In recent studies by historians and political scientists there has been increasing attention paid to the question of executive impact on the budgetary process in Latin America. Wilkie's prize-winning research into the broad outlines of budgetary discretion in Revolutionary Mexico has both stimulated controversy and redoubled efforts to employ budgetary data productively in assessing the impact of who governs upon how people are governed.

Land reform as a subject of investigation in latin america post-dates its appearance as a political measure, and although its appearance as a plank in programs of liberal and leftist parties and movements has been in vogue since the Twenties, few serious studies that can be properly referred to as land reform investigation took place until the Thirties. Many of the early studies that may be cited as pioneer works in this field are fact-finding land use studies by the geographers (e.g., McBride in Bolivia and Chile), and some early rural sociological studies in the same vein (e.g., Carl Taylor in Argentina and the Consejo de Bienestar Rural study on the Venezuelan Andes). In many cases these types of studies have continued into the past decade (DeYoung in Haiti, Ford in Peru, and Fals Borda in Colombia). The wave of anthropological community studies (mostly rural) were microcosmic, pioneer type research on land tenure. There were few agricultural censuses upon which any sort of nationwide study would need to have been based and in general the basic reference material for land reform until 1950 was most spotty and conjectural.

Un pensamiento social militante, coherente y capaz de organizar y sistematizar teóricamente una concepción totalizadora de la cultura de la sociedad ecuatoriana, aún no emerge en el Ecuador. Nuestro país es uno de los pocos en América Latina que aún no ha visto surgir ese tipo de pensamiento, posibilitado históricamente en otros y que parece estar todavía en un proceso de gestación, a madurar en un futuro impredecible. La trayectoria histórica de nuestra estructura social global y la no insurgencia aún de un poderoso movimiento revolucionario de la clase obrera parecerían explicar este desarrollo acortado. En ausencia de una cultura revolucionaria, en el sentido estricto: que no carezca de una teoría total de si misma, es empero posible y necesario una práctica avanzada dentro de la cultura. La lucha por construír y/o fortalecer las corrientes críticas en las Ciencias Sociales a lo interno de nuestras universidades, es una forma de esta lucha. Y es en esa perspectiva que los esfuerzos realizados en estos dos años desde la Dirección de la Escuela de Sociología, para construir lo que se ha construido y fortalecer lo positivo que existía, se han inscrito. Las prioridades para haber hecho efectiva la inscripción de esta política académica en esa perspectiva han sido contínuas a lo largo de este bienio: posibilitar el desafío y la crítica seria al pensamiento seudo-científico de la sociología burguesa; crear condiciones, espirituales y materiales, para el desarrollo de posturas avanzadas en el pensamiento; desarrollar mecanismos de discusión y difusión de ese pensamiento avanzado para posibilitar su mayor influencia en el terreno de la cultura; y abrir alternativas académicas críticas para nuestro estudiantes de Ciencias Sociales.

This essay will focus on Brazil as a Portuguese possession between 1500 and 1800, with all of the problems that Brazil posed for Portugal and Portugal for Brazil within the framework of that larger unity known as the Portuguese Empire. In order to understand historiographical developments during the last ten years, they must be viewed in light of the general development of the science of history. Since 1960 the number of university students has increased considerably, particularly in Latin America and in Europe, and more specifically in Brazil and France. The number of history students has also increased, although the demand for historians has diminished considerably in the last four or five years. Moreover, students in Europe and Brazil tend to continue into doctoral or pos-graduação programs while in the United States, the number of Ph.D. recipients has also increased for reasons that are not strictly demographic. An expected consequence would be an impressive number of dissertations and theses being defended in universities and, perhaps to a lesser degree, actually published. Such a result has been prevented in the field of the history of colonial Brazil, however, by the fact that the current generation is much more interested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than in earlier periods. The advantage of this situation is that as long as the production on the colonial age neither decreases nor increases excessively, it remains quality work and, barring exceptions, is not too affected by the pseudo-marxist language that is extremely popular among certain Brazilian intellectuals. It remains a harmonious blend of genuine scholarship in what might be called the traditional style, and of more innovating accounts inspired by the Annales school that draw on the conceptual approaches and the quantitative concerns of other social sciences. The economic and political concerns are equally represented therein, leaving aside cultural history, which falls outside the field under discussion here.

The dependency theory, under assault from Right and Left, is scarcely sustainable. Impatience with Prebisch's panacea, import-substitution industrialization, gave birth to dependency. A new bogeyman, the multinational corporation, now preoccupies the scholar and polemicist. Paradigms of Corporatism and Structuration supply the ongoing situation for further refinements in Confusionism. But this is the language of economics and political science. Students of chrono-politics (history) may still wish to inquire whether the historical evidence on which the dependency theory was based is more enduring than its currency in modern social science. The issues are very much alive. It was scarcely reassuring to be told, quite recently, that “radical writers on dependency are engaged in much productive and inventive research.”

In recent years, considerable scholarly and popular attention has been extended to the Jewish populations of regions beyond those traditionally discussed—the United States, Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. Particular attempts have been made to record and analyze the experience of Jews residing in Latin America. The dramatic deterioration in the situation of the Argentine Jewish community over the past five years has given special visibility to this group, both because of widespread concern over the human rights issues involved and because of the appearance of Jewish-Argentine exiles in the United States and other areas heavily covered by the media. The difficulties experienced by Jewish citizens of Latin American countries certainly are deserving of attention, but one would hope that the interest aroused by these circumstances would lead to a more general curiosity about the many aspects of Jewish culture in this region.