This article analyses Catholic responses to persecution of the Church by the Mexican state during Mexico's cristero rebellion (1926–9) and seeks to make a new contribution to the revolt's religious history. Faced with the Calles regime's anticlericalism, the article argues, Mexico's episcopate developed an alternative cultic model premised on a revitalised lay religion. The article then focuses on changes and continuities in lay – clerical relations, and on the new religious powers of the faithful, now empowered to celebrate ‘white’ masses and certain sacraments by themselves. The article concludes that persecution created new spaces for lay religious participation, showing the 1910–40 Revolution to be a period of religious, as well as social, upheaval.

This article challenges the notion that the APRA party's poor electoral showings in Peru's southern sierra during the 1930s reflected regional lack of interest in the party and that APRA held little appeal for indigenous peasants. Focusing on two rural districts in the department of Ayacucho, the article reveals that APRA was indeed a formidable presence in rural Ayacucho during the 1930s. With its calls for regional inclusion and decentralisation, APRA appealed to progressive hacendados, schoolteachers and even wealthy peasants, who linked APRA's national discourses to their local struggles for political power and land.

This article recognises the paucity of scholarly work on environmental governance in Latin America. More specifically, it is hypothesised that community-based forest management in Mexico serves as an ideal case of ecologically beneficial and democratic decision-making, or ecological democracy. After introducing some of the relevant literature, this hypothesis is tested through a comparison of two indigenous forest-based communities in Oaxaca's Sierra Norte. Four key themes primarily emerged from semi-structured interviews, participant observation and other data collection techniques: local governance, equitable decision-making, forest management and environmental awareness. In comparing these two Mexican communities, this article aims to extend ideas of ecological democracy by linking empirical findings to political ecology theory and community forestry literature. While it is true that ecological democracy in Mexico has been facilitated under certain socio-cultural conditions, it is concluded that it can be simultaneously hindered. The empirical findings provide an analytical framework for subsequent research on ecological democracy in Latin America.

This article analyses the short-run periods that can be derived from the GDP per capita series for Argentina between 1875 and 1990, after extracting its segmented long-run trend using time series techniques and unit root tests. It also studies the economic forces which, from the aggregate demand side, might provide an explanation for this behaviour. This mode of operation makes it possible to identify successive cycles more accurately than in previous studies. A high level of agreement is observed between the results of this study and arguments in the literature regarding the causes shaping these short-run periods: the analysis demonstrates that exports were the key factor until 1932 while after this year consumption and investment came to predominate.

This article presents a history of ‘Project Cybersyn’, an early computer network developed in Chile during the socialist presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) to regulate the growing social property area and manage the transition of Chile's economy from capitalism to socialism. Under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer, often lauded as the ‘father of management cybernetics’, an interdisciplinary Chilean team designed cybernetic models of factories within the nationalised sector and created a network for the rapid transmission of economic data between the government and the factory floor. The article describes the construction of this unorthodox system, examines how its structure reflected the socialist ideology of the Allende government, and documents the contributions of this technology to the Allende administration.

Rescates (ransoms) consisted of the repurchase by Spanish and Spanish American merchants of ships and cargoes taken as prizes during wartime and sold in the British West Indies. This is the first detailed study of the subject, drawing on archives in Britain, Spain and the Americas. It is argued that rescates typified a broader range of legal ruses designed to protect Anglo-Spanish trade in the Americas from both wartime disruption and customs interference. As a mechanism for the legal protection of commerce promoted by both the British and the Spaniards, rescates enjoyed considerable success during the war that commenced in 1796, especially with respect to trade between the British ports in the Caribbean, Cuba and Mexico. They thus played a key role in the strong and sustained growth which characterised trade between the British and Spanish empires during these years.