Two environmental re-engineering projects clashed in south-eastern Puerto Rico in the early twentieth century. Between 1910 and 1914 the Puerto Rican Irrigation Service built three large dams to water canefields owned by US sugar companies. The new canals and holding ponds created ideal breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and demand for fieldworkers encouraged greater numbers of Puerto Ricans to work and live near these mosquito swarms. Malaria rates soared as a result. Meanwhile, public health officials tried to control malaria, but their efforts faltered, especially when efficient irrigation was prioritised above all else. It was not until the 1940s and 1950s that health officials controlled and then eliminated malaria. In Puerto Rico, malaria rose with the commitment to irrigated canefields and remained tenacious until wartime exigencies inspired greater control efforts, DDT became available and, most importantly, manufacturing eclipsed sugar production as the island's dominant economic activity.

Much of the agricultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America has been dominated by studies of export products and economies. Yet just as important for national development were domestic markets supplied by small-scale farmers. Using Guatemala as a case study for Latin America, this article examines the challenges faced by farmers producing for local, regional and national markets. Over the course of the national period, state authorities’ sporadic concern for domestic agriculture provided indigenous small-scale farmers with opportunities to advance their agendas, which ranged from resisting forced labour to maintaining their traditional agricultural practices. By the 1930s, domestic foodstuff production had increased markedly because in the early twentieth century state authorities had joined small-scale farmers to actively promote domestic-use agriculture.

This article reveals the influence of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) on both the reformers of Guatemala's ‘Revolutionary Spring’ (1944–54) and the reactionaries who overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. It shows how officials in the Arévalo and Arbenz administrations looked to the defeated Second Spanish Republic as a moral and political example, while local opponents of those administrations treated Spain's Nationalist insurgency and Francisco Franco's dictatorship as models for how to exterminate communism. In so doing, the article argues for the importance of multi-sited transnational Cold War histories that complement existing studies of US intervention.

The article addresses the history of the ‘Estatuto del Peón’ (peons’ statute or rural workers’ code), one of the most emblematic measures of the so-called ‘first Peronism’. It tries to weigh the importance of this legendary Peronist act for the actors directly involved and in particular to calibrate the magnitude of the Statute's impact on the everyday life and working conditions of Argentina's rural workers. I analyse in detail how the decree was conceived and the novelties it brought in terms of rights and regulations for rural workers. It also uses trial records to explore the implementation of the Statute and its concrete effects, in terms of both working conditions and the juridical protections offered to rural peons.

Brazil has encouraged an ambitious set of policies towards the pharmaceutical industry, aiming to foster technological development while meeting health requirements. We characterise these efforts, labelled the ‘Complexo Industrial da Saúde’ (Health-Industry Complex, CIS), as an outcome of incremental policy change backed by the sustained efforts of public health professionals within the federal bureaucracy. As experts with a particular vision of the relationship between health, innovation and industry came to dominate key institutions, they increasingly shaped government responses to emerging challenges. Step by step, these professionals first made science and technology essential aspects of Brazil's health policy, and then merged the Ministry of Health's new focus on science, technology and health with industrial policy measures aimed at private firms. We contrast our depiction of these policy changes with a conventional view that relies on a partisan orientation of the executive.

How have governments in Latin America been able to counteract two decades of neoliberalism and pursue post-neoliberal developmental reforms, and what tools have they used to do so? We argue that post-neoliberal projects are possible through the use of three necessary conditions in a context of economic bonanza: (1) extensive use of the legal-constitutional framework to facilitate interventionism; (2) an increase in the centrality of public planning agencies to design those policies; and (3) growth of the bureaucracy to implement the policies. Through a case study of Rafael Correa's Ecuador, we show how a constituent assembly, empowerment of the state planning agency, and an increase in the size of the public administration allowed the president to combat neoliberalism and pursue his ambitious Buen Vivir (Good Living) plan. This simple framework offers important clues for understanding post-liberalism and the return of the state in Ecuador and beyond.

In May 2016, an Argentine federal court concluded a momentous trial, convicting 15 defendants of illegal kidnappings and torture committed against over 100 victims of Operation Condor, and of asociación ilícita (‘illicit association’: conspiracy to commit a criminal offence) to perpetrate these violations. Operation Condor was the codename given to a continent-wide covert operation devised in the 1970s by South American regimes to eliminate hundreds of left-wing activists across the region. The Operation Condor verdict of 2016 broke new ground in human rights and transitional justice, for its innovative focus on transnational crimes and for holding state agents accountable for extraterritorial human rights violations. By analysing this pioneering case, the article brings the question of cross-border crimes into academic debate. As borders become more porous, scholars and practitioners can no longer afford to side-line the topic of accountability for transnational crimes.