During the 1980s, the major security themes that Caribbean scholars studied were geopolitics, militarization, intervention, and instability. The interface between domestic and international politics led to linkages among some of these themes and their domestic, regional, and international dimensions. For example, the militarization of Grenada in the 1980s was predicated on the need to defend the Grenadian revolution against foreign intervention and local counterrevolution. Ironically, the same buildup created the climate that led to the self-destruction of the revolution and presented the United States with a golden opportunity to intervene. In doing so, the United States succeeded in fulfilling a preexisting geopolitical aim of its own. Elsewhere in the region, militarization and concerns about stability in Dominica, Barbados, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines raised security concerns within the Eastern Caribbean, where several countries created the Regional Security System (RSS) in 1982 to bolster subregional security and became willing accomplices of intervention when the United States intervened in Grenada a year later.

In the early hours of 1994, a few hundred men and women of the Ejército Zapatista Liberación Nacional (EZLN) blocked the Pan American Highway between Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital of Chiapas, and San Cristóbal de las Casas and the road to Ocosingo, declaring war on Mexico's ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This move signaled to the world that indigenous populations intended to make themselves heard at home and abroad as Mexico restructures its economy according to the neoliberal model promoted by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The rebels captured and briefly held the municipal buildings in San Cristóbal, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, and Ocosingo. Speaking for the rebels, Subcomandante Marcos declared that their war was “a final but justified measure”: “We have nothing, absolutely nothing. Not a decent roof, nor work, nor land, nor health care, nor education.”

When President Alberto Fujimori suspended constitutional rule in April 1992, he ended Peru's twelve-year experiment in civilian democratic governance. Citing the growing insurgency of Sendero Luminoso, corruption in the political parties, and difficulties with the Peruvian Congress in passing his economic program, Fujimori announced that democracy would have to be “temporarily suspended” in order to build new institutions. This move was backed by the armed forces. Perhaps most surprising to outside observers was the widespread popularity of Fujimori's move, which reflected the growing disenchantment with traditional political parties of the right and the left. Democratic procedures and institutions during the 1980s had been precarious at best. The military's counterinsurgency campaign against Sendero Luminoso had transformed Peru into one of the hemisphere's worst offenders against human rights, with the highest number of forced disappearances in the world. But despite documented cases of torture and other violations of human rights by state authorities, Peruvian military forces acted with the knowledge that they were virtually immune from prosecution.

The ethnic question has been central to the historical process of nation-state building or “nationalization” in Mexico (Adams 1967). To a significant degree, this process has been a criollo and a mestizo project (Aguirre Beltrán 1976; compare Anderson 1983, 1988). Accordingly, indígena identity has been imposed on the non-criollo and non-mestizo population by the Mexican state, with the identification process historically displaying arbitrariness and inconsistency across a range of biological identifiers (especially phenotype) or cultural identifiers (especially language) or both (Marino Flores 1967). Following colonial precedents and in step with the evolving structure of political economy and society, the process of ethnic identification in postcolonial Mexico associated Hispanicity (via white skin color or Spanish descent or Spanish language) with the more valued locations higher in the ethno-class hierarchy and indígena identity with the lower, less-valued locations. In postrevolutionary Mexico, thanks to the contribution of anthropologist Manuel Gamio, the concept of mestizaje was stripped of biological content and culturized.

The March 1976 coup that overthrew a turbulent Peronist government in Argentina also ended one of the few experiments with worker control of industry in Latin American history. For nearly three years, the Buenos Aires local of the country's strong light and power workers' union, the Sindicato de Luz y Fuerza, administered the great public utility SEGBA (Servicios Eléctricos del Gran Buenos Aires), provider of electric power for the capital city and much of the province of Buenos Aires. This experiment with worker control was all the more noteworthy because it was not undertaken by the maverick Cordoban local of Luz y Fuerza, led by Agustín Tosco, principal spokesman within the labor movement for socialism. Rather, the initiative was taken by a bastion of traditional Peronist trade unionism led by Juan José Taccone, the implacable foe of Tosco's clasista positions.

A major question confronting analysts of Latin American labor concerns the relationships among unions, the state, and foreign powers. Some social scientists have argued that the relative autonomy of unions affects the strength of democracy in a given country (see Weffort 1978; Hall and Garcia 1989; Epstein 1989; Cohen 1989; Collier and Collier 1991). They have also asserted that Latin America's ability to control its own destiny has been shaped in part by the influence of foreign powers (particularly the United States) over social institutions like unions (Bergquist 1986; Buchanan 1991; Spalding 1992–1993). An evolving branch of labor studies that now offers a unifying perspective for examining this complex set of relationships is the perspective of labor internationalism.

Inequality in the distribution of land has long been viewed as the social dynamite that has set off many peasant uprisings in the twentieth century. The most extensive study to date of modern guerrilla wars in Latin America, by Timothy Wickham-Crowley, found land tenure and the overall agrarian structure to be a common element in upheaval in Cuba, Venezuela, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Nicaragua, and El Salvador (Wickham-Crowley 1992, 306–7). Samuel Huntington's classic book on development and stability articulated the explanation for these agrarian insurrections: “Where the conditions of landownership are equitable and provide a viable living for the peasant, revolution is unlikely. Where they are inequitable and where the peasant lives in poverty and suffering, revolution is likely, if not inevitable, unless the government takes prompt measures to remedy these conditions” (Huntington 1968, 375).

In the last ten years, the rural history of the colonial Río de la Plata and to a lesser extent that of the first half of the nineteenth century have witnessed an unprecedented boom. Research projects, new sets of questions, and the utilization of new sources and methodologies have all proliferated. Today we have undoubtedly come a long way in our understanding of these issues from where we were only a decade ago.

Until a few years ago, Venezuelans and their historians held black and white notions about the regimes that had governed the country after it became a centralized state in the early twentieth century. As Venezuelan historian Santiago Gerardo Suárez pointed out, “The victor writes history.” And indeed, most portrayals of Venezuelan rulers after 1908 were strongly colored by the roles played by leading members of the political parties that emerged triumphant in 1958 when the modern democratic period was ushered in (Suárez 1965, 20). In fact, the most influential works were written by important politicians and others closely tied to political organizations.

Like the precarious colonial state demeaningly referred to as “España la Boba,” the Dominican Catholic Church of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries endured the Caribbean ramifications of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. This onslaught included the cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, the protracted and bloody revolution in St. Domingue, disruptions in international trade, and invasions by Haiti in 1801 and 1805. Both the colonial state and the colonial church were further undermined by the declaration of Dominican independence in December 1821. Only weeks into Dominican independence, twelve thousand troops under the command of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the island, fulfilling the long-held Haitian goal of unifying the island under Haitian rule. Although considerably weakened, the Dominican church survived as the single truly national institution in the sense that it retained influence throughout the Dominican territory. The church was also national in providing a central element in Dominican elite culture: fervent Catholicism. Thus it was not coincidental that clerics gravitated to the heart of the Dominican struggle for liberation and that the church continued to play a major role in defining political alignments during the forty years following Dominican independence.

This research note investigates class tension between rural women in the context of a grassroots women's development project in the village of Guadalupe in the Mexican state of Querétaro. These tensions affected the cooperative's internal dynamics, economic choices, and inevitably its lack of success. My study found these class tensions to be gendered in that they were manifestations of patriarchy as well as dependent capitalism.

After the slaves were emancipated between 1880 and 1886, the planter class in Cuba underwent a transformation. Successful mill owners modernized their facilities, increased their cane-processing capabilities, and became planter-industrialists. Unsuccessful mill owners who lacked sufficient capital to modernize dismantled their outdated mills and became simply cane farmers. The social structure of the sugar mills was also transformed. Wage labor and tenancy arrangements replaced slave labor, and the industrial process of cane milling became separate from the agricultural processes of planting and harvesting sugarcane. As industrial units became fewer but larger, they could grind more sugarcane than that grown on the land directly under their ownership, and the larger mills therefore entered into arrangements with surrounding mill owners who were unable to make the transition to the new technological phase of sugar milling. Because the new mills centralized the grinding of cane previously carried out by many smaller units, they became known as ingenios centrales and eventually as simply centrales. Planters who gave up their obsolete milling operations and turned exclusively to cane farming were called colonos.

A major archive has recently been established in Paraguay that reveals the internal operations of the security forces during the lengthy authoritarian regime of President Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989). Featuring open access, the archive dubbed by the media as “el archivo del terror” comprises a wealth of primary material on a significant but little researched aspect of the contemporary history of Latin America. This archive provides unique insight into the day-to-day workings of a totalitarian security system and the objectives and strategies of those who headed it. The archive also has regional significance because no comparable archive exists for the period of military rule in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, or Uruguay. Thus it should prove to be of considerable interest to academics analyzing topics like the nature of Latin American military regimes, the practice of national security doctrine, human rights, and related themes.

The recent return of peace to El Salvador is providing increasingly favorable conditions for scholarly research. This encouraging climate will help Salvadoran and guest researchers make up for years of difficult and repressive conditions. Some researchers may begin by examining contemporary questions related to the recent revolutionary process, but historical research should also be greatly facilitated. Entrepreneurial searches for archival materials on the period preceding the mid-twentieth century can be surprisingly successful when one combines a national outlook with careful regional probing. This research note will provide a guide to archival and other historical materials available in the United States and El Salvador and will place these sources in the context of major questions left unanswered by the historiography covering 1700 to 1940.

As a national group, Canadians are frequently viewed as an outward-looking people with an innate thirst for knowledge about the social, economic, and political customs of other nationalities. Traditionally, such curiosity has extended to countries that have played a large role in shaping contemporary Canadian society, especially the United States and the former colonizing powers of Europe. More recently, however, owing at least partly to changing patterns of immigration to Canada and the growth in hemispheric cultural and economic ties, curiosity has turned more and more toward Canada's neighbors to the south, the countries of Latin America.