The empirical validity of traditional perspectives on poverty and under-development has been seriously challenged over the past decade. In contrast to emphasis on what were said to be disfunctional characteristics of the poor themselves, attention has been redirected towards economic and ecological factors which reveal much of the cultural repertoire of peasants and urban and rural poor to be a positive or adaptive response to limits imposed on them by the political economy of capitalism.

There is much in the literature which laments the condition of the common man in nineteenth-century Mexico. Most of the evidence for this sad interpretation, however, is circumstantial and qualitative in substance and leaves one groping at times for more convincing arguments. This pessimistic view seems inappropriate for the North where historical interpretation in these matters is deeply influenced by generalizations arising from studies of the South and Center. Careful examination demonstrates that for at least one region of the North a distinct and varied natural and human environment produced a different set of living conditions. This study assesses the living standards in low-income hacienda laborers in the State of Zacatecas during the period 1820–80. The results suggest a reconsideration of the notion that all nineteenth-century Mexican peones were oppressed and malnourished step-children of the latifundia system.

Given the historic role of cities in Latin America as an instrument for appropriating territory and for ordering society, one may wonder why more attention is not paid to the Latin Americans' own vision of the city. We are sometimes asked to believe that only in the 1940s did the urban phenomenon loom in their world and that our knowledge of it comes from foreign demographers and anthropologists. Colonial sources like Solórzano and the Recopilación, however, demonstrate that the IberoCatholic political tradition gives central importance to the organizational and paradigmatic functions of the urban unit. After independence, to be sure, this tradition was eclipsed by the ‘ruralization’ of Latin American societies as urban, bureaucratic structures decayed and power flowed to the agrarian domain. At this time also, intellectual horizons opened to offer release from scholastic constraints, encouraging the intelligentsia to make eclectic, sometimes euphoric assessments of their new nations' future potential. Of these pensadores Sarmiento almost alone dealt directly with the city's role in nation building. Yet his very plea that the city — whether Buenos Aires or a new ‘Argirópolis’ — assume ‘modernizing’ or ‘developmental‘functions reverts to the old Mediterranean notion that the city (civitas) is one with ‘civilization’. For this Alberdi attacked him, reminding Sarmiento that in Argentina town and country, civilization and barbarism, were not disjoined but fused in a single society and polity.

Early in 1869, when the flags of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were unfurled from the turrets of Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, an end to the horrors of the Paraguayan War was at last in sight. The conflict between Paraguay on the one hand, and Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay on the other, had raged for five years, since 1865, destroying human lives and material wealth. The fighting came to an official end with the death of Francisco Solano López, dictator of Paraguay, on 1 March 1870.

In a recent critical survey of scholarly writing on dependency theory, Ronald H. Chilcote noted that, ‘like other theory in an infant stage, dependency theory has spawned a plethora of interpretations and applications, and has been adopted by ideologues on all sides of the political spectrum’. This enthusiastic response, while welcome for the new perspective it affords on underdevelopment, has led some Latin Americanists to caution against the over-application of dependency theory and the unwarranted inflation of its explanatory power. Richard M. Morse, speaking specifically of urban development observes that ‘the “external dependency” thesis … easily leads to dogmatism’, and Phillipe Schmitter warns against the indiscriminate use of the theory to explain all of Latin America's ills. Such caveats have merit, especially in view of the plasticity of current thinking about dependency.

The Inca ruling elites of ancient Peru based their right to leadership on a claim not only to aristocratic but also to divine blood. They were, they assured their subjects, descendants of Manco Capac, the son of the sun who according to official Inca history had founded the Empire of Tahuantinsuyo (the four corners). For the Incas, therefore, legitimacy rested on charisma, in the sense in which Max Weber used that word: ‘It is the quality which attaches to men and things by virtue of their relations with the “supernatural,” that is, with the nonempirical aspects of reality in so far as they lend theological meaning to men's acts and the events of the world.’

The Club 3 de Outubro, overlooked by most studies of the Brazilian revolution of 1930, played a central role in the tenente movement and in the revolution itself. The 1930s were a watershed in modern Brazilian history, when state, society, and economy were altered, sometimes radically. Although some of the changes were responses to the Depression and international conditions, the revolution as a political phenomenon was a dominant force in shaping contemporary Brazil. State authorities ceded power to the Central Government's interventors (delegates), counteracting Brazil's strong regionalist tradition and assuring the dominance of national institutions. In addition, urban voters in the 19305 for the first time had an influential voice in politics, sometimes as allies of the tenentes. The army, strengthened and unified vis-à-vis the state militias, was subordinated to the Federal Government.

The economic activities of the state have rightly been regarded as a crucial factor in the remarkably rapid process of capitalist expansion experienced by Mexico in the two decades after the Second World War, and must also be seen as such in the imbalance that has emerged over the last ten years –an imbalance that itself led to an accelerated growth of the public sector. State intervention in the process of capital accumulation during the period of dependent import-substituting industrialization is common to the experience of Latin America as a whole, but in Mexico the scale and scope of this intervention appear to have been greater than elsewhere, generating an important debate over the size of the Mexican public sector in the 1960s, and now providing a significant case to be examined in the light of current discussions as to the relative autonomy of the state in capitalist economies.

After the Chilean junta abolished party democracy in September 1973, it announced plans for a new constitution modeled on corporatist lines. Although, to date, few concrete expressions of these proposals have emerged, there is enough evidence since 1973 to suggest the lines along which the junta is thinking, and this indicates that not only international factors but also two sources of native historical inspiration are at work. First, and most important, Chile's military dictators were considering elevating an existing infrastructure of government-certified functional interest groups to replace the outlawed parties as intermediaries between the State and the individual. These gremios (private economic sctoral organizations, such as the National Society of Agriculture) had traditionally shaped public decisions both as representatives of their occupational fields and as permanent, often official, participants in state agencies concerned with their production sectors.

The study of United States foreign policy has recently been invigorated by the introduction of Graham Allison's bureaucratic politics model (BPM). The basic unit of analysis of the BPM is governmental action viewed as political resultant. In Allison's words, the actions of governments are ‘resultants in the sense that what happens is not chosen as a solution to a problem but rather results from compromise, conflict, and confusion of officials with diverse interests and unequal influence…’. The BPM assumes that different players will have different perspectives toward similar problems, that is, they will each see different ‘faces’ of the same issue. The basic assumption of the BPM as it is applied to United States foreign policy toward Latin America by scholars such as Abraham Lowenthal is that United States decision-makes, who share power in both the formulation and implementation of policy, have differing points of view because of their differing organizational and personal perspectives.

The governments of the Orléans Monarchy pursued a very active policy in Spanish America. In 1838–9 France fought a brief war with Mexico. From 1838 to 1840 she was engaged in a dispute with Governor Rosas of Buenos Aires which escalated into an attempt to overthrow him. The French Navy played a distinctly un—neutral role during the Argentine siege of Montevideo in the early 1840s. In 1845 France and Britain cooperated in an attempt to impose a peace settlement upon the belligerents in the Río de la Plata. These two powers also seriously considered a plan to block American expansion in 1845 by offering certain guarantees to Texas and Mexico. The French were also involved in several minor disputes – involving New Granada, Chile, and Mexico again – which nearly led to blows. The armed forces of France were in more constant action only in North Africa. Yet French political and economic interests in Spanish America were hardly as important as these activities implied. In fact, French policy was based upon a misconception of the potential importance of their interests. The error was made worse by the nature of the French policy-making process. The aims of this paper are ito explain how these erroneous conceptions of French interests were formulated, why they were not rectified, and why it was the French rather than the British, despite their greater interest in Spanish America, who appeared to wave ‘the big stick’ there during this period.

It is common knowledge that, prior to the military coup of 1973, Chile was the only Latin American country to have strong workers' political parties of the European type. Many reasons have been given for this phenomenon, but it is clear that Chile has been the only country in Latin-America to allow the development of Marxist parties with strong appeal and a strong following, within the framework of what could be called liberal, democratic processes. Up to 1970, the electoral force of the Socialist and Communist Parties in Chile oscillated between 20 and 30 per cent of the total national electorate. This rose to more than 40 per cent during 1975.

A series of military dictators came to power in the four nothern republics of Central America during the Great Depression of the 1930s and perpetuated themselves in office through continuismo tactics until roughly the conclusion of the Second World War: General Jorge Ubico, the first and strongest of these caudillos, ruled Guatemala from 1931 to 1944; General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez governed El Salvador from December 1931 to 1944; General Tiburcio Carías Andino dominated Honduras from 1933 to 1946; and General Anastasio Somoza García controlled Nicaragua from 1936 to 1956.

A selection of recent books from and about Mexico is, as ever, likely to be very varied. The works considered here might seem at first sight to have little enough in common. Yet behind them all lies the great debate that has gone on in Mexico since 1968 about the meaning of the past, present and future of the Mexican Revolution.