Fundamental issues are raised in Sigmund's attack on our book, concerns that pertain to what has probably become one of the most controversial policy debates in recent times: the role of the U.S. in the overthrow of the Allende government. Measured by the amount of time and space devoted to the issue by Congress, the media, and academia, this question certainly requires careful consideration. Unfortunately, Sigmund presently and in the past has not dealt adequately with either the pertinent questions or the relevant data. The numerous errors and distortions require a thorough response.

The Mexican collection of the International Institute of Social History is substantially smaller than that of Argentina or Brazil. Of this, the collection of periodicals constitutes the principal part. This latter collection (Sections A and B) covers the period ±1880-1940. Although many items represent only a single or limited number of issues of a given publication, the total amount of information is considerable. The pre-revolution period is represented by only a restricted number of literary and positivist magazines, besides a few copies of workers' magazines from Mexico City, Orizaba, and Monterrey. The more important part of the collection, however, is formed by the periodicals of local chapters of the Casa del Obrero Mundial from the years 1912-18, such as Ariete, Redención Obrera, Revolución Social, El Sindicalista, and Tribuna Roja. In addition, there is some material relating to the I.W. W., the C.R.O.M., and the later C.T.M.

During the past decade—more precisely during the last five to seven years—the increased use of urban guerrilla warfare and terrorism have characterized the activities of many revolutionary groups in the less developed world. High-lighted by the olympic assassinations of 1972, this phenomenon has also been evident in various African and Asian states. It is in Latin America, however, that the change from the traditional rural base for guerrilla operations to an urban environment has been most pronounced. The years from 1962 to 1967 saw many Latin American insurgents copying the Cuban revolutionary model, with its emphasis on rural guerrilla operations and the peasantry as the ultimate motive force, but recent years have seen an equally strong pull toward either purely urban insurgency or a more balanced strategy according equal importance to both rural and urban activities. In either case, the identifiable shift away from a totally rural guerrilla strategy for most Latin American revolutionary groups seems an established fact.

The study of political participation in Latin America has, until very recently, been too narrowly conceived by social scientists, focusing largely on elites and violence. The former is illustrated by studies of the military (Lieuwen, 1961, 1966; Johnson, 1964; Horowitz, 1967; Fagen and Cornelius, 1970; Schmitter, 1973), the Church (Dillon Soares, 1967; Solari, 1967; Petersen, 1970; Suchlicki, 1972), industrialists (Cardoso, 1967; Polit, 1968; Petras and Cook, 1973), and large landholders (Whetten, 1948; Carroll, 1966; Feder, 1971; Cockroft, 1972). Attention to violent forms of political participation is found in studies of revolution and the military coup d'état (Payne, 1965; Needler, 1968; Von Lazar and Kaufman, 1969; Moreno and Mitrani, 1971; Kohl and Litt, 1974). Those studies that have centered on nonviolent mass participation (Horowitz, 1970) have generally been limited to elections (for example, Martz, 1967; Petras, 1970), political parties (Fitzgibbon, 1957; Ciria, 1974), and labor unions (Payne, 1965; Angell, 1972; Erickson et al., 1974). As a result of the narrowness of these approaches, we have only a partial image of the faces of the Latin American citizen political activity; we have underestimated the scope of such activity and have failed to investigate its many forms.

One must always make a special case for presenting puerto rican along with other Latin American studies. With public planning this is even more true. Puerto Rico is, after all, legally a part of the United States, and for many decades its well-being has been intimately tied to both general conditions in the U.S. and to U.S. policies, even those not directed specifically at Puerto Rico. For these reasons, planning by the government of Puerto Rico is very constrained: it must act without any of the options available to independent governments, such as the issuance of money or the control of imports; its laws and procedures must accommodate to the constraints of the U.S. legal system; it must permit U.S. citizens who are not Puerto Ricans to participate under conditions of full equality and mobility in Puerto Rico and between Puerto Rico and the U.S. mainland.

We offer the following contribution by Frank Bonilla in this section: 1) because, despite its important message, it does not fit appropriately in the other regular sections of LARR, and 2) because it deals positively with the problem of U.S. research in Latin America, touching upon the repercussions of Project Camelot, reactions to which have previously been allocated space here.

A recent and steadfastly optimistic study of U.S. foreign policy and democratic politics observes matter of factly that “American government frightens and bewilders its friends and its enemies alike.” At the moment, evidence again mounts before the world that we are not only prepared to take the lives and freedom of others on dubious provocation (as in the Dominican case) but also to seriously jeopardize institutions at home on which our own freedom rests. Along the way we have played freely with the careers and life chances of individuals with and without their knowledge or consent. In view of this, there would hardly seem to be any ground for persisting in the belief that reasonable men abroad will continue to look to us for support in rationally pursuing their own political advancement. If there is any reason for believing that we have not morally written ourselves out of a share in these tasks, it rests primarily on the realism, forebearance, and enduring optimism of men abroad who care profoundly about the quality of future political life in their own nations. Having repeatedly experienced political regressions of their own, they may view our own present difficulties with some magnanimity and a differentiating sense of the complex internal forces that have produced them. The Americans to whom these remarks are addressed are thus Americans in the large sense of men of the Americas, and particularly those who continue to hold to the hope that research based social science knowledge can prove a major resource in the achievement of useful human purposes in this part of the world. However, because given present circumstances the action of U.S. social scientists may yet have the capacity to decisively transform and revitalize the prospects for such work rather than continue to disfigure and compromise them, much of this appeal is directed to Americans in this second more restricted sense.

Although written a decade apart, these quotations reflect recent research focusing on the inter-relationship, or lack thereof, between the functional and genetic aspects of the Latin American militaries and their roles in the development process. Generally, the literature has attempted to interweave the military with its role as a subsystem in the larger political system, or it has centered upon the sociopolitical origins or institutional life style of the military establishment. Problematics confronting social scientists have concerned the rationale for military intervention in the political process, the motivational aspects and the divergent variables reflecting the possibilities for the future. The term “military intervention” as used by most social scientists gives a false impression, for it implies that the military operates from outside the political system, when in fact it is recognized as a principal subsystem in most Latin American nations. Throughout this article, therefore, the term ‘military intervention’ is intended to connote an active involvement in the political process by the military establishment functioning from within the overall political system.

The history of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 has suffered from the emphasis placed upon personalities and, as a result, critical political, economic, and social issues have been incompletely studied. In examining the causes of the 1910 Revolution in the state of Chihuahua, historians have concentrated their efforts on exposing the political oppression and, to some extent, the economic exploitation exercised by the Terrazas-Creel family. Perhaps more than any other figures of the Díaz era, Luis Terrazas and his son-in-law, Enrique C. Creel, have come to represent in Mexican revolutionary historiography the system of economic and social privilege against which the revolutionaries fought.