Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's now-classic analysis of Latin American dependent development is perhaps the most important synthesis of the shifting alliances between classes and interest groups that have been cause and consequence of nation-building, state formation, and capital accumulation in Latin America. The book is admirable in many ways, but especially in the scale of its focus across time and space. Rather than telling us every detail of a particular country or period it uses an analytical perspective based on class analysis to compare “situations of dependency” across Latin America from the period of decolonization in the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. I am not a Latin Americanist and so I cannot evaluate the many interpretations of political events in the book. Rather my comments will focus on its theoretical implications, its special strengths, and its possible limitations from the point of view of the capitalist world system as a whole.

The history group of CIESU was formed by Juan Rial Roade, Angel M. Cocchi, and Jaime Klaczko, graduates of the History Section of the Instituto José Artigas, the only institution at the university level devoted to teacher training in Uruguay. They are doing research in urban and demographic history, an area of Uruguayan historiography that has not been much studied by social scientists.

The recent burgeoning of interest in agrarian reform throughout Latin American countries (Schaedel, 1965; Smith, 1965) has been accompanied by unprecedented attention on the part of social scientists in Latin America and elsewhere in what is called colonization. This is largely because what often is designated as official colonization (or projects to establish on the land groups of families headed by the operators of small or medium-sized farms) is one of the major measures used in attempts to achieve agrarian reform, and also because what frequently is referred to as spontaneous colonization (or the process by which settlers established new farmsteads for themselves on portions of the public domain) is another. In this article attention is concentrated upon the books, monographs, and articles dealing with colonization and settlement, and particularly those that have been put into circulation during the last decade.

An increasing amount of research has been undertaken in the last decade on the power structure of the Empire of Brazil (1822–89). In common with similar work on the rest of Latin America, many of the studies on Brazil have adopted the concept of the elite for their theoretical framework. And, as elite studies must do if they are to be more than speculative, several of the works have drawn on prosopography, or collective biography, to support the interpretations of the power structure that they advance. If the results have not, in general, been entirely satisfactory, this is largely due to the limitations in the prosopographical materials used. Since the materials have not easily lent themselves to a proper quantitative approach, they have been used selectively in the form of examples, the validity and relevance of which must always be suspect.

As you know, we have an institution called the sexenio when everything changes.

And we're here now for six years. You know how we all come in and get thrown out at the sexenio.

If someone has a chief who is capable and has the prospects for a good future, then that person will probably think, “Perhaps I can go with him at the sexenio”; and it happens in reverse, too, if someone has a chief who is not particularly capable but who has influential friends, some will want to follow him. There are a lot of changes and it affects our program, especially when people stop working to pursue their futures.

There has been a great deal of interest recently in problems of computation in developing countries. The Jerusalem Conference on Information Technology held in Israel in 1971 (see Bibliography Key, Jerusalem) was dedicated wholly to the topic, and since then the Rio Symposium on Computer Education for Developing Countries (see Rio), and the IBI-ICC Conference on Informatics in Government (see Florence), both held in 1972, have dealt directly with these problems. Latin America has been intent on benefiting from the application of computer technology to development, but the advent of the technology has not always met with the success that was expected. However, the lack of policy that brought about the random introduction of computers into a country, often sacrificing other equipment or services also critical to its development, is now giving way to more rational procedures. A number of countries (Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico) are presently engaged in detailed studies of their systems and those of other developing nations in order to learn from their experiences. This article is an attempt to aid that research effort by providing an annotated bibliography and other sources of information on computation in the region.

The silver anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies (RMCLAS) provides a good opportunity for an assessment of that organization. Much of the following analysis focuses upon annual meetings since they are the major activity of the organizational membership. Programs and minutes of past meetings as well as organizational newsletters and correspondence were examined for patterns in the areas of program participation (numbers, institutional affiliation, academic discipline, and sex of participants), topics favored (as concerns discipline and theme), the general political orientation of the organization, openness to participation from the outside, and organizational publications; an attempt is also made to provide some appreciation for the subjective side of the organization's life.