Chapter 3 presents a comparative analysis of the healthcare reforms in Chile, Mexico, and Peru during the 2000s. It focuses on whether political parties or technocrats shaped the legislative and implementation process. The core argument is that reforms closely aligned with political parties’ core values (programmatic commitment) resulted in higher-quality policy, better funding, and more effective, sustainable access to healthcare. Chile’s AUGE (Acceso Universal con Garantías Explícitas; Universal Access with Explicit Guarantees) reform exemplifies a programmatic path: parties were directly engaged in agenda-setting, debate, and implementation, leading to policy endurance and real improvements in coverage, funding, and infrastructure. In contrast, Mexico’s Seguro Popular (Popular Insurance) and Peru’s AUS (Aseguramiento Universal en Salud; Universal Health Insurance) followed a technocratic path, with disengaged parties and reforms dominated by technocrats. These reforms achieved expanded formal coverage but suffered from unstable funding, inadequate infrastructure, and an inability to deliver on the promise of effective access. The study finds that other factors – such as economic growth, state capacity, clientelism, or federalism – do not, by themselves, explain the variation in reform quality. Only genuine party commitment to the reform’s core values ensured its success and longevity. The chapter underscores the importance of aligning party values with social policy to achieve meaningful, lasting reform outcomes in Latin America.

The Peruvian political system has entered a cycle of profound crisis. High levels of instability have added to the endemic incapacity to forge an institutionalized party system. In recent years, party fragmentation has increased, and ideological polarization has reached unprecedented levels of radicalization. As Sartori’s theory predicts, this constitutes the breeding ground for the emergence of radical political projects at the extremes of the ideological spectrum. Chapter 6 focuses on the emergence of an autonomous far-right project in Peru under the leadership of Opus Dei businessman Rafael López Aliaga. Through the appropriation of a former personal party, Renovación Popular has developed into an incipient personalistic party, articulating a socially conservative agenda and populist rhetoric that differentiates it from other right-wing parties like Fujimorismo. Its relatively successful trajectory – third place in the 2021 presidential elections, a national legislative group, and access to the Metropolitan mayorship of Lima along with twelve municipal districts – provides relevant information regarding the characteristics of far-right projects ruling local governments and their consequences for democracy. The chapter conceives the far right’s emergence in Peru as an expected consequence of its political crisis, and argues that its strength should not be considered a surprise.

Chapter 6 examines five of the nine modal cases of political instability in the region (the seventh chapter examines the other four). These are the ones where T is neither below nor above one standard deviation of its mean. My model anticipates 77 percent of the years with successful military coups in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Peru, Panama, Brazil, and Venezuela. Unlike the highly unstable cases I analyze in Chapter 5, each of the modal cases stumbled into more liberalized political orders. Chapter 6 also explores why military coups ended democratic experiments or reformist interludes in Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Brazil.

Chapter 8 tests the cross-regional validity of the refined theory by tracing processes in Ecuador and Peru and comparing them with patterns in Slovakia and Poland. After a brief discussion of antecedent conditions and crises before critical periods of major market reform, I assess neoliberal junctures in Ecuador and Peru with special attention to the hypothetically crucial variations in terms of political agency. The next two sections analyze divergent path dependencies that stemmed from nuanced juncture contingencies, ultimately showing that illiberal tendencies in the Andes were shaped in ways consistent with theoretical expectations. Finally, I compare the South American and Eastern European cases by focusing on the mechanisms of production and reproduction linking neoliberal junctures and subsequent illiberal tendencies. Contrary to prior research, I conclude that Andean illiberalism’s capacities to be politically dominant and to be contestatory vis-à-vis liberal democracy are, as in Eastern Europe, best understood as distinct adaptations to societal reactions resulting from prior historical contingencies. By offering a theoretically grounded comparative account, this chapter invites new ways of thinking about developments after neoliberal reforms in Latin America.

Chapter 7 further develops the study’s critical juncture framework and justifies its extension to cases in South America. Drawing lessons from Eastern Europe, I begin by distinguishing between varying illiberal tendencies in Slovakia and Poland, based on which I offer new theoretical insights. As I elaborate sequences linking (1) illiberals’ divergent ability to be politically dominant back to whether neoliberal reform agents were social democrats or polarizing populists, and (2) contestatory versus moderate tendencies back to whether or not anti-neoliberal protest was institutionalized during critical periods of early market reform, I elaborate the argument about the durable effects of contingency associated with postcommunist junctures. I then make the case for applying the refined framework to South American cases. Here, I note some blind spots in scholarship on Latin American populism and highlight important commonalities between dynamics in Eastern Europe and the Andes. Next, I review the advantages of analyzing developments in Ecuador and Peru from a comparative perspective that is sensitive to both cross- regional and intra-regional patterns of similarity and difference. Ending with a discussion of the insufficiency of standard explanations of illiberal trends, the chapter sets the stage for the paired comparison that follows.

The magazine Renacimiento was one of the most important periodical publications in the evangelical world during the first decades of the twentieth century. Founded in 1921 by missionary Juan Ritchie, it became the voice of the Peruvian Evangelical Church (Iglesia Evangélica Peruana – IEP), the first national denomination in Peru. The magazine was part of initial efforts to develop Protestant journalistic work, in which other Protestant missionary agencies also participated. However, the influence of the Renacimiento was decisive in creating a Protestant consciousness and developing reactions to various social and religious topics based in a nascent evangelical identity. This chapter will focus on selections from the first years of the magazine (1921–1930), paying close attention to the political and social dimensions of faith in its articles as well as the construction of evangelical identity. Its aim is to contribute to our understanding of this crucial period of evangelical history by analyzing a forum in which the voices of missionaries and national leaders converged.

Francisco García Calderón (1883–1953) was one of the most prestigious Spanish American intellectuals during the first decades of the twentieth century, when he was considered “the best interpreter of the continent’s realities.” A Peruvian national, he was born in Valparaíso while his father (then provisional president of Peru) was held prisoner by the Chilean government following the negotiations that ended the War of the Pacific. The family returned to Peru in 1889, and settled in Lima, where García Calderón grew up. He studied philosophy and letters at the Universidad de San Marcos, graduating in 1903. He soon rose to prominence among a new generation of intellectuals, particularly when the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó wrote the prologue of his first book De litteris (1904). In 1906, he moved with his mother and siblings to Paris, where he spent the next four decades of his life. His book Les démocraties latines de l’Amérique was first published in French with a preface by the French president Raymond Poincaré, in 1912. While some fragments of the book appeared in Spanish in 1951, the full first Spanish version was published by the Biblioteca Ayacucho in Caracas in 1979.

Selected passages from “Nuestros indios” (1904) by Manuel Gonzalez Prada (1844–1918).

Four: I turn from the cormorant itself to the bird’s natural product, guano, a resource that in the nineteenth century brought the Pacific into the global economy, profoundly affected the environment worldwide and enriched Europeans through the de facto slavery of thousands of Chinese indentured labourers on the Peruvian guano islands. Beginning with the filthy riches made from the guano trade by the UK-based Gibbs family, I outline the chemistry of guano, the European capitalisation of guano, and the conditions of labour of the guano workers. I then turn to the James Bond novel Dr No, locating Ian Fleming’s interest in guano and his transposition of the guano trade from Peru to the Caribbean in his banking family’s close connection with the Gibbses. I conclude with a discussion of the origins in the history of guano of the idea of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.

This chapter explores why, despite being central players in transnational drug markets, Mexico and Peru’s post-authoritarian trajectories of peace and violence differ. It first examines how the Mexican military developed a powerful counterinsurgent state to fight leftist insurgents and dissidents under one-party rule. Once it succeeded in suppressing rebels through a Dirty War, authoritarian specialists in violence helped transform local traffickers into transnational drug cartels. After democratization, the first administration failed to adopt a transitional justice (TJ) process and subsequent governments deployed the surviving counterinsurgent state to fight a War on Drugs, leading to the proliferation of conflicts that turned Mexico into one of the world’s most violent democracies. Focusing then on Peru, the chapter traces the rise of the counterinsurgent state under military dictatorship, its expansion during the civil war, and its transformation under Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship. After defeating the rebels, the head of Fujimori’s secret service seized control of transnational drug-trafficking. Following the collapse of dictatorship, the adoption of a robust truth commission and the prosecution of Fujimori’s security apparatus led to the dismantling of the counterinsurgent state, prevented the outbreak of large-scale drug wars, and set Peru on a twenty-year path of relative peace. However, failure to adopt TJ “boosters” opened a new era of violence.