In the past decade or so the international relations of Latin America—for many years the subject of legalistic, institutional, polemical, or purely descriptive analyses—has been investigated on a much more sophisticated basis. Dependencia has emerged as a major organizing concept in much of the literature, and “bureaucratic politics” has provided a focus for some of the work emanating from North American scholars on U.S. Latin American policies. There are a number of other frameworks as well. Welcome as the wealth of new studies is, they nevertheless present us for the first time with a problem of assessing the utility of various theoretical approaches or at least with the challenge of relating them to one another in a meaningful fashion.

A crucial feature of political life in twentieth-century Brazil has been the growing role of the state as the central regulator of social, economic, and political life. One aspect of the expansion of the public sector in Brazil, as elsewhere, has been the accumulation by the state of a number of important social and economic functions previously exercised outside the public domain. One important function adopted by the state in Brazil is that of social protection, in the form of an elaborate and complex social insurance system. Presently some form of social protection reaches almost the entire rural population and some 78 percent of the urban population. The main social protection organization—Instituto Nacional da Previdência Social (INPS)— boasts the second largest budget in the nation (in 1975 CR $43 billion in contrast to the federal budget of Cr $113 billion) and a bureaucracy of over 102,700 employees.

The human rights proclaimed and affirmed in the various international declarations, conventions, and covenants adopted since World War II fall into two broad categories: civil and political; and economic, social, and cultural. The former includes the traditional rights of man, such as the rights to life and liberty; the latter includes such rights as the right to work, to social security, and to the preservation of one's health and well-being.

International agreement in principle on most civil and political rights as human rights has been relatively easy to achieve; disagreement has occurred—and is likely to continue to occur-primarily over their precise meaning. Virtually everyone endorses, for example, a right to life; not everyone agrees, however, that capital punishment or abortion must therefore be prohibited by law.

The activities of the Liberal Union group in the election year of 1892, along with the subsequent appointment that next year of José Ives Limantour as Secretary of Treasury, marked the beginning of the rise of an influential clique of technocrats within the bureaucracy of Don Porfirio Díaz. In addition to Limantour, this group included, among others, Francisco Buhes, Justo Sierra, Rosendo Pineda, Pablo Macedo, and Miguel Macedo. The name the critics used to describe this clique was that of the “scientists” or the Científicos. This name was selected, among other reasons, to express the belief of the opposition that the members of the Científico group were imbued with the scientific and positivistic doctrines of the French philosopher and architect of positivism, Auguste Comte. With the coming of the Científicos to power the course of antipositivism was redirected, given an additional emphasis, and expanded to meet the needs of liberal and clerical critics of the regime.

In a setting as complex as the modern city we can expect that a number of diverse factors wil combine to influence the urban environment and the quality of life and well being of those who reside in it. In the major cities of the developing world, where change is typically rapid, economic and social relationships are diverse, and the patterns of development are often different and in some ways more complex than those of the cities of industrialized nations, and the forces which shape the character of urban life are particularly numerous and often confusing.

The present paper examines a single component of the total environment of the Latin American city of Bogotá, Colombia: the low-income housing market. We begin by looking at some of the more important environmental, socioeconomic, and political factors that have shaped the character of the low-income housing market of the city, with an emphasis on the impact of public policy.