The present-day boundaries of Guatemala and nearby areas, including the Yucatan, encompass the Maya, whose presence can be traced to 2,500 B.C. (Coe: 1966). The Maya have experienced a great part of general evolution, passing from the hunter and gatherer to agricultural/technological levels; they have organized as bands, tribes, and chiefdoms and now live within a modern nation state. Throughout this progression they have had to contend with forces in the natural environment and still continue to adapt to it with many of the techniques assumed to have been part of their cultural repertoire during the phase of sedentary village life in the area. The lack of settlement pattern studies in the Peten region has produced a situation in which the localized definition of tribal society is not yet complete (Sanders and Price: 1968), and until archaeology unearths the remnants and reflections of their struggle, we will be unable to do more than make broad assumptions about Mayan society and culture in the middle Formative period.

Spoken on the high Andean plains of Peru and Bolivia from Lake Titicaca to the salt flats south of Lake Poopó, and in northern Chile, Aymara is the most widespread member of the Jaqi language family whose sole other remnants, spoken in Yauyos, department of Lima, Peru, are the nearly extinct Kawki and the still vigorous Jaqaru. Aymara is estimated to have over a million and a half speakers in Bolivia, roughly 350,000 in Peru, and an unspecified number in Chile, bringing the total to nearly two million.

In analyzing the historical development of Meso- and Andean-American society, historians have stressed the hacienda's destructive impact on native settlements, which, once broken down, became disposed to the adoption of Spanish traits. This view focuses primarily on the hacendado's acquisition of Indian land and labor and the resultant destruction, partial or complete, of traditional Indian forms of cultivation, trade, and ultimately social relationships. To the extent that the hacendado forced communal Indians to resettle in newly opened lands, cultivate European crops, and engage in European trade, he encouraged the Indians to abandon their traditional rituals and adopt readily available Spanish patterns as replacements.

The past two decades have seen an enormous proliferation in writings on economic development, planning, and programming. Equipped with the aggregative tools of economic analysis acquired since the Thirties, economists have searched for methods and policy measures by which to further economic development. In many developing countries the government has assumed the responsibility of pursuing a deliberate, rational, and consistent economic policy in achieving the objectives of development, in accordance with established priorities, by direct and/or indirect interventions into the performance of the economy. With this expanded role of the public sector, the budget has come to acquire an important role as a policy instrument, since it reflects the qualitative and quantitative aspects of public policy, and puts into effect public policy measures influencing economic activity.

After more than a decade of experience, Venezuela's policy planning establishment has come to demand increasingly high levels of performance from its staffs in response to the increasing complexity of the planning tasks proposed. The need to plan for the effects of changing demographic characteristics and to cope with the widespread consequences for the dynamics of family patterns and social interaction that these changes imply, for example, has forced the development planner to search for new tools of analysis which will allow him to gauge accurately the impact of various policy alternatives.

The Central Working Document for the Latin American Bishops' Conference, which met in the summer of 1968, in the industrial city of Medellín, after the Eucharistic Congress in Bogotá, mentioned in its introduction neither pastoral nor theological questions. It began with a matter-of-fact analysis of Latin American reality, discussed the underdevelopment of the subcontinent in sociological terms, and demanded finally a commitment from the Church to the social problems of hunger and misery, which the document stated are the urgent questions upon whose solution the future of Latin America depends. Hesitation on the part of the Church to do its share in creating a more free, more just, and more humane society would be tantamount to being in the state of mortal sin.

Frederick P. Bowser has observed that: “Literature is perhaps as precise a way as any other to determine the attitudes held by racial groups toward each other, but for Spanish America very little systematic investigation has been done in this regard.” This field of investigation now is somewhat better off than the handful of items he mentioned would suggest. Most of this research has been carried out in the last ten years as an increasing number of scholars are realizing that blacks have participated integrally throughout the literary history of Spanish America, both as characters and as authors, and that unlimited possibilities exist for research on black themes in Spanish American literature in general and on Afro-Spanish American literary expression in particular.