In 1537 in Mexico City, Zumárraga’s Inquisition pursued a massive investigation into a network of suspected African and Spanish witches. Those punished were two African slaves, probably of Senegambia, Marta and María. Two freed slaves, María de Espinosa and Margarita Pérez, a Spanish woman Isabel de Morales, and a Nahua man whose name was Antón Cuatecu or Coatecu, were also condemned. The African women were accused of performing sorcery for multiple Spanish women, who were never arrested or prosecuted. These women offered multiple forms of love magic for their Spanish women patrons. Cuatecu was the cultural intermediary and supplied both the African and Spanish women with Mesoamerican plant material, which is not identified by name, only as roots, powders, which is clear evidence that Spanish and African women communicated with Cuatecu in Nahuatl. This network was multiethnic and composed of Senegambian, Maghrebi, Spanish, and Nahua peoples.

This chapter analyzes magic and attitudes toward magic in early modern Spain. The time period for review is primarily the sixteenth century. The chapter summarizes basic Spanish terminology such as hechicería, bruja, and sortilegio. There are two elements to this discussion. First, the chapter examines the cases of famous witch crazes in the Basque region of Spain in 1525 and 1609–11 in Zugarramurdi. There is a lot of popular imagery concerning witch crazes, seen for example in Goya’s painting of the Aquelarre, or the witches’ sabbath. In reality, Catholic courts and the Inquisition were skeptical of the existence of witches. The chapter analyzes some specific anti-sorcery writings such as treatises by Martín de Arlés and Martín de Castañega. It also looks at inquisitor manuals such as those by Alfonso de Castro, Nicolau Eimeric, and Diego de Simancas. Furthermore, this chapter examines the role of royal law in Siete Partidas in establishing jurisdiction over witchcraft. The chapter also includes some observations about uniquely Spanish types of magic and folk healing, such as the belief in the evil eye, herbal remedies, and Saint John’s Night.

Digital and environmental policies are increasingly seen as complementary, both domestically and internationally. In international trade policy, digital and environmental issues have been and continue to be discussed in multilateral negotiations at the World Trade Organisation and in plurilateral negotiations on preferential trade agreements (PTAs). This chapter takes a closer look at the design and impact of digital and environmental provisions in Latin American PTAs. It begins with a brief comparative overview of domestic digital and environmental policies in Latin America, followed by a discussion of the design features of Latin American PTAs. The final section provides an empirical analysis of the impact of these design features on trade. While there is considerable heterogeneity across Latin American countries and PTAs, the analysis suggests a positive relationship between digital and environmental policies. Latin American countries with more ambitious domestic digital policies tend to have more ambitious domestic environmental policies, and vice versa. Similarly, Latin American countries with a broader coverage of digital issues in their PTAs also tend to cover a broader range of environmental issues in their PTAs, and vice versa. The empirical results suggest that the presence and design of digital and environmental provisions in Latin American PTAs have no statistically significant impact on the volume and composition of imports. For exports, the analysis suggests that digital provisions in PTAs tend to increase flows, while the opposite is true for environmental provisions.

Important developments are currently affecting the global trading system. We witness increasing calls for protectionism and a surge in populism in some major economies, while other trading nations continue to liberalise trade, driven by the dynamics of global value chains (GVCs). Even committed trading nations have shown an increased willingness to use industrial policies and have elevated the pursuit of geopolitical concerns through trade. On top of this, calls have increased to tackle the climate crisis through trade policy instruments. In short, important shifts induced by politics and economics shape today’s trade policies.

This chapter examines the earliest cases of sorcery trials in Mexico in 1520s and 1530s. A discussion is presented of the ways that Spanish women learned magic from Nahua women in Mexico City. Spanish women adopted multiple Nahua cultural behaviors. These included understanding the role of the tiçitl; metaphysics of Nahua forms of healing; the god Tezcatlipoca; and invocations in Nahuatl language. Spanish women learned about the Nahua cultural significance of sweeping and brooms, associated with cosmic order and cleanliness. Spanish women also quickly learned Nahuatl, communicating with domestic servants and in the street, where the Nahuatl word for market, tianguis, became the first Nahuatl loanword in Mexican Spanish, as early as 1524. Other cases against Spanish women show that these women quickly adopted Mesoamerican plant material for spells and that these women understood the rite of corn hurling (tlapohualiztli).

This chapter offers an analysis of magic in Mesoamerica. An overview is given of specific Nahua cultural phenomena and of Spanish ecclesiastics’ attempts to place these Nahua concepts within a Spanish and Catholic framework. Nahua concepts explored here include: nahualli, shape-shifting sorcerer; tiçitl, healing specialist, midwife; tlapohualiztli, corn hurling as a form of divination; xochihua, flower-bearer, a gender-fluid man or transwoman associated with sorcery; and teixcuepani, or trickery. Particular attention is given here to Bernardino Sahagún and his Florentine Codex, Andrés de Olmos and his Nahuatl translation of Castañega’s anti-sorcery treatise, Alonso de Molina’s Nahuatl–Spanish Vocabulario, and Juan de Zumárraga’s Doctrina. An analysis is made of the difficulty of applying Nahuatl terms for Spanish ideas, often resulting in neologisms such as texoxaliztli for evil eye. Similarly, the Spanish idea that alcahuetas (procuresses) were linked to sorcery finds translation in the term “tetlanochili,” meaning “sorceress” generally. The Nahua idea of the owl-man tlacatecolotl, simplified by Spanish clergy as Satan, is also discussed.

The thesis of this chapter is that there is a new standard for the signs used to communicate the excess of critical nutrients in processed food. The standard, created in Chile and used by all the Pacific Alliance member states, is composed of octagonal warning signs and, for its simple and clear form, will likely influence other legislations. In this sense, these signs constitute a contribution to International Trade Law. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to explore patterns in the legislative trends observed in Pacific Alliance countries regarding the labelling of foods containing certain ingredients related to non-communicable diseases, and second, it examines whether this new approach can evolve into a new legal standard that other countries in the region are likely to follow.

This chapter tells the story of two mulata women in the 1560s. Bárbola de Zamora was born in Seville and migrated to Mexico where she worked as a midwife in the mining region of Zacatecas. Inquisitional courts condemned her in 1565 and 1569 for sorcery, love magic, and for being an alcahueta. She introduced the hallucinogenic peyote into her life by paying Native men to eat it to find her escaped slaves. Her case also shows the extent to which a Spanish mulata midwife may have learned from the Nahua tradition of temixihuiliztli, or obstetrics. Beatriz de León was accused of being a sorceress in Mexico City in 1571. She used patles (herbal medicine, potion) in her spells. She faced trial before the royal magistrate and a wealthy Spanish notary (possibly her lover) came to her rescue and paid for her bail. These mulatas defied stereotypes of helpless social pariahs. Zamora’s domestic possessions revealed a woman of means who had copper cookware and Spanish soap. She also had a metate, written as such in a Spanish document. These cases reveal the earliest use of three Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish: peyote, patle, and metate.

In this chapter we provide a general overview of trends in PTAs in Latin America (LA), with an emphasis on PTA design and diffusion. We base the chapter around four primary tasks. First, we review extant theoretical accounts underlying the motivations for LA countries’ engagement with PTAs. We classify countries into three groups – the liberal traders, post-liberals and anti-liberals – based on their approach to PTA partner selection and design. Second, we compare Latin America to other world regions. We show that countries in the region sign many PTAs on average, but that design features vary considerably within the region. Third, we show that PTA design in the region is influenced by both economic and political factors. Fourth, we use quantitative text analysis to analyse whether common models or templates can be observed in the region. We find some evidence that agreements involving the US have diffused within the region, but we fail to uncover strong evidence of a single template or templates that LA countries routinely adopt. Overall, our analysis paints a picture of a heterogeneous region where domestic political and economic factors affect how countries engage with the world economy through PTAs.