Until recently Colombia has been a mainly rural and agricultural country. At the turn of the century probably 65% to 75% of the labor force was in agriculture; by 1951 this share had fallen to about 55% and in 1975 to about 35%. The share of population in rural areas was a little higher. In 1900 perhaps 50% to 55% of output came from agriculture; though it remains the main producing sector, its share had fallen to 25% by 1974.

Colombia has always had a highly unequal distribution of income, the major historical cause being an extremely unequal distribution of land. Over the years economic policy could be fairly described as “urban biased,” so that the group to whose welfare public policy has contributed the least are the landless agricultural workers, including a good number of migrant workers.

The problems associated with drug abuse in the United States have received considerable attention in recent years. By the mid-1970s, approximately 500,000 Americans were addicted to heroin, while at least 15 million were regular or casual users of marijuana. None of this heroin originates domestically, and only a small percentage of the marijuana, and this of low potency, is home-grown. Consequently, the question of source has become cardinal to most analyses of drug use and abuse in the United States.

Mexico has long been the primary source of high potency marijuana for the American market. Despite the recent influx from Jamaica and Colombia, Mexico still supplies an estimated 70% of the annual American consumption, or some 10 million pounds. More importantly, Mexico is currently the source of 70% to 80% of the heroin on the U.S. market, an alarming 6-8 ton annual figure. Furthermore, Mexico is both a primary transshipment route for cocaine, an increasingly popular drug originating in South America, and the source of vast quantities of psychotropic substances.

The subject of this article is the Peronist union leadership in the period from the fall of Perón in 1955 until the elections of March 1973, which heralded the return of Peronism to power. The first section examines this leadership mainly in terms of its internal power base, especially vis-á-vis its membership. This involves primarily an examination of internal union government, union elections, and potential limitations of leadership power by the rank and file. The second part looks at the union leadership in terms of its power as a political force bargaining on behalf of the Peronist movement. This will also involve a brief look at the union leadership's relationship with Perón himself. Finally, the third section attempts to suggest an explanatory framework within which to situate the development of this union leadership's power.

December 12, 1974, the Twenty-ninth General Assembly of the United Nations (1974) passed the long-awaited Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States by a vote of 120-6-10. This chapter, conceived by Mexican President Echeverría (UNCTAD, 1972) was drafted upon the supposition that definitive legal guidelines on international economic rights would suppress considerably world political-economic tension and protect the rights of all states, especially developing ones (Vanzant, 1974). Although a substantial proportion of the charter was adopted with relatively little controversy during the two years of negotiations, conflicts over key sections were insurmountable and the negotiating committee failed to attain unanimity on its final text. The inability of the working group to reach a consensus did not come as a complete surprise, since during the past decade important concepts embodied in the document had provoked considerable controversy (Haight, 1975).

History is written by the winners,” wrote Orwell (1970: 110); he went on to suggest that a totalitarian government “claims to control the past as well as the future.” Yet such a concern with controlling the past is not a distinguishing feature of totalitarianism; many examples of an ideological or legendary version of the past receiving government sanction can be found in nontotalitarian countries. While few governments or political parties can afford to ignore the past completely, it is undoubtedly the case that in some countries a “correct” interpretation of the past is of more pressing concern to contemporary politicians than it is in others. Since the early days of independence, Haitians have shown an absorbing interest in their past—not a dead “historical” past, but a living ideological past. The position which a Haitian has taken with respect to the past has been closely connected to his political commitments in the present, and rival parties have elaborated competing legends which function as legitimations of sheir current policies and interests.

Definition of categories is an age-old scholastic and often sterile pastime. But in discussing the Caribbean, definitions are essential, particularly in these days when there is growing fuzziness as to what constitutes the Caribbean.

The fact is that there are three separate but overlapping definitions of the Caribbean in widespread use today.

First, there is the English-speaking Caribbean or the Commonwealth Caribbean or West Indies. Nearly all of these countries and territories are member states of the Caribbean community which comprises the four relatively “more developed countries” of Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, and the generally smaller eight relatively “less developed” countries of Antigua, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent.

Guyana has become the second “socialist” republic in the Western Hemisphere after Cuba. The history of how this occurred is an almost classic example of the futility of inept intervention by outside great powers. Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, brought to office in 1965 by Anglo-American intervention that ousted Marxist Cheddi Jagan from power, has turned Guyana from a safe U.S. client committed to a capitalistic economic model into a strident anti-American bastion on the South American mainland, with a politicoeconomic system in theory and increasingly in practice inspired by Marxism-Leninism. The Burnham regime has nationalized all significant foreign firms, declared itself a cooperative socialist republic, and has forged close collaborative links with Cuba, the People's Republic of China, and such left-oriented African countries as Tanzania, Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique.

The analysis of voting behavior patterns from electoral statistics aggregated by regions and urban and rural districts has a long and rich tradition (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). This mode of electoral analysis has, however, declined in usage due to the emergence of the sample survey method, which allows for a more detailed analysis of individual voting choices and the related social and attitudinal factors which influence them.

It is often forgotten, however, that aggregate analysis of area or geographically defined voting statistics is a low-cost research method when compared to the exclusive and much more expensive sample survey research method. Aggregate analysis can be applied effectively with careful adaptation to most of the areas of electoral analysis, particularly so in societies in which community and residential patterns are structured according to clear socioeconomic and stratification variables such as income, status, and occupation. This applies as well to societies in which regional and cerritorial divisions are more than just administrative units but represent focal points of local identities and loyalties.

The central purpose of this paper is to show that the character of Peruvian national politics changed substantially during the century after independence from Spain and that a focus on the shifting relations between the central government and social and economic power in the private sector is crucial for appreciating the significance of these political developments and for comprehending their sources. Clearly a wide variety of forces conditioned the organization and exercise of political power in nineteenth-century Peru, but historical interpretations that stress the roles of economic elites (e.g., Bourricaud, 1970), foreign interests (Yepes del Castillo, 1972) or leaders’ personalities (Pike, 1967) obscure the magnitude of these political changes and do not adequately explain them.

Seldom can one turn to the news without encountering disclosures exposing the magnitude and nature of United States covert operations designed to influence the disposition of political affairs in a number of countries. As usual, Latin America has come in for its share of clandestine attention, with Chile being the most publicized recent example. This certainly should not surprise anyone with even a superficial knowledge of Latin American history. Latin American countries, however, have themselves not been free of responsibility for domestic manipulation in the United States. Although their endeavors have not dramatically altered the course of hemispheric history, they on occasion have produced significant diplomatic gains. One such occasion took place in 1877 and 1878 when Mexico, under Porfirio Díaz, sponsored covert activities in the United States designed to evoke public support and thus to secure the much needed formal recognition.

The peasant is one of the least understood and most abused actors on the modern political stage. He is maligned for his political passivity and distrust of national political movements. Yet, most of the great twentieth-century revolutions in the Third World have, according to most scholars, been peasant based (Landsberger, 1973: ix; Wolf, 1969). In Latin America the peasant was once pictured as the archetypical parochial who was more suited for siestas under his sombrero than serious political activity. Stereotypes aside, the region has been no exception to the growing tendency of peasants to become involved in major revolutionary processes.

In 1929 the British scholar, Cecil Jane, published his classic, Liberty and Despotism in Spanish America. In it he wrote:

Instead, Jane (1966: 79) argued that the War of Independence was an attempt to realize the most deeply felt ideals, “which were derived not from any external sources, but from the very hearts of the people.” Similarly he argued that the political conceptions of Spanish Americans were (and continued to be) Spanish, not Anglo-Saxon, and he strongly suggested that the example of the British North Americans exerted little if any influence on the Spanish Americans of the nineteenth century. Jane (1966: 111-112, 168-172) also attacked with thinly veiled contempt the idea that the salvation of Latin America lay in emulating England or the United States.

“A new economic order is essential for world peace,” proclaimed President Carlos Andrés Pérez of Venezuela (1976) on November 16, 1976, at the UN General Assembly in fulfilling “the mandate which Simon Bolivar gave [the Venezuelans] more than 150 years ago” (Pérez, 1976: 28). Responding to this call of destiny and reaffirming Venezuela's claimed Bolivarian tradition of placing “its resources.at the service of its people, at the servi of Latin America, at the service of humanity” (Pérez, 1976: 28f President Pérez (nicknamed Simonsito) sought in and through the New International Economic Order (NIEO) a new Lebensraum, not of destructive territorial expansion, but of increased purchasing power, dignity, equality, and independence for the poor, weak, underprivileged countries (Pérez, 1976: 7, 11). The NIEO, “a moral obligation of all nations,” “is required as a¡ desideratum of peace,” especially since the disintegrating “old international economic order which emerged from the Second World War … was an unjust system of relations based on inequality … designed to benefit those countries which had accumulated the fruits of technical progress” (Pérez, 1976: 9).