Chile has a housing problem but not in the traditional sense of something to be solved. Like any other country in the throes of modernization, Chile is producing an inadequate flow of housing services for low income families. Each family participates to some extent in the available housing services, but an estimated 600,000 families are not receiving an adequate supply. This analysis is concerned with the economics of the government response to this situation from 1965 to 1969.

The focus is on the economics of housing because the basic question that the housing policy decisions taken by the government must face is the more efficient administration of the scarce resources available for the production of improved housing services. Housing is a basic social need to which limited resources must be assigned by both the public and private sectors.

La América Latina no sólo ha sido un laboratorio bullente en que se han producido los más complejos procesos de la sociedad humana en forma perceptible, sino que ha sido asimismo un “Continente con contenido” — como se ha dicho felizmente — en que la teoría sociológica se ha formulado, en un primer momento, en forma espontánea y tácita. En ella el estrato más profundo del alma se ha manifestado no por la razón abstracta sino a través de intuiciones, de sentimientos y de enunciación de realidades e ideales, expresados verbigracia en la novela sociológica o en el doctrinal político. A virtud de un dilatado proceso secular nuestra América ha llegado a su madurez, y el ingente drama que ha vivido y vivenciado ha contribuido a desarrollar su genio creador. El dolor es espuela de la razón.

Benjamín Franklin y José Martí estuvieron presentes, respectivamente, en el principio y en el término de un largo período de la vida de América. Fué el período dentro del cual se iniciaron y culminaron en gloriosas victorias los empeños enderezados a desuncir el rigor colonial de los pueblos del Nuevo Mundo transformados en naciones soberanas. Franklin nació en los albores del siglo XVIII. Martí murió en las postrimerías del XIX. Franklin y Martí fueron el primero y el último, cronológicamente, de los grandes libertadores americanos.

Desde la madurez de Franklin hasta la de Martí, y en la madurez de éste se produjo su perecimiento, a lo largo y a lo ancho del Hemisferio Occidental, desde los Estados Unidos de América hasta Cuba, con notorios anhelos de superación y liberación en el tiempo y en el espacio, se transformó todo un medio globo.

A growing realization on the part of scholars and the general public has been the increasing interdependence of the world. Technology and communications have narrowed distance and time between diverse cultures, resulting in increased contact, if not increased cultural harmony.

The immigration of millions of persons to new homes has heightened this interdependence. In the Western Hemisphere not only the United States but also Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile received substantial numbers of immigrants.

Brazil, alone, was the recipient of more than 5 million immigrants. The majority of the immigrants, apart from those of the Iberian Peninsula, came from Germany, Italy, and Japan. Chronologically, the Germans arrived first, the Italians second, and the Japanese third. Numerically, Italy has contributed 1.5 million, Germany 300,000, and Japan 170,000 to date.

A worldwide scheduled air transportation system for passengers, cargo, and mail has been created since World War II. In its global scope it is almost unique; the International Air Transport Association's only prototype is the Universal Postal Union, which for over a century has been the intergovernment vehicle for arranging the expeditious, reliable interchange of foreign mails between nations. Somewhat comparable to IATA in purpose but much more limited geographically, are such arrangements as those which provide for the transfer of electric power across the border between the United States and Canada, the coordination of highway, waterway, and railway traffic respectively in Europe, and the international telephone, cable, and radio services. The general public does not know—and has little need to know—what has gone on behind the scenes to create these facilities which in essence are large international public utility systems. A typical person's impressions would probably reflect his nationality. An American would probably assume that the individual components of such a utility system were privately owned and operated for commercial profit (except for the Postal Service). A European would tend to assume that electric power companies, railroads, airlines, telecommunications companies, and the Postal Service would all be owned by some government. Each would be substantially correct in his own context.

A backward glance, a thumbnail sketch of the Chilean press from the colonial period to 1823, sets the stage for the story of the press from 1823 to 1842. To begin with, Chile was off to a late start — 1747. Mexico had a press in 1540; Lima, 1584; Santo Domingo, 1600; and Paraguay, 1715. Second, the press was closely related with the struggle for independence. Foreign influences were felt through a number of colorful figures such as Mateo Arnaldo Hoevel, a Swedish refugee involved in the assassination of Gustave III, the North-American Procopio Polloc, and three North-American typesetters. Camilo Henríquez, a priest, was “the mentor of the revolution,” while the prócer, Bernardo O'Higgins, also played an important role.

The economic history of Uruguay from the turn of the century up to the early 1950's is characterized by economic growth, by extensive governmental involvement in economic activity, and by an ardent secularist faith in the welfare state ideals of the great José Batlle y Ordóñez and the Batllista tradition which lived on after him. Its small size, stable democracy, and apparent aloofness from the problems of the rest of the continent have earned la Republica Oriental del Uruguay such sobriquets as the “Switzerland” or “Utopia” of South America. Beginning in the early 1950's, however, there were signs that this country which had for so long been a model laboratory for progress and reform to its crisis-ridden neighbors, was itself about to face a crisis. The economic dimension of the Uruguayan crisis is that the annual per capita gross national product (currently about 500 dollars) has not risen for over a decade, and has in fact declined slightly in the last several years.

Virtually all developing countries at various times abandon laissez-faire policies with respect to international trade in order to pursue government-directed strategies of industrialization. Abandonment of free trade always means that private firms and consumers no longer base their economic decisions on world prices of goods but, rather, on distorted domestic prices that alter production and consumption decisions. For example, imposition of a tariff on automobile imports raises the domestic price of automobiles in comparison with other goods in the economy. The higher relative price of automobiles has two effects: first, consumers purchase fewer automobiles because of the higher price, relative to other goods they can buy; and, second, domestic production of automobiles increases in response to the higher selling price while domestic production of other goods falls, as labor and physical capital shift away from the other sectors and toward the automotive sector.

In recent years students of contemporary Argentine letters have begun to recognize the importance of the period 1946-1955 as one of crisis, of fundamental reassessment, and of generational strife. Though it would be an oversimplification to assign the cause of these trends to the political and social changes wrought by Juan D. Perón, the study of his regime—particularly as it affected cultural activity—can help put into clearer focus the confusing picture of literary groups, “generations,” and promociones that confronts the student of recent Argentine literature.

It should be emphasized that peronismo, for better or for worse, was more than an exclusively political movement: its influence was also farreaching in broad areas of popular culture, social standards, in matters of dress, speech, and in the use of leisure time. Its effects were complex, but on balance they all tended to produce a feeling of relaxation, a looseningup of formalities and traditional practices: stuffed shirts were displaced by descamisados; the normal work week was frequently broken up by strikes and government encouraged vacations; formal attire was no longer required at the opera; and many of the public parks that previously had, by some unwritten law, been considered the semi-private preserve of the middle and upper classes, became crowded with picnicking workers and their families.

On December 9, 1964, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, Cuban Minister of Industries and the most powerful man in Cuba under the Castro brothers, flew from Havana to New York to address the United Nations. He lashed at the United States and predicted continental revolution, “That wave of heightening fury, of just demands, of rights that have been flouted, is rising throughout Latin America, and no one can stop that tide.” From New York Guevara flew to Algiers, and thus began a trek that would take him to countries in Africa, Europe and Asia. For three months Guevara traveled, talking to leaders of nations, preaching revolution and communism wherever he went.

In 1874, a group of Frenchmen in revolt against the academic rules of their profession was dubbed “Impressionist”; this attempt at destruction by ridicule failed when the painters turned the intended insult into an honored label. The inflated value put upon their work since has not diminished the honor of the title. Another type of blowing up has had the opposite effect: Anarchism, whose modern emergence was contemporary with Impressionism, has pejorative connotations today. Too often, it is used as a synonym for “anarchy,” and we have been encouraged to think of it as merely a revolutionary creed like communism with, if anything, more nihilistic and destructive overtones. In the empty dialogue of political denunciation, the epithet “anarchist” has become the countercharge to the accusation “fascist,” without the protagonists having much idea what either term means. The height of absurdity was reached when long-suffering Polish workmen were described as “anarchists” by their socialist masters after the economic crisis of Christmas 1970.

Trade policy throughout the Western Hemisphere is in a state of flux, more so now than at any other time in the postwar period. Among policy officials in Latin America, the Caribbean, and North America, there is general agreement on many trade policy issues but uncertainty about others. Although this paper starts with areas of agreement, it focuses upon those issues for which there is no consensus.

This article is a report of a study begun in 1959 and completed in early 1962 at the State University of Iowa as a doctoral dissertation. A descriptive study, it attempted to draw in rather broad outlines the image of the United States and its people as presented in an important segment of the Mexican press1 and in opinions expressed by journalists in interviews and on questionnaires. More specifically, the study was made to determine and describe the volume and kinds of news, opinion, and pictorial material about the United States published over a randomlyselected period (January, 1960) in ten leading daily newspapers of Mexico.

Beyond this main descriptive phase, consisting of the analysis of the content of 300 separate newspaper issues, the study also had as a secondary objective the presentation of opinion about the United States given by journalists connected with the ten dailies and with a few other newspapers. This latter phase proved to be much the more interesting, and the more revealing, aspect of the study, and it is principally with this “opinion” aspect of the study that the present article deals.

Los estudiantes de la Universidad de la Habana, al igual que los de la mayoría de las universidades latinoamericanas, se han caracterizado por su participación en la política nacional. En la etapa independentista, a finales del siglo pasado, la Universidad de la Habana se convirtió en el centro de agitación contra España. El 27 de noviembre de 1871 la colonia ordenó el fusilamiento de ocho estudiantes de medicina acusados de haber profanado la tumba de un militar español. De las filas estudiantiles surgieron los dirigentes de la guerra de independencia. El propio José Martí, a edad muy temprana y siendo aún estudiante, comenzó a luchar por la libertad de su patria. Martí, con su prédica constante, hubo de unir a sus compatriotas conduciéndolos a la guerra emancipadora contra España.

The growing frequency of conflicts in the Caribbean and Central America reveals some new and significant aspects of the old problem of intervention. Failure to recognize these new and significant aspects accounts for much of the confusion evident at the Meeting of Consultation of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American States held at Santiago de Chile, in 1959.

A number of strains have been placed upon the principle of nonintervention and it is important at the outset to note the forces behind them. Two developments which have been proceeding in opposite directions are basic here. The first of these is the mounting exactitude and breadth of the non-intervention doctrine itself. It has been applied to collective action as well as action by individual states; to indirect action such as diplomatic protests and economic pressure as well as to more direct action.

When James Baker, US Secretary of the Treasury, took the rostrum at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Seoul, in October 1985, and told 9,000 delegates from 149 countries that the debt crisis could only be solved by an even closer cooperation of all parties concerned, more money from commercial banks, an enhanced role for the World Bank, and more growth in the developing world, everybody sighed with relief.

The Baker declaration was significant as it had taken three years of muddling through crises for the Reagan Administration to recognize the debt crisis for what it is: a long term economic and political barrier to development that is slowly strangling world economic growth.

La Revolución Mexicana como movimiento armado y como proceso políticosocial constituye un tema apasionado para los mexicanos. A escaso número de años del desarrollo de las operaciones bélicas y con la supervivencia de personajes participantes, se vuelve sumamente difícil esclarecer situaciones, uniformar opiniones y sobre todo conciliar intereses.

Sabemos perfectamente que nuestra organización políticoadministrativa actual tiene sus raíces en la Constitución proclamada bajo la egregia figura de don Venustiano Carranza en 1917 y sabemos también que en el norte la personalidad de Francisco Villa se sigue viendo con admiración y con respeto, y que en el sur, donde parece que la Revolución fué sólo una guerra fratricida sin ninguna proyección social, los campesinos que se debaten en la miseria buscan ansiosamente otro Emiliano Zapata.

Roberto Michels, writing in 1915, said about political parties:

This, in a nutshell, expresses his now famous “iron law of oligarchy”— the assertion that every party organization must sooner or later become dominated by a small elite of leaders who will use their power to perpetuate themselves, and will succeed in doing so even in the face of widespread opposition from the rank and file.

Michels is supported in this view by a more contemporary student of political parties, Maurice Duverger, who says that: “The leadership of parties tends naturally to assume an oligarchic form. A veritable 'ruling class’ comes into being that is more or less closed; it is an ‘inner circle’ into which it is difficult to penetrate.”