The new model looks more like criollo capitalism, in which favoured businesses operate in close partnership with government.

ECONOMIST: Argentina's economy

His radicalism scared criollo landholders, and Mexico declared independence only in 1821, in conservative reaction to a liberal Spanish government.

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In the Andes it was aggravated by well-intentioned liberalism: decrees granting Indians individual possession of communal land, and so the right to sell it, led to large areas being gobbled up by criollo landowners.

ECONOMIST: Millennium issue: Freeing Spanish America

Alberto Alonso Criollo, a political scientist at the local Vasconcelos University, says the old patronage system still works fairly smoothly in a place where the state government is one of the few sources of jobs and money.

ECONOMIST: Politics in Mexico

Developed by men who had left their families behind to start a life in Argentina's bustling capital city, the dance expressed machismo, passion, longing and a fighting edge - and was set to an emerging sound rooted in Spanish and Italian melodies, criollo (Argentine-born) verse and Afro-Uruguayan candombe (a drum-based rhythm).

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