This article challenges the assumption that the underlying principles of state-endorsed ‘multiculturalism’ stand in tension with neoliberal political-economic policies. Based on ethnographic research in Guatemala, it is argued that neoliberalism's cultural project entails pro-active recognition of a minimal package of cultural rights, and an equally vigorous rejection of the rest. The result is a dichotomy between recognised and recalcitrant indigenous subjects, which confronts the indigenous rights movement as a ‘menace’ even greater than the assimilationist policies of the previous era. It is suggested that the most effective response to this menace is probably not to engage in frontal opposition to neoliberal regimes, but rather to refuse the dichotomy altogether.

The centenary in 2000 of Gilbert Freyre's birth occasioned a number of retrospectives on his place in Brazil's history. This article focuses on Freyre up to 1933, the year in which Casa Grande & Senzala was published. Emphasis is given to such formative influences as his undergraduate study at Baylor University, his graduate study at Columbia University and his subsequent travels in Europe. In these years Freyre rejected an invitation to stay in the USA and strengthened his resolve to return to Brazil and make his career as a writer. The theme he soon adopted was Brazil's viability as a modern nation, notwithstanding its supposed defects of race and climate.

This article examines the civic festivals held in nineteenth-century Spanish America to commemorate independence from Spain. Through such festivals political leaders hoped, in Hobsbawm's words, ‘to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’. But when did the ‘past’ begin? If in nineteenth-century France the French Revolution was the time of history, in Spanish America there was no consensus on when history began. The debates about national origins embedded within the nineteenth-century civic festival not only suggest how political elites viewed their Patrias but also shed light on the position of indigenous culture (usually separated hygienically from indigenous peoples themselves) within the developing national histories of post-independence Spanish America.

The Cuban Revolution shattered some of the most important policy formulations by which the United States had traditionally defined its place and defended its interests in the western hemisphere, for which Fidel Castro has been inalterably held responsible. Much of US policy towards Cuba during the past forty years has been driven by a determination to punish Cuba for the transgressions of Fidel Castro and a determination to resist a modus vivendi with Cuba as long as he remains in power.

In 1848 the moderado administration of General José Joaquín Herrera staged public ceremonies to honour the ‘polko’ national guardsmen who had died defending Mexico City during the recent war with the USA. Herrera's government attempted to use the rituals to alleviate the pain of defeat and bring together a divided nation, as well as to reorganise the national guard into a military force manned by the well-to-do that would help preserve political stability and social harmony. Herrera's state-building project ultimately failed because the ceremonies could not surmount the tensions that afflicted Mexico. In the long run, the inability to restructure the national guard allowed Mexican statesmen in the late 1800s to disband that military force and to diminish its status in national patriotic discourse.

The transnational indigenous peoples' movement (TIPM) can convey important political leverage to local indigenous movements. Yet this study exposes a more problematic impact: the political authority gained by funding organisations who interpolate TIPM norms into new discourses regarding indigeneity, and deploy that discourse in local ethnic contests. In El Salvador the TIPM has encouraged the state to recognise the indigenous communities and has opened a political wedge for indigenous activism. Yet TIPM-inspired programmes by the European Union and UNESCO to support indigenous activism paradoxically weakened the Salvadorean movement by aggravating outside impressions that Salvadorean indigenous communities are ‘not truly Indian’.

Even though Mexico has been an important player in the international drug trade, this country's history in such illegal ventures has been insufficiently studied. In an effort to begin to understand how and when the country began to be an active participant in such illicit markets, this article first analyses regulations introduced in the United States regarding drug and alcohol consumption, marketing and production and assesses their impact on the Mexican side. Secondly, it argues that Mexico's participation in the narcotics trade, the routes that have developed and the Mexican states involved in this traffic have roots that can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century at least.

In 1933 the US ambassador to Cuba, Sumner Welles, overthrew President Machado, Cuba's first dictator, with the threat, but not the use, of US force. This diplomatic achievement was unprecedented in Cuban history. Under cover of mediation Welles had encouraged disaffection among politicians and army officers. Machado then succumbed to a popular uprising brought on by a decade of depression and oppression. The insubordination of the officers, however, soon led to a mutiny of the soldiers, whose leader, Fulgencio Batista, eventually seized the presidency and was recognised by the United States.

This article reassesses the influence of American business on US foreign policy towards Nicaragua, 1893–1912. It describes three episodes that involved American interests in Nicaragua – the Reyes uprising of 1899, the Emery claim of 1903–1909, and the US & Nicaragua Mining Company claim of 1908–1912 – as evidence for a different interpretation of US policy, one which stresses how the influence and material interests of American ‘men on the spot’ framed the ways in which the State Department came to understand American aims in Nicaragua. Earlier accounts of ‘Dollar Diplomacy’ do not adequately acknowledge the significant political consequences of American merchant activity on the Mosquito Coast.

The article discusses the use of cost-benefit analysis to assess conservation efforts, and applies this technique to Venezuela's National Parks Systems to assess how much Venezuela should spend in managing its National Parks. As with any major environmental decision, this calls for more than economic criteria. Social values, science and politics all affect environmental decisions, and economics should be but one factor considered. Nonetheless, cost-benefit analysis provides a valuable tool and a framework for improved understanding of the tradeoffs among different factors.

The Hotel Nacional battle occurred during the decisive 1933 revolution, when the siege of the deposed military reached its bloody finale. Overall, historians have downplayed the incident or disagreed about the details and its significance. Such neglect and disagreement can be explained by contemporary confusion and the urge of those subsequently seeking to legitimise the revolution to hide the unpalatable and rewrite history. However, the siege may in fact have decisively changed moderate left political opinion, thus shaping the character of post-1934 politics by contributing to Batista's subsequent rise to power.

Promoting democracy and strengthening good governance have become core components of post-conflict peace-building initiatives of the United Nations (UN). An often overlooked dimension of the analysis of UN peace support operations has been the crucial role played by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at the critical juncture linking peacekeeping to sustainable development. UN peace operations in Central America over the last decade have pioneered the organisation's involvement in the uncharted territory of post-conflict peace building. UNDP's Central American experience was the first step in the organisation's evolution away from providing traditional development assistance, towards playing an active and openly political role in post-conflict democracy building and governance reform. This new role of the UNDP has had dramatic repercussions on its mandate, administrative structures, corporate policies and operational strategies. The current institutional renewal of UNDP has its roots in its endorsement of democratic governance as essential dimensions of its mandate to promote sustainable human development. This article assesses the significance, promises and dilemmas of the governance agenda for UNDP and analyses the scope, nature and institutionalisation of democracy and governance programmes within UNDP, using Central America as a case study. It argues that the future of UNDP democracy assistance will largely depend on how successful it is at resolving the inherent tensions between democracy promotion and national sovereignty, while retaining its multilateral approach to peace and democracy.

This article examines some characteristics of the Argentine business elite between the end of the nineteenth century and the rise of peronismo in the mid-1940s. To do so, it discusses the ideas relating to this theme proposed by Jorge Sábato in his influential study, La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna. Sábato argued that diversification of assets in a wide range of operations constituted the defining aspect of the economic strategy of the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century entrepreneurial elite. This hypothesis requires revision. Simultaneous investment in various economic activities also characterises other entrepreneurial classes in the Americas and in Europe, and for this reason does not offer a convincing account of the peculiarities of the Argentine bourgeoisie. Sábato paid little attention to what in more traditional accounts distinguishes the Argentine proprietor class (and, in addition, the economy as a whole) from its counterparts in other parts of the world: its privileged ties to land and to rural production. However, analysis of probate records confirm this picture, especially for the turn-of-the-century elite.

Policy innovation poses a great challenge to governments to generate stable expectations about a new set of incentives. Drawing on the results of a survey conducted in mid-1999, this article explores the sources and characteristics of top leaders' perceptions about the programme of structural reforms implemented in Argentina during the last decade. In particular, it tries to assess and measure whether a reformist consensus between political and business leaders emerged around the privatisation and regulation policies, what the main issues around which that consensus revolves are, and to what extent it may translate into a source of stability and consolidation of reforms.

The article analyses the Brazilian experience in financing economic activity from the 1964–67 reform until the 1990s. Two issues are addressed: first, what conditions explain the development of a model based on public and external credit in Brazil, quite different from the capital market based system conceived in the 1964–67 reform? Second, what are the perspectives for the development of an alternative model in the country, led by the national private sector? Based on international experience, two alternatives are considered: a) the expansion of the capital market, in order to make possible large scale direct financing; b) the formation of a private banking credit system, complementing or replacing both public and external credit. Despite undoubted improvements, tendencies observed up to 1997 suggest the persistence of the ‘short-termist’ profile that typically characterised the Brazilian financial system. Thus, the development of both capital market and banking credit models depends on financial policies devoted to this goal. General guidelines for such policies are suggested in the last section of the paper.

Information on Cuban immigrants from the recent ‘Measuring Cuban Opinion Project’ survey is used to determine the extent to which race matters. We use multivariate binomial logistic regression models to determine if race can be predicted by key demographic and economic characteristics of the respondents, their use of mass media outlets in Cuba, their evaluation of and integration to the Cuban state and their participation in the dissidence in the island. The conclusion is reached that race cannot be predicted because these immigrants are, in general terms, very similar. However, some racial differences in mode of immigration and likelihood of immigration were found.

The article reexamines financial market opening in Mexico. This article will show how change in Mexico's financial sector created a powerful private sector ally for reform-oriented politicians and helped make financial opening possible. It will also show how financial opening reflected the support coalition that the government relied upon by rewarding the financial sector with protection from foreign direct investment in financial institutions while liberalising portfolio capital flows. Finally, this article will illustrate the importance including an analysis of local financial sector interests in explanations of financial opening.

Since the colonial era Cuba has been the paradigmatic case of a monocultural export economy, dependent upon the production of one primary commodity – sugar – for sale to one principal trade partner. Overcoming dependency was a high priority for Fidel Castro in 1959, yet despite a promising start, his efforts proved ultimately unsuccessful. Only the collapse of communism in Europe freed Cuba from dependent trade relations with the Soviet Union – albeit at the cost of enormous economic disruption. This article examines Cuba's post-1959 pursuit of economic independence, first to explain why the government's initial successes proved unsustainable in the 1980s, and then to examine Cuba's attempt to reinsert its economy into the global market in the aftermath of the Cold War.

In view of the inconclusive statistical results associated with democracy's impact on economic performance, this article unpacks the dependent variable (economic development) by examining democratisation's impact on education policy. To determine whether democracy compels politicians to provide higher levels of educational opportunity, it traces the process of repression and democratisation in Brazil along with government spending on education. It finds that democratisation has observable effects on education spending on three different levels: 1) the percentage of government spending allocated to education; 2) the distribution of federal funding among different levels of education; and 3) the distribution of funds within primary education among state and local actors.

This article reexamines early twentieth-century Argentine cultural nationalism, arguing that the movement's true significance rests in its promotion of a vision of Argentine nationhood that closely resembled the ideal of the folk nation upheld by German romanticism. Drawing from recent theoretical literature on ethnic nationalism, the article examines the political implications of this movement and explores the way in which the vigorous promotion of the ethnocultural vision of argentinidad by cultural nationalists served to detach definitions of Argentine identity from constitutional foundations and from the ideas of citizenship and popular sovereignty. It also challenges the accepted view that Argentine cultural nationalism represented a radical break with late nineteenth-century positivism. Positivist ideas about social organicism, collective character and historical determinism all helped paved the way for the Romantic vision of nationhood celebrated by the cultural nationalists.