Despite recent attention to the relationship between the media and populist mobilisation in Latin America, there is a misfit between the everyday practices of journalists and the theoretical tools that we have for making sense of these practices. The objective of this article is to help reorient research on populism and the press in Latin America so that it better reflects the grounded practices and autochthonous norms of the region. To that end, I turn to the case of Venezuela, and a practice that has been largely escaped attention from scholars – the use of denuncias.

Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.

Recent thinking and practice in transitional justice suggest that victims and societies hold indivisible, perhaps even simultaneous, rights to truth, justice and reparations after gross human rights violations. This article analyses the advantages and drawbacks of such holistic approaches to transitional justice, through a case study of Chile's second official truth commission, the ‘Valech Commission’. The article illustrates the politics of ongoing contestation about authoritarian era crimes in Latin America, showing how and why the commission was designed to deliver on certain truth-and-reparations obligations towards survivors of past state repression, while attempting to explicitly decouple truth revelations from judicial consequences. It also discusses the implications of associating truth-telling and reparations in a single instance, and in doing so contributes to debates about the potentially contradictory or counterproductive outcomes that may arise from the yoking together of truth, justice and reparations functions in transitional justice policy design.

Traditional accounts of the 1948 Bogotazo – the riot in Bogotá, Colombia, sparked by the assassination of populist leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán – have overlooked the urban context that explains the extent of the destruction. Preparing to host the 1948 IX Pan-American Conference, Bogotá had undergone aggressive urban reforms that financially burdened and dispossessed residents. More than just a political figure, Gaitán was recognised as an urban advocate for the marginalised. They responded to his death by destroying reform projects and symbols of political authority. Informed by architectural journals, legislation and periodicals, this article shows that Bogotá’s elite and dispossessed alike inscribed their political projects onto the urban landscape.

In 1868 a cholera epidemic erupted in the north-western Argentine province of Tucumán. Urban-based doctors and politicians argued that fruit cultivated primarily in the south of the province was responsible for the spread of cholera. Hoping to avoid cholera, they advocated the complete prohibition and destruction of fruit in Tucumán as both a prophylactic measure, but also to prepare new land for sugar cultivation. Through a reading of governmental memos, medical journals, and public health reports, this article examines how agriculture, disease, and contagion mediated the interaction between Tucumán's urban minority and rural majority. This article offers a window into grassroots politics and state formation during one of Argentina's most formative periods.

This article discusses the colonial encounter of the Welsh and Tehuelche/Mapuche in the Welsh colony (Y Wladfa Gymreig), founded 1865. The Welsh sought to create a Welsh-speaking utopia in the ‘empty’ lands of Patagonia, paradoxically using this colonisation as a way to resist disparagement of the Welsh language and culture by an English-dominated state. The article deploys a ‘coloniality of power’ perspective and explores archive materials that reveal how both the Welsh and the indigenous communities whose land they colonised were caught up in coloniality and expanding capitalist modernity. I conclude that exploring the ambiguous relationship which results from this encounter complicates and deepens our understanding of how the coloniality of power works. Particularly, I argue that stripping away the ‘myth of friendship’ between the Welsh and indigenous is vital, not to diminish moments of genuine mutual affinity but rather to show how these are caught up in processes of colonialisation.