Os estudos sôbre o carácter brasileiro contam com urna tradigáo filosófica e literaria. Desde José Bonifacio, nos inicios de nossa independencia, até os ensaios mais recentes, um crescente interésse dos brasileiros pelo Brasil e pelos brasileiros criou ambiente próprio para o estudo disciplinado déste tema.

Não seria difícil somar as virtudes e os defeitos dos brasileiros ai apontados e apresentá-los num conjunto em que a presenga de certos qualificativos denunciasse, pela freqüéncia e o somatório, o quadro de nossos tragos psico-sociais. Mas, como já acentuaram varios estudiosos, a cultura de um povo nao é um somatório nem de grupos regionais nem de pessoas e sim a integragáo déstes numa síntese nova, em que o conteúdo espiritual se revela, na sociedade, em tragos permanentes ou variáveis, através de períodos históricos.

One hundred years ago Alexander von Humboldt died at the age of 90, loaded with honors earned by his breadth and brilliance as an explorer, a scientist, a writer, and a liberal thinker about certain aspects of human relations. But it was 55 years before, in 1804, that he returned from his famed five-year “Voyage to the Equinoxial Regions of the New Continent”. In the last 155 years many changes have taken place in Latin America as a whole and in those parts of it which he visited. This paper will mention a few of them which pose problems for presentday students of human affairs in the area, and will also offer a small selection of facts that seem to bear on these problems.

Humboldt represented an era of ambidextrous or multidextrous natural scientists who visited Latin America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and who were able to collect reliable data and to make more than casual travellers’ observations on a broad range of phenomena that are now divided among a series of more or less mutually-exclusive disciplines. Despite the breadth of his interests, however, Humboldt added little to the systematic store of knowledge concerning the ethnography or ethnology of the living native peoples of the regions through which he travelled.

La cuestión colonial fué comprendida por muy pocos políticos españoles del siglo XIX. Pi y Margall fué uno de ellos, si bien cuando llegó al poder no hizo nada. Prim fué otro. Según uno de sus biógrafos, “pensó en conceder la autonomía para después llegar a la independencia, y, cuando pensaba ya en triunfar, librado a nuestro país del cáncer que le consumía … aconteció el vil asesinato de que fué víctima.”1 El tercero fué Rafael María de Labra (1840-1918), a quien nadie excedió en señalar los vicios y pecados de la colonización española.

Verdaderamente sorprende hoy el olvido en que se tiene a un hombre que dedicó lo mejor de su vida a la defensa de los intereses antillanos. Porque América — hay que decirlo — fué su obsesión, no sólo durante los días de la colonia sino después, cuando ya perdidos los últimos restos del imperio español se dedicó a cultivar la intimidad americana y a fomentar la unión espiritual de España con las repúblicas hispanoamericanas.

A striking feature of Spanish-American colonial rule is the contrasting loyalty of cabildos to Hapsburg rulers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and their restiveness and finally their role in fomenting the emancipation movements against Bourbon kings. The following article will attempt to explain the shift in cabildo attitudes.

Difficulties are at the outset encountered by the fact that, on the surface, there were at least two factors which might have been expected to lessen, rather than to nourish, the loyalty of local chambers to Hapsburg rulers. First, there was the indifference and apathy of council members in attending to the official business with which cabildos were theoretically concerned. This attitude suggests that councilmen realized they were, in spite of certain guarantees and legal prescriptions, a relatively impotent agency on the actual level of day-by-day administration.

The Free Trade Zone treaty signed by seven Latin-American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, and Uruguay) last February in Montevideo, is an unprecedented event in this part of the world. When it comes into effect by ratification of at least three of the seven countries the Latin-American Association of Free Trade will be created. It is destined to have considerable influence in the future of this continent if it proves to be an adequate instrument for attaining the goals in sight. These are two-fold: first, the intensification of trade; second, laying the groundwork for a more ambitious scheme of economic integration. Today, trade among Latin-American countries is about 10 per cent of their total international commerce. On the other hand, their economic development has been taking place along lines that are much too protectionist.

Uno de los grandes problemas de nuestro tiempo se relaciona con el estado de pobreza económica del sector subdesarrollado del mundo. Aunque el problema proviene en particular de las condiciones que prevalecen en los países subdesarroUados, se trata de un problema que también concierne a los países desarrollados. De hecho, esta preocupación toca muy de cerca a los Estados Unidos. Siendo este país el primero entre los avanzados, no sólo se da cuenta del problema y sus grandes implicaciones sino que ha dejado constancia de su voluntad de hacer algo al respecto.

En pocas palabras podemos resumir las razones más importantes del porqué del estado de pobreza de los países subdesarrollados vino a convertirse en una preocupación de los Estados Unidos.

When the first Spanish missionaries penetrated the Chaco early in the seventeenth century, they discovered a whole group of linguisticallyrelated tribes whose existence had gone unsuspected for a century. The most important of them, the Mataco, numbered about 30,000, and lived in numerous villages along the banks of the Bermejo, Paraguay, and Pilcomayo rivers. Pushed down off the Bolivian highlands by the more warlike Chiriguanos, the Mataco lived a peaceful, if primitive, life, hunting, fishing, and collecting carob pods, cactus figs, wild squash, and hearts of palm. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while Argentina exterminated most of her Indian population, the Mataco were left practically undisturbed; their lands were simply not valuable enough to be worth the white man's taking. Except for a few Anglican missions and an occasional trading post, the Chaco remained sealed off from the rest of Argentina.

To students of the West Indies, the Negro in the New World, the French Revolution, or Haiti, the name of Jean-Jacques Dessalines appears with alarming frequency. Alarming, because it is so difficult to reconcile the deed of the successful organization and culmination of more than a decade of revolutionary struggle with the character presented by the classical historians.

Chief lieutenant of the heroic and tragic Toussaint L'ouverture, he was, on the submission of the colonial army, reduced to command of a small force, although officially “General of Division,” on the right bank of the isolated Artibonite River Valley. Then, if we are to accept the interpretation of B. Ardouin, St.—Remy (Les Cayes), Madison, Stoddard, and other leading authorities on the period, after the particularly cruel and selfish act of betrayal, followed by the execution of Charles Belair, the nephew of Toussaint, Dessalines was offered the leadership of the consolidated revolutionary forces.