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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.