After decades of authoritarianism and a twelve-year civil war ended by a negotiated peace agreement in 1992, El Salvador is a markedly different country. Despite important changes, however, public institutions have remained largely unresponsive, acute social exclusion persists and violent crime has soared. Rather than the possibly inevitable by-products of a post-conflict situation, these and other developments are the consequences of a regression from an incipient electoral democracy to electoral authoritarianism. The elite-controlled Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party had more to gain from the preservation of the status quo than from democratic changes and only accepted a politically inclusive system to restore the oligarchy's dominant position through electoral politics. Uncommitted to democratic consolidation, successive ARENA administrations maintained an institutional façade of democracy to reproduce authoritarian governance and defend elite interests.

This paper investigates how students at the State University of Rio de Janeiro(UERJ), one of the first Brazilian universities to adopt race-based quotas foradmissions, interpret racial categories used as eligibility criteria.Considering the perspectives of students is important to understand the workingsof affirmative action policies because UERJ's quotas require applicants toclassify themselves. Students' interpretations of those categories often divergefrom the interpretations intended by people who shaped the policy. Students'perspectives are formed by everyday experiences with categorisation and by theirself-assessment as legitimate beneficiaries of quotas. In contrast, the policieswere designed according to a new racial project, where blackconsciousness-raising and statistics played an important role.

This article examines the political imbroglios surrounding the tenure of José García de León y Pizarro (1778–84) as visitador and president-regent of the Audiencia or Kingdom of Quito, in order to demonstrate the deep political divisions that emerged in Spain's Atlantic empire over the Bourbon Reforms. García Pizarro's policies strengthened the colonial state and produced a dramatic increase in crown revenues, but they also led to a groundswell of protest from local elites and even provoked the condemnation of his successors. These political struggles in Quito reveal the many competing viewpoints about the reform and renovation of Spanish Empire. The Bourbon Reforms emerged from a series of hotly contested political struggles on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to patchy and even distinctive outcomes in different regions of the empire. This political contestation also helps to explain why no coherent, commonly accepted plan for the reform of Spain's Atlantic empire ever emerged during the century.

This article discusses the evolution of social protection in Latin America and proposes a conceptualisation and contextualisation of new forms of social assistance. It begins by outlining the main features of social protection prior to the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s and the changes enforced by crises and structural adjustment. It then focuses on the new forms of social assistance emerging in the region, especially conditional and unconditional income transfers and integrated anti-poverty programmes. The article draws out their common features, identifies possible underlying conceptual frameworks, and places their introduction and evolution within the broader context of the new dynamics of poverty and vulnerability in the region.

This paper focuses on congressional politics in Chile before and after the 1973 coup. It challenges a common perspective that sees the congressional decay of the early 1970s as being caused by stringent limits on particularistic bills and by presidents with wide-ranging formal prerogatives. It presents an alternative argument that focuses on electoral competition and ideological radicalisation, derives testable implications, and provides the first empirical comparison of legislative behaviour before and after the 1973 coup. The evidence, which centres on the analysis of policy networks derived from the joint sponsorship of legislation, appears incompatible with the implications of the conventional argument.

The Peruvian Constitutional Tribunal (CT) is currently an independent institutional actor in Peru's politics. By comparing and contrasting the recent history of the CT and two previous ‘cases’ of ‘failed’ constitutional courts – the CT's role during the Fujimori regime and its predecessor, the Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees – the article tests several theories that aim to explain the emergence of independent courts in democracies. The three cases provide evidence in support of theories that highlight the importance of political pluralism as a necessary condition for the emergence of independent courts, but the cases also show that an institutional design that ‘mirrors’ this pluralism is crucial to attain this outcome. The importance of these political and institutional factors suggests that it is too soon to be optimistic about the likelihood that the present CT can maintain its independence in the future.

The new trade data used here document the significance of industrialisation in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico after 1870. By 1910 Brazil and Mexico, in particular, led most of the poor periphery in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. While some of this impressive industrialisation was due to fast productivity growth in manufacturing, perhaps yielding some catch-up on their competitors in the United States and Europe, this article argues that there were even more powerful forces at work. Much of the industrialisation that occurred in Latin America was due to a cessation in the seven-decade rise in its net barter terms of trade, trends that reversed the deindustrialisation and ‘Dutch Disease’ forces that had dominated Latin America for almost a century. Equally important for Brazil and Mexico was favourable policy in the form of higher effective rates of protection for manufacturing, and a depreciation of the real exchange rate. These policies were missing in Argentina and Chile, and industrialisation suffered there as a consequence. Changing market conditions and policies seem to have been more important than changing fundamentals in accounting for Latin American industrialisation after 1870.

This paper examines relations between the state and capital in Argentina with respect to agricultural biotechnology. Argentina is one of the world's leading exporters of genetically modified (GM) crops and is a key player in the global politics of biotechnology. Whereas in other parts of the world, including other countries in Latin America, active civil societies and some governments have rejected the technology, Argentina has adopted it as a central accumulation strategy. The desirability of this strategy has been secured in material, institutional and discursive arenas of power, producing a particular expression of ‘bio-hegemony’. Looking at the role of business in the political economy of agricultural biotechnology is revealing both of the extent and forms of corporate power and contributes to an understanding of hegemony in practice.

In this paper the economic performance of post-independence Latin America is assessed in comparative perspective. The release from the colonial fiscal burden was partly offset by higher costs of self-government, while the opening of independent Latin American countries to the international economy represented a handmaiden of growth. Regional disparities increased after independence, so generalisations about the region's long-run behaviour are not straightforward. However, on average, per capita income grew in Latin America, and although the region fell behind compared with the United States and Western Europe, it improved or maintained its position relative to the rest of the world. Thus the term ‘lost decades’ appears an unwarranted depiction of the period between 1820 and 1870.

This article treats Tio Faustino, a little-known samba musician and Afro-Brazilian religious leader living in Rio de Janeiro, as an entry point for exploring larger questions about Brazil and the African Diaspora. The inquiry expands outward from Tio Faustino to Rio's early twentieth-century markets in ‘African’ commodities, the city's nascent music industry and the growing call to defend intellectual property rights in Brazil. In order to advance their careers, Tio Faustino and other artists accessed nationalist sentiment in ways that highlighted differences rather than commonalities with African-descended peoples elsewhere. In this way, Brazil's global standing and its colonial history and post-colonial trajectory functioned as a counterweight to transnational and diasporic connections. These findings deepen, rather than completely unseat, recent trends in diaspora and transnational studies.

Using a variety of new sources directly pertaining to different types of rural estate, and contrary to interpretations of rural Chile as a traditional society unaffected by economic modernisation, this article analyses the transition of the hacienda system in central Chile towards agrarian capitalism during the period of export-led growth from the 1860s to 1930. It argues that the expansion of the ‘landowner enterprise’, along with developments in mechanisation and irrigation, resulted in the marginalisation of the precarious ‘peasant enterprises’ operated by tenants and the gradual proletarianisation of the agricultural workforce. The development of agrarian capitalism transformed the collective action of rural workers, which assumed modern forms such as strikes and unionisation, and thus became significant in national politics. The first wave of rural conflicts, which took place in the early 1920s, can therefore be understood as the response of the emerging rural working class to the agrarian expansion that Chile experienced as part of the process of capitalist modernisation.

Did Latin American privatisation policies fail because of flawed implementation of fundamentally sound policies or because privatisation policies were themselves seriously flawed? Using the Brazilian electric power reforms as a narrative tool, this paper examines the causal chain assumed by large-scale privatisation policies that were implemented as part of structural reform and adjustment programmes. The paper concludes that many privatisation policies and the economic stabilisation programmes within which they were embedded were not mutually reinforcing in the way that policymakers had expected, and that in their application much of what privatisation theories had claimed was lost in translation.

This article shows how Argentine judges effectively came to make labour law when ruling in occupational accident cases between 1900 and 1915. During this period, in the absence of a specific occupational accident law, a number of Argentine workers who had been victims of occupational accidents sued their employers for damages according to the Civil Code. By reinterpreting the principles of the Civil Code in these cases, Argentine judges attempted to accommodate aspects of a new social and economic reality to an increasingly outdated legal framework. The article argues that, in doing so, these judges articulated their own solution to one of the central issues of the time: the ‘social question’. Furthermore, the article shows how the judiciary's particular solution to the social question effectively defined the kind of citizenship rights workers were able to claim in court.

Using the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state.

This paper attempts to investigate the main factors behind Argentina's relative economic decline by comparing its evolution with that of Australia and Canada. For this purpose a ‘reduced index of economic freedom’ has been constructed in order to capture and summarise the principal macroeconomic trends in Argentina compared with the other regions of recent settlement during the period between 1875 and 2000. The results, obtained using cointegration and causality techniques, show how the macroeconomic policies that were implemented are able to explain the relative evolution of Argentina's economy, in terms of GDP per capita, over the long term. The results revise some of the interpretations prevalent in Argentine historiography.

This article reviews Mexican Supreme Court decisions concerning the legal status of juntas de conciliación y arbitraje (state labour boards of conciliation and arbitration) between 1917 and 1924. During this period the Court played an important role in legitimising these administrative boards, which have since become a constituent part of Mexico's state–labour regime. This examination of the Court's decisions shows how judge-made law contributed to the evolution of industrial relations in the country in the early 1920s. Furthermore, the article's discussion of the connection between the Court's evolving case law and its changing membership in this period indicates how its legal decisions were sensitive to political changes. This presents an early instance of the more recent trend toward the judicialisation of politics in Latin America.

This essay evaluates the political economy of Mexico during the Porfirian period (1876–1911), with the aim of discussing advances in scholarship and presenting an outline of the elements for a future research agenda. To this end, the essay examines the current state of knowledge on four crucial aspects of the Mexican economy: growth and its dimensions; the state, finance and economic strategies; the construction and functioning of the internal market; and the international economic relations of Mexico during the first period of globalisation. In particular, it assesses the arguments that link features of Porfirian economic organisation with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910.

This article investigates the introduction of educational television in El Salvador in the late 1960s, an Alliance for Progress project, in light of the preoccupations of the Cold War, the application of modernisation theory, the growing influence of a development community grounded in the social sciences and the Salvadorean elite's particular obsession with communism. The top-down approach used by the military regime to introduce a flurry of changes in the education system was facilitated by the extensive resources provided by international aid agencies and the US government. However, the reforms alienated Salvadorean teachers and fuelled teachers' strikes that are still remembered as pivotal moments in the urban mass movements of the 1970s which preceded the civil war of the 1980s.

The extensive scholarship on ‘varieties of capitalism’ offers some conceptual and theoretical innovations that can be fruitfully employed to analyse the distinctive institutional foundations of capitalism in Latin America, or what could be called hierarchical market economies (HMEs). This perspective helps identify four core features of HMEs in Latin America that structure business access to essential inputs of capital, technology and labour: diversified business groups, multinational corporations (MNCs), low-skilled labour, and atomistic labour relations. Overall non-market, hierarchical relations in business groups and MNCs are central in organising capital and technology in Latin America, and are also pervasive in labour market regulation, union representation and employment relations. Important complementarities exist among these features, especially between MNCs and diversified business groups, as well as mutually reinforcing tendencies between these dominant corporate forms and general under-investment in skills and in well-mediated employment relations. These four features of HMEs, their common reliance on hierarchy, and the particular interactions among them add up to a distinct variety of capitalism, different from those identified in developed countries and other developing regions.

The Christianity of the future in Latin America will remain dominant but now plural and competitive. The decline of Catholic monopoly and the surge of Protestant and Pentecostal churches, visible since the 1980s but with deeper roots, are explained in the context of social, cultural and political changes that have drawn churches into public space in new ways. The impact of democracy, violence, and a newly open civil society on churches and religious life is visible in new ideas about rights and associational life and in the withdrawal of the institutional churches from political confrontation, diversification of political positions and multiplication of voices in all churches.