Costa Rica suspended payments on its London debt in 1901, at the beginning of a democratisation process and during a crisis in the world coffee market. Meanwhile, autocratic Nicaragua, also a coffee exporter, continued paying its foreign creditors. This article assesses the causes of these distinct outcomes, which are at odds with the influential hypothesis that democracy makes for better borrowers. Strongly represented in Congress, Costa Rica's coffee elite pushed for the end of a tax on coffee as the legislative became more powerful. The executive had used that revenue to service the debt, which went on default as a consequence. Politics were radically different in Nicaragua: coffee growers were weaker and President Zelaya ruled without legislative tutelage. Hence, his government could raise a similar tax to honour the sovereign debt. With a clean record, the dictator borrowed abroad to build a modern army, the backbone of his autocratic regime.

The Ford Foundation's involvement with the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. The paper studies how changed political circumstances in the United States and abroad induced the Foundation to gradually abandon the technocratic approach that had governed its overseas programme since the 1950s, thus introducing a critical shift in its policies toward the developing world. A grant proposal to the University of Brasília, which had been subject to repeated military interventions since 1964, highlighted the ethical dilemmas raised by the goal of fostering policy-relevant research in an authoritarian political context. Relying on a pragmatic decision-making framework that converted ethical and ideological considerations into cost–benefit exercises, the Foundation finally moved away from the maxims of modernisation theory to embrace new strategic priorities like human rights, democracy and intellectual pluralism.

This article addresses one of the instances of the transnationalisation of state terrorism that took place at the end of the Cold War in Latin America. It examines the collaboration of the Argentine military dictatorship with the governments of Guatemala and Honduras in their ‘fight against subversion’ (1980–3) through previously unexplored archives. It presents the different degrees and forms of inter-governmental collaboration, the people responsible, the time frame, and the institutions, seeking to elaborate on the role of this collaboration in the repressive processes of each nation's historical experience. In general terms, this article contributes to transnational studies of the right wing during the recent history of the Latin American Cold War.

This article contends that Brazil's evangelical Christian networks increasingly function as penal infrastructure. Since the 1990s, the scale and scope of evangelical involvement in the criminal justice system have grown significantly. One clear result is that the capillary relationships that constitute Christian community now mobilise resources to support or even substitute the basic functions of punishment. I draw on fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro to understand this shift and its broader implications for the Brazilian project of incarceration. I also make a general claim for thinking with and through infrastructure as a pathway to understand penal governance.

Since the inauguration of Mexican democracy in 2000, organised criminal violence had been leaking into the political arena. Yet, it escalated in the 2018 elections, when dozens of local candidates were killed. In most of these cases, the concrete perpetrators and motives remained in the dark. How did Mexican society make sense of this opaque, unprecedented wave of electoral violence? On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of over 1,200 news reports, I examine the structuring power of a shared narrative: the frame of organised crime. By conceiving candidate killings as economic violence within the criminal community, this commonsensical frame of interpretation permitted Mexican society to ‘normalise’ these killings as ‘business as usual’ by criminal organisations.

The objective of this paper, based on interviews with 95 human smugglers (coyotes) involved in agriculture and 51 in prostitution, is to provide a comparative analysis of the networks transporting (mostly) male migrants intending to work in US agriculture and those recruiting women/girls for the US sex industry. Networks carrying females for sex work are bigger and use more fraudulent recruitment strategies. However, migrant smuggling for agriculture is not totally different from sex trafficking; similarities between the types of networks analysed dwarf their differences. Smugglers frequently use some form of deception to convince their would-be clients/victims to undertake risky journeys. I conclude that both networks are demand-driven. Smugglers serve the interests of US agribusinesses and sex business owners rather than those of the males and females they recruit.