This article will focus on the interactions between the Venezuelan government and FEDECAMARAS, the umbrella organization of most Venezuelan private-sector groups, while a strategic policy was being formulated and implemented that FEDECAMARAS regarded as seriously detrimental to the interests of the Venezuelan private sector. This policy was developed after the official devaluation of the Venezuelan bolívar on 18 February 1983 and consisted of two stages: first, the government refused to supply foreign currency at the rate of 4.3 bolívares to the dollar, the predevaluation rate (PDR), for any foreign debts contracted by private enterprises prior to 18 February, a decision that forced many debtor companies to obtain foreign currency at the floating rate. This rate increased from approximately 8 bolívares to the dollar in March 1983 to some 25 to the dollar in late 1986. Second, the government imposed a price freeze and then price controls. This policy, which was simultaneously regulatory and redistributive, was vehemently opposed by FEDECAMARAS. Yet the results of the organization's efforts indicate that its actual influence has been overstated.

Writing of nineteenth-century Peru, historian Jorge Basadre observed, “To discuss the commercial life of the country is to discuss the role of the foreigner.” Historian Francisco Calderón similarly stated that during the late nineteenth century, “it may be affirmed that various foreign houses with great capital generally dominated Mexican overseas commerce.” A visitor to nineteenth-century Brazil remarked of Rio de Janeiro's foreign trading houses, “these large firms are the main prop of Brazilian commerce; almost every shopkeeper in the country is, more or less directly, dependent on them.” Nor were Peru, Mexico, and Brazil atypical. In almost every Latin American nation, foreigners dominated international trade during the nineteenth century. As the above authorities imply, this domination was not only economic but numerical: the majority of overseas traders in most Latin American nations were aliens (only Colombia constituted a clear-cut exception). Foreign numerical domination among overseas traders may have had a profound effect on Latin American development.

Fiscal history has become one of the most active new fields of research on colonial Spanish America. This trend has resulted from a number of recent breakthroughs, most notably the reconstruction of colonial treasury records and the appearance of the first revisionist studies based on the new data. These works are challenging traditional views, particularly the general understanding of the colonial economic experience and the evolution of imperial ties. Indeed, the fiscal series now being made available, if properly supported by qualitative research and regional studies, may affect seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiography as notably as the demographic works of the Berkeley school affected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiography.

Until now, discussions of theories of media and society or media and the state in the North American literature have been limited. The four theories of the press advanced by Fred Siebert, Wilbur Schramm, and Theodore Peterson cover the main approaches of Western liberal society, the libertarian and social responsibility models, and some aspects of the Eastern bloc in the “totalitarian” model. Under the heading of “authoritarian,” however, a number of very diverse systems are lumped together. One major variation seen in Brazil is the continued vitality of the corporatist model of state and society, which has distinct implications for the role of mass media. In particular, aspects of corporatism seem to be combining with aspects of democracy and mass mobilization politics in ways that shed light on the role of the media in constructing or undercutting ideological hegemony in the heterogeneous, class-divided societies of Latin America.