In 1572 the Viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, despatched an expedition to the stronghold of Vilcabamba to capture the last claimant to the Inca throne, Tupac Amaru. The unfortunate prince was brought to Cuzco and there before the assembled population executed in the main square. Determined to provide an historical justification for his brutal eradication of the Inca dynasty, Toledo had already earlier in the same year summoned representatives of the Inca nobility to hear a public reading of Sarmiento de Gamboa's Historia Indica, a work written with the express intention of demonstrating that the Inca empire had been an unmitigated tyranny, created but recently by force of arms, and maintained through the merciless exploitation of its subjects. The auditors at this sinister farce were then called upon to sign a notarised declaration testifying to the accuracy of a text which stripped their ancestors of their status as rightful, sovereign lords of Peru.

The past decade has witnessed a rich harvest of regional studies of the Mexican Porfiriato. There are two predominant currents in the recent literature. One group of scholars has focused attention on the political sphere, examining the process whereby the Porfirian central state increased its power at the expense of the regional peripheries. Invariably, the federal cause was advanced by Don Porfirio's ability to manipulate local factional struggles, playing off contending parentescos or élite family networks. Another group of historians has explored the external dimension of the Porfirian regional economy, examining patterns of cooperation and conflict between local élites and foreign investors. The contradictory nature of such transnational alliances and their impact on non-élite groups have now been analyzed for several important Porfirian regions.

The Huasteca, a region with a semi-tropical climate and abundant vegetation, has become one of the most violent and conflict-ridden parts of rural Mexico. Starting in the mid-1970s, a series of land invasions involving mainly Nahuatl-speaking Indian peasants broke out in the district of Huejutla in the northeastern portion of the state of Hidalgo (also known as the Huasteca Hidalguense). Militant agrarian peasants, who cut fences, confiscated coffee orchards and ripped out cultivated grasses, justified their use of direct action both in terms of Mexico's agrarian code and Nahuatl notions of village boundaries; similarly, local landowners appealed to their rights as property owners and the legal system in general in order to persuade law enforcement agents to evict peasant intruders and have them arrested. Many poor peasants, who live in usually cohesive communities, also became bitterly divided over whether or not they should join in land invasions, and some people on both sides took the law into their own hands and meted out their own version of justice through abductions, corporal punishment and even executions. The resulting violence and political turmoil culminated in the expropriation, by the Mexican government, of 18,000 hectares of privately owned land and the implementation of a programme of social reform.

Creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 and the subsequent Edict of Free Commerce in 1778 fostered a flourishing export trade from that region, mainly of hides and silver. Merchants of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, both criollos and recently arrived peninsulares, prospered during the 1780s and early 1790s, an era of international peace. While a few of these merchants owned and operated ships out of the Río de la Plata, most were content to export to the Peninsula in craft of metropolí registry. Indeed, given the traditional and strong ties of commercial obligations to the Peninsula and the enforcement of imperial trade laws, any other course of action, if not unthinkable, would have been difficult.

Our knowledge of Mexican agrarian history has been greatly enhanced by hacienda studies, based on original hacienda archives. Inter alia, these have finished off for good the old notion of ‘feudal’ hacendados who spurned profit for prestige. But if – thanks to their reliance on hacienda accounts – these studies have shed light on hacienda marketing and profit-maximizing, they have told us less about the hacienda's internal workings. The hacienda's relations of exchange are, therefore, better understood than its relations of production. And, from some theoretical perspectives, it is the latter which are primary (which, in grand terms, determine whether the hacienda is to be termed ‘feudal’, ‘capitalist’ or something else again).

On 1 January, 1899, the noon ceremony in Havana was brief but solemn. The Spanish flag was lowered, the United States flag raised. Officers of both countries exchanged formal salutes and informal salutations, whereupon the official ceremony came to an end. After nearly a century of covetous preoccupation with the island, the Unites States assumed formal possession of Cuba.

A number of recent studies1 suggest that prostitution – ‘The act or practice of indulging in promiscuous sexual relations, especially for money’2 – in western society increased dramatically in the late nineteenth century, both in real terms and in popular consciousness. ‘Large scale, conspicuous prostitution’, they argue, ‘was a by-product of the first, explosive stage in the growth of the modern, industrial city…’ It is a proposition of this article that such changes were, in fact, far more widespread. From the evidence of Guatemala it appears that prostitution also increased during these years in agricultural export societies. Under the impact of demands from industrializing nations, colonial and neo-colonial regimes overhauled domestic economic and social structures to increase raw material and food production for export. Unprecedented but unstable economic prosperity, urbanization, and the social disorganization resulting from the implementation of systems of forced labour and removal from the land created a climate propitious for an increase in and institutionalization of commerical sex. This paper is an examination of the growth of female prostitution in late nineteenth-century Guatemala City, of the situation and attitudes of the women involved, and of state efforts to control the traffic. More broadly, it argues that attempts to regulate prostitution must be understood as part of a liberal drive to mobilize and control society as a whole in the interest of a class-defined vision of national development.

Although Belize City has almost always been the centre of population in Belize, few studies have been devoted to its historical geography–or indeed to the urban geography of the country as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to gather together much of the scattered material on Belize City, in the hope that this codification will help the reader to understand the growth and present status of the city, and, perhaps, inspire others to do further research on this, still the major urban centre of Belize.

The subject of United States foreign policy towards Argentina in the years during and immediately after World War II continues to hold the attention of scholars. Their interest goes beyond the intrinsic importance which Argentina had then, or now. Rather, interest is fixed because this case provides the first post-War illustration of several serious problems which United States foreign policy in the hemisphere has demonstrated many times since, and currently in its relations with Nicaragua.

In Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, Jacobo Timerman exposed the anti-Jewish side of the official war against ‘subversion’ in Argentina during the late 1970s. His dramatic testimony is only the latest entry in the lengthy history of twentieth-century Argentine anti-Semitism. Researchers and observers have commonly identified anti-Semitism in that country with rightist factions within the upper strata, including members of such important élites as the military, clergy, and intelligentsia. While only a small minority of the Argentine populace fits into this category, the anti-Semitic right's visibility and fervor have inspired widespread concern and scholarly interest.

During 1984 and 1985 there was much discussion of an apparent ‘resurgence’ of democracy in many countries in Latin America. As the military handed over the reins of government to elected civilian rulers in Honduras, El Salvador and Argentina, and steps toward the same end were taken in Uruguay and Brazil, the American media and the Reagan administration – conveniently forgetting its earlier support for military dictatorship – began to speak glowingly of a new ‘Latin spring’.

The walls of downtown Buenos Aires displayed a new and haunting image in the weeks before the inauguration of President Raúl Alfonsín in December, 1983: black, outlined silhouettes of human beings, each accompanied by a name. The ghost-like figures represented those who had ‘disappeared’ in the military's proclaimed ‘war against subversion’. They testified silently but eloquently to the memory of the victims of that experience in the thoughts of many Argentines, and foreshadowed what was to become one of the most vexing political problems for the new civilian government. Among the many difficulties bequeathed to President Alfonsín by the military juntas who ruled Argentina for the eight preceding years, first among these in ethical exigency was the question of what to do concerning los desaparecidos.