If Publicity has done its job, then everyone will have heard by now of the Library of America–an ambitious series of books being funded by the Lord Foundation and the National Endowment lor the Humanities. Everyone will have heard of the project's attenuated arrival (it was first proposed by the late Edmund Wilson in the early 1960s); of its plan to furnish the world with the works of the greater and lesser authors of this country, set forth in elegant volumes, and, finally, of the extraordinary collaboration that the project has prompted between forces normally opposed or estranged: The series is to be edited by the academic community. on the one hand, and manufactured and distributed by “the Trade” on the other.

The banners can be seen across the major highways of Venezuela: “The Malvinas Are Argentine.” This impeccably democratic country that since 1958 has been an island of freedom in a sea of Latin American military dictatorships has taken the lead in supporting ihe Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. Long one of the closest U.S. allies in the hemisphere, Venezuela now vigorously denounces the U.S. support of Britain and openly discusses the replacement of the Organization of American States with an all-Latin regional organization. Even the Catholic bishop of Cumana, in eastern Venezuela, called the U.S. position “traitorous and perfidious” (traicionera y desleal). Caracas has also offered petroleum and military aid to Argentina, and it has been a central coordinating point for discussions about Latin American joint diplomatic action against Great Britain.

People seeking a settlement of the Palestinian question have focused on several options during the past few years. These proposals cover a wide range of choices from annexation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza, to a Palestinian semiautonomy in the same territories, to some kind of union with Jordan. However, the only viable proposal is an arrangement that satisfies the population most directly involved; i.e., the Palestinians. And they will be satisfied with nothing less than true independence from both Israel and Jordan for the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Just as other “peoples” have done before them, the Palestinians today are struggling for one thing above all else: the powerful idea of “self-determination” or “sovereignty.” In the twentieth century that means an independent state.

America's foreign policy establishment is bracing itself for a pesticide time bomb: the explosive revelations of how developing countries are being turned into dumping grounds for dangerous pesticides that are banned in the United States. A House subcommittee on international economic policy and trade, which is conducting hearings on a bill introduced by Representative Michael D. Barnes (D-Md.) to control the export of hazardous materials, has information from the World Health Organization that 500,000 people are poisoned each year in the Third World as a result of direct exposure to pesticides, about 5,000 fatally.

“The nations of the developing world are most vulnerable and often lack the capability to monitor and regulate dangerous imports,” says Jacob Scherr, staff attorney for the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, a group that monitors global environmental matters. In his testimony to Congress Scherr warned of “the potential negative foreign policy consequences of the export of hazardous wastes to developing nations.”

Easter, 1982, marked the nineteenth anniversary of Pope John XXIII's greatest encyclical, Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth“), a document whose impact, rather than diminishing, shows every indication of growing in the years to come. The encyclical, I should explain, has had a special meaning for me. As one of a ridiculously small band of self-styled Catholic “pacificists,” who had experienced during World War II the unwillingness of our fellow communicants to accept us as anything more than a “lunatic fringe,” u was always necessary for us to scratch for whatever support might be found in respectable sources—a reference to Scripture here, an episcopal or papal utterence there. Imagine my joy, then, when suddenly we had a whole encyclical we could call our own!

I first heard of V. S. Naipaul in 1977. Preparing for a Fulbright lectureship in Trinidad, I asked State Department experts what to read. Their answer: V. S. Naipaul. Today, if a student were to ask me what author to read to learn about the Third World, my answer would be the same: Naipaul.

What is the Third World? Political sociologists and economists proffer definitions and statistics. Naipaul gives us vivid images and stories about people who live there. His purposes have been literary and reportorial. They have also been deeply personal, for Naipaul has sought to escape and transcend the Hindu-Trinidad milieu in which he was raised.

Ever since the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) toppled the fifty-year-old dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Nicaragua in July, 1979, the United States press has paid consistent close attention to civil liberties issues, especially press freedom, in assessing the course of the revolution. On the heels of the FSLN victory, the Establishment media's attitude toward the newly reconstituted Central American state was one of suprised approval: This leftist regime had embarked on a unique form of reconstruction marked by a mixed economy and genuine respect for civil liberties. During the past two years, however, watchful anticipation has given way to stern judgment. Now, when reporting on the new government's human rights and civil liberties record, these press observers tend to picture a repressive, one-party state.

“Foreign aid has a great future—behind it,” observed a United States congressman in the late 1960s. The words were prophetic. Since then the aid program has encountered growing opposition; it has steadily dwindled in size, especially in real terms; and worst of all, it has become more than ever an odd amalgam of contradictory objectives. Meanwhile, what had been its sole purpose—to help build the nascent economies of the poor nations on sound foundations—has receded into the background. Today that purpose is almost foreign to foreign aid.

This, at least in hindsight, is not too surprising. Foreign aid was born of mixed parents, a hybrid; and as time went by it was further hybridized as it was impregnated by ever more extraneous elements.

It was in May, 1974, at the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations, that a majority of the nations of the world, overriding Western objections, passed a resolution that called for the establishment of a New International Economic Order. This resolution put on a new plane the issues raised in 1964 at the first session of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development when Raul Prebisch, the UNCTAD secretary general, had called in his opening speech for a new international order.

Since 1974 a number of conferences and discussions have been held about how to implement the new order. In 1975, in the wake of a memorable speech read by then U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan that reflected a more conciliatory posture by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the U.N. Seventh Special Session passed a revised declaration.

Throughout most of the twentieth century Mexico's rural sector has been an open sore. In the years following the 1910-17 revolution, large private estates were expropriated by the government and divided into tiny plots for distribution to landless peasants. But political power soon passed from the countryside to the cities. The peasants, victorious in the revolution, were largely neglected by subsequent “revolutionary” governments.

As a result, the near-feudal social conditions of nineteenth-century Mexico were perpetuated. Most peasants, lacking credit, seeds, fertilizer, machinery, and education, were scarcely able to feed their own families. With each new generation the tiny plots were further subdivided and more and more farmers were forced to migrate to cities or to follow seasonal crop harvests as far north as the United States.