It requires a lot of temerity to analyze in a few pages such a great and complicated topic as “The Study of Latin American History Today,” especially if one is not Richard Morse. My only vantage point is a rather varied experience. A European historian, I am an autodidact in things Latin American. Since the late 1940s, I have visited and done some research in most of the countries of Latin America, and Spain. I have had the privilege of teaching Latin American history at five major United States universities during a total of five and a half years. At the present time I find myself once again in Europe. Thus I am familiar with the increased European interest in Latin American studies during recent years as well as with the various factors which still hamper us in our job. From the psychological point of view I have probably become a kind of mestizo, a Swedish-Latin-North American blend. Though at ease in any of three environments, I have the feeling of being to some extent an outsider even in the country of my birth. After this presentation-confession I shall first survey the current situation in broad terms. The second point will be to discuss the purpose of the study of Latin American history and finally, to recommend some norms of policy.

The Petras-Morley reply to my review is useful in bringing out the basic issues between us. I think they come down to two: one is on the nature of U.S. foreign policy in general, and the other is on the relation of U.S. policy to the 1973 coup in Chile. On the first point, Petras and Morley describe U.S. policy as that of “the imperial state” autonomously formulating a policy that is “largely the product of an integrated body of aggregate interests of the corporate world as a whole,” and in the Allende case involved “the combined and mutually reinforcing efforts” of the multinationals, the U.S. government, and the international banks. I see a variety of interests at work, including those of the corporations, which may and did differ among themselves; U.S. strategic or diplomatic interests, which may or may not coincide with those of the companies; bureaucratic interests within the U.S. government and the international financial institutions; and personal motivations and ideologies, which may make an important difference in the content and purpose of policy (as our limited experience with the Carter administration is already demonstrating). There is now full documentation of the divisions among the companies and within the U.S. government, and of the saliency of personal, ideological, and strategic motives in the decisions of Nixon and Kissinger. Indeed, the very quote from a U.S. government official that the authors cite with reference to ITT: “No country should sacrifice its overall relations or interests or other groups in the country for the sake of one interest group,” makes my point rather than that of Petras and Morley—not as Petras and Morley would have it, the need to subordinate ITT's interest to that of the corporate world as a whole, but the priority of considerations of the national interest over those of the multinationals.

In 1977 concern for the long-range effects of policy-making prompted President Carter to direct the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and the Department of State to study the “probable changes in the world's population, natural resources, and environment through the end of the century.” The projections of that commission, as detailed in The Global 2000 Report to the President (Barney et al. 1981), foresee a growth in the world's population of as much as 70 percent, combined with staggering increases in demand for the world's resources of water, minerals, soils, and forest products.

A central issue in the analysis of military regimes in Latin America is their policy impact. How successful are military governments in promoting economic development? How do their policies and performances compare with those of civilian governments? The sheer volume of research on the causes of military takeovers in Latin America implies that regime changes have important consequences. Yet to date we are far from having satisfactory answers to the questions posed above. As a recent study of public policy in Latin America noted, “If students of Latin American politics were to inventory verified propositions regarding the performance of Latin American regimes, the resulting list might not exceed zero” (Ames and Goff 1975, p. 175).

The state of minas gerais, atop the central brazilian plateau, has long cast a spell over people of adventurous spirit. For years it supplied the Portuguese empire with a seemingly endless supply of mineral wealth. In 1698, gold was discovered and the famous ‘century of gold’ was ushered in. The mines of Minas proved to be among the richest ever worked by man and they provided the base for the luxurious Mineiro society that flourished throughout the eighteenth century.

As in other European socialist countries, in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), research on Latin America has increased steadily since the 1960s. After the reopening in 1946 of the high schools and universities in what was then the Soviet Occupied Zone, research and teaching on problems of Latin America developed initially in a sporadic way according to the personal interests of scholars within various scientific disciplines. From the beginning, however, these efforts were founded upon the democratic and humanistic traditions of German research on Latin America. The scholars tried consciously to uphold the heritage of Alexander von Humboldt, above all his idea of mutual give-and-take and his sympathy for the fight for independence against the Spanish colonial regime.1 By eschewing nationalistic, racist, and eurocentrist biases, Latin American studies in the German Democratic Republic aim, in the von Humboldt tradition, to avoid patronizing the Latin American people.

Urban insurgency has been used with increasing frequency and effectiveness in many areas of the developed and less developed world during the past decade. In Latin America, this trend toward expanded urban guerrilla warfare has been most pronounced in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. In the three nations, revolutionary forces have rejected completely the concept of the primacy of guerrilla activities based in the countryside, a theory adapted to the Latin American environment by Cuba's Ernesto “Che” Guevara and French Marxist Régis Debray. Instead, attention has been focused on organizing and developing guerrilla and terrorist operations in such population centers as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Córdoba. (For a discussion of factors leading to the development of urban insurgency in Latin America see “The Urban Guerrilla in Latin America: A Select Bibliography,” LARR: 9: 1).

During the 1960s, social scientists optimistically predicated a significant role for Roman Catholicism in the promotion of social reform throughout Latin America. But political developments during the 1970s, notably in Chile and Brazil, implicitly challenged that view and the theoretical foundations on which it rested. Not surprisingly, one recent and knowledgeable reassessment of the Church's role contends that Catholicism—for reasons that went unaccentuated in earlier scholarship—is both institutionally and ideologically incapable of legitimating and implementing reforms basic to a new egalitarian order.

The Renaissance of Interest in Spanish Louisiana Over the Past Ten Years owes much to the acquisition of important document collections by such universities as Loyola in New Orleans, Northwestern of Louisiana, Tulane and Memphis State. Graduate students and scholars who lacked sufficient funds for research in Europe now find adequate materials in the United States.