Although unimagined and unanticipated within the Creole nationalist ‘discursive frameworks’ of the liberal-republican state, nineteenth-century Andean peasant communities sought mediated re-insertion in the postcolonial Peruvian Republic. Key to peasant political engagement in the Andean region of Huaylas-Ancash was the tactical deployment of ‘Indian rights’ of colonial origin to make moral and material claims on the postcolonial caudillo state. In Huaylas-Ancash peasant claims and political practices destabilised liberal notions of ‘republic’ and ‘republican’ citizenship, and eventually challenged the teleogical historicity of Creole nation-building itself.

This article presents a portrait of New Granada's colonial lawyers. Though it focuses primarily on individuals qualified to practise law before the Audiencia, it deals not just with practising lawyers as such but also with those who, despite being qualified to practise law, ended up choosing other occupations; in particular, joining the bureaucracy. It examines the social characteristics, family strategies, and bureaucratic careers of these professionals to demonstrate how, as chief competitors for state jobs, lawyers complemented their clans' power in important ways. By providing a vital component of the colonial elite's survival kit – bureaucratic power – they increased their families' overall influence, honour, and social status. In doing so, some lawyers came to build true family-bureaucratic networks which proved resistant to the late colonial Bourbon reforms that sought to undo them.

A comprehensive study of the available documents about the Bay of Pigs, including many that have been declassified within the last eighteen months, and extensive interviews with the protagonists in the CIA, the White House and the State Department lead me to conclude that the disastrous operation was launched not simply because Kennedy was poorly served by his young staff and was the captive of his campaign rhetoric, nor simply because of the hubris of the CIA. Rather, the Bay of Pigs was approved because the CIA and the White House assumed they were speaking the same language when, in fact, they were speaking in utterly different tongues.

This study of public health policy in Chile uncovers some of the social tensions in that country during the 1880s, and illustrates the fragmentation of the Chilean elite prior to the Revolution of 1891. The Chilean government's controversial and contested public health policies implied the increasing bureaucratic organisation and regulation of society. The justifications offered for these policies by central government officials reveal both the deep roots in Chilean politics of a powerful Executive, and the early linkage between the ‘scientific discourses’ of medical professionals and the bureaucratic centralisation of state power.

The inauguration of electric streetcar service by two foreign-owned companies in Montevideo in 1906 set off an intense debate between the city's elite and its anarchist workers over the nature of progress. The streetcar became a contested symbol of modernity as the elite attempted to dictate the terms of a new urban order. Anarchists countered with an alternative vision of progress that emphasised social equality, education and liberty, and they competed for the sympathy of the middle class which grew increasingly ambivalent towards the streetcar. Trolley workers resisted a new system of discipline at the workplace and eventually led the city's first general strike, with broad public support.

Only in the last century has the territory of the Enxet Indians of Paraguay been colonised by non-Indians, led initially by Anglican missionaries. This article examines the Enxet in the contemporary political context of Paraguay giving special attention to their claim for 160,000 hectares of their traditional territory. It also considers the development of a mythically expressed autochthonous political discourse and the relationship of the Indians to professional politicians. Despite significant legal backing, the Enxet land claims are strongly opposed by powerful landowners and their best chance for success will be to gain international support.

Brazil's Contestado Rebellion (1912–1916) pitted 20,000 millenarian rebels against two-thirds of the Brazilian army. A major event in the consolidation of the Brazilian Republic, it serves as an important case study of the dynamics of central state intervention in the Brazilian hinterland. Local notables took advantage of a new, unprecedented central state presence to press for advantages in their local struggles. At the same time, officer experiences during the rebellion led them to question the institutional arrangements that they felt produced the conflict. The result was a new officer push for a nationalist, central state intervention during the Republic.

With the passage of the Jones Act (1917), the United States expanded Puerto Rican autonomy, made Puerto Ricans citizens of the USA, and gave the island prohibition of alcohol. The Puerto Rican people overwhelmingly ratified prohibition in a referendum in July 1917. Prohibition won because it was emotionally linked to patriotism and morality. Prohibition enforcement was almost impossible, compounded by the colonial status of the island. It was that status which brought an immediate end to prohibition in Puerto Rico with the demise of prohibition in the United States in 1933.

This paper examines the relationship of the Rio de Janeiro Tramway, Light and Power Company and the municipal council in the provision of streetcar services in Rio de Janeiro, 1903–1920. Using archival materials collected in Brazil and Canada, it demonstrates that the utilities company lost the contest for control of Rio de Janeiro's mass transit system to the municipal authorities. Although it had the advantages of capital, technology and skill, this Canadian enterprise did not dictate its demands to an acquiescent municipal council. Rather, the municipal council and prefecture managed to extract an expensive streetcar system from the company to service its growing city.

The specificities of contemporary Honduran politics are explored by examining both national historical development and the cooption of popular protest by military reformism in the 1970s. The dynamics underpinning demobilisation of the popular movement after 1976 are explained with reference to both the agrarian reform implemented by the military and certain features of local political culture, such as patronage and clientelism, which – it is argued – were utilised selectively to coopt a sector of the organised labour movement. Divisions within the popular movement, in part a product of traditions of statelabour relations, were also significant in weakening the popular challenge.

This article provides an analysis of Ernesto Che Guevara's theory of guerrilla warfare, the foco. The numerous changes to the original foco thesis, as presented in Guerrilla Warfare (1960), are examined in detail covering two dozen articles, speeches, essays, interviews and books authored by Guevara, Castro and Debray while stressing their relation to national and international politics. The author argues that there was an apparent discourse between Cuban politics and the numerous changes in Guevara's writings. Juxtaposing changes to the foco theory from 1960 to 1967, to Cuban historical events, reflects the political expedience of the 1960s and the primary interests of the fidelistas, specifically Guevara.

This article locates the first regime of Alfonso López Pumarejo (the Revolutión en marcha, 1934–8) within the social dynamics of Colombia's polarised party system, rather than the developmentalist and class dynamics that are frequently invoked. López's economic and political thought is shown to be far closer to the partisan and antistatist traditions of Colombian liberalism than is often assumed, and his rise to power is depicted as a victory of political strategy rather than class alliances. After surveying the role of the Acción Liberal group of intellectuals in the radicalisation of Liberal discourse, culminating in the constitutional reform of 1936, the article offers hypotheses about the transitory nature of López-era Liberal radicalism.

This article analyses the variables shaping economic relations between Argentina and Brazil in the 1939–5 5 period, namely changes in the international economy, bilateral trade, the industrial structure and domestic politics. It is argued that although rivalry prevailed in most of the period this was qualified by the interest of Argentina and Brazil in securing the gains from trade and in enhancing their position in the international system. The balance of these contending forces was a pattern of limited or restrained cooperation. If significant trade concessions were offered, their institutional framework remained unstable and fragile. This was reflected in the uncertainty that plagued bilateral trade and in the failure of more ambitious initiatives aimed at economic integration, as those proposed in the Pinedo Plan and in the economic union agreements of 1953–54.

This article assesses competing explanations of the independence from political and economic elites achieved by Brazil's Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econömico (BNDE) during the 1950s. Whereas others have stressed the actions taken by Presidents Getúlio Vargas and Juscelino Kubitschek, I attribute the Bank's remarkable independence to a cadre of innovative civil servants. In this account, independence is measured by control over personnel recruitment, loan allocation, and generation of funds. The considerable control BNDE bureaucrats exercised over personnel recruitment and loan allocation countered their limited control over funding, permitting the Bank to become an independent and effective development institution.

This article examines the history and ideology of the Communist Party of Peru-Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). The rebels claim to embody a distinctively Peruvian Marxism. However, a close examination of the party betrays a conspicuous indifference to Peruvian culture and traditions. The distinctiveness of this largest and most diverse of the Andean nations disappears in the orthodoxy of a universal Marxism, in this respect placing the Shining Path within the long legacy of the imperial inscription of Latin American history into the preconceived categories and linear narratives of Western philosophy and science.

This article explores the relationship between civil-military relations and political change. Transitions to democracy in Latin America have led scholars to focus attention on the legacy of military rule and those efforts aimed at securing democratic control of the military. The article examines the foundations of civilian supremacy in Mexico, established within the context of a hegemonic party system. Changes brought about in the civil-military balance as a result of shifts in the division of labour between civilians and soldiers, as well as the impact of political liberalisation, are also analysed. Drawing on the experience of other transitions to democracy, the article discusses some of the issues raised by the dismantling of hegemonic rule for civil-military relations in Mexico.

The article utilises oral history, labour and military court records, newspaper accounts, and government documents to narrate the history of rural labour mobilisation in the Aha Mogiana region of São Paulo, Brazil, during the years 1959 to 1964. It shows how rival rural leaders linked either to the Brazilian Communist Party or the Catholic Church organised many workers, led numerous influential strikes, and helped hundreds of workers sue for their rights in court. Eventually, Catholic and Communist competitors joined forces under the guidance of a federal agency (SUPRA). Coordinated by SUPRA, the newly unified Alta Mogiana movement was suppressed by the military regime that took control of Brazil in April 1964.

The essential explanation of Argentina's 1989 hyperinflations is that the stabilisation programmes immediately preceding them drove the public sector in particular, the central bank – into ‘debt distress.’ These stabilisation programmes sought to anchor prices on an appreciated exchange rate, sustained by tight monetary policies that maintained high interest rates. The problem was that the government and the central bank had heavy domestic-debt burdens, and their combined interest bill far exceeded their non-interest surplus. To finance the interest without creating money, the government and central bank had to add continually to the outstanding debt stock as they capitalised the interest due. The debt swelled, and interest rates were pressured upward. Heavy pressure against the exchange rate, devaluation and hyperinflation then ensued when the public-sector debt stock exceeded what financial markets could be persuaded to hold at reasonable interest rates.

This interdisciplinary study approximates the Columbian interpretation of the Taí nos – filtered and re-interpreted by the Dominican people, through their museums. Cultural phenomena such as vomitic spatulas, ‘talking’ idols, hallucinogens, infant cranial deformation, dances, nudity, sexual customs, punishments, and live burial produced Columbus's tendency to denounce the Taínos in his writings. These texts are displayed in the Museo del Hombre Dominicano side-by-side with anthropological exhibitions. Together, these texts and artifacts become purveyors of an ideology, one which Dominicans use to challenge the Eurocentric, romanticising, Noble Savage approach propagated during the Quincentennial.

This commentary argues that heavy-handed regulation and onerous implicit taxation of financial intermediaries in Latin America in the 1980s was softened by governments' assumption of responsibility for bank failures. This in turn induced governments to avoid dealing with bank distress, with disastrous subsequent consequences. In effect, mismanaged bank regulations were propped up by mismanaged bank exit procedures. The disincentives induced by such financial policies on bankers, depositors, creditors and regulators were pervasive. Illustrations are drawn from the experiences of four Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela) in the 1980s.