This article traces the history of estate landholding in the Andean valley of Antapampa over the first half of the twentieth century. It challenges a long-held and widely accepted belief that highland haciendas concentrated vast tracts of land in just a few hands. Rather, by the middle of the last century, many properties had fragmented into numerous more modest holdings. Others either held very little land at all, found themselves severely restricted by the mountainous terrain, or ceded most, sometimes all, of their possessions to a rapidly growing number of tenant farmers. The relative absence of mass land concentration, then, forces us to reconsider the role of a key institution in the countryside, in Peru, in Latin America and even beyond. To do so, this study draws upon extensive and original archival materials from roughly 300 Ministry of Agriculture case files, rarely, if ever, used before.

Compulsory voting (CV) has been common in Latin America. While research on its effects is burgeoning, little is known about its origins. This article seeks to start filling the gap by focusing on the adoption of CV in democratising polities. It proposes an explanation that rests on two implications of what this institution can reasonably be expected to do, i.e. increase turnout. The first logic suggests that CV was established to curb electoral malfeasance. The second, in turn, posits that it was introduced for damage limitation to those who held power. These hypotheses are tested against alternatives through a comparative historical study of three South American countries.

This article examines the national and international context within which Colombian immigration policy developed in the mid-twentieth century. Focussing on Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War, it traces how and why policymakers and public opinion began to see these groups as potentially harmful to society. It argues that Colombian immigration policy emerged at the intersection of multiple, evolving discourses of race which both helped frame and were shaped by anxieties over a mass influx from Spain. By exploring the stories of several Republicans who tried to come to Colombia, the article also reveals how they helped shape immigration policy.

This article analyses a complex period in Colombian history, from the electoral victory of the Liberal Party in 1930 to the end of the Frente Nacional (National Front) in 1974, from the perspective of constitutional politics and constitutional theory. During this period, Colombia transited from democracy to dictatorship (civilian and military) and back to democracy. We therefore divide the period according to changes in regime type and also to changes in the degree of institutional constraints on power. We show that, due to combinations of regime type and constraints on power, under the same Constitution of 1886 three different constitutionalisms ensued: abusive, window-dressing, and authoritarian constitutionalism. Our analysis on Colombia highlights the role of powerful actors, such as the armed forces and the Catholic Church, that breathed life back into key constitutional provisions when these served as focal points for coordinating their actions even under an authoritarian regime.

Scholars have debated Esteban Montejo ever since the publication of Biografía de un cimarrón (1966). This article analyses hitherto unexamined documentary records of Montejo’s participation in Cuban cinema, which illustrate how Montejo and cinematographers mutually constructed narratives of slavery, revolution and African-inspired death. Studies of Cuban revolutionary cinema have barely investigated the role of ‘informants’ in the process of film production, as most scholars continue to place film directors centre stage. This article shows how social actors engaged in memory work to shape the structures of Cuban history within an ‘audiovisual interface’. It takes its cue from scholars who have highlighted how Black Caribbean subjects engaged with the means of historical production, arguing that Montejo historicised his experiences with the archival tools of the revolutionary state but beyond a politics of national liberation.

This article examines why, beginning in 1946, the Brazilian government under President Eurico Dutra supplied arms to Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, fuelling a regional arms race and reshaping Caribbean Basin dynamics at the onset of the Cold War. It argues that these transfers bypassed conventional diplomatic channels, reflected radical anti-communist currents within Dutra’s inner circle and undercut US non-proliferation efforts. Far from a passive ally, Brazil emerged as a pivotal, if under-recognised, actor in the continental polarisation that led to democratic collapse in Venezuela (1948), Cuba (1952) and Guatemala (1954). The article challenges assumptions of Brazil’s limited Latin American engagement and repositions Dutra’s foreign policy within broader continental strategies of ideological alignment and regional influence. Drawing on Brazilian diplomatic and press sources, as well as archival and printed materials from across Latin America, Europe and the United States, it addresses historiographical gaps around Dutra’s agency and reveals the material underpinnings of Trujillo’s aggression, contributing to a revised understanding of Brazil’s Cold War trajectory.

This article investigates ministerial instability within autocratic regimes, with a particular focus on the case of Argentina. Using an original dataset on ministerial tenures in four key portfolios – Economy, Education, Foreign Affairs and Health – across seven Latin American countries between 1945 and 2020, we show that, in contrast to broader regional patterns, Argentina’s military governments experienced exceptionally high levels of cabinet turnover. Applying Kaplan–Meier survival analysis and process-tracing methods, we examine two critical autocratic periods: the Argentine Revolution (1966–73) and the National Reorganisation Process (1976–83). Our findings reveal that political fragmentation, intensified by the incorporation of competing civilian actors and complex institutional arrangements, undermined ministerial stability. Through detailed case studies of El Cordobazo and Law No. 21.431, we demonstrate that a fragmented system of rule, rather than inter-branch military rivalries or formal institutional designs, accounts for the instability observed. This study challenges prevailing assumptions that autocracies are more likely to maintain bureaucratic continuity and contributes to a broader understanding of elite competition and internal dynamics within authoritarian regimes.

This article examines the role of Pedro Ibáñez Ojeda – a prominent Chilean politician and businessman – in the development of Chilean neoliberalism, with a focus on his international networks and the organisation of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) regional meeting in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1981. I argue that Ibáñez represented a distinctive pathway within Chilean neoliberalism, here termed the ‘coastal route’, which highlights the movement’s multi-scale and polycentric nature. This route is multi-scale in Ibáñez’s promotion of liberal ideas through interconnected national, Latin American and global actors, and polycentric in showcasing independent yet complementary initiatives that collectively shaped Chile’s neoliberal trajectory. These dynamics position Ibáñez’s route as part of a broader Latin American and global community.

This article analyses samples of unexplored photographic series produced by US photographer Alan Fisher (1913–88) in Brazil between 1950 and 1953. These images are part of visual reports produced for the United States Information Service (USIS) documenting the screening of newsreels, short films and cartoons in factories and rural communities in Brazil. The article repositions Fisher as a key figure for understanding US information warfare in mid-century Brazil. It theorises these screenings as political-performative events and develops an approach that accounts for the persuasive (and deceptive) dimension of these campaigns while acknowledging the audience’s agency and strategic complicity.

Gelman v. Uruguay (2011) was a watershed moment in Uruguayan civil society’s quest for accountability, prompting official repeal of the country’s 1986 Amnesty Law. Much scholarship about the case centres around the immediate aftermath of the decision, largely on initial compliance and cautious optimism for accountability. Yet the analysis of a longer timeframe reveals mixed results. The article examines how initial momentum unravelled as conditions for compliance weakened amid backlash against the judgment. It reveals the challenges with implementing criminal accountability measures, even in established democracies with otherwise strong human rights records, and argues for the importance of understanding compliance as a non-linear process.

This article examines the crucial yet underexplored role of indigenous peasant women in the struggle for agrarian reform and peasant liberation during the second half of the twentieth century in Latin America. Focusing on and re-examining the peasant movement of La Convención (Peru) and employing historical and anthropological methods, it argues that these women were far from peripheral actors. They actively engaged in unions, collective actions and even armed militias, performing both traditional and non-traditional gender roles to challenge the exploitative hacienda system and gender hierarchies. The article also analyses the impact of the Cold War on their rhetoric, alliances and broader struggle for social justice.

This article examines the 1 July 1992 massacre of 18 Indigenous males and the concurrent cutting off of the hair of their wives and/or female kin carried out by the Shining Path in the Andean village of Huamanquiquia (Fajardo province, Ayacucho region). Based on first-hand accounts of the Maoist insurgents and the Indigenous women, I frame these events as a local case study of gendered atrocity that was experienced differently by men and women, focusing on the symbolic violence of haircutting. While this atrocity reflects some well-known patterns seen in other armed conflicts, it is shaped by two key factors specific to the time and place: first, particular understandings of the significance of hair within broader Andean cosmologies; second, tensions within the Shining Path movement at a key juncture in the war. I show that the Andean insurgents knew about the symbolic dimensions of haircutting, a crime against the integrity of the human body–soul – one understood to cause endless suffering in the journey to the afterlife in the Andean worldview – but they underplayed them. From this viewpoint, haircutting meant the mutilation of women’s physical integrity, with psychological, social and gender implications.

Nonviolent resistance against rebels has received increasing scholarly attention over the past decade. Research has explained why and when civilians engage in resistance or place different types of demands on rebels. However, the question of whether nonviolent resistance succeeds or fails to achieve its objectives remains understudied. This article addresses this gap by theorising and testing three key factors that shape rebel responses to civilian resistance: the nature of civilian demands, the power of civilian resisters, and the rebels’ own power. Fieldwork in Colombia’s Caquetá region reveals that FARC rebels accommodated civilian demands only when these did not threaten their strategic goals. The group responded with repression whenever resisters clashed with its politico-military objectives. While unarmed resistance campaigns have successfully overthrown repressive states, there is no evidence for civilians in Colombia or elsewhere managing to push armed groups to make far-reaching concessions, let alone defeat rebels via nonviolent action only.

US control over the Panama Canal symbolised Washington’s dominance in Latin America. The Torrijos–Carter Treaties of 1977, concluding years of negotiations, marked a turning point by transferring control over the Canal to Panama. This work focuses on the crucial May 1977 round of negotiations, a pivotal yet underexplored period, whose outcome laid the foundation for the treaties, addressing key issues such as control over the Canal Zone and the neutrality of the Canal. This study addresses gaps in the existing literature through newly available archival sources, offering a more detailed understanding of the negotiations that shaped the future of the Panama Canal.

Understanding how policy design and implementation differ under populist and non-populist governments is complicated by the fact that populism never exists in a pure form and is always attached to a more developed ideology. Leveraging the near-simultaneous election of left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, this article analyses populism’s effect on cash transfer programmes. Despite the diametrically opposed ideologies of their presidents, rather than diverging, Mexican and Brazilian cash transfer policies converged under populism. Both leaders rebranded the programmes they inherited and moved policy in an improvised, politicised and clientelistic direction.

Mass street protests and other highly contentious actions often capture headlines and public attention, but what remains after the news cycle moves on? Many times, grassroots initiatives crystallise during or after these intense moments of participation, leaving in their wake effective organisations that continue to make daily life more liveable in contexts of extreme vulnerability. Despite the persistence and impact of these ‘things that work’ – as we call them – they are often less visible and understudied. How do these initiatives emerge and sustain themselves in the communities in which they work? Using ethnographic methods, we investigate the case of a community centre formed in the wake of a land occupation in the urban periphery of Buenos Aires to answer these questions. We argue that grassroots initiatives build local power through everyday care-work: forming relationships, changing identities and providing valuable services and information.

This article examines the fantasies and fuckeries that shape Mexican nationals’ sanctioned border-crossing experiences between Mexicali, Baja California, and Calexico, California. Drawing on ethnographic research (2017–21) at four ports of entry, I employ a Žižekian critique of ideological fantasy to reveal how the border’s power operates beyond military force and physical barriers. I argue that border communities must recognise, internalise and negotiate the border’s power before experiencing it as either threatening (fuckeries) or desirable (fantasies). These fantasies – from escaping everyday Mexican life to achieving higher social status through US consumption – demonstrate how ideology materialises through the ways border-crossers find meaning in their journeys. Through intimate attachments to ‘tours’ of the other side, changing behaviours between countries, and social hierarchies tied to border access, Mexican nationals both question and ultimately reproduce the border’s power, offering insight into how geopolitical boundaries become internalised as lived experience.