This article examines the Mexican state's surveillance of Spanish political exiles. As the Mexican government publicly welcomed over 20,000 political refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), its intelligence apparatus characterised anarchist and communist refugees as subversive threats to the Mexican nation. Despite these efforts, the Mexican secret police failed to prevent the emergence of new political bonds between the two countries’ popular classes. This article shows the consequences of the Mexican secret police's campaign against radical exiles while also highlighting instances in which Spaniards evaded the state's purview and contributed to revolutionary projects in Mexico, Latin America and Spain.

This article examines the transnational activism of the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (Revolutionary Student Directorate, DRE), a group of exiled Cuban anti-Castro students. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, with CIA funding, the DRE attempted to challenge student support for the Cuban Revolution in Latin America and elsewhere in the global South. This article uses the DRE's trajectory to rethink the 1960s as a period of anti-communist, as well as leftist, youth ascendancy. It challenges the idea that Cuba garnered universal youth support, stressing instead that the Cuban Revolution helped turn student politics into a key battleground of the Cold War.

Many of today's central banks in Latin America were established in the interwar period. During the 1920s, most of them were designed under the influence of money doctors. The main mandate of these new institutions was to cope with inflation and provide exchange stability. This article analyses how these central banks responded to the onset of the Great Depression. I show that, in accordance with the requirements of the monetary regime, central banks initially acted to prevent capital outflows and to protect their gold reserves. This led to a credit drop to the private sector. Additional credit was made available once governments decided to intervene more actively in the economy, thereby disregarding the advice of money doctors. The central banks that were founded in the 1930s, and the reforms introduced to those already operating, were conceived to face the effects of the crisis.

A product native to the Amazon forest, cacao became the most important staple of the Portuguese Amazonian colonial economy from the late seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth century. Based on extensive research in Brazilian and European archives, this article analyses cacao exploitation in Portuguese Amazonia, examining its dual spatial dimension: the expansion of an agricultural frontier, and the expansion of an extractive frontier in the deep hinterland, with a particular focus on the role that Indian labour played in this development.

During the 1960s, the Cuban government attempted to play a leadership role within the Latin American Left. In the process Cuban leaders departed from Marxist−Leninist orthodoxy, garnering harsh criticism from their Soviet and Chinese allies. Yet Cuba found a steadfast supporter of its controversial positions in North Korea. This support can in large part be explained by the parallels between Cuban and North Korean ideas about revolution in the developing nations of the Global South. Most significantly, both parties embraced a radical reconceptualisation of the role of the Marxist−Leninist vanguard party. This new doctrine appealed primarily to younger Latin American militants frustrated with the established leftist parties and party politics in general. The Cuban/North Korean theory of the party had a tangible influence in Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, Bolivia and Nicaragua, as revolutionary groups in these societies took up arms in the 1960s and 1970s.

What are the conditions underlying successful implementation of participatory security mechanisms? Drawing on the case of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl and from the notion of social embeddedness, we argue that participatory security reforms that aim to include citizens in defining security priorities allow for better adoption of reforms in practice. Local level reforms are not implemented in a social vacuum but rather in pre-existing social networks that are key to their adoption in practice by citizens. However, not all social networks are equal, nor do they operate in the same manner. In ‘Neza’, it is through existing clientelistic networks and socially embedded local brokers that the redes vecinales were implemented and adopted by citizens, leading to varied reform adoption patterns at the very local level.

This article maps the contentious forms of political life that emerge when multicultural rights and non-formal gold extraction coincide. Specifically, it shows how, in the Colombian department of Chocó, Afro-descendant community councils have produced a unique form of mining governance that, while depending for its legitimacy on everyday uses of Afro-Colombian legislation, consists of the organisation, taxation and policing of mining activities that are in tension with official notions of extractive and multicultural law. In exploring such ‘underground’ cultural politics, the article highlights the limits of state-centric analyses of ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ and, accordingly, underscores the instrumental role that governed subjects play in the on-the-ground unfolding of multicultural governance regimes.

The origin of illicit economies has been understood as a consequence of ‘low stateness’ (i.e. low reach of the state). Given the limited stateness in many regions, however, this article seeks to explain how only some sub-national territories have become vulnerable to illegal drug trafficking. To make this case, the representative example of the Alto Huallaga valley, in the Peruvian Amazon, is analysed. This article argues that ineffective development and settlement efforts by the Peruvian state in the Alto Huallaga, rather than the absence of the state, produced socio-ecological conditions in the region, in the late 1970s, that made it more vulnerable to the illegal economy. At the same time as international demand for illegal cocaine was expanding, two conditions resulting from frustrated state development plans came together: an enclave of poor peasants who were not self-sufficient and a natural environment impoverished by soil degradation and intensive deforestation, paradoxically not suitable for any crop except coca.

The reform approved in Peru in 2009 during a right-wing government deviates from similar attempts in the region to expand access to healthcare. Left-wing parties in Peru were extremely weak during the policy-making process and the political parties were non-programmatic. Based on original field research, this article demonstrates how parties that lacked core values uniting their leaders and had no commitment to the health reform did not care for the definition of specifications regarding funding and implementation. Instead, technocrats dominated the process of policy formation, which, accompanied by the lack of commitment from key political actors, led to poorly specified policy and deficient implementation.

This article proposes a framework for evaluating the development and evolution of economic instruments for environmental conservation through the examination of their design and the interactional and structural aspects of their implementation. The framework is applied to comparatively describe the historical evolution of the world's longest-running ecological fiscal transfer (EFT) scheme in two Brazilian sites. Results show that while legislative aspects of programme design, such as linkages and flexibility, are crucial for performance, interactional and structural characteristics during implementation, such as capacity, knowledge-sharing and transparency, can be determining factors in how the programme functions at the municipal level. Policy recommendations are provided for the development of this type of programme elsewhere. Results contribute towards the conceptual understanding of EFTs, an under-utilised mechanism with great potential for a role in conservation policy mixes.

The article analyses two delegated governance projects carried out in Ecuador's Amazonian south-east in the twentieth century. In collaboration with the military and public institutions, two Catholic missions, the Salesian and the Franciscan, were central actors in the colonising of an area inhabited by the Shuar. Considering the wider historical and ethnographic regional context and focusing on practices of cultural translation and territorial politics, I discuss the two missions’ divergent governance sensitivities vis-à-vis the Shuar. ‘Governance sensitivities’ refers in this context to the colonial actors’ capability to recognise colonised subjects as culturally distinct. I combine new empirical material from the historical archive of the Franciscans in Zamora with secondary sources in order to analyse how differences between the two missions’ sensitivity and insensitivity to Shuar otherness became especially prevalent in the 1960s and 70s. The divergent ways the Salesians and Franciscans perceived the Shuar colonial subject had consequences for how they engaged in the protection of Shuar land and for how they contributed to facilitating or holding back indigenous political organisation.

This article describes the Brazilian civil–military dictatorship's anti-inflation advertising campaigns in 1973 and 1977. It shows how Finance Ministers Antônio Delfim Netto and Mário Henrique Simonsen used advertising as a substitute for economic policy. It argues that they turned to advertising to divert attention from their own policy failures by blaming urban women, small shopkeepers and consumers for the growing inflation problem. This article details the background of the campaigns and examines the advertisements, especially their use of normative gender ideologies. By reference to newspapers and political speeches, it also documents the social and political reaction to the campaigns.

Since Chile returned to democracy in 1990, centre-left governments have tried to reform the provisions on collective bargaining, strikes and unions established by the Pinochet dictatorship. Between 2015 and 2016 President Michelle Bachelet made the latest attempt to reform them. Despite favourable conditions, the changes were modest. This article explains why this is so. Drawing upon the notion of ‘associational power’ and through comparisons with labour reforms in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, this article suggests that the imbalance between workers’ and employers’ collective power is key for explaining why pro-labour reforms fail.

For over a decade, Salvadorean grassroots movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) pursued legal innovations with the aim of protecting their water sources from potentially polluting industrial activities such as mining. They initially drafted bans on mining that would preclude the extractive-based development path embraced by neighbouring countries. Eventually, they scaled up their approach and devised a draft proposal for a transboundary waters treaty that addressed the challenges that the ecological materiality of international watercourses poses to national de jure sovereignty. In so doing, the transboundary watershed has become a useful heuristic, a spatial trope to which Salvadoreans have turned to substantiate their claims to sovereignty over the Lempa River waters that El Salvador shares with pro-mining Guatemala and Honduras – claims imbued with an ethics of care rooted in wartime politics and Catholic morality.

In April 1982, Great Britain and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands/Malvinas. On 14 June, the defeated Argentine military began the evacuation of the Islands. Most Argentines came to view this short war as an absurd adventure entered into by a military dictatorship in decline trying to cling on to power. Yet by analysing Argentine songs about the Malvinas from 1941 to 1982, this article shows that the national imaginary had long included ideas of sovereignty usurped and captive islands awaiting redemption. Argentine songs about the Malvinas, I maintain, can be analysed as expressions of an ‘emotional community’ around the Islands. By examining the emphases, constants and changes in the songs emerging from that community, we get a clearer picture of how ideas about the territory and its recovery changed over time.

Fatherhood is a key but missing component of research on welfare regimes. What do states formally demand from fatherhood across Latin America? Using a novel data set of coded legal and policy provisions for 19 Latin American countries, this article offers a conceptual framework to examine state interventions targeting biological, caregiving and breadwinning dimensions of fatherhood. My findings show that, regardless of how robust their social policies are, most countries presume fatherhood to be complementary rather than co-responsible to motherhood. By making a conceptual, empirical and practical contribution to studying the state regulation of fatherhood, this article contributes to a more comprehensive view of welfare regimes.

We explore how formal mandates associated with Guatemala's 2008 ‘Law against Femicide and Other Forms of Violence against Women’ and with specialised violence against women (VAW) courts have encountered significant challenges due to state-imposed constraints. Drawing on courtroom observations, analyses of case files, and interviews, we find that while formal mandates incorporated feminist understandings of violence against women, which were often internalised among court officials, in daily practice specialised courts reproduced tendencies to depict violence as interpersonal, fragment people's experiences and enact narrow forms of justice that do not incorporate the full intent of the 2008 VAW Law and institutions intended to support it. This case study thus illuminates how and why legal solutions alone are not sufficient to reduce gender-based violence and feminicide, particularly in the face of uneven and openly hostile challenges posed by governments.

Practices of denunciation are at once ubiquitous and marginalised in literature on the Guatemalan armed conflict. Meanwhile, ordinary Guatemalans who spontaneously denounced neighbours, former friends and fellow villagers have largely escaped scrutiny in scholarly work on low-level perpetrators. Departing from untapped confidential documents in the Historical Archive of the National Police, this article provides the first archival study of denunciatory behaviour during the Guatemalan Civil War, specifically at the height of the conflict (1970–85). This contribution reveals both the strategic considerations that spurred state intelligence apparatuses to elicit civilian information as well as the broad range of personal, opportunistic and strategic motives that drove civilians to denounce. The case study questions scholarly consensus on the spontaneous and voluntary character of denunciation by arguing that besides providing novel pathways for opportunistic action, denunciations also opened up new strategies for survival in the face of a civil war that structured available choices.

Studies of liberationist Christianity in Argentina have largely explained its emergence with reference to changes or continuities within the Catholic Church. This article instead analyses firstly how Marxist humanism, dependency theory and left nationalism shaped a rapprochement with Christianity in the 1960s, with Peronism often functioning as an intermediary. Moreover, it demonstrates the ways in which the ongoing ambivalent relationship between Marxism and the liberationist Christian movement in Argentina manifested in the fragmentation of the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (Movement of Priests for the Third World) in the first half of the 1970s. In doing so, it identifies Marxism not as merely a passive repository of ideas but as an active agent in liberationist Christianity's development, and adds a new layer of understanding of the dynamics and fragmentation of the movement.

Although partisan bias – when an authority transfers discretionary public resources to a politically aligned receiver − has been extensively studied, less is known about how this practice is affected by the voting regime − compulsory or voluntary voting. In this article, I study partisan bias in Chile, using administrative data of transfers from the central authority to local governments, highlighting two relevant scope conditions: the electoral cycle, and electoral uncertainty caused by the adoption of voluntary voting. I found strong evidence of partisan bias, especially in election years and in electorally riskier municipalities. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced by this electoral reform induced politicians to allocate a large share of resources to risky municipalities, because such resources would play a more significant role in the electoral outcome. Overall, these results imply that voluntary voting has a large impact on the way that resources are allocated across subnational units.