This article recounts the story of the Seventh-day Adventists’ success in Puno, Peru, between 1900 and 1925, from a grassroots perspective. Retracing the footsteps of prominent indigenous converts, the article presents the discovery that most of the church's native leaders were army veterans. These men had spent years away from their communities and, upon their return, discovered the numerous challenges of reintegration into rural society. In almost every aspect of communal life, veterans encountered obstacles to their reintegration: their lands had been usurped, they lacked the necessary social and political outreach, and they were ridiculed and marginalized because of the cultural—apparently mestizo—habits and practices they had adopted while away. In their quest for alternatives, these veterans left the Catholic Church and converted to Seventh-day Adventism. Conversion, I argue, offered an answer to the difficulties of their reintegration. It provided new opportunities for social and economic mobility and possibilities for veterans to reinterpret their Indian racial identity in a way that would include the seemingly mestizo traits they had adopted while in the barracks and on the coast. Thus, this paper sheds light on how religious conversion served to ameliorate some of the difficulties that veterans faced as they attempted to re-enter rural life.

This article investigates the use of coca by the Bolivian Army during the Chaco War of 1932–35. I present research that reveals the surprising extent to which the Bolivian Army provisioned coca to its soldiers as a substitute for adequate nutrition; as a morale booster; as a stimulant; and as a medicine. The article explores the social and cultural implications of mass coca consumption by Bolivian soldiers, many of whom were mestizos who had never before chewed the leaf. Ultimately, I argue that the pervasiveness of coca within the traumatic popular experience of the Chaco War sowed the seeds of a historic transformation of the politics of coca in Bolivia. The Chaco War initiated a process by which coca in Bolivia was transformed from a neo-colonial marker of the Indian caste to a material and symbolic element of an emergent interethnic working class. Through a comparative analysis of the Bolivian army's use of coca in the Chaco War with the German army's use of methamphetamine during World War II, this article concludes with a consideration of the ways in which the present case study expands our understanding of the crucial but under-studied historical relationship between drugs and warfare.

In 1941, the well-known international Cold War actor Serafino Romualdi traveled to South America for the first time. As a representative of the New York-based Mazzini Society, Romualdi sought to grow a robust anti-fascist movement among South America's Italian communities, finding the most success in Uruguay. As Romualdi conducted his tour of South America, he began writing a series of reports on local fascist activities, which caught the attention of officials at the Office of the Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA), a US government agency under the direction of Nelson Rockefeller. The OCIAA would eventually tap Romualdi and his growing connections in South America to gather intelligence concerning Italian and German influence in the region. This investigation sheds light on the critical function that Romualdi and his associates played in helping the US government to construct the initial scaffolding necessary to orchestrate various strategies under the umbrella of OCIAA-sponsored cultural diplomacy. Despite his limited success with Italian anti-fascist groups in Latin America, Romualdi's experience in the region during the early 1940s primed him to become an effective agent for the US government with a shrewd understanding of the value in shaping local labor movements during the Cold War.

This article traces resistance among members of the armed forces who opposed the military dictatorship in Brazil during the first four years of the regime, 1964–67. I show that despite scholars’ efforts to depict the 1964 coup as a project supported by the armed forces as a strategic and ideological unit, there were battle lines within those forces along which hard-liners and moderate interventionists battled for government control. There were, in fact, hundreds of officers and soldiers who opposed the coup and organized against it. To contain resistance efforts inside the armed forces, the generals who orchestrated the coup labeled opponents to intervention as communists and expelled them from the institution, in many cases under considerable duress. This article discusses the first opposition efforts of officers and soldiers, particularly the Nationalist Armed Resistance (RAN) and the Caparaó Guerrilla Movement. Members of the military who were opposed to the coup shared an anti-interventionism and nationalism that united them against the regime. After 1964, their efforts to oppose military interventionism, previously carried out inside the military barracks, became the fight of all its opponents, members of the armed forces and civilians alike.