Prominent among nineteenth century Argentine politicians, Carlos Pellegrini is best remembered today as the harassed chief executive who inherited the mantle of Miguel Juárez Celman and the challenges of the terrible depression following the “Revolution of ’90.” He is likewise recalled as the ardent defender of Argentina's obligations to its foreign creditors at a time when European investors were being blamed for most of the ills besetting his country. Less well known, however, are his views on the subject of national unity and his untiring efforts, primarily in the Argentine Congress, to sell his countrymen on the dream of a unified Argentina devoid of exaggerated local and provincial loyalties.

Portuguese, a relative newcomer to most college and university curricula, may possibly have been taught in the United States as early as the close of the seventeenth century in a school belonging to the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of New York City. It seems likely that the early records kept in Portuguese over several decades were written by those who received their training in the language in New York City. Instruction in Portuguese in college was first offered by a Frenchman, Father Peter Babad of the Society of St. Sulpice. Just when the priest began teaching Portuguese at St. Mary's College in Baltimore, Maryland, is not precisely known, but in 1816 he had a class in it under the auspices of the Department of Classical Languages.

In this paper it is intended to present the “political ethnography” of Villalta, a community in the Dominican Republic, from the period before the rise of Trujillo until May 1968, when municipal elections were held throughout the country. The principal concern is to show how the power structure and system of patronage which developed in Villalta during the Trujillo years has responded to the political fortunes of the country since the death of Trujillo.

Much of the discussion will deal with a small group of men who are the principal dispensers of political patronage and who, over the years, have represented the community to the outside. At lower levels, those who acquiesce to the judgment of these men frequently do so in accordance with patron-client ties. Because of both political and economic change within and outside the community, the basis on which this acquiescence has rested, has undergone change and the position of the power-holders has been rendered more tenuous.

In 1989 The Inter-American System will celebrate its centennial anniversary, tracing its lineage to the International Union of the American Republics formed at Secretary of State Blaine's Washington convocation in 1889. Over the years the mantle was passed, first, to the Pan American Union, and then to the system's present incumbent, the Organization of American States (OAS). It has been a century of unprecedented achievement and unremitting frustration, of great triumphs and repeated failures. Given the present state of the system, however, the major question is whether the system can endure, much less match the rhetoric and aspirations of its members, in its second century.

International cooperation is a political decision in search of a framework. The Organization of American States is the attempt to express and enhance that cooperation among the nations of the Western Hemisphere. It is, and can be, no better than the underlying relationships among the nations.

This paper presents data on the social and political opinions of junior college students in Belize (British Honduras) prior to independence. The data are intended to give a preliminary indication of current patterns of conflict and consensus which can be used as a bench mark against which future development in Belizean political culture can be measured. The organization of the data has been based on theoretical considerations of political development and socialization in transitional societies.

A major influence on political attitudes and partisanship is the impact of social identity. In the United States, a self-identification as a Republican or a Democrat usually carries connotations of a wider range of social characteristics. In fact, people often adopt the partisan identification most appropriate to their social situation. Once acquired, partisan attitudes tend to influence other political attitudes as people react to issues and events in a way that tends to support and justify their party choices (Dawson and Prewitt, 1969).

The psychological development of most human beings leads to the emergence of feelings of “belongingness” vis-à-vis certain social groupings. I shall denote such feelings by the term “loyalties.” With the emergence of the state, and increasingly on into the contemporary era, an attempt has been made by these maximal-sized, territorial-based political units, to develop a state-focused civic sense within their respective societies. According to Geertz (1963: 156), the civic sense involves “a definite concept of the public as a separate and distinct body and an attendant notion of a genuine public interest, which though not necessarily superior to, is independent of and at times even in conflict with both private and other sorts of collective interest.” However, within the confines of already existing states may be smaller territorial units who view themselves as political communities with their own publics.

This article analyzes the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions in the 1996 reform of the civil service in Uruguay. Beneath the appearance of a process led by technocratic principles, the reform's agenda and content were shaped by legitimating principles, strongly institutionalized interests, and the political legacy of earlier failed reform attempts. Reformers sought a strategy of a reform “without losers,” which, instead of gathering support for adoption and implementation, sought to minimize opposition. This deliberately low-profile strategy left people unaware of the reform's achievements and thereby reinforced a political culture that has made resistance to change both a political virtue and an inescapable condition.

In the transition from military rule to democracy, the government of Augusto Pinochet bequeathed to Chile a unique electoral law by which all legislative seats are contested in two-member districts. A key implication of this rule is that in order to secure legislative majorities, coalitions have to put their strongest candidates in the most precarious electoral list positions. This generates a divergence of interests between coalitions and politicians. Chile's largest coalition, the Concertación, has resolved the dilemma by providing appointed posts to unsuccessful congressional candidates who accept personal political risk on the coalition's behalf. This study argues that this insurance system has provided the critical glue to hold the coalition together since Chile's transition to democracy in 1990. Recent changes in the electoral environment could threaten the Concertación's control over the appointed posts that have sustained this informal institution. This could jeopardize the Concertación's cohesion during the process of negotiating coalition candidate lists for the 2005 legislative elections.

To understand the social revolution in Cuba today one must be at once anthropologist, historian, sociologist, political scientist, scientist, economist, writer, philosopher, and something of a rebel oneself. In other words, one must be a Universal Man. Who of us today, however, would pretend to such all-encompassing knowledge? The Cuban Revolution in the nineteenth century, however, did produce such a man, José Martí. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that such a man produced the Revolution, at least in the sense that Marti was the main publicist for the revolutionary Cuban exiles, co-ordinator of the emigrant groups, money collector, and author of its major political documents.

Although Marti ranks with Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín as a liberator, he is relatively unknown in the United States. Yet his collected works fill seventy-four volumes. One bibliography lists over 10,000 items, including more than a hundred books and more than 200 monographs written about him. Marti was first and last a revolutionist, but he was also a poet, one of the best, and highly praised by such authorities as Gabriela Mistral, Rubén Darío, Miguel de Unamuno, Fernando de los Ríos, Rufino Blanco Fombona, and Amado Nervo.

The stability of Latin America rests essentially on the solution of two interrelated problems—population growth and economic development. A further corollary, and an extremely significant one, will be the social distribution of the benefits accruing from economic betterment. Latin America is both the fastest growing world region in population and also the most advanced (in terms of the death rate, literacy, and per capita income) of the underdeveloped regions of the world. It is also the only region of the underdeveloped world that had evolved from political colonial status prior to World War II. This region, therefore, has had the longest history of endeavoring to solve directly many of the problems that plague the 70 per cent of mankind that lives in the underdeveloped countries.

Perón and the Peronista party and movement have been interesting from at least two crucially important perspectives: first, Perón's ability to keep Argentina hostage for three decades in his roles as twice-elected “lider,” as exiled “caudillo,” and president once more (I say “hostage” in the sense that he remained the pivotal political force in all the crucial coalition bargains struck among the major power contenders since 1943); second, his ability to forge an intellectual and political clientele that spanned several generations and encompassed various, but unique, ideological views. Perón had the leadership capability not only of touching many people but also of striking a common political resonance among vastly differing sets of values.

Valparaíso's first modern water-supply system was constructed by William Wheelwright in 1851. When he arrived at the port to settle in 1829, it was “entirely destitute of pure water, and this want seriously affected trade and industry not less than the health of the population.” Following a series of editorials on the poor system of water supply, the municipality passed a corrective law in July of 1829. Certain quebradas (ravines) in the hills overlooking the municipality were made fit to serve as reservoirs. People residing in the vicinity of the quebradas were enjoined against taking water out of the quebradas. Nor were they permitted to water horses or wash clothes. The law did not prove to be a panacea. Valparaíso continued to be without an adequte water supply.

Latin-American education today bears more resemblance to its ineffective past than to the great and good plans which its educators have regularly got incorporated into law. For two generations all the southern republics have passed constitutional provisions guaranteeing free and compulsory education. Haiti has carried such a provision in its legal code since 1871, yet today 92 per cent of its people are illiterate.

The percentage figure ranges somewhat lower for the other countries, but the basic situation remains the same. As H. W. Spiegel reported in The Brazilian Economy: “At present no more than one-third of Brazil's child population attends school. Schools, including the elementary, are overcrowded. Teachers are scarce. Education opportunities for higher training are poor and expensive. During 1940 to 1944, seventyeight per cent of the immigrants were literate; in 1940 only thirty-two per cent of the native Brazilians were literate.”

The Commonwealth of the Bahama Islands entered the international system as a sovereign state on July 10, 1973. It did so by sponsorship, which is to say that as far as relations between the Bahamas and the imperial country (United Kingdom) are concerned, independence has been granted, rather than taken or seized, with a minimal amount of difficulty. The identification of various issue-areas related to the entry of the Commonwealth into the international system is one way of indicating the various components that have gone into making up the “national interest” of that country, at least in the perspective of the state's policy makers. More concretely, the peculiar problems arising from its character as an archipelago state with a relatively open economy, make the questions to be resolved before and immediately after independence perhaps more complex than those faced by the other independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean that have acceded to full sovereignty in the last decade.

El autor, que desde hace más de un cuarto de siglo viene participando activamente en reuniones de esta clase, en el terreno de la organización y del derecho municipales y especialmente en las últimas reuniones celebradas por la Asociación Interamericana de Abogados, conocida en los Estados Unidos por la sigla I.A.B.A., no perdería un solo instante en escribir el presente artículo si tuviera la más mínima duda acerca de la utilidad, de la conveniencia y de la necesidad de fomentar, de estimular, de apoyar por todos los medios a su alcance, las conferencias y congresos organizados para estudiar los defectos o las fallas de las instituciones. Sean estos los municipios o los poderes de gobierno, como el poder judicial, para analizar sus causas y buscar los remedios jurídicos o de otra clase, convenientes para subsanarlos, e impulsar de ese modo el perfecto funcionamiento de las instituciones jurídicas, el progreso social, en general, dentro de los moldes del llamado “Estado de Derecho”.

Does electoral campaigning in Latin America make a difference, and does it merit the attention of scholars? This was at the core of an extensive bibliographic analysis, published nearly two decades ago, which noted the paucity of literature on the subject, extending throughout the Third World and even including Western Europe (Martz, 1971). However, the rising tide of military authoritarianism dramatically reduced the relevance of the question in the region, and students of Latin American politics turned away, understandably, from concerted attention to campaigns, elections, and parties. Only with the reemergence of democratic regimes in recent years has interest turned back toward older emphases (Martz, 1990). Once again, theoretical developments have been colored by the events of the day, reorienting scholarly attention “from the military overthrow of civilian regimes and Latin American authoritarianism toward the prospects and processes of redemocratization” (Malloy, 1987).