Protestantism has grown strikingly throughout Latin America in the last two decades. Estimating such growth is hazardous in the absence of firm national survey data, but the phenomenon is clearly embracing sizable segments of national populations. In Guatemala, estimates of Protestants in the national population ranged from 20 to 25 percent by the early 1980s, with more recent estimates approaching 30 percent.

In his acclaimed synthesis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Alan Knight observed that “the social bandit's career in Academe has somewhat paralleled his life under the greenwood tree. Introduced by Professor Hobsbawm, he was initially welcomed, even feted, and he put in many appearances in academic company; but then (inevitably, after such uncritical acceptance) some academics grew leery, and the recent trend-especially among experts—has been to qualify, de-emphasise and even deny his role.”

On 10 October 1988, President Miguel de la Madrid authorized loading of the first of two reactor units at the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant, on the Mexican gulf coast above the port of Veracruz. De la Madrid's decision to move ahead with Laguna Verde, Mexico's first foray into commercial nuclear energy production, came as no surprise. What was extraordinary was that it proved to be one of the most controversial policy actions of his sexenio. Culminating twenty years of planning and development, the Laguna Verde project, which had been emblematic of Mexico's technical progress and promise at its outset, had turned into a political albatross.

The past fifteen years in Peru have seen dramatic changes in the role of the public sector in the accumulation and distribution of capital. Increasing structural pressures on the economy, combined with growing disillusionment over the distributional results of the prevailing economic liberalism, set the stage for a nationalist military coup in 1968. With the advent of General Juan Velasco Alvarado and his Gobierno Revolucionario de las Fuerzas Armadas, the public sector shifted from its previous ancillary position of facilitating private investment to emerge as the prime generator of economic growth.

Over the past two decades, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the University of Alabama, the University of Texas at Arlington, and the Universidad de Yucatán have produced microfilm copies of primary source materials in the Yucatán. While their films only begin to tap the rich documentary resources of the peninsula, the combined holdings put a large corpus of materials for reconstructing the Yucatecan past within the reach of scholars in the United States. This brief essay will describe the four microfilm collections as they existed in the fall of 1984 as well as the finding aids that have been developed to assist researchers in accessing them.

The Mexican government recently proposed as a medium-term objective that the minimum rate of economic growth should be twice the rate of population growth (Mexico, Presidencia de la República 1988). This proposal may indicate a renewed interest in Mexico in linking demographic variables to the economic and development issues of the country. In proposing such a target, the Mexican government seems to be suggesting that its long-term development plans will hinge on criteria that depart radically from those recently used to assess the performance of these plans. The proposal seems particularly revealing because it came from President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who is an economist himself.

The distinctive blend of authoritarian and technocratic rule in Brazil since 1964 has been well explored in its implications for industrial policy, but the consequences of two decades of military rule for agriculture are only now being studied. This article will analyze state policy in the single agricultural sector of sugar in light of major changes in sociopolitical and economic structures and in view of the particular relations between the state and civil society that have characterized Brazil after 1964. Although debate continues over the precise nature of these relations, it is widely held that the state played the dominant role in the policy process, subordinating elites, excluding popular classes from the decision-making arena, and incorporating international capital as a critical element in economic growth.