As in the case of Mark Twain, the reports of the death of the Organization of American States (OAS) are greatly exaggerated. Certainly it is not operating at peak performance. However, neither is it the moribund institution that the mass media would have us believe—although some recent reports of the General Assembly meeting in Santiago have given us glimmerings of hope for a rebirth. It is the purpose of this report to investigate the status of one of the major aspects of the contemporary OAS reform efforts—the peaceful settlement of disputes within the organization's structure. The indefinite postponement of this particular issue cannot belie the fact—amply demonstrated in the debates of the Special Committee to Study the Inter-American System and Propose Measures for Restructuring It, the Conference of Plenipotentiaries to Amend the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, and the Permanent Council—that the resolution of disputes is of fundamental importance to the nations of the hemisphere and that there is some degree of relative satisfaction over past OAS performance in that area. It would thus be appropriate for students of inter-American relations to take a greater scholarly interest in the OAS than is now the case.

Social scientists generally present the conclusions of their studies without describing how their ideas may have changed in the course of doing research. They also rarely discuss the impact they have on the persons they study or the ethical problems of research. I will address both of these issues, focusing on my experiences doing research on Mexican urban poor. In addition, I will describe how and why my conceptual framework changed during the study and raise some general questions about the relationship between theory and methods and the types of moral dilemmas faced by researchers, who often are neither value-free nor politically neutral.

If an observer from outer space had landed his UFO at any meeting of Latin Americanists during the last few years, he would have had to agree with the structural anthropologists. He would have said that at these meetings, versions of the same myth are constantly repeated: dependency and development, exploitation and wealth, backwardness and sophisticated technology, unemployment and extreme concentration of income. Somewhat wearily, our creature from space would have commented: “The brains of these beings appear to limit their images and thoughts to binary opposites.” Returning to the debate on the meaning of analyses of dependency gives one the sensation of entering a discussion in which imagination is bound by preestablished models. Nevertheless, as though I were one of the “founding fathers” of dependency, I endorse the ceremonial consumption of the theme. How to escape from this uncomfortable position?

Carlos Fuentes's preoccupation with history is best expressed in Terra nostra (1975). This novel constitutes a rewriting of Western history from the Roman Empire to the end of the twentieth century for the purpose of tracing the historical and ideological bases of contemporary Latin America. In this work, Fuentes proposes to identify the origin of Latin American structures within the historical and ideological configuration of Hapsburg Spain. To this end, his novel portrays an all-encompassing vision of the conquest and the founding of the New World that situates the reader at the crossroads of Hispanic history. Such a goal simultaneously requires an interpretation of the sociopolitical and conceptual history of the West and an evaluation of the premises that gave rise to the Modern Age.

A vital interest in the affairs of Latin America has grown recently in Australia. There, in that land “in back of the beyond,” professors are offering new programs of Latin American studies while their librarian counterparts have strengthened their holdings through active participation in the Latin American cooperative acquisition program (LACAP) and in the seminars on the acquisition of Latin American library materials (SALALM). The move of claudio Véliz from the universidad de chile to the chair of the department of sociology, La Trobe University (Bundoora, Victoria), will stimulate further the development of Latin American studies in the antipodes, while the resurgence of trans-pacific sailings during the past decade is attracting the interest of the Australians to the nations across the Pacific. It is worth noting that last year Professor Gilbert Butland of the University of New England, Armidale (New South Wales) published a general study entitled The other side of the Pacific: Problems of Latin America (Sydney, 1972).

Some men become symbols of an intellectual epoch, partly because they helped to create it and partly because they integrated and expressed so powerfully the themes that others of their time were emphasizing. Gino Germani was the outstanding symbol of the emergence of empirical sociology in Latin America in the two decades following World War II.

The employment growth rate during the last decade is one of the economic topics that has stimulated great attention in recent years. The absence of data that may be used for national level comparisons, however, has led to a number of inexact statements and positions on the problem. The purpose of this study is to fill in this informational vacuum in order to ascertain the data relevant to changes in employment in Chile for the period 1974–78.