Recent studies on the figuration of the nation in nineteenth-century Hispanic America have used sophisticated analyses of different media to suggest that Indigenous references were progressively excluded from urban public space as national symbols. In these spaces, the creole authorities placed themselves and their ancestors centre stage. However, these studies have neglected a highly representative medium: street names. This article demonstrates that street nomenclature was key in figuring the nation in a capital city and shows a different trend from that established using other media. Specifically, after the 1861 municipal reform of street names in Lima, Peru, the majority of official names were Indigenous and did not celebrate creole or military elites. This article examines this reform and the conflicts it provoked.

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.

The independence of Brazil (1822) resulted in its separation from Portugal and its birth as an independent empire. It is important to understand the role of people of colour in this movement for independence. Focusing on Ceará, the main argument of this article is that people of colour, both free and enslaved, played an active and significant role in Brazilian independence, as they fought for freedom, for established rights, and for greater involvement in public affairs. They accomplished this amidst social upheaval, political instability and the rise of local authoritarian leadership resulting from the collapse of the old colonial order. As a study in subaltern agency, the contributions of this article go even further, as the consulted primary source material depicts the vital role of Ceará in the absorption of Brazil's northern regions into the new empire – an understudied topic in its own right.

Repressive state violence, intended to tamp down collective mobilisation, sometimes inspires greater participation by protesters. When popular and/or elite reactions cause the repressing party to concede, civil resistance scholars define the failure of state repression as ‘backfire’. Some have proposed that movements’ nonviolent discipline is essential to backfire. This article demonstrates that movements that practise ‘unarmed militancy’ – forceful, combative tactics less damaging than armed violence – can also succeed through backfire, achieving policy concessions and even presidential resignations, and presents a qualitative comparative analysis of the outcomes of 48 protest events with multiple deaths in Bolivia between 1982 and 2019, and a case-based analysis of how either movements or repressors prevailed. Movements that confronted deadly repression succeeded in 57–8 per cent of cases. Whether or not protesters engaged in lethal defensive violence did not affect their likelihood of success. However, state repression of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, and during polarised partisan conflicts, was consistently successful. Current understandings of backfire need to be reconsidered in light of successful unarmed militant protest in Bolivia and numerous other locations worldwide.

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.

What is the origin of the Frente Amplio? While most contributions focus on party-building strategies and the electoral success of the Left, scholars have overlooked the previous process of party formation. This paper studies the Frente Amplio's formation in 1971 as a case of complete electoral coordination between extant parties, factions and individual left-wing politicians who understood the electoral inefficiencies of competing with each other. Making use of a historical narrative, our account complements other approaches, suggesting the critical role of electoral coordination, favoured by two systemic conditions (electoral stability and programmatic politics) that eased the process of party formation.

Across Latin America, there continues to be strong resistance to the claim that racism plays a role in the production of urban space. Deemed antipatriotic, this issue remains widely unaddressed in urban planning and geography. Based on qualitative research in Bogotá and secondary literature on other Latin American cities, this article explores the afterlife of mestizaje (racial mixture) as a racial–colonial project from the viewpoint of its materialisation in the city and society–space relations. In particular, it illustrates how racism in the city is transfigured as ‘always something else’ (e.g., culture, class, regionalism, displacement) through a variety of normative, discursive and operational devices. Thus, the article confronts the need to divest from the racial hegemony of mestizaje in urban planning and geography, suggesting that it is hindering the path towards more equitable urban futures.

Based on his record as president, Carlos Ibáñez is usually considered a populist caudillo in Chilean historiography. However, there are few studies of whether his electoral base permits this classification or of the type of populism he represented. In his four presidential bids between 1927 and 1952, Ibáñez ran with the support of both left- and right-wing parties. Using municipal-level data, we assess his electoral support in the 1942 and 1952 presidential campaigns and support for Ibañista parties in the 1953 legislative elections. In 1942, Ibáñez's electoral base was similar to that of right-wing candidates while, in 1952, his support increased in areas where the Left was historically strong. While he received consistent support in agricultural areas, it fluctuated in mining and industrial areas.

Why do governments that redistribute property on a massive scale so frequently fail to grant property rights to land beneficiaries? A recent contribution answers this important question by suggesting that countries involved in major land reforms suffer from ‘property gaps’, while those that did not, like Colombia, are in a much better situation. Based on the Colombian case, we challenge this conclusion. We show that, far from having clear property rights over rural land, the country suffers from very serious gaps, both in a broad and narrow sense. This substantially weakens the purported negative association between redistribution and well-established property rights, and also reveals the glaring limitations of the liberal conceptualisations of such rights when applied to democratic states with gaping inequality in land distribution and violent conflicts over rural land.

This article examines the activities of Comunidades Cristianas Populares (Popular Christian Communities, CCPs) in marginalised neighbourhoods of Chile's capital, Santiago, during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. It traces how the CCPs emerged, thrived and then stopped, to showcase the uneasy co-existence between liberationist practices espoused by popular sectors and traditional ecclesiastical paradigms until their breaking point in 1990. In doing so, I argue that religious ritual is an important form of social protest against authoritarianism. Public processions exposed tensions between the Church and state, within the Church's diverse constituents, as well as between Christian community members and left-wing party militants. In the late 1980s, as the Church increasingly retreated from liberation theology, the dictatorship successfully co-opted social organisations and rendered religious rituals largely ineffective as a form of social protest.

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.

Accessing and retaining adequate housing can be a major challenge for low-income city residents, particularly women trying to escape domestic abuse. Focusing on housing struggles amidst urban poverty, this article explores a specific kind of gender-based violence – violation of women's property rights – recognised by Latin American legal systems as ‘patrimonial violence against women’. Drawing on qualitative research in Brazil, this article shows how women are likely to experience gendered evictions and dispossession, and why patrimonial violence against women remains largely misunderstood and underreported, despite legal progress. The discussion expands current understandings of the interplay between gender, violence (explicit or otherwise) and the reproduction of asset inequalities.

In Bolivia, expectations for a decolonised society turned into a political crisis in the autumn of 2019. Discussing the limitations of progressive politics in cultivating democracy, this article identifies three narratives of authoritarianism – liberal democratic, developmentalist and colonial – which the opponents of Evo Morales use to frame their disillusionment with his rule. It argues that these multiple narratives lend meaning to contradictory experiences in a context in which hopes for a major decolonising state-transformation process have devolved into a deep polarisation of Bolivian society. The events in Bolivia are discussed in the context of rising authoritarianism throughout Latin America.

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 proposes the concept of ‘memory script’ to analyse how, in the aftermath of political violence, memory activists narrate their lives in a way that is practised, repetitive and performative. Through a self-reflective life history of Aluízio Palmar, a Brazilian human rights activist and former political prisoner who suffered intense torture under military rule, this approach seeks to elucidates the personal and political contours of somebody's decision to transform their experiences into a public narrative. A close reading of Palmar's various platforms of memory-sharing reveals the complex moral reckoning of an activist's own trauma.

Why do organised criminal groups (OCGs) resort to dismemberment – a costly and resource-intensive practice – rather than simpler targeted killings? This article challenges the notion that such brutal violence is solely a byproduct of inter-criminal rivalries or efforts to conceal violence. Instead, we argue that dismemberments serve to entrench criminal governance regimes. By publicising these acts and/or the reasons behind them, criminal groups are demarcating the boundaries of acceptable behaviour and reinforcing their system of norms and punishments. Dismemberments serve as communicative violence targeting three audiences: rivals, group members and civilians. We demonstrate the logic of this argument through an original qualitative dataset of dismemberment cases in Barranquilla, Colombia, and multiple interviews gathered during over five years of fieldwork. This article contributes to understanding the mechanisms of extra-lethal violence that sustain criminal governance in Latin American cities.

This article critically examines reasons for the persistent use of states of emergency (SOEs) as a tool of crime control in Jamaica and risks associated with normalising these measures in small, low-capacity, competitive democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). We attend to the question of permanent SOEs as an issue of law and certain policing methods becoming normalised. This differs from scholars who think about the use of permanent SOEs as suspension of law or executive rule and make a clear distinction between law and violence and normalcy and emergency. Our findings show that persistent usage of SOEs in Jamaica reflects the incapacity of the state to control violent crime as well as its effort to strengthen its coercive capabilities and compensate for the ineffectiveness of the police. It is also a response to public demand for SOE policing. State strengthening is a necessary condition for a more peaceful and law-abiding society but is also a carrier of risks of democratic degeneration via rights-disregarding policing. Nonetheless, we have seen authoritarian management of crime without descent into authoritarianism, in general, and strong boundary-marking and patrolling by some state-oversight institutions that enjoy the support of civil society.

In 2019, thousands of women took to the streets in Mexico City to protest gender-based violence. The demonstrations were characterised by the defacement of iconic monuments, which was widely condemned. But the protests also ignited widespread political mobilisation, including by a group of women restorers who, despite being designated to clean the monuments, refused to perform their work and publicly defended the protesters. By withholding their labour and their ostensible duty to the state and to the nation, the restorers’ actions helped to transform narratives around feminism, protest and the meaning of national heritage. Based on a case study of this previously depoliticised group of art restorers who went on to become one of the most important faces of Mexico's feminist movement, this article argues that political mobilisation can be rooted in and directly linked to people's labour and professional expertise.

Latin America was one of the regions hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to assess the evolution of family income inequality and its components from the onset of the pandemic to the end of 2021 in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru and Uruguay. The unequalising impact of the worsening of the labour market during the contraction period was associated with the significant loss of informal jobs. This effect was partially offset by the equalising role of cash transfer policies. During the recovery period, the distributive impacts of these income sources were the opposite of those observed during the contraction period, as most countries gradually reduced or ceased these transfers while labour incomes partially rebounded. Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, income inequality in most countries either remained the same or had decreased compared to 2019, even though total family incomes are still below the levels of that year.

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.