This study is a sequel to one done by this writer on the foreign policy of Jamaica from 1972 to 1977 (Lewis, 1981) and covers the remaining period during which the People's National Party (PNP), led by Prime Minister Michael Manley, presided over the government of the country.

In elections held on October 30, 1980, the PNP government was decisively defeated by the opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). The latter had, in the previous elections of December 15, 1976, retained only 13 seats in Jamaica's parliament. When the Jamaica Labour Party administration took office, as the party had promised in its election manifesto, it reversed the central planks of the domestic and foreign policies of the PNP administration and reestablished a close relationship with the United States as the main element of its domestic and foreign policies.

Agrarismo is the body of thought that is understood to have guided Mexican peasant struggles in this century. It seems reasonable to expect an essay on peasant ideology to open with a clear definition, or at least a list of the doctrines that form the content of this ideology. But agrarismo has often served as an imprecise catchword for a wide variety of goals espoused by peasants and peasant leaders during seven decades of struggle in the Mexican countryside. Even when we consider only the mainstream of agrarianist thinking in twentieth-century Mexico, we find that an agrarista vision of a just order has implied committment to a strikingly diverse series of programs from 1910 to the present day.

Notwithstanding the substantial differences in size and wealth of the national economies, there are significant areas of comparability between Mexican and United States agricultures. In this paper, essential elements of the national agricultural structures for both the United States and Mexico and the currently predominant policy issues that emanate from these structures and from announced societal goals are sketched. Following the establishment of these bases, areas of competition and complementarity are explored as well as the technological elements that cross national boundaries and that are and have been affecting the agricultural sectors and individual well-being both in the United States and in Mexico. The discussion will concentrate most heavily on the Mexican experience.

An article written for my forthcoming book on Trinidad and Tobago argues that the events of 1969-1970 in Trinidad should be seen as a result of a process of delegitimization—both personal and systematic—and that the public declaration by Trinidad and Tobago's prime minister of his intention to resign as political leader of the governing party was an attempt to arrest that process. My argument is that the attempt failed, and that by December 1973,

During the second half of the last decade, the three countries of the Southern Cone of Latin America—Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay—were subject to radical economic reforms that completely changed the structure upon which economic development took place in the past. While the new policies were in effect, their implementation was closely scrutinized by observers holding very different ideological convictions. As the region plunged into economic turmoil, the same policies became the subject of heated debate and have been analyzed and interpreted in many different ways.

Beginning in the early 1960s, manufacturing operations of the larger U.S. corporations became more international in scope with the emergence of the globally integrated production system (Moxon, 1974: 60). Fundamental to the successful functioning of the system was an international division of labor. Generally, workers in less developed countries (LDCs) were utilized for labor-intensive tasks, and capital-intensive, highly skilled phases of production were carried out in the United States. The geographical separation of labor inputs became the hallmark of the internationalization of production directed by multinational corporations (MNCs). More efficient modes of transportation, such as containerization and air freight, and improved communication, information, and production control techniques made possible centralized administration of dispersed production units (Vuskovic, 1980: 10). In addition, the global context of production required a new approach to foreign investment—the offshore installation, which eventually assumed two forms: the export platform and the satellite plant.

In June 1977, Argentine army forces in Entre Rios, Corrientes, and Missiones went on alert; while across the Rio Uruguay, Brazilian garrisons throughout Rio Grande do Sul readied themselves. The nerve center at Santa Maria vibrated with activity and even friendly military observers were warned away.

Some months previously the book El Espacio Argentino by Pablo R. Sanz had been published in Argentina outlining various hypotheses of how a war with Brazil might be conducted (Sanz, 1976: 335-351). The book had been circulated through the Brazilian general staff. Although it carried nothing new for the intelligence services, its publication was taken as an indication of Argentine attitudes.

This article assesses the 1976-1981 price stabilization and restructuring program and its impact on major macro- and microeconomic variables in Argentina. More specifically, it concentrates on examining the attempt simultaneously to control inflation and to redirect the economy towards a more marketoriented structure with a rapidly changing combination of domestic and external economic measures. After discussing the objectives and implementation of the program, the development of major macroeconomic variables between 1976 and 1981 is briefly examined. Since several of the macrovariables give conflicting evidence, a more detailed analysis of the program's impact on agriculture and industry was undertaken, which stresses the need to differentiate among the various actors within the major subsectors of the economy.

In this analysis of contemporary economic and sociopolitical reality in the smaller states of the Commonwealth Caribbean— the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) comprising Antigua, St. Kitts-Nevis and Montserrat (the Leeward Islands) and Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent (the Windward Islands)—developments within the larger CARICOM countries—namely Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Barbados—will be discussed. All too often social science analysis of the Commonwealth Caribbean assumes a great deal of homogeneity among all CARICOM countries, therefore concluding that what might be a correct analysis of Jamaica, for example, is equally applicable to any of the smaller territories. This article shows that this assumption is often erroneous and can produce several pitfalls in perspective, diagnosis, and prognosis.

During the 1970s there have been several concrete developments in the Commonwealth Caribbean presenting the intellectual community with unprecedented tasks of interpretation. Broadly, the decade began with the massive “black power” upheavals in Trinidad and Tobago and culminated with the revolutionary overthrow of the neocolonial Gairy regime next door in Grenada.

After more than a year of intense civil war, Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle resigned from office on July 19, 1979, and fled the country. Accompanying the opposition's Provisional Junta when it entered Managua were the foreign ministers of the five Andean Group nations: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. The presence of the Andean Group representatives during the transfer of power is indicative of the important part played by international governmental organizations (IGOs) during the Nicaraguan revolution. Along with the Andean Group, the Organization of American States (OAS) acted with a degree of independence not usually evident in hemispheric affairs.

In recent years Latin American countries have become a principal source of narcotic drugs for the United States market. Mexico, once the fount of 85% of the heroin consumed by American addicts, still supplies approximately 30% of the drug. Peru and Bolivia grow a combined total of 60 million kilos of coca leaf annually, more than twice the amount needed for legitimate use. The remainder is either processed into cocaine for direct shipment abroad or smuggled in base form through Ecuador into Colombia, where chemists distill tons of the prized white powder that sells for $100 gram in diluted form on the streets of Chicago, Montreal, and Frankfurt. Colombia also surpassed Mexico in the late 1970s in marijuana production and currently holds the dubious honor of being the world's leading manufacturer of illicit methaqualone. Methaqualone base, originally smuggled in from Hungary, is currently believed to originate in mainland China.

The last two decades or so have seen academic interest in urban Latin American history mature to the point where questions of cultural realities have taken on greater complexity and importance. For reasons bound up with the socioeconomic factors usually studied first, the period between 1870 and 1930 seems fated to be especially attractive. That was the period, after all, when the neocolonial order came of age and, with it, the cultural possibilities born of greater wealth, a larger leisure class, an urban way of life in the expanding port and administrative centers, and the greater access to European cultural models through travel and luxury imports.

The socioeconomic behavior and belief systems of industrial elites in Latin America have received considerable attention from social scientists, but research on the political ideology and activities of these important groups has been surprisingly limited. The socioeconomic literature has focused on the development or underdevelopment of entrepreneurial attitudes and values among Latin American industrialists. The major conclusions, documented by considerable quantitative research, are that industrial entrepreneurship in Latin America has been inhibited by international and domestic structural factors. It is accepted that national industrial elites in general tend to resist economic change and innovation, prefer the maintenance of traditional values such as family ownership, paternalistic labor relations, and laborintensive, low-technology means of production. National industrial elites are furthermore dominated by "internationalized" entrepreneurs and direct state investment.

In view of Latin America's growing bargaining power within the international system, the Chilean Heraldo Muñoz (1981) has assessed the power potential of several Latin American states, basing his calculations on abstract statistics. According to this categorization, Colombia has a power potential comparable to that of Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela. Colombians would probably be very surprised at such an analysis. As they see it, their country does not figure in international politics. Hence, the idea of a nation with a foreign nonpolicy (Drekonja-Kornat, 1982b) seems justified.

However, countries must adapt to new situations, and growing tensions in the Caribbean Basin are forcing Colombia to examine the apparent contradiction between its potential and its real capacity. This is particularly important when one considers that Colombia's low profile in foreign policy is not a product of abstentionist or neutral doctrines (as in the case of Canada, Switzerland, or Austria) but is the result of historical developments occurring after the secession of Panama.

After a period of economic stagnation that lasted from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, Uruguayan economic growth took off. Between 1974 and 1981 real GDP growth averaged 3.8% per annum (p.a.) versus .7% p. a. between 1956 and 1974. Yet, in 1974 Uruguayan prospects appeared rather dismal—inflation was high and accelerating, the fiscal deficit amounted to 4.5% of GDP, international reserves were largely exhausted, the debt service ratio exceeded 40%, the terms of trade were falling as a result of the oil price rise, and the EEC had just cut off imports of Uruguayan beef. How Uruguay achieved a dramatic turnaround in the face of these poor initial conditions is an interesting case study in the role of stabilization cum liberalization programs.

The pivotal role energy plays in national economics not only converts the access to sources of supply into a vivid issue of foreign policy concern, but also causes an understandable preoccupation with investment capabilities and self-sufficiency. A report prepared by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1974 predicted a bright future for nuclear energy in the i developing countries and encouraged use of this form of energy after numerous field studies.

A nation that commits itself to nuclear energy by purchasing nuclear power-generating technology but not fuel cycle facilities incurs the risk of becoming dependent upon the supplier country because a quick switch to alternative sources of supply is difficult in cases of curtailment of fuel.

Since the mid-1970s, the Southern Cone countries of Latin America have experienced profound political, institutional, and economic reforms. Their immediate causes can be found in the evolution of their relatively recent (prereform) political situation, which saw marked polarization of different groups and political forces, social unrest, and a general feeling of dissatisfaction with the countries’ economic performance.

These events were followed by the installation of military regimes, with the new characteristic of trying to go far beyond the traditional attempt of introducing social (and particularly, labor) discipline and put the “house in order.”