By the end of the nineteenth century, railway expansion had led to the formation of a technocratic bureaucracy in Chile and other countries in Latin America. Central to this formation were the engineers who oversaw and regulated both public and private railways. Recently, historians have begun to re-examine engineers’ roles in this period. By employing methods and theoretical framings from the history of technology, this article argues that engineering was an important framework through which state–capital relations evolved, making engineers pivotal actors in the evolution of political economy at the time.

In 1905, world-renowned bullfighter Luis Mazzantini arrived in Guatemala City for a number of corridas. Despite the excitement of the urban elite, the matador's fights were poorly attended by the working class due to high ticket prices. This article uses the ‘Mazzantini Season’ as a case study of working-class consumer culture in Guatemala City to trace shifts in Guatemalan political economy through the 1890s and early 1900s, analysing the constraints on popular consumerism such as price inflation, currency deflation, food shortages and other factors affecting working-class urban Guatemalans. It also demonstrates the manner in which responses by the state and coffee planters to economic crises to protect elite interests fundamentally undermined the ability of working-class residents of Guatemala City to participate in consumer culture.

This article takes existing histories of Chilean transnational anti-communist activity in the 1970s beyond Operation Condor (the Latin American military states’ covert transnational anti-communist intelligence and operations system) by asking how the Pinochet dictatorship responded to two key changes in the international system towards the end of that decade: the Carter presidency and introduction of the human rights policy, and the shift of the epicentre of the Cold War in Latin America to Central America. It shows how both Salvadoreans and Chileans understood the Pinochet dictatorship as a distinct model of anti-communist governance, applicable far beyond Chile's own borders. This study of Chilean foreign policy in El Salvador contributes to new histories of the Latin American Extreme Right and to new understandings of the inter-American system and the international history of the conflicts in Central America in the late 1970s and the 1980s.

Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala City are informal responses to drug use, with these all-male institutions attempting to save drug users from what some Christians call ‘the devil’. Of ethnographic interest is that the mothers, sisters and wives not only pay for the capture and captivity of their loved ones but also volunteer their labour to support these centres. This article, in response, assesses not only the Christian impulse to domesticate sinners but also the extent to which a cult of domesticity organises Guatemala's war on drugs.

Observers have increasingly described the drug-related violence and corruption affecting Central America as the region's ‘Colombianisation’. This narrative is not just confused and misleading; it is dangerous. The Colombianisation discourse perpetuates ineffective and destructive anti-drug policies. It also obscures the circulations and connections that make the drug trade, the drug war and their associated economies of violence possible. We do, however, recognise one form of Colombianisation that actually is under way, but it is not the one imagined by security pundits. The real Colombianisation is a convergence of geopolitical and economic interests that have seized upon the geographical realignments of the drug trade to expand the same agroindustrial-military nexus in Central America that proved so ‘successful’ in Colombia.