This study explores some of the changes currently taking place in the USSR and the possible impact of changing Soviet foreign policy on Latin America. The article begins with an analysis of the possible effects of the attempts to separate Party and State on foreign policy and on the interpretation and observance of the so-called internationalist obligations of the Soviet Union towards Latin America. It goes on to investigate the possible impact of perestroika on the internal relations of COMECON countries and any weakening in the commitment of its members to political and social changes in the Latin American republics. These changes are looked at particularly, though not uniquely, with reference to Cuba and Nicaragua. Some predictions are also made as to the possible future moves the USSR might make to strengthen and improve its relations with the largest countries in the region such as Brazil and Argentina.

The purpose of this article is to examine the evolution, between 1840 and 1914, of the freight rates for bulk cargoes and general cargoes, in the trades between South American ports in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Peru, and European ports in the United Kingdom/Continent range. The article does not deal with the transport of passengers nor the exports of refrigerated foodstuffs from South America. The basic data on the freight rates charged for some of the main exports and imports in those trades are shown in Graphs i a/b (p. 24). The Appendix includes information about the methodology and the sources used for the preparation of the freight series. The freight rates quoted in the text are nominal or ‘market’ prices in decimal pounds.1

The Paraguayan liberal republic, spanning from the end of the War of the Triple Alliance until the end of the Chaco War, is one of the most under-researched and probably one of the most undervalued periods of Paraguayan history and has only recently elicited some scholarly interest.1 During this period capital accumulation developed exclusively in the private domain, economic policies were informed by laissez–faire doctrines, and the political arena embodied, if mostly theoretically, the liberal principles of public contestation and elite competition. Those basic and distinctive traits, and in that particular combination, are found in no other period of Paraguayan history. It therefore makes conceptual sense to speak of the liberal republic as a distinct period in Paraguayan history.

When the Venezuelan dictator, Juan Vincente Gómez, died on 17 December 1935, after ruling Venezuela with an iron fist for 27 years, an outburst of popular unrest and nationalistic fervour was unleashed against the foreign oil companies operating on Venezuelan soil. The dominant oil interests in Venezuela at the time were Royal Dutch Shell, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and the Gulf Oil Company. There were several smaller companies such as British Controlled Oilfields, a British state-owned company with a network of Venezuelan affiliates, and the Socony Vacuum Company, a New York-based company which was a significant latecomer. It was the first three aforementioned companies, however, that constituted the Big Three.1 The oil companies were associated in the popular mind with the odious Gómez dictatorship and partly for this reason became the object of the people's wrath. Yet there were also practical economic and social reasons for the popular feeling against the companies. The latter paid low wages, provided miserable housing and social amenities for their workers and discriminated against Venezuelans in their employment practices.2 For more than a year after the dictator's death Venezuela was in the throes of popular unrest.

In recent years there has been significant improvement in terms of the quantity and quality of empirical studies on Latin American urban labour markets.1 The relative degree of ignorance concerning the market for domestic service is therefore particularly notorious. Some important gaps in the current state of our knowledge are the determinants of long-term trends and of short and medium-term fluctuations in this market, the relationship between domestic service and female rural–urban migration, and that between domestic service and the aggregate labour market.

On 15 March 1945 Juan José Arévalo became president of Guatemala. His inauguration marked the beginning of an unprecedented democratic parenthesis – ‘spring in the land of eternal tyranny ’1 – a spring that ended abruptly with the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.

Arévalo was an anti-communist, a nationalist, and a reformer. He was an anti-communist who believed that individual communists should not be persecuted unless they violated the law. He was a nationalist who accepted that Guatemala was in the US sphere of influence. He was a reformer who eschewed radical change.