The debt crisis has been the dominant feature of Latin American economic and political life since 1982. While the Reagan Administration gave greater priority to Central America, it nevertheless managed the international response to the debt crisis. US management initially seemed logical for several reasons: US hegemony worldwide, the traditionally close relationship between the United States and Latin America, and the leading exposure of US banks in Latin American debt. During the period since 1982, however, two of these three elements have changed. Japan has challenged US hegemony, although it certainly has not displaced the United States, and Japanese banks have caught up with their US counterparts as holders of Latin American debt.2 Despite their lack of traditional relations with Latin America, then, the Japanese are becoming increasingly – although perhaps reluctantly – involved in the region.

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 archive of the now disbanded jefatura política of Tetela de Ocampo is an account of the funeral ceremony of the Puebla State deputy and school teacher, Ciudadano Miguel Méndez, only son of General Juan Nepomuceno Méndez, caudillo máximo of the State of Puebla between 1857 and 1884. The Velada Fúnebre was held in 1888 in the cabecera of Xochiapulco (alias ‘La Villa del Cinco de Mayo’), a municipio of nahuatl speakers on the southern edge of Mexico's Sierra Madre Oriental, adjoining the cereal producing plateaux of San Juan de los Llanos. The ceremony took place in the ‘Netzahualcoyotl’ municipal school room and was organised by the municipality's Society of Teachers. The description of the elaborately decorated room and baroque ceremony fills several pages.1 The teachers had decked the school room (normally adorned by ‘sixty-two great charts of natural history, twenty Industrial diagrams, large maps of Universal Geography, and diverse statistical charts and many engravings related to education’) with military banners and weapons, masonic trophies, candelabra, floral crowns and yards of white and black ribbon. In the centre of the room stood the coffin on an altar, itself raised upon a platform, guarded by four National Guard sentries and attended by the philharmonic corps of Xochiapulco and all the public officials of the cabecera and its dependent barrios. For nine days preceding the ceremony this band had played funeral marches, between six and eight in the evening, on the plaza, in front of the house of the deceased. The service was taken by Mr Byron Hyde, a Methodist minister from the United States. Accompanied by his wife at a piano, Hyde gave renderings (in English) of three Wesleyan hymns.2 There followed three eulogies of Miguel Méndez, extolling his services to the Liberal cause and on behalf of the ‘desgraciada nación azteca’. These speeches were infused with extreme anticlerical and anti-Conservative sentiments, a martial patriotic liberalism, a reverence for the principles of the French Revolution, an admiration for Garibaldi and Hidalgo (in that order), and an obsession with the importance of education as the only means for emancipating the indigenous population from clerical subjection.

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.

In 1879, for the first time, Argentina exported more wheat than it imported. A generation later the Republic figured among the top five exporters of wheat in the world and wheat had become its premier earner of foreign exchange. The expansion was by any account remarkable.1

With the expulsion of the Indians from the Pampa Húmeda in the late 1870s, hundreds of thousands of hectares of arable and highly fertile land were suddenly made available to agriculturalists. Railways, built largely with British capital, provided the means to ship new agricultural produce out of the region to the newly constructed ports. Immigrants flocked from Europe to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the vacant land, either as new property owners, as tenants or as wage-earners. The surge in the supply of land, labour and capital initiated a period of growth in Argentina, a growth which was shared by other regions of recent settlement which responded to similar opportunities.2

As the developing world modernises and traditionally excluded groups seek to take part in their societies, the political activity of the peasantry assumes an ever-increasing importance. Yet most scholarship has focused on the more spectacular forms of political action such as rebellion. In recent years some scholars have turned their attention to the other extreme of everyday resistance,1 but such contributions are still limited in number. This paper utilises an inclusive view of peasant politics and takes the position that all kinds of peasant political action are different parts of one whole, such that a similarity of motivation lies behind them all. It concentrates upon a category of political action that falls between rebellion and everyday resistance: organised, non-violent peasant protest. It studies these alternative forms of political action within a political system which is relatively open to such tactics. The story which emerges reveals that by resorting to non-violent protest, peasants can make a positive contribution to their societies and improve their own welfare. In developing this argument the paper links the study of non-violent protest to existing theories and research on peasant violence and everyday resistance. In doing so it argues that the explanations for riot and rebellion given in the moral economy theory, and which underlie acts of everyday resistance, also help to account for collective, non-violent peasant political activity.

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.

On 16 October 1962, President John F. Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was building bases in Cuba for ballistic missiles that could destroy major US cities. In the days that followed, US officials focused nearly all their attention on strategies for removing the Soviet missiles, on Soviet motives, and on the Soviet Union's reaction to the naval quarantine. Cuba was the locus of this most dramatic superpower confrontation, but Cuban perceptions, motives, and reactions were largely ignored.

It is widely recognised that dependency analysis developed out of two traditions of economic thought, Marxism and Latin American structuralism, associated with the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Although structuralism is acknowledged as a progenitor, Marxism is usually viewed, implicitly or explicitly, as the primary tradition from which dependency arose. This is perhaps because dependency per se is so widely perceived as having begun with two books for which Marxist antecedents were claimed. Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (1969), by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, and Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), by Andre Gunder Frank, ‘stood out as the leading theoretical and systematic efforts to construct a dependency perspective for Latin America’, and remain ‘the landmarks to which assessment of dependency perspectives inevitably return’.1

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.

It is difficult to state positively whether truly ‘autonomous’ economic thinking has ever existed in Latin America. Nevertheless, even if this reservation is correct, some ‘autonomy’ has existed in such currents as structuralism and the dependency school. In both there are undeniable outside influences. In the first, there is a clear association with the Keynesian school which took over economic thought in the developed countries in the 1930s and led to aggressive state interventionism. In the second, the additional influence of Marxism is also evident. However, these currents in regional thought, together with the external influences mentioned, produced an interpretation of economic and social developments in the region which gave them a very autonomous character. They also demonstrated a great capacity to influence currents of thought outside Latin America. They were, in fact, one of the most important foundations of Third World thought, which developed and spread in the 1960s, and they have had a very noticeable impact on academic ideas in the northern hemisphere, although more especially in social sciences other than economics.