As Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez strode to the dedication stand, confetti and rose petals filled the air; and upon raising the Mexican flag at the base of a 135-foot-high statue located in the middle of the Baja California desert, more than 5,000 peopled cheered, “Viva Mexico, viva la carretera” (the highway). The occasion of the recent dedication and praise was the completion of the first paved highway that effectively links northern and southern sections of Baja California. To North Americans who have been numbed by the dizzying pace of superhighway construction, this single, rather narrow, twolane highway may seem of scarce consequence. But for the inhabitants of the Baja California peninsula, one of the most desolate areas of land on this earth, the 1,061-mile highway heralds a new era. This paper intends to explore some of the economic and political consequences likely to evolve from the road's existence. More specifically, it examines the basic objectives Mexican officials bring to the highway, and posits the likelihood of the fulfillment of these objectives.

The use of “group” as a unit of analysis has a long tradition in political science. Some proponents of this approach (Bentley, 1908; Hagan, 1966) define group in such a broad way as to simplify the study of politics little if any. An empirically more useful approach to the study of groups is that pursued by David Truman (1955), who concentrates his attention on interest groups. Although he never states that all of the politics of the United States can be understood through the study of interest groups, it is clear that Truman considers the study of such groups to be a central aspect and, in effect, hypothesizes that such would be the case in any political system. Whether this is in fact the case can be tested by cross-national studies. In one such study, Joseph La Palombara (1960) concluded that the important aspects of Italian politics are not explained satisfactorily by studying organized interest groups. This is in direct contradiction to Truman's implicit hypothesis, which would be refuted if numerous studies in other political systems concluded as La Palombara's did.

One of the most curious phenomena ever to be recorded in the annals of Latin American church history was a peculiarly Brazilian institution known as the Catholic Electoral League. Lofty in its ideals but confused in their practice, disclaiming political party status yet directly involving the Church in every political campaign of the day, the League functioned between 1932 and 1937 as a political pressure group under the direct auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. It operated on a more national scale than the political parties themselves, which were still basically regional.

It is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the Colombian population now lives in cities of 100,000 or more. Although the pattern of urbanization in Colombia is more dispersed than in most Latin American countries, the proportion of the urban population living in the four largest cities has steadily increased. Over the last 13 year period, this rate of growth ranged between 4.4 and 7.0 percent (Agency for International Development, n.d.: 17). For example, Bogotá had a population in 1950 of approximately 500,000, but estimates indicate that by 1975 it will have a population of 3,605,000.

In 1943 a small group of ultra-nationalist Argentine army officers, including the youthful and ambitious Juan Domingo Perón, utilized its control of key Cabinet posts to achieve absolute dominance within the government of General Pedro Ramírez. Blatantly invoking fascist Germany as a model for national emulation, this clique launched an expansionist program aimed at creating an Argentine-dominated neutralist bloc in southern South America. The State Department, under the direction of Secretary Cordell Hull, responded to Argentine aggression by providing military aid to Argentina's neighbors, laying plans to impose stiff economic sanctions and threatening to publish intelligence data linking certain Argentine officials with Axis espionage and sabotage rings operating in South America. U.S. pressure produced immediate results: Ramírez broke with the pro-Axis, expansionist group within his administration and severed diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy, and their allies.

In the United States in recent years in almost every state there has been a strong move toward more centralized coordination and control of higher education, a movement growing out of the rapidly rising costs of higher education as well as, perhaps, some public disillusion with the universities. This move toward centralized control means, of course, a shift of power away from individual universities.

A group in the Institute of Higher Education at Berkeley (Glenny et al., 1971) strongly favors coordination of universities; Lewis Mayhew (1972) of Stanford predicts that many states will opt for centralized control rather than coordination. The long tradition in the United States of nonacademic control of individual universities through boards of trustees made up of business and professional people rather than academic leaders probably has made the shift to centralized control by the nonacademic boards of entire state systems of colleges and universities more acceptable within and without the universities than has been true in most other countries where the legal decision-making power, the administrative and academic autonomy of the university, has been in the hands of members of the academic community.