Nowhere, perhaps, is the often-remarked historiographical bias in favour of social/economic studies for the colonial period and political/ institutional studies for the national period more jarring than in treatments of the activities of the Mexican church before and after independence.1 The position of the church in the colonial economy has been the subject of several specialised works and is widely regarded in broader histories as most significant.2 But students of independent Mexico have usually focused on the church's role in the political arena, characterising the politics of the period from 1821 to 1856 as, in essence, a battle for supremacy betweenthe church and the state, or in a slightly different formulation, as a struggle between liberalism and conservatism.3

In 1908 an editorial in El Diablito Rojo, itself a penny journal, made some disparaging, yet revealing, remarks regarding the impact of the penny press of the time on Mexican workers:

There is hardly a worker in Mexico [today] who every morning does not bring to his workshop or leave at home the paper of the day in addition to the small papers dedicated to workers which he acquires with real pleasure. In the big paper [the worker] looks for the daily news… in the small weekly he looks for a joke, a caricature, an anecdote; something that can distract or instruct him…

But is that small press useful to its readers?… No: the journals constituting the small press all call themselves defenders of the worker and preach a dangerous gospel: hate of the bourgeois… [so that today] The worker already sees the bourgeois as an ogre…

The small press does not… demonstrate to the worker the evils brought about by rebellion or violence, instead it tries to flatter the proletariat, indeed defending it in its own way when it is victimised, but only by fomenting in him a bad attitude towards his work.1

In the late morning of 18 July 1949, several armed men sped from Guatemala City in two cars. Near a small bridge, the Puente de la Gloria, they waited for Francisco Arana, Chief of the Armed Forces of Guatemala. They did not have to wait for long. As Arana and his three companions approached the Puente de la Gloria, ‘there was, on the other side, a grey Dodge, because of which, seeing that it was impossible to cross the bridge, Col. Arana stopped the car’.1 A brief shoot-out ensued. Arana lay dead. There was no investigation of his murder. His assassins were never apprehended.

Charting the historical paths to democracy has been a long-standing concern of political sociology.1 With the demise of authoritarian rule in Latin America over the last decade, a classic question of the genre has resurfaced: are there certain developmental sequences that are more likely to produce successful transitions to democracy? If there is any conclusion to be drawn from recent experiences, the answer is no. Highly heterogeneous circumstances have produced Latin America's most recent wave of democratisation. From the Caribbean to the Southern Cone, countries at different levels of economic development, with distinctive authoritarian legacies and divergent class structures, all underwent transitions to elected civilian governments in the last decade.

This paper attempts to draw out the significance and meaning of the recorreo [sic] (recorrido) de los linderos (going around the boundaries), also called linderaje ritual in an Andean peasant community. In villages such as Kallarayan which lie in the crop and pastureland regions of Cuzco department, Peru, the recorreo is a regular point in the ritual calendar, occurring as part of the lead-up to Lent.1 The event, which occurs on the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, contains multiple references to the Peruvian nation, to surrounding haciendas, to local apus (spiritual powers embodied in mountain peaks), and to the community: as such it is a ‘polyvalent’ ritual,2 juxtaposing and inter-mingling symbols and meanings which otherwise are kept separate.

Many foreign policy analysts in the United States expected a shift in US policy towards Latin America when George Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan as president. Though Bush had been a loyal supporter of Reagan's policies throughout the preceding eight years, Bush nevertheless seemed more pragmatic than his mentor. Whereas Reagan was the leader of the Republican Party's right wing, Bush was a scion of the East Coast Republican establishment, stronghold of the party's moderate centre.