This article explores the US contribution to the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil and the tensions generated by this hemispheric connection in the mid-nineteenth century. It combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, based on diplomatic records and Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, in order to assess the size and variety of forms of US participation in the traffic to Brazil. More generally, the article examines the tensions caused by the rise of abolitionism and the limits to the enforcement of anti-slave trade legislation in the free trade international environment that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars. By framing the attitudes of the US government within a broader Atlantic context, this work shows why certain forms of US participation in the contraband slave trade (such as providing US-built ships) became more predominant than others (such as directly financing and organising slave voyages) by the mid-nineteenth century.

The agrarian body of law created by government legislators and jurists in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), sought to restore pueblos’ juridical standing by allowing communities to hold land collectively in the form of ejidos. Yet, state efforts to restructure property relations in the countryside often articulated with local alternative territorial projects that challenged the implementation of these redistributive legal measures. During the course of 50 years, cattle ranchers from the community of El Huanal in Nautla, Veracruz, defended private property, resisted land expropriation, and prevented the establishment of an ejido in the community. How did rancheros achieve this? How did they respond to the pressures of ‘peasant’ mobilisation? How did post-revolutionary legal discourse come to frame this struggle over land? What changes did this failed attempt to implement land reform trigger in the region? Looking closely at the conflicts, interactions, negotiations, and everyday practices that unfolded among a variety of actors around the interpretation and the applicability of ‘the law’, this article demonstrates how the agrarian reform, despite never having been implemented, altered both the material landscape and the social configuration of this community of coastal Veracruz.

This article unveils the continuous and productive relationship that developed between Chile and the IMF during Salvador Allende's presidency (1970–73). This counter-intuitive relationship was made possible by the systematic depoliticisation and technocratisation of the ties between them. By downplaying ideological discrepancies and keeping a high degree of autonomy, the IMF and Chilean technocrats blurred rigid Cold War divides and circumvented the US-imposed embargo against Allende's regime. The examination of this relationship sheds new light on Allende's positioning in the international arena and provides a unique prism to reconsider dichotomist perceptions of the Cold War in Latin America.

Latin America is widely known as a low-tax region, but Brazil defies that description with a tax burden almost double the regional average. Though longstanding, Brazil’s position atop the tax burden ranking is not a historical constant. As recently as the early 1950s three other countries, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, had similar or even heavier burdens. However, by the early 1980s Brazil had emerged as the most heavily taxed country in Latin America, and subsequent decades reinforced that status. This article seeks to uncover the roots of Brazil’s heavy taxation by examining the process through which it rose to the top of the regional ranking and managed to stay there. It emphasises two variables, the social class bases of public sector growth and the degree of support for democracy among key political actors. Despite changing over time, these variables have consistently interacted in ways that favour rising taxation.

Anthropological analysis elucidates how discourses about agriculture in one North-east Brazilian community reflect relational roles of citizens and the state, the position of farmers in society, and the relationship of individuals to their work. In these discourses, farmers are positioned as moral, hard-working, autonomous citizens, justifying their participation in low-paying activities. The declining numbers of agricultural workers is explained as a result of individual laziness or government irresponsibility. In using these discourses to take stances publicly on agricultural issues, speakers assign responsibilities and moral status to agents. In constructing rural identities, such moral discourses emphasise the symbolic value of subsistence agriculture as its economic value declines.

This article analyses the background to and the content of the Peruvian prior consultation law – the only one enacted in Latin America to date – and its regulating decree. In contrast to the widespread conception that prior consultation is a means for preventing and resolving conflict, it argues that this new legislation will not help to transform conflicts as long as the normative framework itself is contested and the preconditions for participatory governance are not in place. Establishing these preconditions would result in state institutions capable of justly balancing the diverse interests at stake; measures that reduce power asymmetries within consultations; and joint decision-making processes with binding agreements.