the period of rapid sugar expansion in the 1820s and 1830s, and continued as an important source of labor until abolition in 1873. Contrary to prior interpretations, the history of slavery in Puerto Rico differed little from that of the other sugar producing islands of the Caribbean

Prosperity and increasing inequality may well be the most suitable terms to describe at first glance the evolution of the Central American economies from the post-war period until the beginning of the eighties. Prosperity based on a very favourable external economic situation was characteristic of the fifties, with promotion of technological modernization and some diversification in the export sector. Sustained economic growth continued during the following decade, thanks to structural change brought about by industrialization and by the process of Central American integration. This upward trend began to break up in the seventies, and the whole region was plunged into crisis and instability. Although the gloomy side of the new international situation cannot be denied, twenty or thirty years of prosperity seem to have created internal conditions sufficient to nurture a social conflict of vast proportions, which embraces since at least 1978 not only the economic sector but all aspects of Central American life.

Although in recent years there has been an increasing quantity of suggestive and important investigations of Peronism, little attention has been paid to the continuity between the pre-1943 and the Peronist labor movement.1 This continuity has been neglected despite general recognition that there were important labor leaders from the earlier labor movement who provided key initial support to Peonism and that the pre-1943 labor movement was one of Latin America's strongest.

The subject of agrarian reform in El Salvador has an importance which extends beyond considerations of that country's immediate crisis. The agrarian problems in many parts of Latin America originate from similar sets of conditions, but nowhere have these conditions reached a more critical point than in El Salvador. Consequently the experience of agrarian reform there is likely to anticipate those problems of agrarian change which eventually will have to be faced by most Latin American countries.

For more than 40 years Mexico has experienced sustained and rapid economic growth. Until the recession of 1976–7, GNP grew at an annual rate of 6%. By 1977 there were some four and a half million industrial workers in Mexico and the growth of modern industry was proceeding apace. The Mexican economy began to experience serious problems in the second half of the 1970s and, by 1982, despite (or because of) an attempt to use oil exports to promote recovery, had plunged into a severe crisis. Together with the development of this economic crisis, the 1970s also witnessed the emergence of a sustained increase in industrial conflict and in working-class militancy in general. This upsurge of militancy involved the formation of ‘independent’ unions not affiliated with the official party, and the development of militant factions within some of the larger national industrial unions, affiliated with the official party. It has been suggested that the development of union militancy has been connected with the growth of modern industrial establishments. While this claim cannot be accepted without serious reservations, it is certainly the case that there have been upsurges of union militancy in modern industrial sectors. This article will examine the nature of union militancy in two industries which can be regarded as modern in the context of Mexican development: steel production and automobile assembly.

Recent research on Costa Rican social and economic history has made notable advances regarding the classic coffee economy of the 1850–1950 period. Major works by Hall and Stone, and essays by Cardoso, Pérez, Vega, and Samper have offered suggestive new materials and perspectives on the basic dynamics of coffee culture and the social antagonisms which developed within it. Nevertheless, the differences in opinion in this literature on the coffee economy, in particular the degree of land concentration and proletarianization within the Central Valley region, tend to obscure an even more basic agreement of the pre-coffee starting point: the predominance of dispersed, self-sufficient smallholders on privately owned plots, with a very weak elite structure and minimal social division of labor in artisanry or agriculture.

On 26 January 1981, one of the colonels in Brazil's National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), Colonel Zanoni Hausen, issued an instruction from his department, the DGPC (General Department of Community Development – now extinct), to three public servants hitherto undistinguished for any particular contribution to indigenous affairs in Brazil and with no particular qualifications for the task assigned to them. Their brief was to form a ‘Committee for the Identification of Criteria of Integration’ and they were to present their results within ten days. The criteria, the document states, need no justification or explanation; ‘it is sufficient to list them in their principal groups; ethnic, sociological, economic, linguistic and so on’.

For the vast majority of people around the world, Central America is a small group of countries bridging the gap between the Mayan ruins of Guatemala and the Panama Canal. The names of those countries are only recognized when the major contending ideologies of capitalism and communism clash in one of them, or when an international figure of ill or good repute establishes some sort of link with them. A football game that leads to war also catches the eye of the media. An example of the first situation would be the ousting of the communist regime of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala by Honduran troops backed by the United Fruit Company and the CIA in 1954; another would be the rise of the marxist regime in Nicaragua in 1979. The second is evident in the establishment in Costa Rica of the international fugitive Robert Vesco around 1970, as well as in the visit of Pope John Paul II to each of the five nations in 1983. The last refers to the ‘soccer war’ between El Salvador and Honduras in 1967. In each instance the countries concerned made headlines around the world for a short time and people learned their approximate geographical location even if in a passing fashion.

In December, 1976, the peasants of Cuyumalca, a small, dispersed rural settlement in the northern Peruvian mountain department of Cajamarca, organized the first of what have become known as the rondas campesinas, village level vigilante committees whose primordial aim was from the first and continues to be that of putting an end to robbery, both professional cattle rustling and petty thievery. The rondas patrol roads, trails, pastures and fields