Until quite recently, most attention to Brazil’s agrarian history has focused on the chief export crops of sugar and coffee. This makes sense both because until the post-World War II period these were largely responsible for integrating Brazil into the world economy and because they have traditionally been the chief financial props for the elites and the central state. Exports have the advantage too of being relatively easy to study, given the availability of reports and statistics from domestic and foreign sources. But it is important to remember that exports have not been what have occupied most rural Brazilians most of the time, and this was particularly the case in the nineteenth century. Rather, their day to day activities have involved primarily the so-called “internal economy,” the production, consumption, and exchange on local, regional and, but only indirectly, national markets of food, animals, raw materials, and artisan handicrafts.

The administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico is famous for the enormous distribution of lands that it undertook, the prize of the bloody and protracted revolution that had promised tierra to the nation’s peasants two decades earlier. Less well remembered are the actions the administration took against the peasantry, when federal troops stationed in southwestern Chihuahua killed several Mexicans while protecting a colony of Canadian-born Mennonite fanners. This quiet display of the central government’s authority was not the first of its kind in the area around the growing town of Cuauhtémoc. President Alvaro Obregón’s administration had also sent troops to Cuauhtémoc, and their mission then as under Cárdenas was the protection of the lives and properties of the small Mennonite enclave that resided in the area south of Chihuahua City. It was Obregón who invited the religious minority to settle in Mexico shortly after his election, and it was he who pledged federal government protection of the Mennonites’ interests. The incongruities evident in the case begin therefore not with the stationing of the troops in Cuauhtémoc, but much earlier, with the very concessions that Obregón gave the Mennonites in the years after the Mexican Revolution.

Victory over Spain in 1898 provided the United States with the opportunity to pursue the various options that imperial status now offered. Indeed, under the influence of the strategic precepts of an Alfred Thayer Mahan, the messianic expansionism of a Josiah Strong, the extended frontier concept of a Frederick Jackson Turner, and the now seemingly obtainable economic aspirations of a James G. Blaine, North Americans looked to their newly established imperial arena with anticipation and confidence. It would be the adjacent circum-Caribbean region, for the most part, where the United States government would attempt to create the appropriate climate for the attainment of its strategic, economic, and altruistic goals. Acquisition of the Canal Zone in 1903 served in particular to focus U.S. attention on the isthmus. Accordingly, whenever revolutionary violence erupted in Central America, the United States government more often than not took vigorous action to ensure the survival or emergence of governments and factions which were supportive of North American interests.

The governmental era of the Bolivian conservative parties—Constitutional, Democrat, and Conservative—encompasses the historical period from Bolivia’s withdrawal from the Pacific War (1880), which saw a Peruvian-Bolivian alliance against Chile, to the outbreak of the Federal War of 1899 between conservatives and liberals. Within this period of infighting lies the genesis of the Bolivian political party system. With the establishment of a truce in 1880 between Chile and Bolivia, without which Bolivia would have had to definitively withdraw from the conflict and break its Peruvian alliance, two positions arose concerning a resolution of the conflict: the continuation of the war or peace. These polar solutions adhered to the first ideological substratum of the Bolivian political parties, making it possible to define the various factions of the elite in light of the new political restructuring and the role of the State.