The literature on political participation has consistently found that protest positively and significantly correlates with voting. However, Chile can be considered a deviant case to this pattern. During the last decade, Chileans who participated in street demonstrations were unlikely to participate in elections. What explains this anomaly? We argue that this rupture between participation in protest and in elections results from an effective distancing between social-movement organisations (SMOs) and institutional politics. However, this distancing of SMOs from party politics has not been homogeneous. To examine this heterogeneity, we conduct a comparative design of two cases: the labour and student movements. Based on a mixed-methods study that combines interviews with movement leaders and surveys of protest participants in marches, we seek to highlight the mediating role of SMOs in the promotion of different forms of political participation.

This article examines the collective action frames that civil societal actors in Argentina have used while engaging in advocacy. It argues that by devising effective framing strategies, members of civil society organisations increase their chances of participating in the agenda-setting, formulation and adoption phases of policy-making. The relationship between framing and participation is supported by a comparative analysis of two cases of advocacy: the campaign for a freedom of information law and the struggle for child protection legislation. The evidence suggests that civil societal actors often rely on the strength of their ideas and their persuasive power to achieve political relevance, which is analytically distinct from political outcomes.

The history of the transition to civilian rule in Chile largely overlooks or marginalizes the role of the armed and confrontational forms of resistance to the dictatorship. This article traces the pre and post-coup history of the Left's engagement with armed forms of struggle and evaluates the effects their incorporation into the struggle against the dictatorship had upon the regime and the Reagan administration. It concludes that armed resistance was a major factor in determining US policy to Chile during the 1980s, and therefore played an important role in the transition as a whole.

Cuba–Soviet relations are examined in the period that Mikhail Gorbachev was leader of the Soviet Union, focusing on the Cuban perception of the effects of the Soviet reforms on the relationship, in the light of the campaign of rectification of errors. It is concluded that the Cuban leadership kept a surprisingly united front in this period; the year 1989 and repercussions of the August 1991 coup were vital; but the Cuban reaction was not more critical due to diplomatic constraints and the hope that a semblance of the relationship could continue, despite the situation within the Soviet Union.

The main concern of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in recent years has been to lead and supervise the implementation of the resolutions adopted at its First Congress in 1975. Those resolutions cover a broad range of political, social, and economic issues, so that a full account of the Party's work over the past 5 years would require a complete survey of Cuba's domestic and foreign policies during that period.1 The very breadth of the PCC's work agenda in the latter half of the 1970s indicates how much the role of the Party in Cuba has evolved over the past decade;2 such responsibilities demonstrate a continuation of the process of strengthening the Party begun in the early 1970s.

Medical developments in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century have received little attention. This study examines the Mexican responses to the success and failures of an important international health campaign of the 1950s: malaria eradication. During the 1950s malaria became the disease of central concern for international and US agencies working in developing countries (as yellow fever and hookworm were for tropical health during the early twentieth century). This article outlines the motivations, design and techniques of the campaign. It concentrates on two local responses: first, the enthusiastic support displayed by personnel working in the field; and, secondly, the reactions against the campaign of a local doctor – who revealed some of the inadequacies of malaria eradication – and of two medical anthropologists, who emphasised the scant attention paid to the cultural and social aspects of the campaign.

Many of the essential early qualities of the Cuban Revolution emanated from the experience of armed struggle. In the Sierra Maestra microcosmic features of the socialist order acquired their earliest expression, assumed recognizable form, and established the foundations upon which the radical transformation of Cuban society would proceed. The exigencies of armed struggle created a new consciousness and at once proletarianized bourgeois revolutionaries and militarized civilian combatants. The guerrilla war conferred on the revolutionary order a powerful legacy of struggle which, in its earliest forms, expressed itself most compellingly in the Rebel Army.

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.

Most recent literature on military government is extremely skeptical of the possibility of effective military reformism. This scepticism, encouraged by various behavioural hypotheses, has been further strengthened by a number of cross-sectional analyses, which seem to show that most military governments are unstable, conservative, and indifferent at economic management.1 The military government in Peru, therefore, appears to be something of an exception. Its first President, General Velasco, stayed in office for nearly seven years, and his successor, General Morales Bermúdez, has promised that the nature of the regime will not be drastically changed. Even more important, the Government claims to have carried out a comprehensive set of agrarian, industrial and social reforms that were aimed at bringing Peru out of its former underdevelopment. Moreover, the Government has claimed to have achieved all this during a seven-year period in which the conventional criteria of economic success – a substantial growth in real income per capita, a moderate rate of inflation and a reasonably stable exchange rate – also appear to have been met.

Cuban scholars are not noted for fashioning consensus, much less unanimity. Yet it is unlikely that a Cubanist could be found who would not agree with the proposition that Cuba in 1992 is in the worst crisis of the revolution. It is perhaps arguable that the material situation on the island in 1969 was as difficult as it is today, but back in 1969 the revolution was young and the Cuban people for the most part were energetic and hopeful. Cuba was then an increasingly accepted and economically integrated member of the large world socialist community.

The proximate cause of Cuba's present predicament is not hard to identify. Cuba has a small and heavily trade-dependent economy. In the presence of the US embargo, Cuba came to depend on the former Soviet trade bloc (CMEA) for over four-fifths of its imports. Without access to the US market, with access to other markets restricted and with imports from the former CMEA countries reduced by roughly two-thirds, Cuba's economy and its people are struggling to survive.

The government's response to the crisis has been deliberate but inadequate. A number of reforms initiated prior to 1989 are being continued,1 others are being accelerated and some new programmes are being put in place. The new emphasis on foreign investment and tourism, structural reforms in the operation of foreign trade, and the impossibility of central planning in the presence of ubiquitous supply uncertainties have combined to transform the nature of Cuba's economic mechanism. Despite the promise of some extension of private enterprise and the market in the service sector, however, the needed and more concerted introduction of a broader market mechanism has not been forthcoming.

In a recent critical survey of scholarly writing on dependency theory, Ronald H. Chilcote noted that, ‘like other theory in an infant stage, dependency theory has spawned a plethora of interpretations and applications, and has been adopted by ideologues on all sides of the political spectrum’. This enthusiastic response, while welcome for the new perspective it affords on underdevelopment, has led some Latin Americanists to caution against the over-application of dependency theory and the unwarranted inflation of its explanatory power. Richard M. Morse, speaking specifically of urban development observes that ‘the “external dependency” thesis … easily leads to dogmatism’, and Phillipe Schmitter warns against the indiscriminate use of the theory to explain all of Latin America's ills. Such caveats have merit, especially in view of the plasticity of current thinking about dependency.

Based on a study of the 1960s generation of Chilean left-wing leaders, this article offers a three-dimensional model of individual political identity to examine how leaders justify their contributions to society and the political programmes of which they are a part. The central dimension of individual political identity is that of cognitive frameworks, that is, individuals' fundamental approaches to politics, rooted in the values they assign to ideas, political organisation and their relationships to fellow political leaders and activists. The article identifies four cognitive ideal-types: political party loyalists, personal loyalists, political thinkers and political entrepreneurs. The article concludes that the conceptualisation of individual political identity is a powerful explanatory framework for understanding the formulation and reformulation of political thinking and action, particularly in periods in which political institutions are in a state of flux or crisis.

One of the most striking developments in Mexican historiography during the last twenty-five years is the burgeoning of the genre known as the ‘history of ideas’. The origins of the movement date back to 1925, when German historicist and existentialist philosophy made its entry into Mexico through the ideas of José Ortega y Gasset. More recently the impetus came from the seminar in the History of Ideas initiated at El Colegio de México and at the National University by the Spanish philosopher, José Gaos. So great has been the influence of Gaos that it is fair to say that until very recently die history of ideas or intellectual history in Mexico has been dominated by his students—men such as Luis Villoro, Francisco López Cámara, and Leopoldo Zea. Edmundo O'Gorman, while not a student of Gaos, shares his views and has come to be considered as a natural member of the history of ideas group.

This article examines how poverty came to be identified as the key category of the new social question in Argentina during its post-1983 transition to democracy. It pays special attention to the conformation of an expert group at the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, INDEC), which focused on the construction of statistical instruments aimed at describing the social reality of poverty. Through practices of objectification and classification carried out by those experts, poverty was made into a measurable object, at the same time that it was publicly instituted as a political-moral problem and as an object of state action.

This article challenges the notion that the APRA party's poor electoral showings in Peru's southern sierra during the 1930s reflected regional lack of interest in the party and that APRA held little appeal for indigenous peasants. Focusing on two rural districts in the department of Ayacucho, the article reveals that APRA was indeed a formidable presence in rural Ayacucho during the 1930s. With its calls for regional inclusion and decentralisation, APRA appealed to progressive hacendados, schoolteachers and even wealthy peasants, who linked APRA's national discourses to their local struggles for political power and land.

Many of today's central banks in Latin America were established in the interwar period. During the 1920s, most of them were designed under the influence of money doctors. The main mandate of these new institutions was to cope with inflation and provide exchange stability. This article analyses how these central banks responded to the onset of the Great Depression. I show that, in accordance with the requirements of the monetary regime, central banks initially acted to prevent capital outflows and to protect their gold reserves. This led to a credit drop to the private sector. Additional credit was made available once governments decided to intervene more actively in the economy, thereby disregarding the advice of money doctors. The central banks that were founded in the 1930s, and the reforms introduced to those already operating, were conceived to face the effects of the crisis.

In many developing countries where formal institutions fail to guarantee rule of law, criminal organisations have emerged as intermediaries between citizens and the state. In some cases, these armed non-state actors adopt repressive strategies to govern their territories and local populations. This study asks under what circumstances local actors mobilise against criminal governance. Focusing on the case of Michoacán, Mexico, I argue that the emergence of vigilante groups, known as autodefensas, was prompted by the breaching of a social contract – a set of formal and informal agreements and obligations – between organised crime and civil society. As criminal governance spread in Michoacán, so did predatory behaviour against local communities, which gave way to an elite-organised social movement structured by rural inequalities.

For the last fifty years Chilean rural unionism has been characterised by a structural weakness vis-à-vis the state, political parties and the vested landed interests. For instance, the formation of peasant unions remained illegal until 1967 and, after a short period of strength during the land reform, they could only barely survive the military takeover of 1973. So, in marked contrast to miners and industrial workers – who since the 1930s have built strong national organisations and achieved significant bargaining power within Chilean society – peasant unions have always had to rely on the support of urban social and political forces to exist.

The most persistent theme in social science analyses of Haiti concerns the causes of the country's economic underdevelopment. During the past few years, a number of significant works have been published which touch upon this theme. The present article will comment on some of these contributions to the debate, beginning with the discussion of the Haitian state and the defence mechanisms employed by the peasants against the autorités. I will then move on to examine survival problems in urban areas before ending with a look at some of the controversies regarding the determinants of peasant poverty in Haiti.