As practiced contemporaneously in most of Latin America, political democracy is more accurately elite governance, with many of the thornier authoritarian trappings cloaked behind an often transparent facade of “popular suffrage” and “parliamentary government.” Democracy, as a normative basis for the “good life,” is difficult to describe and conceptualize, especially when one assumes that the democratic prototype is to be discovered somewhere within that caldron of slippery political variables known as the Anglo-American model. I do not assume in this report that the nations of Latin America should be trying to move in the direction of the Anglo-American model (assuming we can describe, more or less generically, the constituent parts of that model). Nevertheless, I would be remiss in not stating the general outlines of what I understand political democracy to mean as related to the quinquennial survey of scholarly images to be reported herein.

To think of Nicolás Guillén is to be immediately reminded of two observations. The first by José Martí, who, quite aptly argued:

I Congreso Venezolano De Historia Caracas, Venezuela June 27-July 3, 1971

The first Venuezuelan history congress was held under the auspices of the Academia Nacional de Historia of Venezuela. The following works were presented:

J. Ignacio Rubio Mañé, México, Orangibación de las Instituciones del Virreinato de la Nueva España;

Mario Germán Romero, Colombia, El Cpildo de Caracas y la Iglesia;

Preservation of written testimony is essential to the writing of history. Yet, in Latin America, historical documents, though copiously produced, have been sadly neglected and too often destroyed. What remains, then, assumes inestimable value for all historians—humanists or social scientists—for only on its basis can this hemisphere's past be reconstructed. A knowledge of the exact location and condition of material is necessary for the formulation of a reasonable historical research project; it is obviously essential to the research itself.

Freedom of the press has long been considered a critical requirement for the maintenance of democratic government. Most previous writings on the position of the press around the world, however, have argued that restrictions on the press have become generally more numerous in recent years and, hence, press freedom levels have been declining over time. Merrill et al., in their survey of national press systems, note that “recent surveys and studies tend to indicate that in many ways freedom of the press is eroding slowly in a worldwide context. Press laws are proliferating, sanctions of many kinds are growing up to thwart the free workings of the press, and press councils and other groups are moving in to restrict activities of the press.” Survey articles on the state of the press in Africa and in Asia reach the same conclusion for those regions, and a recent report of the prestigious Inter-American Press Association argued that press freedom in the western hemisphere is under greater threat than ever before. Even in some advanced western nations the press has come under attack by governmental officials, as is evident in the United States with both the Nixon administration's antipress activities as well as recent court rulings that limit press coverage of legal proceedings and the secrecy of newsmen's sources and working materials.

Despite calls to improve and systematize research on political participation in Latin America more than a decade ago (Kling 1964, Flores Olea 1967), the burgeoning literature on the subject has yet to achieve full recognition. Thus certain contradictory and incomplete traditional images still linger in the scholarly literature (Booth and Seligson 1978a). These treatments vary dramatically and almost bewilderingly: while one suggests that Latin Americans are becoming increasingly politically mobilized, two others hold that mass participation is very low and that most political activity is restricted to socioeconomic elites. Other images portray mass political participation as irrational and dwell upon political violence. Such familiar notions have often intertwined. For example, a common picture depicts most Latin Americans, and especially peasants, as politically passive and quiescent until provoked, when they may burst violently into the political arena (for example, see Forman 1971, Singelmann 1975, Handelman 1975b, Moreno 1970). Similarly Wiarda (1974, pp. 4–5) discusses how the image of mobilization often combines with that of violence, producing the notion that the rising political awareness and participation of Latin Americans leads inexorably to ever greater levels of conflict (e.g., Schmitt and Burks 1963, Hadley 1958, Petras and Zeitlin 1968, Petras 1968).

In Brazil, as in Spanish America, poor public libraries and rich private libraries are mutually reinforcing phenomena. The researcher who must rely on public institutions usually spends much of his or her available time scurrying from one library to another in (often fruitless) search of materials. To the extent that one needs theoretical works and foreign publications, rather than works about, and published in, Brazil, the chore becomes more onerous.

As the title indicates, this review of research in latin america covers a wide variety of topics. It can, however, be subdivided into three main divisions : (a) counseling, guidance, and student personnel work, (b) research dealing with disabled and/or handicapped persons, and (c) studies dealing with cultural-attitudinal-value influences within Latin American education as they affect counseling and guidance and special education-rehabilitation.

La violencia in Colombia, from 1946 to 1965, the largest armed conflict in the western hemisphere since the Mexican Revolution, was one of the world's most extensive and complex internal wars of this century. The study of the violencia strains at the limits of all the social sciences.

Recent years have witnessed a massive resurgence of interest in the question of socially determined sex roles. Investigators, both rigorous and popular-essayistic, have inquired into the ways in which society regulates which attitudes and behaviors are appropriate to men and which to women. There have been widespread expressions of dissatisfaction with the excessive constraints inherent in the traditional female role, along with numerous proposals for affording women greater freedom. The consideration of this set of related issues might most accurately be described as the critical questioning of sex roles, but it is generally referred to as feminism.

The thirty-four-year reign of President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) is generally acknowledged to have been the period of Mexico's great economic transformation. In reality, Mexico was unable to avoid the accelerated change that overtook it during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as proliferating patterns of trade, which accompanied the burgeoning industrial development of the United States and Western Europe, tied Mexico ever more closely to the global economy. An international economic division of labor was negotiated between foreign industrialists and entrepreneurs—who urgently needed primary products, markets for goods, and opportunities for investment, and national and regional elites—who welcomed infrastructural improvements, modern machinery, an array of consumer goods, and the increasing availability of foreign capital.