Recent scholarship in the historical political economy of Latin America and the Caribbean seeks to understand social, economic, and political processes as being primarily driven by human agency, shying away from historical predetermination or structural inevitability. Current work considers the possibility of alternative scenarios (counterfactuals), embracing the potential outcomes framework in econometrics, and rigorously testing hypotheses with painstakingly reconstructed historical data. This scholarship traces the hinderances and blockages to development in the past, usually exploring how formal and informal institutions have made historical legacies persistent. In order to further advance in this agenda, I make a plea for researchers to provide a better understanding of the ethnically diverse and heterogeneous makeup of Latin American and Caribbean peoples, tracing their historical origins. I also suggest that future progress will require taking greater care in assessing and reconstructing past units of analysis, away from the emphasis on contemporary nation states or the use of latitude and longitude grids or anachronistic modern local jurisdictions. The paper concludes by considering the long tradition of Latin American Utopias and its survival today.

It is well-established that the Conquest of the Americas by Europeans led to catastrophic declines in indigenous populations. However, less is known about the conditions under which indigenous communities were able to overcome the onslaught of disease and violence that they faced. Drawing upon a rich set of sources, including Aztec tribute rolls and early Conquest censuses (chiefly the Suma de Visitas (1548)), we develop a new disaggregated dataset on pre-Conquest economic, epidemiological and political conditions both in 11,888 potential settlement locations in the historic core of Mexico and in 1,093 actual Conquest-era city-settlements. Of these 1,093 settlements, we show that 36% had disappeared entirely by 1790. Yet, despite being subject to Conquest-era violence, subsequent coercion and multiple pandemics that led average populations in those settlements to fall from 2,377 to 128 by 1646, 13% would still end the colonial era larger than they started. We show that both indigenous settlement survival durations and population levels through the colonial period are robustly predicted, not just by Spanish settler choices or by their diseases, but also by the extent to which indigenous communities could themselves leverage nonreplicable and nonexpropriable resources and skills from the pre-Hispanic period that would prove complementary to global trade. Thus indigenous opportunities and agency played important roles in shaping their own resilience.

How can societies restrain their coercive institutions and transition to a more humane criminal justice system? We argue that two main factors explain why torture can persist as a generalized practice even in democratic societies: weak procedural protections and the militarization of policing, which introduces strategies, equipment, and mentality that treats criminal suspects as though they were enemies in wartime. Using a large survey of the Mexican prison population and leveraging the date and place of arrest, this paper provides causal evidence about how these two explanatory variables shape police brutality. Our paper offers a grim picture of the survival of authoritarian policing practices in democracies. It also provides novel evidence of the extent to which the abolition of inquisitorial criminal justice institutions—a remnant of colonial legacies and a common trend in the region—has worked to restrain police brutality.