The goal of “health for all by the year 2000” was endorsed by member nations of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) at the International Conference on Primary Health Care, held at Alma Ata, U.S.S.R., in September 1978. The goal of attaining total health care coverage of the population had been agreed upon by the Ministers of Health of the Americas at their III Special Meeting in 1972. Meeting again in 1977, the ministers took stock of the region's accomplishments and remaining shortcomings in preparation for the Alma Ata conference. They concluded that their institutional health care systems, which bear the major responsibility for providing total coverage, had not yet attained this goal; among the reasons mentioned were institutional rigidities that made it difficult to determine and respond to unattended needs for health care, and the financial inaccessibility to large population groups of the institutions providing health services. These problems were compounded by a “significant increase in the cost of medical care … which reduces the resources available for providing universal coverage.”

Se procurará deslindar algunas significaciones que cobija la debatida noción de filosofía latinoamericana; sin ánimo de suponer por ello que se esté frente a un asunto que, al estilo neopositivista, pueda disolverse bajo el mero análisis lingüístico. Por el contrario, se trata de un problema que elude las divisorias tajantes, tal como la naturaleza que avanza y se entremezcla más allá de las marcaciones cartográficas. Al mismo tiempo, se ilustrarán los aspectos acotados, aunque posponiendo el examen de sus tan desiguales grados de importancia reflexiva y pragmática.

During the National Conference on Education, Science, and Technology, held in June 1976 as part of the political campaign just prior to the change of administrations, the spokesman for the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) stated, in the presence of the incoming president of Mexico, that:

It is presently impossible to doubt the need for a policy on science and technology in Mexico. Such a policy should not base the country's scientific and technological development upon the never-ceasing imitation of the research lines and technological solutions of the advanced countries. It is necessary for us to look for our own model of scientific and technological development.

The Amazon was, until recently, one of those distant and unknown regions that excited the imagination but was largely irrelevant to the daily lives of scholars, policymakers, and the majority of Latin Americans. This is no longer the case. Developmentalists and disenfranchised people alike look to it as a vast resource area capable of yielding mineral, forestal, animal, and agrarian riches. Ecologists warn against the potential devastation of an environment that is still poorly understood. Agronomists are challenged by the variability encountered at every turn and the diverse responses of crops to standard management practices. Anthropologists and sociologists decry the lack of a social consciousness in the development of the Amazon and try to assess the human costs of this development paid by native and peasant populations. Many other specialists also have found the Amazon an important natural laboratory for their research skills. Yet much of this research remains inaccessible in specialized disciplinary or regional journals and unrelated to the central problems that are, fundamentally, multidisciplinary.

Historians have long complained that research on the regional and local impact of the Mexican Revolution has been eclipsed by macro-level analysis of national politics, including studies of formal institutions (the army, the Church, political parties) and biographies of “great men.” Very few of the global studies of the Revolution published in English have paid more than token attention to its regional complexity. It is ironic, for example, that until recently the most detailed, if idiosyncratic, treatment of regional politics in the 1920s was provided by Ernest Gruening's Mexico and Its Heritage (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1928). Its devastatingly drawn picture of violence at the local level was richly documented from official archives opened to the author by the Calles government in an effort to discredit its enemies. More recently, Jean Meyer's study of the period 1910–40 has provided historians with an analysis that offers both a general characterization of the revolutionary process and a narrative that is informed throughout by a keen appreciation of the Revolution's regional and local variations. Another particular merit of this and other work by Meyer is its iconoclastic vigor and insistence on viewing the Revolution as an event that deepened Mexico's dependence upon international capitalism, providing revolutionary leaders with abundant opportunities for personal enrichment.

No one with even a passing acquaintance with the literature on Mexican society, not to mention the rest of Spanish America, can fail to be impressed by the frequent use of the term mestizo. Despite its ubiquity in the writings of social scientists, however, the concept of the mestizo is customarily employed in a vague fashion and usually left undefined. This is especially evident in the work of anthropologists, who for many years have been preoccupied with defining the Mexican Indian but have rarely focused their analytical powers on the mestizo. The term itself has been used rather loosely to refer to a certain group of people who presumably comprise a majority of the Mexican population, a cultural pattern shared by these people and other Latin Americans, and even a personality type.

On October 14, 1967, the Consejo Latinoamerican de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO), which includes about forty of the most important social science research institutions in Latin America, was constituted in the city of Bogotá, Colombia.

The regulations of the Council provide for the creation of Working Committees devoted to specific tasks in the common interest of member institutions and of social science research in Latin America. Among the first Working Committees to be created was one devoted to the creation, development and modernization of SocialScienceData Archives in the area.