This note reports on research in Latin America and the Caribbean concerning international relations and foreign policy. It lists persons in the region who are working on these subjects, comments on changing priorities in research by Latin Americans, broadly evaluates the quality of their research, considers the institutional loci and contexts for Latin American work in this field, and discusses the relevance of work in Latin America and the Caribbean to scholars in the United States and other Northern countries, and to those in developing countries beyond Latin America. The report draws on a considerable number of books, journal articles, and unpublished memoranda made available by colleagues, on correspondence with a number of Latin American social scientists, and on several interviews. These notes are surely not complete, and inadvertent inaccuracies may be included, but this version is presented with the hope that it will be helpful to others in its present form and that it may stimulate the submission to LARR of additional pertinent material.

One of the Reasons Given for the Neglect of the Spanish Era in Mississippi history has been the concentration of historians and writers on the Civil War which has overshadowed everything else. To that conclusion should be added a second consideration. The attention of a large number of graduate students has been centered on those four horsemen (one horsewoman) of Mississippi literature, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, James Street and Eudora Welty. A brief examination suggests that there have been more graduate studies written on these authors in the last thirty years than on any single topic of Mississippi history, the Civil War notwithstanding. The number of theses and dissertations on Faulkner alone would make an impressive bibliography. Without any visible decrease in the devotion shown Faulkner and his literary companions, the decade of the 1960s may be considered the renaissance for the study of Spanish Mississippi. Not that there have been any large number of people working in that period; but, because a few dedicated scholars of the younger generation, notably Jack D. L. Holmes, have worked energetically and productively on the years of the Spanish domination. The renewed interest in that fascinating age stimulated by Holmes and others is responsible for this survey which attempts to assess the state of historical and other scholarly studies for Spanish Mississippi. But what specific geographic area does this term embrace?

Geopolitics as an approach to politico-military matters was of considerable significance up to the end of World War II, when it declined in respectability and prestige due to its association with Nazi theories of world conquest. As a result, very few strategic or military writings in the United States or Western Europe since World War II have been called “geopolitical,” even though they might include many of the concepts subsumed under the pre-1945 term. But, interestingly enough, the concept is alive and well in Latin America, especially in those Southern Cone countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile) where the most prolific thinking and writing on geopolitics has taken place in the last thirty years.

The study of politics in british universities has traditionally been historical in approach and parochial in scope. It is only recently that the teaching and research interests of british political scientists have spread beyond the Anglo-European parliamentary tradition to the more ‘exotic’ areas of what is inaccurately called the ‘third world’. In the first half of this century the observation and analysis of political activity in the non-European parts of the world were the unchallenged concerns of travellers, diplomats, and journalists; and their writings found few serious readers in the universities. Their work was regarded, and often conceived, as a species of adventurers' tales describing quaint but essentially pre-political societies.

Agrarian studies in Peru experienced an unusual development in the seventies, when a new generation of scholars emerged whose impact has been considerable. The advances made are the result of their collective contribution. One consequence of recent research has been the displacement of a traditional view consisting of a schematic paradigm of the Peruvian countryside that long dominated the thought of social scientists and laymen. Its origins can be traced to the portrayals by Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre of Peruvian society of the twenties, which at the time were fresh and meaningful. The paradigm can be recognized in works such as Roel (1961) or CIDA (1966) that, despite their merits, failed to place sufficient emphasis upon the new trends that emerged in Peruvian agriculture following the Second World War. The structuralism of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and the reformist agrarian thought of the fifties and sixties reinforced this accepted interpretation that was transformed into an increasingly ideologized vision of reality.

Present conditions in the international energy market and the problems they pose for Latin America hardly need emphasis, especially the uncertainty with respect to the availability and price of specific forms like oil. These concerns are, of course, aggravated by the need to respond to the short-term severe dislocations in the energy market, while at the same time taking coherent steps toward long-term solutions of national energy problems. Indeed, how should oil importing countries offset price increases, which exacerbate national deficits and debt service; deal with inflation, which raises the cost of developing indigenous resources; and successfully increase exports, when a number of other countries around the world are pursuing similar export expansion policies? While in broad terms the international energy market imposes a set of constraints upon all Latin America, there is a wide variety of responses among the countries themselves. The oil importing countries (Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Brazil) face a set of problems different from that of more-or-less self sufficient nations (Argentina, Colombia), which is in turn quite different from the major oil exporter (Venezuela). The needs of each country are, therefore, a combination of the international context and the specific situation within a country, and this is reflected in the nature of their energy planning and policy institutions.

This study concerns the structure of power in Brazil during the early seventies, when economic growth, and political repression, were at their height. The objective is not to discover the power structure, as if there were serious doubt about its existence or even much mystery about its composition. For all the curiosity value of first-hand information about elites in a virtually closed political setting, there is a danger of confirming what is already known about the workings of authoritarian rule. The point of departure here is that “what everybody knows” about the Brazilian power structure is not so much wrong as it is limited and in some ways misleading. In order to understand this, it is first necessary to outline the common ground among scholars regarding interelite relations in Brazil and then to suggest how this view might be modified.