In 1920, at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City a series of experiments into the techniques of fresco painting blossomed into a full-blown mural movement that captured and held the American imagination for thirty years. Long before the names of the painters were famous as “revolutionary” artists, however, Mexican art had been in revolutionary ferment. The painters, despite their many individual differences, shared a common rich heritage which made possible the success of the mural movement.

The creative outburst which culminated in the Mexican mural movement was dependent upon two oddly dissimilar precedents. The first was the formal academic training most of the painters received at the Academy of San Carlos, the government-supported art school. The second was their participation in a bloody revolution and their assessment of the struggle when peace was restored.

In Describing Latin America as the “strategic rear” of the United States, the Soviet Union attributes great significance to this region for US interests and, consequently, to any changes which might alter the long-standing US dominance there. That the United States enjoys a unique position in Latin America has consistently been acknowledged by Soviet leaders. The US has been seen as able to enforce a “hands off” policy to extra-hemispheric powers; hence, the Kremlin has referred to “geographic fatalism” as its way of rationalizing the difficulties inherent in successfully effecting communist revolution, or even to advance Soviet influence, in an area so close to the United States.

El problema que nos hemos propuesto dilucidar en este breve ensayo es el alcance y significado inmediato de la desintegración en nuestras relaciones sociales. Resultado y conclusión de nuestra observación directa, procuramos registrar objetivamente y con un criterio antropológico, las distintas reacciones del hombre medio de nuestra ciudad en cuanto tiende a violar el sentimiento de comunidad. Precisamente, uno de los rasgos más dramáticos que advertimos en la evolución de la presente sociedad argentina es la pérdida, por atrofia, de dicho sentimiento, el que en las actuales circunstancias ha perdido su valor pragmático. Con todo, la deshumanización de las relaciones sociales no es exclusiva de nuestro socius; el desarrollo histórico de Occidente en el actual período de integración imperialista se caracteriza por llevar esta deshumanización — derivada de la transformación de un medio natural en un medio técnico — a sus últimas consecuencias psicosociológicas.

As Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez strode to the dedication stand, confetti and rose petals filled the air; and upon raising the Mexican flag at the base of a 135-foot-high statue located in the middle of the Baja California desert, more than 5,000 peopled cheered, “Viva Mexico, viva la carretera” (the highway). The occasion of the recent dedication and praise was the completion of the first paved highway that effectively links northern and southern sections of Baja California. To North Americans who have been numbed by the dizzying pace of superhighway construction, this single, rather narrow, twolane highway may seem of scarce consequence. But for the inhabitants of the Baja California peninsula, one of the most desolate areas of land on this earth, the 1,061-mile highway heralds a new era. This paper intends to explore some of the economic and political consequences likely to evolve from the road's existence. More specifically, it examines the basic objectives Mexican officials bring to the highway, and posits the likelihood of the fulfillment of these objectives.

This paper posits the thesis that the age-old conflict between the agricultural and pastoral ways of life continues to be a major obstacle to agricultural and rural development throughout Latin America; and the same probably is true in many other of the so-called “underdeveloped” portions of the globe. A quarter of a century of professional involvement with Latin American societies has convinced me that improvement that is designated as “type of farming” in the sociocultural system is an indispensable part of the modernization of agriculture. I firmly believe that in most places it is of the utmost importance to combine both livestock and crop enterprises in a close symbiotic relationship in individual farm units. This definitely is not the case throughout Latin America, and this conclusion is exemplified by the fact that neither by personal observation, nor by reading, nor by questioning others have I been able to discover a single instance in which a farmer grows a crop of corn and then uses it to fatten his cattle for the market.

After more than a year of intense civil war, Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle resigned from office on July 19, 1979, and fled the country. Accompanying the opposition's Provisional Junta when it entered Managua were the foreign ministers of the five Andean Group nations: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. The presence of the Andean Group representatives during the transfer of power is indicative of the important part played by international governmental organizations (IGOs) during the Nicaraguan revolution. Along with the Andean Group, the Organization of American States (OAS) acted with a degree of independence not usually evident in hemispheric affairs.

The history of Man is marked by recurrent autocratic rule. In fact, autocracy in its various guises is perhaps the most prevalent form of political authority in history. Latin America has suffered autocratic rule as has the rest of the world; but while the genus is autocrat, the species, caudillo, is almost unique to nineteenth-century Latin America (more specifically, Spanish America). To understand the distinctive qualities of the caudillo, as opposed to any other kind of autocrat, one must examine the historical matrix of nineteenth-century Latin America and the cluster of cultural values that at once limited and provided opportunities to persons in the society. The question becomes one of interaction between the temporal and cultural circumstances, and the variable of choice of action by men.

Since 1950, 28 developing countries have produced tanks, ships, aircraft, other major weapons systems, and infantry and artillery weapons for their own use and for export. Local input has ranged from assembly of imported components to completely indigenous design and manufacture. In 1967 exports from lessdeveloped countries (LDCs) were worth $194 million, as compared to exports from all sources of $201 billion. By 1976 world arms exports had increased to $398 billion and LDC exports to $820 million (ACDA, 1978). Even though the role of lessdeveloped countries in world arms production is still small, it is growing and can be significant in some local and regional contexts.

Nascent defense industries in the Third World raise important questions. Terrorists, insurgents, and governments everywhere may find arms more readily available as sources of supply diversify. The spread of weapons manufacture both reflects and promotes the diffusion of power within the international system at large.

El movimiento de la juventud estudiantil, que alrededor de 1920 apareció en la mayoría de los países latinoamericanos, se presentó bajo distintas formas en cada uno de ellos. Esta nueva generación persiguió no sólo la reforma de la Universidad. Se trató más bien de una actitud que, desdeñado las viejas estructuras sociales, luchó por otras nuevas. La juventud planteó una renovación de América Latina. Esta actitud tomó forma y contenido determinado en Chile.

Chile en la proportión correspondiente ha pasado por todas las etapas del desarrollo capitalista. En particular en el período de la República ha seguido en tono menor su curso general. Surgió la gran industria en la forma específica chilena, en la minería. Gran industria que en su época inicial lleva implícita la explotación humana en sus formas más duras. Efectúa un aparente retorno al período de la Acumulación Primitiva, forzada, propia de la América del siglo XVI. Entre esos rasgos antiguos, hay uno específico: la esclavitud.

Some maladjustments exist in all living, functioning cultural systems, even the most isolated and the most stable. This is merely to say that no cultural system (other than Utopia) is perfect. The possibilities of maladjustment or imperfect function rise with the increased size and complexity of a culture. Modern complex sociocultural systems or civilizations are therefore much more liable to suffer the difficulties of maladjustment than were the primitive and folk systems that preceded them, even in the same territory. Not only do modern systems contain more custom-patterns and institutions in absolute numbers, but they involve numerous subcultures and specialties serving the many differentiated groupings and categories that make up a modern society. Furthermore, all modern systems are in process of rapid change for they are in close and rapid contact with the constant flow of innovations from other modern systems.

Drawing on theories of regime change, revolution, and democratization, this paper proposes a process theory to account for the 12 major regime transformations that have occurred in Central America since 1970. Political regimes, coherent systems of rule established among a coalition of dominant political actors, change when their prevailing political rules and their ruling coalitions undergo transformation. External forces are important to this process. The focal case is Guatemala and its prospects for democratic consolidation.

The period of Panamanian history which is commonly referred to as that of the “military regime” (1968-1989) can be divided into two, and clearly distinct, phases. During the first stage (1968-1982), the military regime was engaged in trying to resolve the contradiction posed by two incompatible commitments: the commitment to pursue a national project of capitalist development on the one hand, and a commitment to support US interests on the isthmus on the other. To many observers, Panama assumed this latter commitment when it became a signatory of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties concerning the Panama Canal. The second stage (1983-89) witnessed some significant changes in this agenda, particularly the regime's abandonment, for the most part, of the project for national development, replacing it with a program to militarize the Canal route.

Analyses of military roles in Latin America during the two decades following World War II often assumed the military were both isolated or apart from politics, and hence amenable to civilian control. The resurgence of militarism since the early Sixties has been reflected in scholarly works reassessing these assumptions. Whereas the pioneers in this field, such as Lieuwen (1964) and Needier (1969), are clearly civilianist—reflecting a democratic and distinctly liberal bias in their values—students of Latin American militarism in the late Sixties and Seventies have increasingly, if tacitly, assumed the unviability of civilian hegemony and tended to downplay the democratic normative issue. Terms such as militarism, democracy, and civilian supremacy have been virtually eclipsed from analyses of military intervention (Johnson, 1964; Einaudi, 1969; Ropp, 1970; Stepan, 1971; Rankin, 1974; Needier, 1975; Fitch, 1979).

A “messiah,” as the term is used here, is taken to mean a person believing himself to be divinely called, as a result of a dream or a series of visions, to lead a group of people from some catastrophic set of conditions into a more perfect state of affairs. “Messianism” is a term used in a variety of ways but usually to characterize a religious movement led by a messiah. Sertão is a Portuguese word meaning simply “hinterland” or interior and is usually taken to refer to a region in Brazil known as the polígona das sêcas (drought polygon) which extends over an area of the states of Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte, Sergipe, Alagoas, and Bahia subject to periodic and unpredictable droughts.

The greatest change in the Latin American labor picture during the 1960s has been the emergence and growth of the Latin American Confederation of Christian Trade Unionists (Confederación Latino Americana de Sindicatos Cristianos—CLASC). The outcome of the struggle between the Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT), the older, AFL-CIO influenced movement in Latin America, and the CLASC for the leadership of the non-Communist sector of Latin American labor remains in question, but the result, even if a situation of peaceful coexistence develops, will have a significant impact on the political, social, and economic evolution of Latin America. This study attempts to sketch the unique ideological base on which the CLASC is founded, to outline its method of operation, and to explain the nature of its competition with the ORIT.

On March 15,1987, Brazil celebrated the second anniversary of the Nova República, the popular term for the new civilian government headed by José Sarney. While commemoration of the return to more open, competitive politics after 21 years of authoritarian rule is certainly cause for justifiable national pride, a worsening economic crisis combined with escalating domestic social and political conflict leave many Brazilians deeply worried about the future of their incipient democracy.

By conventional standards, Brazil has joined the ranks of fullfledged political democracies. Nevertheless, a more stringent view would hold that Brazil has really only entered into a new, more complex phase of political transition in which genuine democracy has yet to become firmly established. The new civilian government must now address fundamental issues of social justice and more balanced, equitable economic growth than was realized under authoritarian rule.

In the 1990s, trade liberalization eroded the competitiveness of Caribbean economies as manufacturing export platforms. Proposed new economic strategies favored a shift from vertically integrated, transnationally based segment manufacturing to segments of knowledge-intensive industries and services. This strategy, however, reproduces the economic asymmetries associated with the core-periphery relation (low wages, value-added rates). Postindustrial technologies and economic strategies provide the opportunity to formulate alternative policies to overcome the shortcomings of peripheral postindustrialization and foster sustainable postindustrial development.