Mexican agrarian philosophy has been characterised by remarkable consistency over the 70 years since the Revolution despite drastic changes in the overall economic context. The symbols of Revolutionary reform persist untarnished – ‘land and liberty’, Zapata and the ejido, an unique form of peasant land tenure. ‘El agro’ and agrarian policy remain a highly sensitive area shrouded in the mystique of past social struggles, so that the legacy of previous development decisions tightly constrains present-day options.

Though Argentina has long been synonymous with trackless pampas and teeming livestock herds, this common image requires some qualification. Before the late nineteenth century, when refrigerated transport made possible a large international market for Argentine beef, cattle played a less important role in the economy of the Río de la Plata than is usually assumed. Except for Buenos Aires province, where stockraising was predominant even in the colonial period, ranchers often had to struggle hard and insistently to find their niche in the overall commerce of the region. Grazing conditions were excellent in many areas of the Río de la Plata, but because the port of Buenos Aires always enjoyed a near-exclusive control over external trade, the porteños effectively blunted the development of any stockraising that threatened to compete with their own exports. In the northeastern provinces, this resulted in a cattle industry marked by technological backwardness and erratic growth. The chaotic politics of the post-independence era reinforced these conditions, though reform-minded ranchers and government officials consistently tried to improve provincial standards of stockraising.

Anastasio Bustamante is one of the forgotten men of early nineteenth-century Mexican history. Like many of his contemporaries during the so-called age of Santa Anna – José Maria Tornel, Gabriel Valencia, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, Mariano Paredes y Arrillaga, to name only a few – he has attracted scant attention of biographers and little serious study has been made of his long and eventful career. Yet Bustamante was in full control of the presidency, as president or vice-president, for a longer period in total than any president before Porfirio Díaz and he presided over crucial stages in the nation's development from colony to sovereign republic. By ideological conviction or political expediency – it is still not clear which – he came to be the figurehead of the conservative, traditionalist forces in Mexican society which struggled to preserve not only their economic control but also their religious, social and moral values against what they considered to be the destructive onslaught of increasingly fashionable and radical liberal ideas. Born in 1780 at Jiquilpan (Michoacán), son of Spanish parents, trained as a doctor, Bustamante fought for the royalist cause in the war of independence until he joined with Iturbide in the plan of Iguala (1821). Various important political posts followed and he first rose to supreme power in 1829 when, as vice-president, he successfully led a rebellion against president Vicente Guerrero.

In the second half of the 1930s, confidential information from and concerning Latin America reaching Washington promoted the suspicion, and ultimately the conviction, that the security of much of Latin America, and by extension that of the United States, was imperiled by the Axis powers. Officials in Washington were convinced that the Axis menace to the Western Hemisphere was not in the form of a direct military threat, but rather through the use of propaganda and subversion. Such concern – based in part on fascism's appeal to Latin America's elites – was aroused particularly by the efforts of the Axis powers to organise their own national communities in Latin America into instruments of their foreign policy and by the simultaneous mounting of a propaganda campaign intended to win over public opinion in the Americas and to weaken the support for democracy.1

With the downfall of the Somoza regime and coming to power of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in July 1979, Israeli– Nicaraguan relations declined, to be eventually cut off three years later. An important contributing factor to the deterioration and breach of relations was Israel's involvement with Anastasio (Tachito) Somoza Debayle, in particular the military assistance which his faltering regime received from the Likud government until shortly before the end. By no means Tachito's sole armourer,1 the salience of Israel's role was, nonetheless, noted by many, including Somoza Debayle himself.2 This, however, was justified by Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin as the sole honourable course of action in view of earlier favours to the Zionist cause, going back to the pre-state period, by Tachito's father, Anastasio (Tacho) Somoza García.

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.