In years past, Mexico's political system was often cited as a model for political development in the “third world” (Scott, 1974, 1965). While most Latin American governments allowed associational interest groups little opportunity to articulate their needs and demands, Mexico's ruling party (the PRI) provided institutionalized representation for three major segments of the nation's population: the agrarian sector (peasants and agricultural workers); the middle class (the “popular sector”); and organized labor unions. Anderson and Cockcroft (1966: 16) indicated that “the Mexican national leadership seem … to be committed to tolerating a substantial amount of political pluralism. It is taken for granted … that occupational groups attempt to promote their interests and demands through organizations.”

More recently, however, a “revisionist” group of political scientists has disputed the contention that Mexico is moving toward democratic pluralism; instead they characterize its political system as essentially authoritarian (Purcell, 1973; Johnson, 1971; Stevens, 1970; Davis and Coleman, 1974). In this article I shall examine the degree of latitude which the Mexican political system allows independent labor movements I in articulating the demands of their members and in pressing I those demands on the ruling party.

Democracy has been better to the Venezuelan Church than many of its leaders or militants thought possible as they witnessed its rebirth in the early days of 1958. Despite the hierarchy's role in stimulating and legitimating opposition to the Pérez Jiménez regime, and its effusive praise of democracy as a system (Conferencia Episcopal Venezolana, 1958), private fears were great. After all, the years of military rule had been good times for the Church—Catholic institutions (particularly in education) had prospered, and their leaders responded with broad support for the military regime until shortly before the end (Colmenares Diaz, 1961).

The Church's traditional attitude towards democracy had been a mix of suspicion of majoritarian principles of rule and specific rejection of what it saw as democracy's embodiment in Venezuela in Acción Democrática (Levine, 1973: 38-42, 62-93). This party's policies were seen as secularizing, socialistic, and anti-Catholic, and bitter memories of clashes with Acción Democrática governments in the late 1940s remained vivid.

The problem of the brain drain—movement of highly skilled personnel across national borders—has been an object of increasing concern during the last two decades. International agencies, especially those linked with the United Nations, have seized the subject as one of the clearest manifestations of international imbalances in favor of the developed’ countries (United Nations, 1971; Kidd, 1967).

It is clear, despite variations across countries, that loss of professionals represents a significant cost for many nations, especially less developed ones. Recent data from three widely different countries may be used to illustrate such costs: from 1955 to 1968 Colombia lost 20,506 professionals to the United States; at an estimated cost of U.S. $8,000 for the training of each individual, Colombia made a contribution to the “development” of the United States of $164,048,000 during the period.

During the 1890s, the young Brazilian republic suffered from almost constant political and economic turbulence. Various civilian and military groups contended for power, while rapidly rising prices aggravated urban unrest. At the same time, increasing numbers of European immigrants entered Brazil, and, as in other Latin American countries, became a source of controversy (see Solberg, 1970). Some immigrants, such as Italian or Spanish anarchists, were themselves radical, and some opposition to immigrants came from conservative elements of Brazilian society. But the most vehement anti-immigrant outbursts of the inflation-ridden 1890s issued from radical nationalist sectors. The Portuguese, members of the largest foreign colony in Rio de Janeiro, became targets for virulent attacks by a little-known group who styled themselves Jacobinos. Both the ultranationalistic Jacobinos and the Portuguese, or Galegos, as they were scornfully termed, viewed each other as the most dangerous enemy they faced. After examining some aspects of Portuguese immigration to Brazil and the origins of Lusophobia, this article will focus on Jacobino criticisms and activities, which can best be understood within the specific economic and political context of the 1890s.

The year of 1972 brought the marked aggravation of a series of political-economic conflicts in Brazil's relations with developing countries outside the Western Hemisphere, calling into serious question the continued viability of its efforts of several years to maintain good relations with both Portugal and the nonaligned states (particularly those of Africa). Following successful tours of Latin American countries in 1971, Foreign Minister Mário Gibson Barboza termed 1972 the “Year of Africa” and visited Zaire and eight countries of West Africa to advance Brazil's ambitions as a leader of the LDCs by offering technical assistance, development financing, and increased trade, cooperation in commodity agreements, and cultural exchange based on the African component of Brazilian culture. This tour was intended to promote the image of Brazil as a peacefully multiracial, rapidly developing tropical civilization eager to share with others the solutions to economic growth which it had found.

The military coup of October 3, 1968 appears to have inaugurated a new era in Peruvian sociopolitical life. Unlike earlier “revolutions,” the current one is neither a simple military intervention to give the traditional civilian system a breathing space nor is it the action of a traditional caudillo in alliance with the oligarchy. Rather, the Peruvian Revolution is a fundamental attempt to effect major structural changes in the sociopolitical economic order.

In the six years of Revolutionary government, many changes have been made. The semi-feudal power of the traditional coastal agricultural oligarchy has been broken and partially channeled into the modern industrial economy with its attendant influence. The means to this end was, of course, the agrarian reform which turned the large, productive coastal haciendas into generally economically successful producers' cooperatives. Similar results have been obtained in the industrial, mining, and fishing reforms.

Education is one of the variables most frequently used by students of bureaucracy to determine background characteristics of political elites (Cochrane, 1967; Gruber, 1971; Hopkins, 1967; de Imaz, 1970; Verner, 1973). Especially in Latin American research, scholars often examine educational levels of men who serve in high public office. Although such studies usually look at the type of education, the number of years of study, and the location of the institution, very few, if any, authors have examined the determining influence on the careers of future political elites of student contact as well as student to faculty relationships at the preparatory school or university. The omission is significant because it is the contention of this paper that at least since the 1946 presidential administration in Mexico, contact which took place during the school days of future political leaders was an important form of recruitment.

By the application of fresh analytical approaches such as prosopography and the concepts of “secular trend” and “conjuncture” pioneered by the Annales school, historians are at last beginning to probe the social and political structures of Latin America in the national period. What before had been surmised or supposed, particularly in regard to the dominance of political and social life by elites, can now be quantitatively confirmed, while the identification of secular trends permits the historian to penetrate behind the confusion of the incidentals to the basic characteristics of the different nations and their evolution over time.

The standard interpretation of Imperial Brazil (1822-1889) has until recently been that of a stable but anomalous monarchy dominated for most of its existence by its ruler Pedro II. The aging of the Emperor, the abolition of slavery on which the regime is conceived as being based, the discontents of the military, and the inevitable advance of Republicanism have been taken as the principal causes for the collapse of the Brazilian Empire on November 15, 1889.

In the historiography of the philosophy of Mexican history and culture one of the begging questions has been the genesis of Samuel Ramos' book El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1934). Did this work, which shifted Mexican problems from a physical base to a psychological plane (Villegas, 1960: 135-136), spring full-blown or was it a reflection of attitudes shared by other intellectuals who defined a movement in the history of ideas? Ramos is usually credited as the initiator of national self-analysis (Diccionario Porrúa, 1971, 1723), and indeed he helped perpetuate the myth of his seminal role in the philosophical and characterological study of the Mexican (Ramos, 1943: 153). Moreover, Ramos stated that his work was the first to treat the “psychology of the Mexican” (see Castro, 1951: 36), yet this very theme was anticipated by Antonio Caso in 1925 (1925a).

Initial and prolonged military intervention in Brazil beginning with the events of 1964 has been the subject of considerable theorizing. Yet, relatively little data has been produced to support the various theories. As a consequence, scholars are left with a variety of imaginative and cogently stated options but without an ability to decide which of the choices most closely describes the political reality.

Direct and prolonged military intervention has been linked to factors external and internal to the military. Theories emphasizing the change of foreign investment patterns beginning in the 1950s (Cardoso, 1973), the persistence of an authoritarian, perhaps, corporativistic culture (Skidmore, 1973; Roett, 1972; Schmitter, 1971 and 1973), economic malaise (Skidmore, 1967; Lewis, 1975; Fishlow, 1973) and the shortcomings of political parties and civilian leadership (Schneider, 1965 and 1971; Tavares, 1970; Stepan, 1971; Reisky de Dubnic, 1968), and stress elements external to the military. Others, the role of the Superior War College in shaping interventionist attitudes among the officer corps (Stepan, 1973) and the military's assumption of the moderating power or poder moderator (Torres, 1966) stress elements internal to the military.

A number of excellent studies of the U.S.-Mexican border have indicated that the border is occasionally a barrier but more often a permeable membrane through which goods, services, and people can filter. Employment practices and reciprocal trade across the border, together with tourism, have increased the need for policy cooperation among the jurisdictionally distinct but functionally integrated border communities. Our study represents an exploratory effort to find out how border cities are responding to this imperative of greater policy cooperation despite the presence of an international boundary. We selected the cities of Laredo and Nuevo Laredo for our first analysis of policy cooperation because our preliminary investigations of twin cities had persuaded us that relations between the Laredos were numerous, complex, and friendly. The two cities were obviously interdependent; the incentives to achieve a cooperative community appeared to be strong.

Although the United States entered the Cuban war against Spain in 1898 with a great burst of pro-Cuban enthusiasm, this friendliness suddenly soured into contempt. A revolution in public opinion during the summer of 1898 abruptly lowered the Cuban heroes to the status of villains in North American eyes, while the Spanish enemy came to be regarded as brave and honorable. A Michigan soldier expressed a characteristic view when he confessed that “while my opinion of the Spanish troops is in the ascendant, that of the Cuban troops is at the other end of the teeter.

Among the thousands of disillusioned republicans who left Germany after the revolutions of 1848 was a Jew named Isidoro Epstein. He was one of the small number of forty-eighters who chose to migrate to Mexico. There the record of his varied career as statistician, mapmaker, educator, publisher, and journalist illustrates how the skills and talents of a professionally trained foreigner met the needs of Mexico as these needs were perceived and defined by the Mexican elite of the second half of the nineteenth century. His career as outspoken liberal editor of German language newspapers, however, was marred by conflict with a German community that was divided in its interpretation of German nationalism and in its feelings about liberals and Jews. Both aspects of Epstein's life in Mexico, from his immigration in 1851 until his death in 1894, demand attention and prove to be fascinating.

In retrospect John F. Kennedy's foreign policy has become more and more controversial. Recent studies have stressed the dichotomy between Kennedy's idealistic rhetoric and the moves he made in carrying out an interventionist, counter-revolutionary foreign policy. He acted not only to check his two great socialist adversaries but also to stifle nationalistic revolutions in the underdeveloped world (Walton, 1972; Fitzsimmons, 1972). Under Kennedy, the United States launched a great offensive on real and imagined enemies. This offensive led to intervention in Laos, South Vietnam, Cuba, Guyana, and the Congo as well as to international confrontations over Berlin and missiles in Cuba. Idealistic-sounding programs like the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress were launched but they were coupled with counter-insurgency studies and the formation of the Green Berets. All had the same aims: to retrieve the deteriorating economic and worldwide political situation inherited from Eisenhower. Above all, although the United States might have to learn to live with the Soviet Union and China, she could not afford to lose the markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities in the underdeveloped world.

Colombia remains one of a very small group of countries in Latin America which retain competitive, liberal-democratic political institutions at this writing. Indeed, Colombia's civil government, recognizing a modicum of individual liberties and conducting periodic elections, has been shattered on relatively few occasions since the mid-nineteenth century, a record equalled or surpassed by few other Latin American countries. The Colombian political system is still dominated by the two traditional political parties (Liberal and Conservative) which arose in Colombia and elsewhere in the region in the nineteenth century. In almost every other country they have long since passed into oblivion or insignificance. This continued dominance by the traditional parties is commonly attributed to their successful mobilization of mass support, especially among the peasantry. The Colombian parties (unlike their counterparts elsewhere) early moved beyond being mere elite factions by using traditional authority relationships, clientelistic exchanges and ideological appeals to develop durable bases of mass support.

Intermittent cycles of boom and bust based on one product have long characterized the economic history of Brazil. In this respect, the immense tropical rainforest comprising the Amazon Basin has been no exception. Economic activity reached its peak in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when this region held a virtual monopoly position in the world rubber market. Manaus, strategically located at the confluence of the Negro and Solimões (Amazonas) Rivers, became the hub of the rubber industry and was transformed from an obscure river town of 3,000 inhabitants to a prosperous, cosmopolitan city of 50,000 in less than forty years. Due to an influx of Asian plantation-grown rubber, though, world prices started declining after 1910 and the Brazilian monopoly was broken—between 1910 and 1934, the Amazon's share of the world rubber market fell precipitously from 60 percent to 1 percent (Andrade, 1950: 23).

The unemployment problem in Colombia was recently discussed by Geithman and Landers (1973) in this journal. They argue that one of the fundamental causes of unemployment is a “higher capital-labor ratio” than would otherwise exist, according to factor endowments and the structure of final demand. This is attributed to the dependency of less developed countries (LDCs) on capital from advanced countries (ACs), with laborsaving characteristics suitable for the latter (Geithman and Landers, 1973: 317). Their excessive capital intensity thesis is based on Bruton's cross-sectional statistical study (1967), which made a number of simplified assumptions which should be examined in some detail.

Since Bruton and Geithman and Landers use the production function in their analysis, it is necessary to briefly discuss its most important characteristics. The quantities of capital (K), labor (L), and other inputs required by the industrial sector or the entire economy to achieve various levels of output (Q), can be viewed as a generalized production function.