The political tensions surrounding economic stabilization in revolutionary Nicaragua between 1979 and 1988 will be examined in this article. A review of the Nicaraguan case reveals that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass “national unity” created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation. After 1981, access to external finance became more restrictive, the payoff horizon for investment projects began to lengthen, and destabilization intensified. Failure to assess these internal and external tensions realistically contributed to inflationary pressures and de facto shifts in income distribution, which at times undermined the consolidation of revolutionary hegemony and required reconsidering alliance strategies.

Since 1981 the Brazilian economic and political system has passed through a period of crisis and upheaval. The country's foreign debt has been at the center of its economic problems, and the debt crisis has defined many of the contours of the political crisis. This article will examine Brazil's accumulation of the Third World's largest foreign debt and the consequences of both the debt and the debt crisis for the Brazilian pattern of economic and political development. The article will focus on the role of economic interests, specifically the role of different sectors of the Brazilian business community, in the borrowing boom and bust.

This article will examine the efforts made by Argentina and Brazil to attain a measure of technological autonomy in the fields of computers and nuclear energy. Grieco's study of the Indian computer industry and separate studies of the Brazilian computer industry by Evans and Adler have shown the inadequacy of the arguments raised by the dependency literature, namely, that in areas of highly sophisticated technology, owned mainly by multinational corporations, the developing country will fail in any attempt to achieve domestic technological development.

The fight against ecological degradation “has become a generalized policy demand of the whole society,” declared Marcelo Javelly Girard, Mexico's Secretary of Urban Development and Ecology. Addressing the Mexican Cabinet and hundreds of dignitaries attending Mexico's Primera Reunión Nacional de Ecología in June of 1984, Javelly Girard thus placed environmental concerns on President Miguel de la Madrid's official policy agenda. Appropriately convened in Mexico City (the world's fifth-most-polluted city by the Mexican government's own reckoning), the congress climaxed two years of effort by the de la Madrid administration to promote public environmental awareness as part of its national development program.

Cocoliche, that curious dramatic character improvised under the circus tent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, is no longer a vital aspect of Argentine life today. Yet his caricatured presence over a period of fifty years proved critical in the creolization of Italians and natives as well as in the sociocultural redefinition of Argentina's “national character.” Creolization (the cultural redefinition negotiated by two or more diverse groups coming into contact—in this case, Italians and Argentines) yields a new ethic and aesthetic order wherein the presence of each group becomes integral to the national whole. As will be shown, Cocoliche became a key vehicle for this process of creolization.

Relations between China and Latin America date back hundreds of years and have intensified since the founding of the People's Republic of China. Recognizing that meaningful relations with Latin America require an understanding of that varied region, China has established appropriate study and research programs. This essay on current Latin American programs in the People's Republic of China will report on research organizations, research interests of Chinese scholars, and current trends within Latin American studies. The double objectives are to describe China's interest in Latin America and to establish closer contacts between Latin Americanists in China and the United States.