In February 1948 a spirited presidential race sparked a political powderkeg in normally tranquil Costa Rica. The opposition candidate, Otilio Ulate, unexpectedly defeated former president Rafael Angel Calderón. Calderón's National Republican Party, the Communist Partido Vanguardia Popular (Vanguard), along with incumbent President Teodoro Picado immediately overturned the results. The opposition responded by launching an armed struggle to install Ulate in power. Led by José Figueres, the rebels defeated the government army and its auxiliaries composed primarily of calderonista and vanguardista militiamen. In late April Figueres victoriously entered San José and established a revolutionary junta that ruled the country for eighteen months. At the end of this period, he stepped down and allowed Ulate to serve his full four-year term.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and first three decades of this one, a small though increasing number of Middle Easterners–principally Lebanese, Syrians, and Palestinians–made their way to the Americas. Hitherto a little studied influx, the Arabic speakers were part of the largely southern European immigration that reached Latin America in general, and Argentina in particular. Included among the arrivals were the forebears of such future heads of state as Argentina's Carlos Saúl Menem, Bolivia's Juan Pereda Asbún, Colombia's Julio César Turbay Ayala, the Dominican Republic's Elías Wessín y Wessín, or Uruguay's Alberto Abdala, and of such presidential hopefuls as Paulo Salim Maluf (Brazil), Abdala Bucaram (Ecuador), and Jorge Dager (Venezuela). Their spectacular rise, in many cases achieved by the first generation of the immigrants' local offspring, must not obscure the fact that the Arabic speakers were generally undesired. That much was clearly spelled out in the legislation of various countries. Unlike some of her sister states, Argentina, the region's principal absorber, did not seek to block the Middle Easterners' entry before 1928. This was so irrespective of the Argentine constitution's bias in favor of European immigration, the preference for north Europeans shown by the country's elites and their illdisguised disdain for the Arabic speakers, among other ethnic and religious groups. Hence, as the numbers of Syro-Lebanese taking advantage of the absence of Argentine barriers rose, they became the victims of xenophobic attacks, especially since the 1880s.

The United Mexican States are the advance sentinels of Latin America and guard their northern frontier, the plow in one hand and the rifle in the other.

Mexican diplomat José Manuel Gutiérrez Zamora, 1909

Mexico has long been the principal rival of the United States in Central America. Throughout the past century, the country has, to the measure of its ability, steadfastly resisted U.S. interference in the area. Because of Mexico's geographical location and its experience with U.S. intervention, the strengthening of nationalist forces in Central America has always been a subject of paramount importance for any Mexican regime. Both before and after the Revolution of 1910, Mexico frequently resorted to intervention of its own in attempts to create or maintain a counterweight to U.S. influence. The country has pursued its goals mainly by providing encouragement, diplomatic protection, money, and sometimes arms to Central American governments and factions that have portrayed themselves as opponents of U.S. hegemony.

In 1791 the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue became the site of the only successful slave uprising in the history of the New World. As the French Revolution reshaped the political and social institutions of the mother country, Saint-Domingue's free people of color, led by an indigo planter from the island's southern peninsula, began a campaign for civil reform that helped destabilize colonial slave society. Despite their pivotal role in what would become the Haitian Revolution, relatively little is known about this important population. Widely acknowledged to be the largest and wealthiest group of its kind in the New World, this class comprised a remarkable 47 percent of the colony's free inhabitants in 1788. While elsewhere in the eighteenth-century Caribbean free coloreds tended to be urban based, most of Saint-Domingue's gens de couleur dwelt in the countryside and a number were successful planters. By 1790 members of this class owned enough slaves and plantations that they were said to possess one-third of the colony.