In the late 1980s and early 1990s political liberalisation, including the reduction of the military's institutional prerogatives, occurred in Colombia despite the increasing strength of an internal insurgency. Why would Colombia's national political elite weaken the institutional role of the armed forces in the context of an escalating internal war? What was the role of paramilitary groups, which were responsible for the vast majority of massacres and political violence against suspected unarmed civilians, during the 1990s? This paper argues that the elite civilian politicians who dominated the Colombian state promoted formal institutional changes, but tolerated paramilitary repression in order to counteract a strengthening guerrilla insurgency. These civilian leaders represented a modernising elite focused upon co-opting political opposition and establishing neoliberal economic reforms, thus constructing a Low-Intensity Democracy.

This article examines the implications of Latin America's recent wave of state-embraced multiculturalism for the region's indigenous peoples, arguing that state recognition of indigenous difference is not inevitably empowering for indigenous groups or transformative of nation-states. It utilises data from fieldwork with the Kuna Indians of eastern Panama in order to delineate more precisely the contexts and strategies of indigenous peoples which may serve to push outwards more constrained forms of institutional multiculturalism. It explores the links between Panama's historical nationalist project, contemporary state multiculturalism and ethnically specific forms of mobilisation for land rights and autonomy. It also examines the transformative potential of multiculturalism in the context of the simultaneous implementation of global economic and cultural projects of neoliberalism.

This article examines the experiences of the Afro-Brazilian coffee transport workers of Rio de Janeiro's port district in the generation following the abolition of slavery in 1888. While they have been condemned by some scholars as reformist and placatory, this article argues that these Afro-Brazilians aggressively contested the new ‘free labour’ regime and the thousands of immigrant labourers who arrived to compete with them. Indeed, far from marking them as passive recipients of state paternalism, the subsequent decision of the port workers to seek an alliance with the state points to the importance of nativism as a middle-ground upon which successive Brazilian governments and Afro-Brazilians could meet.

Rescates (ransoms) consisted of the repurchase by Spanish and Spanish American merchants of ships and cargoes taken as prizes during wartime and sold in the British West Indies. This is the first detailed study of the subject, drawing on archives in Britain, Spain and the Americas. It is argued that rescates typified a broader range of legal ruses designed to protect Anglo-Spanish trade in the Americas from both wartime disruption and customs interference. As a mechanism for the legal protection of commerce promoted by both the British and the Spaniards, rescates enjoyed considerable success during the war that commenced in 1796, especially with respect to trade between the British ports in the Caribbean, Cuba and Mexico. They thus played a key role in the strong and sustained growth which characterised trade between the British and Spanish empires during these years.