This article discusses the development of social categories and ethnicity in the peninsula of Yucatán, Mexico, since the Conquest in the sixteenth century. Based on the Yucatec case, it demonstrates that ethnicity is not a ubiquitous form of social organisation, but rather a historical process related to specific techniques of social distinction. It argues that the starting point for the analysis of ethnicity should not be ethnic collectives, but instead the ways in which individuals use ethnic categories in social interaction.

The traditional literature on Mexico's formerly hegemonic party, the PRI, notes the importance of the ‘informal rules of the game' in determining outcomes, such as who will be the PRI's presidential candidate. This article argues that the onset of electoral competition allowed weaker actors within the party to strengthen their position by reforming the statutes in order to give them decision-making power previously denied them. However, this was a difficult process. President Salinas was able to overturn statutory reforms, while President Zedillo was not. Now that the PRI has lost the presidential elections, internal mechanisms of distributing selective benefits become even more important because of the loss of the omnipotent president who once exacted cooperation from all actors within the party and the regime.

Under his administration (1994–2000), President Ernesto Zedillo replaced Pronasol, the targeted poverty alleviation programme created by his predecessor, with his own programme, Progresa. Pronasol had come under severe attack as a politicised federal welfare programme intended to generate votes for the PRI. In contrast, the Zedillo administration insisted that Progresa was a genuine poverty-alleviation programme devoid of any political agenda. The purpose of this article is to assess whether Zedillo's claim is valid. To do so, I build a statistical model with the aim of identifying the factors that may have influenced the reach of Progresa in 1999, an important year of electoral preparation for the July 2000 elections. The picture that emerges is not entirely clear-cut. On the one hand, poverty indicators played a key role in determining who should benefit from the programme. On the other hand, Progresa also displayed a political edge, revealing that, in certain respects, the executive and the PRI continued to resort to old tricks in an attempt to alter electoral results.

This article examines the process of militarisation in Honduras in the 1954–1963 period, also the public reaction to it and its political consequences. The extant literature ignores the significant public opposition to an institutionalised military. As an autonomous military institution was first taking shape in the 1954–57 period, the militarisation issue was one of the dominant themes in the national press, and a sophisticated public debate took place between school teachers and military officials over whether the country needed a military at all, or whether the country should follow the Costa Rican example of military proscription. The 1957–59 period witnessed pressures from politicians, students, and labour to curtail military power and excesses. Finally, the platform of the favourite candidate in the 1963 presidential elections called for demilitarisation and again the Costa Rican model was a high-profile alternative. Demilitarisation played well with the masses, and this contributed to the preemptive military coup just days before the elections. Militarisation affected power relations and undermined democratic consolidation.

Chile's new civilian government, the centre-left Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia, has been strongly praised for its efforts to strengthen the rights of labour and correct Chile's severe social inequalities. After nearly a decade of civilian rule, however, it has become increasingly clear that these efforts have not succeeded. Indeed, one of the defining features of Chile's new democracy is the profound inequality and imbalance of power between capital and labour upon which it has been constructed. This article seeks to explain this outcome and examine its implications for Chile's post-military political and economic order.

The occasion of honouring the memory of John Brooks, a great friend of Latin America, has helped me vanquish my initial reluctance to tackle a topic that is as broad, varied and still open-ended as the present situation of democracy in South America. As a first measure of my limitations, with the exception of some references to Costa Rica and Mexico, I will not discuss Central America and the Caribbean, not because I feel these regions are unimportant but because, simply, I do not know enough about them. However, when I feel that I am on sufficiently solid ground so as to refer to Latin America as a whole, I will do so.

I begin by noting that in contemporary South America some countries satisfy the definition of political democracy. Those countries share two main characteristics. One is that they hold elections under universal adult franchise that, at least at the national level, are reasonably fair and competitive. These are standard criteria in the political science literature. However, having in mind the experience of Latin America and elsewhere in the third world, I believe that we should add that such elections must be institutionalised. By this I mean that all relevant actors expect that elections of this kind will continue being held in the indefinite future so, whether they like or not, it is rational for them to play democracy, not coup-making or insurrection. We should also stipulate that these elections are decisive, in the sense that those who are elected do occupy the respective offices and end their terms in the constitutionally prescribed way; they are not, as it has happened too often in Latin America, prevented from occupying office or thrown out of it because some supra-constitutional power feels that they are the ‘wrong people’.

The second characteristic is the enjoyment of certain political rights, especially of opinion, expression, association, movement and access to a reasonably free and pluralist media. Of course, these and other rights are important per se; in addition, they are instrumental – necessary conditions – for the effectuation of the kind of elections I have just specified.