This article explores the financial and geopolitical networks behind the independence of Gran Colombia. It shows that the failure to obtain official British government support for independence was compensated for by the development of a network of private individuals and partnerships that supplied large quantities of arms, equipment and men. A Colombian government document granting ‘Powers’ to London intermediaries was crucial to the construction of this network. We analyse who the key players were and how the network operated. By exploring the decisions and actions of merchants through the lens of risk, trust, credit and networks, we provide a fresh insight into the wider process of independence in Gran Colombia.

This article contributes to broader discussions of early Latin American nation-making by focusing on the interplay among territory, sovereignty and human movement in nineteenth-century Central America. How did early Central American nations create sovereign spaces? And how did human movement in turn impact the meanings of bordered spaces? Drawing from constitutions, legal codes and archival documents related to the implementation of migration laws, the central argument of this article is that Central American governments typically treated free migration not as a threat to sovereignty but as an opportunity to reinforce sovereignty over the fixed spaces through which people moved.

Based on declassified documents from the archives of the Czechoslovak intelligence agency (StB) and the contemporary press, this article delves into the working mechanisms of the Communist secret services in Latin America in the 1960s. Specifically, focusing on the case of the newspaper Época, it deals with the production of articles aimed at discrediting the capitalist states and their publication in the press through local collaborators. The link between the StB and the Uruguayan newspaper, which claimed to be politically and economically independent, was pragmatic and, for a time, helped both parties to achieve their political ends. While the StB managed to obtain a space where it could carry out its operations, Época's motivations were not only ideological but also economic and related to the urgent desire of the non-Communist Left to get funding for its political activities.

The central role of economic elites in shaping public policy in Latin America has become increasingly clear. Yet most of the recent literature on the subject focuses on democratic contexts. This paper analyses pension privatisation in Chile as a case study for improving our understanding of business–state interaction in authoritarian contexts. Globally, the 1981 pension reform carried out during the Pinochet dictatorship became an example for pension privatisation elsewhere. Analysis of the policy-making process, based on novel empirical material, shows that from 1973 financial groups accumulated growing power which enabled them to first (a) defeat their opponents within the economic elite, (b) overpower their rivals within the state and, finally, (c) force Pinochet into passing pension privatisation legislation. Our results stress the need to include the study of different actors’ power resources – along with ideological issues and the regime structure – in attempts to understand the outcome of policy processes in authoritarian contexts.

This article examines the ways in which Brazil's African foreign policy during the Ernesto Geisel administration (1974–9) utilised notions of ‘racial democracy’ and the nation's Africanity in framing itself as an intrinsic partner to the continent across the Atlantic. It does this through an analysis of Brazil's involvement at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC’77, 15 January–12 February 1977), hosted in Lagos, Nigeria. The international event celebrated past and present contributions of Black and African cultures to global civilisation. An assessment of the Brazilian government's delegation to FESTAC’77 shows how the Geisel administration attempted to depict Brazil as a harmoniously integrated society, where, through a historic process of mixing, the nation's racial identity was united into an equitable whole. In contrast, the propagation of these ideas at FESTAC’77 left the regime's racial ideology vulnerable to attack from international and domestic audiences.

This article assesses the inner workings of Cuban diaspora statecraft behind the ‘La Nación y la Emigración’ Conference, post-Soviet era Cuba's first major outreach to the Cuban community abroad. In contrast to works observing how changing emigration demographics might have transformed Cuba, this study argues that the Cuban state purposefully tried to reshape the homeland–diaspora relationship through the design of its emigration strategies. Because the Cuban geopolitics of mobility had profound security, economic and ideological implications, the leadership discussed not just how to neutralise the counterrevolution abroad but how to address both the diaspora's needs and popular sentiment at home.