Pierre Elliot Trudeau became leader of Canada's Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada in April 1968. Almost immediately he promised an effort to take new directions in Canada's external relations. One of the regions he focused attention on was Latin America (Dobell, 1972: 115).

That Trudeau was interested in Latin America appears natural for an intellectual raised in Quebec. There has long been a certain sympathy with the concept of latinité. French-Canadian intellectuals often believed that they had much in common with Latin Americans, because of their religions or cultural heritage, and felt a pull from that region even if they had never visited it. Trudeau had been editor of a leading Quebec journal, Cité Libre, and that journal occasionally had editorial comment on events in Latin America. Indeed, Trudeau established his position on political involvement in the Inter-American system in that journal and he has not wavered from that position since then (Octobre 1964; and his recent statement in International Canada, 1976).

When students in Latin America break into international headlines, it is usually as the result of some mass demonstration or riot. The image the public forms is that of hordes of wild-eyed and threadbare fanatics who alternate fitful class attendance with assaults on the palaces of dictators, insults to visiting dignitaries, and the practice of arson on municipal transport. Even in Latin America the press is likely to give student activities only passing notice except in periods of unusual agitation. The student is painted alternately as hero, criminal, petulant malcontent, or the docile tool of subversives—often depending entirely on the political viewpoint of the newspaper concerned.

The Central American Economic Integration Program, commonly called the Central American Common Market, was initiated in 1951 by the Central American governments and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), The stated objective of the movement is “to overcome the limitations and obstacles to Central American development arising from the limited resources and market expansion opportunities which characterize the economy of every Central American State.” The hope is that these ends can be promoted through liberalization of intra-regional trade and other forms of economic co-operation.

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.

The activities of the Liberal Union group in the election year of 1892, along with the subsequent appointment that next year of José Ives Limantour as Secretary of Treasury, marked the beginning of the rise of an influential clique of technocrats within the bureaucracy of Don Porfirio Díaz. In addition to Limantour, this group included, among others, Francisco Buhes, Justo Sierra, Rosendo Pineda, Pablo Macedo, and Miguel Macedo. The name the critics used to describe this clique was that of the “scientists” or the Científicos. This name was selected, among other reasons, to express the belief of the opposition that the members of the Científico group were imbued with the scientific and positivistic doctrines of the French philosopher and architect of positivism, Auguste Comte. With the coming of the Científicos to power the course of antipositivism was redirected, given an additional emphasis, and expanded to meet the needs of liberal and clerical critics of the regime.

Colombia provides a particularly instructive case of auto industry development. An intermediate-level country in terms of market size and stage of industrialization, its potential for dealing or bargaining effectively with transnational automobile firms is considerably less than that of Brazil, Mexico, or Argentina, but far more comparable to that of most Third World countries. It would be wrong, however, to lump all intermediate countries together. They vary enormously in terms of the size of their carbuying publics, their economic and natural resources, and their commitments to and progress toward industrial development. Moreover, these factors themselves are conditioned by past and present policy decisions and are subject to the politico-economic priorities and strategies of individual governments.

In an Effort to extend and accelerate regional cooperation and coordination in the “War on Drugs” in the Western Hemisphere, President George Bush hosted a widelypublicized, regional, anti-drug presidential summit in San Antonio (Texas) on 26-27 February 1992. This cumbre was conceived as an expanded sequel to the first “Andean” drug summit held in Cartagena (Colombia) on 15 February 1990. In addition to the original four-country participants in Cartagena I — the United States, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia — Ecuador, Venezuela, and Mexico attended Cartagena II as well.

After decades of neglect, interest in the political significance of Latin American Catholicism increased sharply in the late 1960s when it began to appear that the Church might have unimagined potential for promoting social change, particularly in a continent plagued by social upheaval and political instability (Drekonja, 1971: 59-65). In both word and deed, the postconciliar Church manifested a changing social orientation which entailed open involvement in political issues on behalf of the poor. In fact, by August 1968 and the convening of the Council of Latin American Bishops (CELAM) in Medellín, Colombia, the Church seemed to be changing its social and political attitudes so profoundly that reports of a revolutionary Church began to accompany discussions of the political situation in Latin America. Since Medellín, an important literature has evolved from efforts to understand this change in Latin American Catholicism.

Literature on U.S. influence in the Organization of American States reveals a marked diversity of views. Some authors consider that U.S. influence is absolute or very nearly so; others hold that it is relative; still others think it is minimal.

In the nearly-absolute school, former Guatemalan President Arévalo (1961: 126) says that the United States “always wins” in the OAS. The Ecuadorian writer Benjamín Cardón (1965: 29) says that the OAS “receives orders and complies with them, with the appearance of discussion, and the appearance of votes that satisfy pro-forma the hypocritical quakerism of the masters.” This view might be summed up by a comment attributed to a Latin American delegate to one Inter-American Conference: “If the United States wanted to badly enough, it could have a resolution passed declaring two and two are five ” (New York Times, March 8, 1954).

Drawing on ethnographic research in El Oasis, a highly precarious self-built settlement in Medellín, Colombia, this article examines the illegal practice of autoconstruction as a material expression of hope. It focuses on the multilayered, symbolic meaning of self-built housing, as it represents the pursuit of dignity, permanence, and agency—as opposed to poverty, uncertainty, and lack of agency—and an active and material form of hoping for a better future in the city. The state plays an ambiguous role in residents’ perspectives, who conceive of it, simultaneously, as a threat to and a guarantor of their future in the city. This ambiguity becomes materialized in the physical form of residents’ self-built housing, as residents either embrace or refrain from making improvements to their houses in response to shifting perceptions about the state’s intentions regarding the future of the settlement.

The modern US defense role in the Western Hemisphere is framed by the terms of the 1947 Rio Treaty, the 1948 Charter of the Organization of America States (OAS), and subsequent bilateral and multilateral protocols like that creating the 1982 Regional Security System (RSS) in the Eastern Caribbean. As components of a collective security system that was explicitly anti-communist in design and intention, the Rio Treaty and its successor documents were established to combat threats posed either by direct aggression on the part of the Soviet Union and/or of Soviet-sponsored, Marxist-Leninist infiltration in the region. These represented the mainstay of the US-Latin American strategic alliance for over 40 years. Most importantly, the orientation of the Inter-American Defense System (IADS) fostered the notion that, within the embrace of the US strategic nuclear and conventional umbrella, military threats to the Western Hemisphere would originate primarily from within, aided and abetted from abroad by the communist alliance. This belief in, and fear of, internal enemies became an enduring theme in modern Latin American geopolitical thought, even when sharing space with traditional external defense concerns (Child, 1985).

Beginning in the 1980s, social and political actors across Latin America turned to courts in unprecedented numbers to contest economic policies. Very different patterns of high court–elected branch interaction over economic governance emerged across the region, with crucial implications for economic development, democratic governance, and the rule of law. Building on both institutional and strategic accounts of judicial politics, this article argues that high court “character,” a relatively stable congeries of informal institutional features, channels interbranch struggles into persistent patterns. Two case studies illustrate the argument. In Argentina, the high court's political character encouraged a pattern of court submission to elected leaders marked by periodic bouts of interbranch confrontation over economic governance. In Brazil, the high court's statesmanlike character induced interbranch accommodation. This study demonstrates that even in politically unstable settings, institutional features can shape law and politics.

Education is one of the variables most frequently used by students of bureaucracy to determine background characteristics of political elites (Cochrane, 1967; Gruber, 1971; Hopkins, 1967; de Imaz, 1970; Verner, 1973). Especially in Latin American research, scholars often examine educational levels of men who serve in high public office. Although such studies usually look at the type of education, the number of years of study, and the location of the institution, very few, if any, authors have examined the determining influence on the careers of future political elites of student contact as well as student to faculty relationships at the preparatory school or university. The omission is significant because it is the contention of this paper that at least since the 1946 presidential administration in Mexico, contact which took place during the school days of future political leaders was an important form of recruitment.

Spanish American fiction, from its earliest moments, has emphasized the whore as a reflection of society and the basic drives of human beings. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's protagonists associate with numerous prostitutes, and one of them, Don Catrín de la Fachenda, works in a whorehouse. Other nineteenth century whores include the sentimental one in Eugenio Cambaceres's Música Sentimental (1884) and the idealistic one in Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera's El Conspirador (1892).

Twentieth century Spanish American fiction is replete with man-eaters like Gallegos's Doña Bárbara, Rivera's Zoraida, Rojas González's Angustias, and with promiscuous types like the oddly named Pura, the sensual dancer of El Embrujo de Sevilla (1922). The prostitute as protagonist, however, enters the century through Augusto D'Halmar's Juana Lucero (1902) and Federico Gamboa's now classic Santa (1903). A poor, seduced, and abandoned country girl, Santa becomes first a high- and then a low-class prostitute in brothels and bordellos.

Among Latin American nations, Cuba has had a prominent tradition of student involvement in politics. Although University of Havana students supported the independence movement from Spain, organized political activism began only in the 1920's. Influenced by the reformist ideas emanating from the Córdoba Reform Movement and from the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, the Cuban students began searching for answers to the island's many problems. Cuba's severe economic crisis of 1920 brought economic chaos and social misery to the island, accelerated the desire for change, and led to a questioning of the existing order of society. Close supervision of Cuban affairs by the United States, the failure of the old generation emerging out of the War for Independence to implement needed social, political, and economic reforms, and the desire for a modern and autonomous university all combined to produce a brewing student revolution.

The role of the Latin American industrialist as a potential modernizing agent promoting social and economic evolution has received increasing attention in recent years. Yet discussions of the industrialist's role have been largely impressionistic; few opinion surveys of the industrialist's goals and values are available. This study was based on such an opinion survey of industrial trade association leaders in Argentina, a nation in which the debate over the role of the industrialist in social evolution has received wide attention.

The industrial trade association movement itself is split into two factions: the porteño-dominaied Argentine Industrial Union (UIA), created before the turn of the century, and the interior-based Confederation of Industry (CI), founded during the second presidency of Juan Domingo Perón. The ability of the sector to strengthen its political position hinges largely on the need to develop greater rapport between these two groups of industrialists.

According to the present paper, absolute poverty and relative inequality have persisted in Latin America as a result of mutually reinforcing, and unfair, patterns of distribution of final private, broad, and total consumption and income. Furthermore, it is argued that the prevailing pattern, characterized by a vicious circle of distributive injustice in both consumption and income (production), can be broken only by mesoeconomic, sectoral constitutions and, thus, by public policies that uphold the principles of justice, freedom, and equality — on both the consumption and income (production) sides.

When the educated natives of the capital city of Ecuador are questioned about social class and the power structure of their country, the answer comes unhesitatingly and with little variation. Everyone, and of course the educated are as yet few in number, knows who is who and what is what. The sampler of random opinion concludes that the real power is no longer in Quito but in the port of Guayaquil. This has been documented by Díaz, who claims that the traditional aristocracy today owns only about 50 percent of sierran acreage, most of it impoverished and ruined, and that this class is declining steadily with the growth of various coastal “bourgeoisie” classes which stem from the commercial and banking interests of the coast. Politically, too, according to Lang, the coastal influence is undermining that of the sierra, the deposition of the military junta in 1966 being attributable to pressures from the Guayaquil commercial oligarchy.

The Argentines, especially the artists, have long tilted at that psychological phantom of any pluralistic society, the cultural identity crisis. The jousting of civilization with barbarism in Sarmiento's Facundo and of civilized barbarity with barbarous civility in Martín Fierro wove a tangled maze into Argentine consciousness. Was the “true Argentine” the outward-looking porteño of Buenos Aires or the introverted gaucho of the Pampas? Should the Argentines send out feelers toward European culture or roots into the indigenous heritage? Because of such cosmic soul-searching, the labyrinthine images of Julio Cortázar's Rayuelo fit naturally into his hero Oliveira's hopscotching toward “home,” first in Paris, then in Argentina. But the Argentines, like the Chileans and Venezuelans, have not generally had a lot to say about the central theme of the Mexican and Andean artists of the twentieth century, the interaction of European and Indian identities.