Hispanoamérica se ha presentado constantemente a los ojos de muchos de sus escritores en forma problemática: como una entidad social o humana que, a pesar de sus muchos y continuados esfuerzos, no ha logrado satisfacer a plenitud los intereses o las esperanzas de felicidad y desarrollo humano que en ella han cifrado los propios hispanoamericanos. Esto no impide que, en la mayoría de los casos, esta visión inquietante y a veces desalentadora haya sido considerada con un grado de esperanza; con la convicción de que, si bien Hispanoamérica no ha logrado su plenitud, puede y debe lograrla.

The Cauca Valley in southwest Colombia offers a good closeup view of social change, the power struggle at the grass roots, and rural and urban problems in a country whose size and strategic location make her future a matter of special concern to those who seek to avoid violent solutions to Latin America's social problems.

Colombia would seem to have better prospects for evolutionary development than several Latin American countries with less enlightened leadership and fewer democratic traditions. But Colombia's ruling groups face formidable, sometimes seemingly insoluble economic and social problems. The economy has been wobbly for years, buffeted by fiscal crises, foreign exchange shortages, quickening inflation, and urban unemployment. Also, Colombia has suffered more than any other country in this hemisphere from a species of internal war referred to locally as the violencia.

Rapid Modernization is Latin America's chief development requirement. Its costs and benefits are central questions for educators, developers and leaders to ponder and help answer.

Among the requirements of educational modernization is the adoption of curricula more pertinent to new social, political and economic needs than the outmoded curricula most schools and universities still have. Curriculum changes must also be accompanied by the introduction of new methods of instruction, improved physical facilities and raised academic standards. Another immediate challenge to the effectiveness of Latin American education, especially of universities, is the development of ways to engage facilities and faculties in significant service to public and private development activities. Contributions of educational institutions to the processes of national development no longer depend solely on their capacity to supply well-trained graduates. They must also contribute to the formulation and implementation of research and policy in the applied fields of government and industrial development.

In few areas of the world are the role and contribution of the intellectual elite more significant than in Latin America. Its membership has historically been in the forefront of major political and social movements, and there has been somewhat less of the distaste for politics and public responsibility than is often found elsewhere. Leading intellectuals are widely respected and nationally prominent, enjoying a degree of prestige that is scarcely exceeded in any other region. The pensador—sometimes likened to the eighteenth-century philosophe— has been intimately involved in major political movements from colonial times to the present.

Strange as it may seem, the theater is probably the least known of the cultural manifestations of Latin America, despite the fact that its history can be traced back to the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas. The first references to an indigenous theater are found in the second and third Cartas de relación of Hernán Cortés and in the Royal Commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. Only fragmentary evidence is preserved, unfortunately, of the considerable dramatic activity that took place during the colonial period. A few of the plays are known by tide, and still fewer have survived in manuscript form, until we come to those of Fernán González de Eslava, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and the Mexican playwright, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (1580-1639), whose comedias were produced in Spain during the height of that country's Golden Age.

Cuando hace unos veinticinco o treinta años, el estudioso interesado en investigar el quehacer creativo de los músicos latinoamericanos buscaba información en publicaciones musicales del Nuevo y el Viejo continentes, sólo tres nombres surgían como los auténticos representantes de la composición musical seria: el prolífico compositor brasileño Heitor Villa-Lobos, el maestro argentino Juan José Castro y Carlos Chávez, figura cimera de la música mexicana. Si se rebuscaba un poco más en los escritos que sobre la música latinoamericana aparecían de vez en cuando, también se mencionaba, aunque con menos frecuencia a los cubanos Amadeo Roldan y García Caturla, al mexicano Silvestre Revueltas (los tres desaparecidos prematuramente alrededor del año 40), a los brasileños Francisco Mignone y Mozart Camargo Guarnieri, a los chilenos Pedro Humberto Allende y Domingo Santa Cruz, al colombiano Guillermo Uribe-Holguín y a dos o tres compositores más de la América del Sur.

La nota de amargura circunstancial, ya observada, en Crepusculario (1923), el primer libro publicado por Pablo Neruda, proviene de la percepción crítica y compasiva de ciertos detalles de la vida chilena, tanto de la capital como de la provincia; la constatación amarga de músicos ciegos, mercachifles venidos de otras tierras, sucios barrios sin luz, maestranzas desoladas, y prostitutas deshechas por la miseria, se expresa sobre todo en poemas publicados ya en la capital.

Colombia's current attempt at agrarian reform began in December 1961 with the passage of Law 135, “On Social Agrarian Reform.” The Law has as its central objective a change in land tenure relationships in the densely populated western (or Andean) section of Colombia, where latifundia and minifundia often exist side by side. The Law established the Colombian Agrarian Reform Institute (Instituto Colombiano de la Reforma Agraria or INCORA) as a semiautonomous governmental agency to direct the process of reform. In recent months, however, the pace of the reform, which began ten projects during the first six months of 1962, has been slowed considerably due to a multitude of problems, among which the most serious are unswerving opposition to the program by both the large landowners and their allies on the right, the Movimiento Revolutcionario Liberal (MRL and its allies on the left, and inadequate financing.

La urgencia de reformas que se desprende de las necesidades actuales de Hispanoamérica nos obliga a analizar las transformaciones que ya tuvieron lugar al respecto, puesto que pueden servirnos como directrices para el futuro. Del desenvolvimiento general de las vicisitudes que les acompañaban se puede, además, como decía Cervantes, sacar “algún ejemplo provechoso”.

De los varios países hispanoamericanos que emprendieron reformas, México es el único donde la revolución del siglo xx ha constituido el mayor intento de mejoramiento de vida de las masas. Aunque sus resultados no son finales, la palabra “revolución”, ha perdido en el suelo mexicano su sentido original. Se ha convertido en un sinónimo de progreso social y sobre todo, agrario.

Quando em 1960, integrando urna comitiva de 12 deputados brasileiros em visita aos Estados Unidos a convite do govêrno norte-americano, integrando sem ter pleiteiado e só figurando entre os convidados, porque depois de muitas escolhas domésticas em vézes sucessivas, chegara fatalmente minha vez, troquei idéias em New York, na Columbia University, com um dos seus professôres de Historia.

Sendo eu professor de Historia da América, da Universidade do Paraná, manifestei em meio da palestra, minha predileção pela Historia colonial, largo período do mais alto interêsse, por ser ai que se descobrem as verdadeiras raízes da formação americana.

Carlos Vaz Ferreira, born at Montevideo, Uruguay in 1872, a graduate of the School of Law, and at twenty-five appointed to the Chair of Philosophy there, was a prolific writer who for more than thirty years presented special lectures open to the general public. As a result he was one of the most influential men of this century in his homeland. Frank and honest and intensely stimulating, Aníbal Sánchez Reulet has termed Vaz Ferreira an “intellectual pontiff.”

From 1929 to 1941 he was, off and on, the Rector of the University and in 1945 he became Director of the School of Humanities in Montevideo, which position he held until his death in 1959.

“One of the chief objects of my administration,” Woodrow Wilson stated on March 11, 1913, after learning of political unrest in the Caribbean, “will be to cultivate the friendship and deserve the confidence of our sister republics of Central and South America, and to promote in every proper and honorable way the interests which are common to the peoples of the two continents.” Believing, however, that “cooperation is possible only when supported at every turn by the orderly processes of just government based upon law, not upon arbitrary or irregular force,” he wanted the Latin American nations to build their governments upon the same foundation of law and order as that of the United States. On the part of his own nation, he renounced, in his Mobile Address of October 27, 1913, the “Dollar Diplomacy” of his predecessors Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and proposed instead a Pan American Pact to provide mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity.

The persistence of peronista political power remains the essential political concern of post-Perón Argentina. This dilemma has never been resolved and its presence affects any approximation of social and political integration. As contemporary peronismo responds to an apparent psycho-social void that has not been filled by any other party or movement, the alternatives today are as they were ten years ago: to allow the peronistas legal political status, to integrate them into existing political parties, or to permanently isolate them. The astounding peronista successes in the March 1965 Congressional elections favor the first solution to this now historical problem.

Emphasis today is on the political and economic factors in social change in undeveloped countries. This approach, combined with the wholehearted acceptance of the role of the middle class as a psychological leavening agent in such countries, tends to obscure the presence of other factors. Especially are there other categories of human beings who are responding to the forces put into play by world changes and by the increasing pressures exerted upon the social systems of which they are a part. Recently, some of these groups have been given more notice, such as students, intellectuals, labor union members, etc. Another such important category is the servant class which for the most part has been ignored and yet which appears significant, even though not as a political group, in terms of both the effects it has on changes being attempted in social organizations and on the personality development of nationals in such countries.

Hasta los críticos más ardientes de la Unión Soviética han de admitir que las realizaciones de ese inmenso conglomerado de repúblicas en el campo de la educación pública han sido impresionantes en las últimas generaciones. Lo certifican los hechos y las cifras disponibles tanto en fuentes soviéticas como en las occidentales, al extremo de que la abundancia de datos numéricos al respecto hace más bien pensar en un exceso de “kremlinólogos”.

Por ese motivo fue con gran placer que acepté la invitación de J. Gvishiani, vicepresidente del Comité Estatal de la URSS … para la Coordinación de la Investigación Científica, en el marco del intercambio cultural norteamericano-soviético, para tomar conocimiento directo de la labor que realizan en Moscú diversas ramas de la Academia de Ciencias, particularmente el Instituto de América Latina. Habituado a estudiar in situ los problemas interamericanos —materia a la que vengo dedicando desde hace varios años mi más fervoroso empeño— traté de aprovechar al máximo la experiencia que se me brindaba.

La última conferencia económica de Ginebra, de tan magros resultados, y los “planes” de distintos países han puesto al orden del día el tema del desarrollo económico. Se habla y se escribe, mucho más que antes, en todos los tonos, de importantes objetivos a alcanzar: de creación de riquezas, de reactivación de las economías nacionales, de tecnificación de la agricultura, de modernización de las comunicaciones, de reabsorción de la mano de obra ociosa, en fin, de revitalizar la producción general, elevar el consumo y asegurar en los países, ahora llamados “subdesarrollados”, un más alto nivel de vida.

Tales objetivos pueden ser fácilmente enunciados pero no concretamente alcanzados. Si “la naturaleza no camina a saltos”, tampoco pueden alterarse por decreto las etapas del lógico desarrollo económico sin tener en cuenta las reales posibilidades materiales, técnicas, financieras y culturales de cada país.

Bajo un mismo título hemos reunido a Alberdi y a Sarmiento, acercando nosotros, en un pretencioso papel de dueños de su posteridad, a dos hombres que ofrecieron el espectáculo de su distanciamiento y de su antipatía. Ese espectáculo ofrece la grandeza de dos que peleaban entre sí a favor de la Argentina.

De diferente biología y de diferente estilo, los unía el fervor de un amor desesperado a la patria. Fueron hijos de una época, y, por lo tanto, con hondos nexos comunes, y ambos estuvieron animados de la fiebre de levantar en la tierra argentina una verdadera Nación.

No me propongo especialmente escribir su larga batalla, sino exponer sus pensamientos sobre algunos problemas de la Argentina, a veces diversos, pero con notables coincidencias en lo general.

Los Estudios sobre el liderazgo se han llevado a cabo en muchos lugares diferentes, empleando un número de métodos distintos. Estos métodos varían en el enfoque y en los resultados obtenidos: uno se limita a preguntar a los informantes claves, quiénes son los líderes de la comunidad, y en acercarse a esos líderes repitiendo la pregunta a cada una de las personas que aparecen en la lista. Conforme más y más van apareciendo en la lista, se entrevista también a las nuevas personas mencionadas. El resultado final es una lista de personas que se describen como líderes o que tienen influencia en los asuntos de la comunidad. Los líderes principales en este caso son aquellos que aparecen con más frecuencia en las diferentes listas obtenidas.

In the Broadest historical and technical sense recognition in international relations refers to the acknowledgment by a nation of any change in a situation in a foreign country. The authority to extend recognition is an attribute of sovereignty by which a nation, government, or people fixes its relations with other nations, governments, and peoples, thus establishing or reestablishing a legal continuity which has, for one reason or another, been broken. Decisions on recognition are usually restricted to the recognition of new states, the recognition of belligerency or insurgency, and the recognition of new governments. They involve such questions as the following: When does a state acquire juridical personality and become entitled to enjoy the rights and incur the obligations of a state under international law? What cognizance can or should governments take of the domestic situation within another state? When does a new government begin to function formally in international relations?

El derecho laboral latinoamericano ha sido repetidamente criticado por su falta de aplicación efectiva. La crítica proviene primordialmente de estudiosos norteamericanos interesados en la problemática social de los países al sur del Río Grande. Robert Alexander, por ejemplo, se refiere a este tópico diciendo que para muchos observadores las leyes laborales y sociales de la América Latina existen sólo en los textos legales pero no son adecuadamente implementadas. En forma más precisa otros autores como Burnett, Morris y Tannenbaum han puesto también de relieve la existencia de serios fallos en la aplicación del derecho del trabajo latinoamericano.

Lo curioso es, sin embargo, que este tema es casi totalmente ignorado por los autores latinoamericanos, los cuales dedican largas y sesudas páginas a la discusión de teorías jurídicas y problemas doctrinales, pero no se hacen cargo de esta deficiencia práctica.