The objective of this article is to reappraise both the accuracy of the official export statistics and the narrative of Brazilian export growth during the period immediately following independence. We undertake an accuracy test of the official values of Brazilian export statistics and find evidence of considerable under-valuation. Once corrected, during the post-independence decades (1821–50) Brazil's current exports represented a larger share of its economy and its constant growth is found to be more dynamic than any other period of the nineteenth century. We posit that this dynamism was related to an exogenous institutional shock in the form of British West Indies slave emancipation that afforded Brazil a competitive advantage.

Following the ends to the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the revolutionary coalitions that had led the fight against authoritarian regimes began to fracture. However, none of the splinter parties that broke from the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit has succeeded on their own as political parties. In this article, I argue that there is no single reason to explain the poor performances of the Democratic Party (PD), the Renovating Movement (MR), and the Democratic Front Party (FDR) in El Salvador, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Renovate-MRS) and the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (Rescue-MRS) in Nicaragua, and the New Nation Alliance (ANN) in Guatemala. However, their limited financial resources, alliances with non-revolutionary centrist and centre-right parties, and voter tendency to overlook internal ideological and personal debates within the original political parties, especially the FSLN and FMLN, have not helped.

Existing research shows that the ideas of judges shape their behaviour. A natural next question to ask is, where do these ideas come from? Yet, there is little empirical evidence regarding the content and distribution of these ideas and even less evidence regarding the sources of these ideas, especially how ideas transfer or diffuse among judges. In this article, a survey of judges in the Mexican state of Michoacán generates original data on the attitudes and professional ties among these legal elites, and a mixed-methods design examines the diffusion of these attitudes along these ties, sequencing quantitative network analyses and interviews with judges to strengthen causal inferences. The core finding that the social structure of judges influences the attitudes judges hold contributes a valuable analytic complement to scholarship on comparative judicial behaviour, and clarifies our understanding of the role of judicial networks in strengthening democracy and the rule of law.

Cohabitation is a distinctive feature of low-income groups in Latin America. In the past, it has been linked to colonial legacies including notions of familial honour, poverty, and a kinship system focused on blood ties. By contrast, some scholars consider rising levels of cohabitation in the present day to be an effect of modernisation, through increased gender equality. The present research, based on life histories of young, poor, urban co-habitees in Chile, aims to show that rising cohabitation is linked to targeted social policies and also to declining patriarchy, which is distinct from gender equality.

In this article I examine ordinary ethical practices that underpin intimate relations in the Brazilian state of Maranhão. I focus ethnographically on jealousy and seduction as complementary forms of play, which simultaneously affirm and challenge such aspects of emotional relatedness as trust and love. I argue that since a measure of concealment is inherent in both these play-forms, they render invisible those actions that challenge conventional moral injunctions, such as sexual infidelity. I consequently offer an ethnographic theory of ‘invisibility’ by which opacity, uncertainty and paradox become intrinsic to the emergence of intimate relations as ethical practices in their own right.

This article offers a critical analysis of scholarship produced about Brazil's Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES) since its founding, in 1952, to 2013. BNDES has performed an important, if changing and sometimes controversial, role in Brazil's economic development over the past 60 years, especially as provider of long-term finance. This analysis of almost 1,000 texts highlights discussions about its initial organisation and mission and how the role and activities of the bank changed over time, guided by turbulent national political and economic contexts. In spite of the bank's institutional importance, however, the literature is more narrative than analytical and of limited scholarly impact, dominated as it is by the bank's authorship. We argue for independent, evidence-driven, critical analyses of the effectiveness of this important institution in promoting Brazil's economic and social development.