In 1572 the Viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo, despatched an expedition to the stronghold of Vilcabamba to capture the last claimant to the Inca throne, Tupac Amaru. The unfortunate prince was brought to Cuzco and there before the assembled population executed in the main square. Determined to provide an historical justification for his brutal eradication of the Inca dynasty, Toledo had already earlier in the same year summoned representatives of the Inca nobility to hear a public reading of Sarmiento de Gamboa's Historia Indica, a work written with the express intention of demonstrating that the Inca empire had been an unmitigated tyranny, created but recently by force of arms, and maintained through the merciless exploitation of its subjects. The auditors at this sinister farce were then called upon to sign a notarised declaration testifying to the accuracy of a text which stripped their ancestors of their status as rightful, sovereign lords of Peru.

Creation of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776 and the subsequent Edict of Free Commerce in 1778 fostered a flourishing export trade from that region, mainly of hides and silver. Merchants of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, both criollos and recently arrived peninsulares, prospered during the 1780s and early 1790s, an era of international peace. While a few of these merchants owned and operated ships out of the Río de la Plata, most were content to export to the Peninsula in craft of metropolí registry. Indeed, given the traditional and strong ties of commercial obligations to the Peninsula and the enforcement of imperial trade laws, any other course of action, if not unthinkable, would have been difficult.

Our knowledge of Mexican agrarian history has been greatly enhanced by hacienda studies, based on original hacienda archives. Inter alia, these have finished off for good the old notion of ‘feudal’ hacendados who spurned profit for prestige. But if – thanks to their reliance on hacienda accounts – these studies have shed light on hacienda marketing and profit-maximizing, they have told us less about the hacienda's internal workings. The hacienda's relations of exchange are, therefore, better understood than its relations of production. And, from some theoretical perspectives, it is the latter which are primary (which, in grand terms, determine whether the hacienda is to be termed ‘feudal’, ‘capitalist’ or something else again).

Although Belize City has almost always been the centre of population in Belize, few studies have been devoted to its historical geography–or indeed to the urban geography of the country as a whole. The purpose of this paper is to gather together much of the scattered material on Belize City, in the hope that this codification will help the reader to understand the growth and present status of the city, and, perhaps, inspire others to do further research on this, still the major urban centre of Belize.

In Prisoner Without A Name, Cell Without A Number, Jacobo Timerman exposed the anti-Jewish side of the official war against ‘subversion’ in Argentina during the late 1970s. His dramatic testimony is only the latest entry in the lengthy history of twentieth-century Argentine anti-Semitism. Researchers and observers have commonly identified anti-Semitism in that country with rightist factions within the upper strata, including members of such important élites as the military, clergy, and intelligentsia. While only a small minority of the Argentine populace fits into this category, the anti-Semitic right's visibility and fervor have inspired widespread concern and scholarly interest.

The walls of downtown Buenos Aires displayed a new and haunting image in the weeks before the inauguration of President Raúl Alfonsín in December, 1983: black, outlined silhouettes of human beings, each accompanied by a name. The ghost-like figures represented those who had ‘disappeared’ in the military's proclaimed ‘war against subversion’. They testified silently but eloquently to the memory of the victims of that experience in the thoughts of many Argentines, and foreshadowed what was to become one of the most vexing political problems for the new civilian government. Among the many difficulties bequeathed to President Alfonsín by the military juntas who ruled Argentina for the eight preceding years, first among these in ethical exigency was the question of what to do concerning los desaparecidos.