This article examines the tensions between the Gran Colombian republican constitution of 1821 and Simón Bolívar's fear of a mulatto takeover. It focuses on Cartagena in the 1820s, where the mulatto general José Padilla challenged the socio-racial hierarchy and accepted notions of equality of the city, heading a three-day coup in 1828 against Bolívar's attempt to impose a new authoritarian constitution. Padilla failed to rally the mostly African-derived population of Cartagena behind the republican views of Francisco de Paula Santander and was promptly executed. Using the protagonists' correspondence, manifestos, criminal investigations, consular reports and censuses, the article analyses the factors in the city's demography, political leadership and culture, and in the composition of its military forces, that explain Padilla's failure. It highlights the role played by race and by Bolívar's views of mulattos in the process.

This article considers the ways in which provincial elites in the Peruvian Andes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries addressed the task of dismantling colonial institutions and relations. It draws on material from a municipal archive to trace how the land-for-labour ‘pact of reciprocity’ linking the town of Tarma both to the central state and to the indigenous hinterland was re-worked and eventually brought to an end. The contexts in which a postcolonial discourse of the Indian emerged are explored, and are understood as linked to struggles between local government and central state over the deployment of indigenous labour.

This article focuses on the months before the Spanish-American war began in April 1898 and addresses two related questions: first, why was the opposition to the war so strong in the United States; second, why did it not prevail? To explore these questions, the papers of the McKinley administration are examined, along with the Congressional Record and forty-one US newspapers, as well as twelve major European newspapers (British, French, German and Spanish) and the relevant documents from the British and Spanish archives. It is only in the press that one can find a coherent, well-articulated and explicit explanation of the antiwar position.

Some recent works on the relationship between coffee interests and the State during the Brazilian ‘First Republic’ (1899–1930) have shown that the relationship between the national State and ‘coffee bourgeoisie’ was not quite as simple as earlier studies had made it seem. However, these analyses seem to assume that, at the regional level, the federalism of the First Republic placed regional political structures under class control. The goal of this article is to show that the ‘instrumentalist’ thesis is not even valid for the State apparatus when considered at the regional level. The article focuses on São Paulo state, seat of the most powerful interests linked to the coffee economy.

This article uses the 1931 strike by the Lima bakery workers' union as an optic through which to study the politicisation of industrial relations in the context of the emergence of populist politics in Peru. Faced with a loss of control over the bakery workforce and a hostile and ineffective system of collective bargaining, the union turned to an alternative strategy in its attempts to gain control over the workforce and the productive process. It presented itself as a bulwark against labour militancy and sought to establish political ties to the Sánchez Cerro government. Although the strategy was largely unsuccessful, this case study illustrates the extent to which Peruvian workers played an active role in the construction of populist politics in the 1930s.

A crucial development in current Latin American politics is the growing involvement of indigenous movements in democracies grappling with the challenges of regime consolidation. This article examines how Ecuador's indigenous movement consecrated new rights and national constitutive principles in the 1997–8 constitutional assembly. It argues that the indigenous movement defined the legitimacy and purpose of the assembly through an ideological struggle with other political actors, in turn shaping the context and content of constitutional reforms in Ecuador. The article concludes that softening the boundary between ‘cultural politics’ and ‘institutional politics’ is necessary in order to understand the impact of social movements in Latin America.

A polarisation of foreign railroad, oil and other business interests in Mexico occurred during the early years of the Mexican Revolution. Some of the American interests resented Porfirio Díaz's favouritism towards Europe and supported Francisco Madero for a change, and later, Venustiano Carranza. There is evidence of limited logistical support by the US government in May 1911 for the Madero revolution, and of financial support by US railroad and oil magnate Henry Clay Pierce. The overthrow of President Madero at the instigation of General Victoriano Huerta and General Félix Díaz, with the tacit support of British railroad and oil magnate Weetman Pearson, had very strong repercussions through President Huerta's subsequent alliance with British interests in Mexico. The US military superpower intervention in Veracruz of April 1914 was the action involving US business lobbying which had the greatest impact on the outcome of the Mexican Revolution, in favour of Carranza.

Cycles of bureaucratic corruption in nineteenth-century Cuba evolved according to institutional conditions shaped by interest groups, financial needs, imperatives of colonial governance, and internal conflicts and war. Corrupt gain inimical to general public interest was not a consequence of cultural constants, but of unreconstructed institutional flaws and weaknesses. The risks of engaging in bureaucratic corruption diminished under the systematic condoning of administrative faults, collusive allowance of illegal slave trafficking, and a code of illegal rewards expected by loyalist officials opposing colonial reform. Despite some few anti-corruption initiatives, the prosecution and punishment of corrupt officials was lax. The implicit, yet significant, financial, institutional and political costs of corruption contributed to the demise of Spanish imperial dominion over Cuba and left a damaging burden and legacy for Cuban civil society.

In recent years Latin American countries have enacted sweeping privatisation measures and major trade, financial and tax reforms, but they have moved much more slowly to reform their pension systems and labour laws. This pattern of reform partly reflects differences in the intensity of organised labour's opposition to the reforms. Organised labour has undertaken greater efforts to block labour law reforms and, to a lesser extent, pension reforms, because these measures impose severe losses on more unions than other types of reforms. These greater efforts, moreover, have had significant effects on policy outcomes. The article shows how organised labour reacted quite differently to various types of market-oriented reforms in Argentina and Mexico in the 1990s, and describes how the reaction of the unions helped shape the fate of the reform proposals.

In Bolivia's 2002 national elections indigenous-movement-based political parties combined to capture 27 per cent of the vote, far surpassing their previous performance and constituting a major improvement in the representation of the country's excluded indigenous majority. Using a social movement theory framework, I attribute this result to five interacting factors: institutional changes that opened the system; the collapse of two competitive parties; the consolidation of indigenous peoples' social movement organisations; the unpopularity of the Banzer-Quiroga government and the intense anti-government mobilisations it provoked in 2000; and the ability of the indigenous parties to capitalise on growing nationalist, anti-US public sentiment.

Beset by a variety of diseases, numerous public health measures were advocated in late-nineteenth century Chile. Among these was the call for mandatory vaccination. Although the state supported programmes to encourage vaccination, these were voluntary. In the early 1880s, however, some legislators argued that compulsory vaccination would substantially reduce the death rate. Surprisingly, the legislature rejected this proposal. Claiming that the vaccination legislation would enhance the power of the executive branch, the congressmen soundly rejected an apolitical proposal designed to improve public health.

Marked differences in mid-twentieth-century reformers' approaches to politically active working women in Belize and Puerto Rico help to explain the emergence of colonial hegemony in the latter, and the rise of mass nationalism in the former. Reformers in both colonies were concerned with working women, but whereas British and Belizean reformers treated them as sexually and politically disordered, and aimed to transform them from militant wage-earners to clients of state social services, US and Puerto Rican reformers treated them as voting citizens with legitimate roles in the economy and labour movement. Although racialised moralism was not absent in Puerto Rico, the populism of colonial reform there helped cement a renegotiated colonial compact, while the non-populist character of reform in Belize – and the wider British Caribbean – alienated working women from the colonial state.

This article seeks to expand our understanding of the dynamics of the Gómez regime and of its treatment of foreign investment by examining its relationship with a large British enterprise engaged in ranching and frozen meat exports. The company and the regime established mutually beneficial relationships during the First World War, but when the tighter market conditions of the post-war period obliged the company to restrict its purchases of cattle from Gómez, he forced the company to end its exports. The regime's treatment of the Vestey enterprise thus offers a vivid contrast to its treatment of foreign oil companies.

Brazil's President Fernando Henrique Cardoso will be remembered for his administration's accomplishments as well as the problems his government left unresolved. On the one hand, fiscal policy represents one of Cardoso's success stories: the Plano Real curbed inflation, established economic stability, and enabled the central government to rein in subnational governments' out-of-control spending patterns, which had been a key source of macroeconomic instability. However, the question remains whether Brazil can truly escape from the political and economic consequences of past fiscal profligacy. Despite many successes, Cardoso's own policies have created additional obstacles that future administrations will necessarily confront, in particular a dramatic increase in Brazil's internal debt. Observers of Brazil should count both sides of the accounting ledger when evaluating the Cardoso administration. Much has been gained, but the costs of those gains must be recognised and the impact of those gains on the range of policy choice available to future administrations understood. This article explores the factors that contributed to Brazil's macroeconomic difficulties prior to 1995, and then explores how the Plano Real provided the Cardoso administration with leverage to constrain the capacity of subnational actors to affect Brazil's economy. Subsequently, however, the paper describes how the Cardoso administration's policies have created Brazil's current ‘fiscal straitjacket’, and concludes by discussing how Cardoso's policies will constrain future administrations.

In 1994 Mexico's ruling party granted new powers of judicial review and increased independence to the Mexican Supreme Court. Would these reforms enable the Court to overcome decades of judicial subordination? I examine all Mexican Supreme Court decisions addressing the constitutionality of electoral rules – rules that are inherently contentious because they determine the chances for obtaining power – during Zedillo's sexenio. These cases, culminating with a 1998 ruling counter to a key PRI political interest, demonstrate a fundamental change in Mexico's institutional power balance. This study also demonstrates the utility of electoral cases to evaluate Court power within and across countries.

The political life of Argentina between 1946 and 1955 cannot be defined exclusively by the emergence and consolidation of Peronism, but was also shaped by the actions, ideas and conflicts of opposition to it. The evolution of the Radical and Socialist parties during those years was marked both by their respective internal discrepancies and by the dynamics of confrontation with the government. In the face of Perón's emergence as a political figure, Radicals and Socialists revitalised inter-party agreements that had been tried and tested in previous years. The Radicals, their internal disagreements notwithstanding, were to become the main representatives of anti-Peronism their oppositional roles changing as the institutional spaces for conflict and engagement with Peronism developed. Meanwhile, the Socialists lost political and representational weight, despite their desperate attempts to maintain themselves as an option within the political arena. When the rules of political competition changed in Peronism's favour, Radicals and Socialists became convinced of the legitimacy of challenging the constitutional order in an attempt to increase the political representation of anti-Peronism.

This article analyses some of the difficulties of institutional modernisation based on a study of Brazilian port reform in the 1990s. It explains how and why Brazilian business managed to organise collective action for dramatic reform of the port structure and labour regime, but was unable to maintain the consensus to ensure full implementation. It emphasises how the formal rigidities and informal outcomes of the corporatist institutional structure hampered an efficient pace of modernisation. The analysis applies two complementary theoretical approaches, institutional analysis and the logic of collective action, to illuminate the evolution of Brazilian corporatism in the context of a more democratic society and open market economy.

‘Demanding adherence to principles is, either, to accept the federal system with all its advantages and dangers, or to denounce it frankly and proclaim the empire of central government, granting it the power to correct the abuses that local authorities might commit.’Ignacio Vallarta

The annulment of the 2000 gubernatorial elections in Tabasco marked a fundamental precedent for electoral justice in Mexico and the role of the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación – TEPJF) in federal, state and local elections. Successive constitutional reforms that ended with the ‘definitive’ electoral reforms of 1996 have consolidated a regime of electoral dispute adjudication at the federal level, giving political parties the right to appeal state cases before federal authorities. Whereas a clear tendency exists towards greater decentralisation of power under ‘new federalism’, in the electoral field centralism concentrated on the TEPJF and the Supreme Court of Justice has been adopted. However, in the context of political pluralism and a more authentic federalism, the TEPJF's new role has caused conflicting reactions. Some sectors are insisting on the need to limit this institution's powers so that in the future it can only rule over subnational elections based on well-defined criteria that respect specific jurisdictional principles.

This article examines the recent trends in extending the global garment production process to the rural areas of the Laguna region and the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. As these remote regions are incorporated into global markets, several similar patterns and rationale are found behind the policies followed by state governments to attract these types of enterprises. The implications for regional economic development are also discussed.

27 February 1989 saw a popular revolt, which was to escalate dramatically, break out in Venezuela. Both Caracas and most of the main and secondary cities of the country were the scene of barricades, road closures, the stoning of shops, shooting and widespread looting. This article describes the events occurring during the Caracazo or Sacudón, as the episode is known, in order to show the key role played by the weakness of a set of social and political institutions in the violent forms of collective action that prevailed. This data, on a comparative basis, may enrich our understanding of other similar uprisings in the region and worldwide.