“Statistics are the poetry of Latin America” was Frank Tannenbaum's discreet version of “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” This is a widespread enough view, even now, when numbers are fashionable, and a fair number of my colleagues suggest any series will do to illustrate their well-conceived articles. A few skeptics refuse to go in for misplaced fashion. A Mexican economist, working in the statistics in the boondocks, said he was told to apply a correction coefficient to his numbers, to make them consistent with his boss's earlier reports. He quit, and became an essayist. An Argentine economist said that when his division head wanted to show growth, the investigators were sent to big firms; slumps were reported by surveying the output of small firms.

Few events in Latin America have attracted so many journalists as Pope John Paul's visit to Mexico in January 1979. Few have been so poorly reported.

The contradiction is a reflection of coverage of Latin America in general: of the more than one thousand reporters present in Mexico, only a handful, mostly from the Catholic press, had a background in both religious affairs and Latin America. The vast majority did not speak Spanish, knew nothing about Latin America's Catholic Church, and had only a rudimentary understanding of Vatican affairs, which are Byzantinely complex even for the initiated; “color,” therefore, substituted for in-depth reporting. But then journalists are not the only ones ignorant of the Latin American Church. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned intelligence representatives on the National Security Council about Catholic leaders in Latin America, in regard to the United States' “unpreparedness” for the religious upheaval in Iran, they reportedly could not name a single one.

Durante el mes de septiembre de 1976, se visitaron diferentes personas e instituciones que en forma directa o indirecta realizan o están en disponibilidad de realizar, programas de investigación o acción en relación con la mujer. De estas visitas se presenta a continuación una lista por países con el nombre de la persona, la institución a que pertenece, la actividad que realiza o está en capacidad de realizar, y su dirección. Esta lista de ninguna manera es exhaustiva y representa sólo los contactos obtenidos en un corto viaje.

There Have Been Few Scholarly Comparisons of Latin America With other areas of the Third World. As a contribution to such comparative study, the University of California Colloquium attempted to examine links between Brazil and Portugal's African territories of Angola, Guinea and the Cape Verdes, and Mozambique. The objectives were to overlap the traditional area boundaries that separate specialists of Latin America and Africa, to focus on common themes from the perspective of varying social science disciplines, and to reassess and evaluate, first, a series of historical cases of crisis, protest, and resistance and, second, nationalist trends and events in relation to patterns of change and development. The specialized essays were to be analytical and exploratory, raising questions for possible future research.

Roberto González Echevarría's recent article in LARR, “The Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Dictatorship: Carpentier, García Márquez and Roa Bastos,” though elegantly written and full of ideas, seems to me to have confused almost every issue it raises and to have evaded other equally important issues rather than confront them. The persistent, largely unspoken promise of his text is that it will illuminate both history and literature by separating and contrasting them, whereas in fact it surrenders completely to the latest version of the literary critic's traditional means of escape. Where previously it used to be said that history was the realm of mundane reality and literature the realm of the imagination, critics now tell us that the twentieth century has proved that all reality is fictive and that the borders between reality and what used to be called fiction are impossible to draw, all men's actions and reactions forming and being formed from a seamless web of invisibly structured discourse. This is evidently RGE's view, and the influence of French structuralism is apparent in his text.