This article traces the history of estate landholding in the Andean valley of Antapampa over the first half of the twentieth century. It challenges a long-held and widely accepted belief that highland haciendas concentrated vast tracts of land in just a few hands. Rather, by the middle of the last century, many properties had fragmented into numerous more modest holdings. Others either held very little land at all, found themselves severely restricted by the mountainous terrain, or ceded most, sometimes all, of their possessions to a rapidly growing number of tenant farmers. The relative absence of mass land concentration, then, forces us to reconsider the role of a key institution in the countryside, in Peru, in Latin America and even beyond. To do so, this study draws upon extensive and original archival materials from roughly 300 Ministry of Agriculture case files, rarely, if ever, used before.

This article examines the role of Pedro Ibáñez Ojeda – a prominent Chilean politician and businessman – in the development of Chilean neoliberalism, with a focus on his international networks and the organisation of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) regional meeting in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1981. I argue that Ibáñez represented a distinctive pathway within Chilean neoliberalism, here termed the ‘coastal route’, which highlights the movement’s multi-scale and polycentric nature. This route is multi-scale in Ibáñez’s promotion of liberal ideas through interconnected national, Latin American and global actors, and polycentric in showcasing independent yet complementary initiatives that collectively shaped Chile’s neoliberal trajectory. These dynamics position Ibáñez’s route as part of a broader Latin American and global community.

Understanding how policy design and implementation differ under populist and non-populist governments is complicated by the fact that populism never exists in a pure form and is always attached to a more developed ideology. Leveraging the near-simultaneous election of left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, this article analyses populism’s effect on cash transfer programmes. Despite the diametrically opposed ideologies of their presidents, rather than diverging, Mexican and Brazilian cash transfer policies converged under populism. Both leaders rebranded the programmes they inherited and moved policy in an improvised, politicised and clientelistic direction.