Many jurisdictions around the world, which came to be known as “tax havens,” offered refuge against the high mid-century tax rates. Some individual taxpayers physically moved to these havens, which were primarily located in small, resource poor, countries whose primary source of commerce was from tourism because of their exotic locales. Corporations used techniques to shift profits to these tax haven jurisdictions while remaining based in the U.S. In either case, not only would the profits and income earned be free from tax in these jurisdictions, but because they were sourced there it would shield them from tax in the U.S. until the money was repatriated. These tax havens were portrayed in marketing materials and in the media in a way that deliberately associated the tax savings with the pristine beaches or snow-capped mountain ski resorts of the countries that hosted them, making the whole enterprise of tax dodging seem glamorous and exciting to the average taxpayer reading about them. Even though they were but a mirage for these average taxpayers, they inspired envy rather than resentment, which helped to normalize and spur interest in tax dodging among the middle class.

Justo Arosemena (1817–1896), better known today as the “father of Panamanian nationalism,” was one of the most notable constitutionalist jurists in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In 1855, Arosemena published El Estado Federal de Panamá at a time when New Granada (Colombia today), of which Panama was part, was following a radical federalist trajectory – that year, he was elected as the first president of the Federal State of Panama. As a leading figure from one of the nine states that formed the Estados Unidos de Colombia in 1863, Arosemena’s voice carried weight. In the following years, he was appointed to several diplomatic posts to represent Colombia in the United States and in other Latin American countries. His credentials as a constitutionalist of hemispheric dimensions were marked by the publication of his Constituciones políticas de la América Meridional (1870), expanded and reedited in 1878 as Estudios constitucionales sobre los gobiernos de América Latina, from which we have selected the passages for our volume.

Chapter 6 offers an analysis of the Nicaraguan Revolution with a particular focus on Araceli Pérez Darias, a Mexican citizen of Spanish descent fighting with the Sandinistas on the Western Front in Nicaragua during the late 1970s. She was ambushed, raped and killed in 1979. Using Araceli’s life story as a prism, this chapter offers a unique survey of women’s contribution to transnational warfare in the twentieth century, arguing that their challenges were multiple. Unlike their male comrades in arms, they were generally not allowed to fight at the front. Further, they were often subjected to abuses, and their armed resistance – originally motivated by their opposition to the enemy – eventually became intertwined with their struggle to be accepted as equals by the movement they represented at the front. In addition, the chapter provides the first comprehensive overview of the foreign brigades fighting for the Sandinistas, explaining why some have survived in the collective memory of the revolution while the most decisive of them all, consisting of Panamanian volunteers, were cast into oblivion.

Chapter 3 explores the production of knowledge about Catholicism by people of African descent and their engagement with Iberian and their religious vernaculars. It is based on a small body of Inquisition records, largely relaciones de causas de fe, and one full proceso de fe, the sacrilege case of Felix Fernando Martínez in 1776. The only chapter that focuses on the Caribbean region, it demonstrates the importance of Catholicism in black material and oral culture, whether that be through embrace, questioning, or overt criticism of the Church, Catholic cosmology, and the saints. The religious knowledge production of defendants from the Caribbean, most of whom were free and described as mulato, does not suggest African intellectual genealogies alone. Rather, people of African descent were part of and constructed a vibrant and heterogeneous religious Caribbean and exchanged knowledge about the supernatural, especially Catholicism, with people of all ethnicities. Such speech, and on occasion acts, nevertheless was potentially dangerous to them in the transcultural Caribbean, evidenced by the violent sentences handed down, ranging from spiritual exercises, to forced labour and execution.

During the 1960s, the effects of the Cuban Revolution – especially in terms of support for guerrilla warfare against U.S. allies – became all too evident, and the United States pursued interventionism with new vigor. This renewed use of power included economic and diplomatic pressures, veiled threats, covert operations, and even invasion. U.S. officials framed the Cold War as a valiant struggle to protect freedom in the hemisphere, and the cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Guatemala epitomized the lengths to which the United States would go to fight what it considered to be security threats. In Latin America, many elites supported U.S. policy, but a growing undercurrent of discontent also emerged, which pushed for negotiated conclusions to war and protested against the treatment of so many citizens caught in the middle. They did not share the notion that leftist or even Marxist governments necessarily constituted a threat to national security and global order. This chapter ends with a discussion of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

The regulation of digital trade has become one of the key topics in trade law and policy.

The chapter focuses on one group of countries of the Latin American region, which have been the most important vectors of the inclusion of e-commerce and data rules in PTAs – a group that includes Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Panama. Besides highlighting the contribution that those countries have had in the creation and diffusion of this new rule-making, the goal is also to determine the level of regulatory convergence that Latin American countries (LACs) have on rules for digital trade and data flows, and the potential disparities between international obligations and domestic privacy protection regimes.

: The Republican colonizationists had always fixated on Latin America, especially Central America, where African American settlers might resist “filibusters,” expansionist expeditions supported by American citizens. For their part, the region’s rulers toyed with an influx of immigrants that would expand their population but darken its complexion. Once Abraham Lincoln came to power, he focused on the province of Chiriquí in what is now Panama (then part of Colombia), where black colonists might secure an isthmian crossing for US troops and traders. Announcing the venture in a notorious address of August 1862, the president had to retreat once he came to realize the instability of Colombian politics and the extent of his own associates’ stake in the business. Accordingly, the very same day that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he instead signed an agreement with a contractor to settle a party of freed slaves on the Île à Vache, one of Haiti’s satellite islands. That colony’s tragic failure finally impressed on him that he should not deal with sovereign states via shady contractors.

Waves of early twentieth-century Asian migration to the Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean migration to and from Panama bankrolled the education of a new black and brown middle class. This essay argues that we can hold more of the Caribbean literary tradition within a single frame if we reconfigure the archive so as to highlight the moments when the educational advances the concurrent migrations facilitated allowed both African and Asian Caribbean communities to exert greater control over the terms of their representation. It advances three approaches to rethinking Caribbean literary history. The first examines how early twentieth-century Caribbean fiction represents both groups’ changing attitudes towards money and modern subjectivity. The second considers how migrants’ counterintuitive investments in imperial expansion complicate the political stakes in Caribbean nationalist narratives. The third juxtaposes literary and non-literary forms of cultural production in Jamaica and Panama to demonstrate how, in privileging written texts, we obscure the contributions marginalized groups make to what we think of as national cultures.

This brief biography of Blazquez de Pedro illustrates not only his central ideas but more importantly how he was representative of Caribbean transnational anarchism. As a Spanish soldier in the 1890s, he fought against anarchist-supported independence for Cuba. After the war, he discovered anarchism and became an important literary and educational figure in the movement. In 1914, he moved to Panama and helped the isthmus maintain regional linkages with Havana. He combined literary with labor anarchism in the 1910s and 1920s, becoming the most recognizable face of anarchism in Central America. His deportation to and death in Cuba was not the end of his transnational wanderings as comrades returned his remains to Panama in 1929.

This chapter contextualises how project finance mechanisms interface with indigenous land rights recognition and implementation, and the effects of that convergence for communities in Mongolia and Panama. I analyse how, in two cases, lender safeguarding policies are prioritised through the ordinary and mechanical stream of lender decision-making and the contractual networks that operationalise those policies, questioning the effectiveness of those policies to deliver fair, rights-compliant outcomes. I examine how private environmental and social experts, hired by the borrower, will sort and (de)prioritise local and international norms on indigenous rights and decide which social safeguard policies a borrower should comply with, and how. This provides insights into the operation of law and power in this field: specifically, the fragmented, de-prioritised and powerless nature of different sources of formal indigenous rights norms as they sit against contractual and policy norms. A larger question is of an over-reliance on private experts, the lack of transparency around their decision-making and a deficiency in independent regulatory oversight over these routinely delegated processes.

Examines George H. W. Bush’s efforts to establish a new world order and reliance on traditional Cold War strategies and alliances. Assesses Bush Sr.’s successes (e.g. German reunification) and failures (in Yugoslavia and Iraq). Documents beginning of post-Cold War US wars of Muslim liberation, a pattern continued by the presdients that followed him.