This article examines the Colombian peace process since 1982, arguing that the government must strengthen the state and expand its presence into the remote areas in which the leftist guerrillas have established para-statal organisations. The traditionally weak Colombian state has allowed rebel groups to flourish in isolated areas. However, President Ernesto Samper has announced a new initiative that features an ambitious plan to strengthen the state. The plan includes judicial and social reforms that address many of the guerrilla demands, but also threaten to undermine their para-statal organisations. Massive oil discoveries and tax reforms could provide the necessary funding.

Based on a study of the 1960s generation of Chilean left-wing leaders, this article offers a three-dimensional model of individual political identity to examine how leaders justify their contributions to society and the political programmes of which they are a part. The central dimension of individual political identity is that of cognitive frameworks, that is, individuals' fundamental approaches to politics, rooted in the values they assign to ideas, political organisation and their relationships to fellow political leaders and activists. The article identifies four cognitive ideal-types: political party loyalists, personal loyalists, political thinkers and political entrepreneurs. The article concludes that the conceptualisation of individual political identity is a powerful explanatory framework for understanding the formulation and reformulation of political thinking and action, particularly in periods in which political institutions are in a state of flux or crisis.

Costa Rica's long-term standing as one of the few countries in Latin America with a stable democracy has prompted many to view its polity as an inevitable outcome of a racially homogeneous and relatively egalitarian society. Without ignoring the importance of sociological factors, this article contends that institutional arrangements played an equally important – if not more central – role in the development of a stable democratic regime in this country. The structure of Costa Rican presidentialism encouraged incumbents to maintain control of the state while it, as a consequence, incited the opposition to rebel against central state authorities. Political competition became more peaceful as parties that failed to hold or to capture the presidency were nevertheless compensated by being allowed to occupy legislative seats.

In much historiography of the colonial Caribbean, British administrators are portrayed as mediators between domestic elites, foreign capital, and the working class. Such scholarship converges with popular belief in Belize, whose institutions are seen as a legacy of ‘impartial’ British rule. This article examines the relationship between the United Fruit Company and the colonial government of British Honduras. Contrary to claims of administrative impartiality, colonial officials facilitated the company's monopoly over the banana industry and acted as company advocates before the Colonial Office, actions that ultimately undermined the colony's independent banana producers.

This study of organised political violence in north-central Nicaragua from 1926 to 1934 focuses on the infamous Conservative gang leader Anastacio Hernández and on Sandino's rebels. The contexts of a weak central state and local-regional caudillismo are outlined. It is shown that after the 1926–27 civil war. Hernández and others produced ritualised spectacular violence in the service of their Chamorrista caudillo patrons. The language, practices, and characteristics of organised violence are examined. It is argued that Sandino's rebels appropriated these tools of political struggle, and that changes and continuities in the organisation of violence in Nicaraguan history merit greater attention.

This analysis of the historically high level of state-sponsored violence in Central America, typically explained in terms of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘civil-military relations’, argues for according it a more independent research status. Three historic dimensions of state-sponsored violence – the mechanisms by which caudillo violence was displaced upward in the late 19th century, the level of subaltern collaboration with the agents of state violence as a function of clientelist politics, and the intrusion of US military power after 1940 – are proposed. The implications for the utility of political culture theory and for a reevaluation of the literature on civil-military relations are developed.

Prospects for democratisation in those Central American countries that experienced revolutionary processes are discussed in the light of recurrent structural constraints – such as incipient structural differentiation, overwhelming poverty, dependence on foreign financial subsidies – and specific sociopolitical variations, i.e. uneven modernisation of traditional rule; tensions between the recent mobilisation of both ‘old’ and ‘new’ social actors, and political institutions and actors (such as parties, unions, parliaments, government and multilateral agencies) which in some cases lead to current social demobilisation and electoral apathy and in others prevent the effective uprooting of political violence; persistence of traditional authoritarian culture and its articulation to the new ingredients of the post-war political and socioeconomic setting.