Long a region seemingly immune to modernization and relegated to governmental neglect, the Brazilian Amazon has nonetheless frequently been the theme of political rhetoric. While the area has stagnated, Brazilians have continually referred to it as the “Land of Promise.” Now, however, it appears that Amazonia is finally to become a major government beneficiary.

An area comprising 42 percent of Brazil's territory but only about three percent of its population, a land often inaccurately portrayed as both a “Green Hell” and a “Green Paradise,” the Amazon recently has been selected by President Garrastazu Médici as the site of a major development effort. Its colonization and economic development have been assigned priority status within the president's “Plan for National Integration.”

Holy Week in San Pedro, Colombia, a small town near the bustling city of Cali, begins with a procession that commemorates Jesus’ triumphal march into Jerusalem. The week climaxes on Holy Friday with processions and rites which act out Christ's crucifixion and death. The remaining days of Saturday and Sunday, days that ostensibly glorify Christ's victory over death, evoke little enthusiasm; only the priest and a few hard-core faithful trudge through the rites necessary to terminate the week.

The events which lead to the agony of Christ (his march into Jerusalem and the Last Supper), most of all the agony itself (the struggle up Calvary), are the events that the townspeople celebrate.

When the educated natives of the capital city of Ecuador are questioned about social class and the power structure of their country, the answer comes unhesitatingly and with little variation. Everyone, and of course the educated are as yet few in number, knows who is who and what is what. The sampler of random opinion concludes that the real power is no longer in Quito but in the port of Guayaquil. This has been documented by Díaz, who claims that the traditional aristocracy today owns only about 50 percent of sierran acreage, most of it impoverished and ruined, and that this class is declining steadily with the growth of various coastal “bourgeoisie” classes which stem from the commercial and banking interests of the coast. Politically, too, according to Lang, the coastal influence is undermining that of the sierra, the deposition of the military junta in 1966 being attributable to pressures from the Guayaquil commercial oligarchy.

In recent years students of contemporary Argentine letters have begun to recognize the importance of the period 1946-1955 as one of crisis, of fundamental reassessment, and of generational strife. Though it would be an oversimplification to assign the cause of these trends to the political and social changes wrought by Juan D. Perón, the study of his regime—particularly as it affected cultural activity—can help put into clearer focus the confusing picture of literary groups, “generations,” and promociones that confronts the student of recent Argentine literature.

It should be emphasized that peronismo, for better or for worse, was more than an exclusively political movement: its influence was also farreaching in broad areas of popular culture, social standards, in matters of dress, speech, and in the use of leisure time. Its effects were complex, but on balance they all tended to produce a feeling of relaxation, a looseningup of formalities and traditional practices: stuffed shirts were displaced by descamisados; the normal work week was frequently broken up by strikes and government encouraged vacations; formal attire was no longer required at the opera; and many of the public parks that previously had, by some unwritten law, been considered the semi-private preserve of the middle and upper classes, became crowded with picnicking workers and their families.

On 24 June 1969 the military government of Peru, exercising its de facto power to issue legislation by decree, promulgated a law of agrarian reform. In Latin America legal norms—even radical ones—are not necessarily to be feared. Many countries have agrarian reform laws and in most of these agrarian structures have not been changing rapidly. Indeed, the previous administration in Peru had passed a mild law in 1964, but the hacienda structure of the Peruvian Andes remained virtually intact. Few feared that the new code enacted by the military would present a strong challenge to tradition.

Forty-eight hours after its promulgation opinions began to change. The government announced that interventors were being sent to eight of the largest sugar estates on the northern coast. Intervention is the first step toward expropriation. The sugar estates lie at the heart of the Peruvian oligarchy: they were exempt from the 1964 legislation.

The controversial Mexican literary periodical Contemporáneos (1928-1931) has recently received considerable attention from literary critics who view it as a significant document in the history of twentieth-century Mexican belles lettres. The journal was not, however, exclusively a literary review but, as the subtitle (Revista de Cultura Mexicana) clearly indicates, a magazine of varied cultural pursuits as well. It contained a number of important essays in which the members of Mexico's post-revolutionary intelligentsia attempted to define and interpret national problems. It will be the purpose of this essay to discuss the role played by the journal in Mexican intellectual history.

In June 1928 the first issue of Contemporáneos appeared in the bookshops of Mexico City. The events leading up to its publication and the reasons for its sudden cessation in December 1931 can be traced to the activities of a group of young Mexican intellectuals later to be classified by the title of this their most significant literary review.

João Capistrano de Abreu changed the course of Brazilian historiography. Unlike previous historians who had oriented their studies toward colonial history as an expression of Brazil's connections with European culture, he pointed to the socioeconomic and psychological aspects of the evolution of the Brazilian interior as the most significant part of Brazilian history. By reinterpreting familiar sources and uncovering new material, he reconstructed the Brazilian colonial experience from a totally original point of view. Dating from the publication of his two major works, Os Caminhos Amigos e o Povoamento do Brasil (1889) and Capítulos de História Colonial (1907), the perspectives of historiography in Brazil have altered, and historians have reoriented their studies to emphasize the development of Brazil as an independent nation rather than as an appendage of Portugal.

An article by Professors Richard B. Gray and Frederick R. Kirwin entitled “Presidential Succession in Chile: 1817-1966” and subsequent correspondence with one of the coauthors encouraged me to write a similar study on Ecuador. In researching the available material on the subject I can well appreciate the reasons for the great lack of comparative data on the Latin American presidency and the need for additional studies on this subject.

Of the few sources available on Ecuador's presidents no two provide exactly the same information. This pertains to biographical data as well as to time served in the executive office. There is even disagreement as to who served at a given time. Some of these discrepancies are the result of the turbulent events of the first three decades of Ecuador's republican history during which the country attempted to make strides toward the establishment of a national identity.

On the occasion of a meeting of Mexican and United States historians a discussion was scheduled to deal with the historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of New Spain. For the purposes of this paper, the period will be extended to the 1760s or about the time when the Bourbon reforms became effective. Although the following reflections were prompted by this topic and the illustrations are drawn from that period and place, the frame of reference is largely incidental to the discussion of a problem which is typical of all narrative history. New Spain serves here only as a convenient base to supply a structure to the inquiry and to give a convenient support of detail.

The church in Brazil suffers many but by no means all of the ills usually ascribed to Catholicism in Spanish American countries. Concern over these problems has grown throughout the Catholic world, as well it might. One-third of the world's Roman Catholics live in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere. According to many churchmen a state of spiritual bankruptcy confronts the church in most of these countries. Basically it is a matter of the irrelevance of a system still rooted in hierarchic and paternalistic spiritual guardianship among people in transitional societies whose goals are modern, affluent egalitarianism. In simpler terms, more and more people in Latin America learn about widespread wealth among others, and fewer and fewer believe that their own disadvantages are preordained and can be changed for the better only in the next world—as the church has long taught.

A revolutionary change in the shape of inter-American relations has taken place in the last few years. The most casual observer is aware of this fact but it is difficult to assess the effects of the changes and to determine the prevailing tendency for the future. Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba in 1959 appeared for a while to be just another Latin American “revolution” but it soon developed into a major threat to United States hegemony, confirmed by the ensuing missile crisis which marked the entry of another great power into the Western Hemisphere, a major zone of United States influence. Nothing in the Americas has been the same since then, although the effects of Castro's regime on other American States continue to be debated with more heat than light. Results tend to reflect previously established positions on the nature both of Castro's government and that of the states influenced by his activities.