When President Alberto Fujimori suspended constitutional rule in April 1992, he ended Peru's twelve-year experiment in civilian democratic governance. Citing the growing insurgency of Sendero Luminoso, corruption in the political parties, and difficulties with the Peruvian Congress in passing his economic program, Fujimori announced that democracy would have to be “temporarily suspended” in order to build new institutions. This move was backed by the armed forces. Perhaps most surprising to outside observers was the widespread popularity of Fujimori's move, which reflected the growing disenchantment with traditional political parties of the right and the left. Democratic procedures and institutions during the 1980s had been precarious at best. The military's counterinsurgency campaign against Sendero Luminoso had transformed Peru into one of the hemisphere's worst offenders against human rights, with the highest number of forced disappearances in the world. But despite documented cases of torture and other violations of human rights by state authorities, Peruvian military forces acted with the knowledge that they were virtually immune from prosecution.

The March 1976 coup that overthrew a turbulent Peronist government in Argentina also ended one of the few experiments with worker control of industry in Latin American history. For nearly three years, the Buenos Aires local of the country's strong light and power workers' union, the Sindicato de Luz y Fuerza, administered the great public utility SEGBA (Servicios Eléctricos del Gran Buenos Aires), provider of electric power for the capital city and much of the province of Buenos Aires. This experiment with worker control was all the more noteworthy because it was not undertaken by the maverick Cordoban local of Luz y Fuerza, led by Agustín Tosco, principal spokesman within the labor movement for socialism. Rather, the initiative was taken by a bastion of traditional Peronist trade unionism led by Juan José Taccone, the implacable foe of Tosco's clasista positions.

Like the precarious colonial state demeaningly referred to as “España la Boba,” the Dominican Catholic Church of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries endured the Caribbean ramifications of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. This onslaught included the cession of Santo Domingo to France in 1795, the protracted and bloody revolution in St. Domingue, disruptions in international trade, and invasions by Haiti in 1801 and 1805. Both the colonial state and the colonial church were further undermined by the declaration of Dominican independence in December 1821. Only weeks into Dominican independence, twelve thousand troops under the command of Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded the eastern part of the island, fulfilling the long-held Haitian goal of unifying the island under Haitian rule. Although considerably weakened, the Dominican church survived as the single truly national institution in the sense that it retained influence throughout the Dominican territory. The church was also national in providing a central element in Dominican elite culture: fervent Catholicism. Thus it was not coincidental that clerics gravitated to the heart of the Dominican struggle for liberation and that the church continued to play a major role in defining political alignments during the forty years following Dominican independence.

After the slaves were emancipated between 1880 and 1886, the planter class in Cuba underwent a transformation. Successful mill owners modernized their facilities, increased their cane-processing capabilities, and became planter-industrialists. Unsuccessful mill owners who lacked sufficient capital to modernize dismantled their outdated mills and became simply cane farmers. The social structure of the sugar mills was also transformed. Wage labor and tenancy arrangements replaced slave labor, and the industrial process of cane milling became separate from the agricultural processes of planting and harvesting sugarcane. As industrial units became fewer but larger, they could grind more sugarcane than that grown on the land directly under their ownership, and the larger mills therefore entered into arrangements with surrounding mill owners who were unable to make the transition to the new technological phase of sugar milling. Because the new mills centralized the grinding of cane previously carried out by many smaller units, they became known as ingenios centrales and eventually as simply centrales. Planters who gave up their obsolete milling operations and turned exclusively to cane farming were called colonos.

A major archive has recently been established in Paraguay that reveals the internal operations of the security forces during the lengthy authoritarian regime of President Alfredo Stroessner (1954–1989). Featuring open access, the archive dubbed by the media as “el archivo del terror” comprises a wealth of primary material on a significant but little researched aspect of the contemporary history of Latin America. This archive provides unique insight into the day-to-day workings of a totalitarian security system and the objectives and strategies of those who headed it. The archive also has regional significance because no comparable archive exists for the period of military rule in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, or Uruguay. Thus it should prove to be of considerable interest to academics analyzing topics like the nature of Latin American military regimes, the practice of national security doctrine, human rights, and related themes.

As a national group, Canadians are frequently viewed as an outward-looking people with an innate thirst for knowledge about the social, economic, and political customs of other nationalities. Traditionally, such curiosity has extended to countries that have played a large role in shaping contemporary Canadian society, especially the United States and the former colonizing powers of Europe. More recently, however, owing at least partly to changing patterns of immigration to Canada and the growth in hemispheric cultural and economic ties, curiosity has turned more and more toward Canada's neighbors to the south, the countries of Latin America.