Chile has a housing problem but not in the traditional sense of something to be solved. Like any other country in the throes of modernization, Chile is producing an inadequate flow of housing services for low income families. Each family participates to some extent in the available housing services, but an estimated 600,000 families are not receiving an adequate supply. This analysis is concerned with the economics of the government response to this situation from 1965 to 1969.

The focus is on the economics of housing because the basic question that the housing policy decisions taken by the government must face is the more efficient administration of the scarce resources available for the production of improved housing services. Housing is a basic social need to which limited resources must be assigned by both the public and private sectors.

Roberto Michels, writing in 1915, said about political parties:

This, in a nutshell, expresses his now famous “iron law of oligarchy”— the assertion that every party organization must sooner or later become dominated by a small elite of leaders who will use their power to perpetuate themselves, and will succeed in doing so even in the face of widespread opposition from the rank and file.

Michels is supported in this view by a more contemporary student of political parties, Maurice Duverger, who says that: “The leadership of parties tends naturally to assume an oligarchic form. A veritable 'ruling class’ comes into being that is more or less closed; it is an ‘inner circle’ into which it is difficult to penetrate.”

La Revolución Mexicana como movimiento armado y como proceso políticosocial constituye un tema apasionado para los mexicanos. A escaso número de años del desarrollo de las operaciones bélicas y con la supervivencia de personajes participantes, se vuelve sumamente difícil esclarecer situaciones, uniformar opiniones y sobre todo conciliar intereses.

Sabemos perfectamente que nuestra organización políticoadministrativa actual tiene sus raíces en la Constitución proclamada bajo la egregia figura de don Venustiano Carranza en 1917 y sabemos también que en el norte la personalidad de Francisco Villa se sigue viendo con admiración y con respeto, y que en el sur, donde parece que la Revolución fué sólo una guerra fratricida sin ninguna proyección social, los campesinos que se debaten en la miseria buscan ansiosamente otro Emiliano Zapata.

The economic history of Uruguay from the turn of the century up to the early 1950's is characterized by economic growth, by extensive governmental involvement in economic activity, and by an ardent secularist faith in the welfare state ideals of the great José Batlle y Ordóñez and the Batllista tradition which lived on after him. Its small size, stable democracy, and apparent aloofness from the problems of the rest of the continent have earned la Republica Oriental del Uruguay such sobriquets as the “Switzerland” or “Utopia” of South America. Beginning in the early 1950's, however, there were signs that this country which had for so long been a model laboratory for progress and reform to its crisis-ridden neighbors, was itself about to face a crisis. The economic dimension of the Uruguayan crisis is that the annual per capita gross national product (currently about 500 dollars) has not risen for over a decade, and has in fact declined slightly in the last several years.

A backward glance, a thumbnail sketch of the Chilean press from the colonial period to 1823, sets the stage for the story of the press from 1823 to 1842. To begin with, Chile was off to a late start — 1747. Mexico had a press in 1540; Lima, 1584; Santo Domingo, 1600; and Paraguay, 1715. Second, the press was closely related with the struggle for independence. Foreign influences were felt through a number of colorful figures such as Mateo Arnaldo Hoevel, a Swedish refugee involved in the assassination of Gustave III, the North-American Procopio Polloc, and three North-American typesetters. Camilo Henríquez, a priest, was “the mentor of the revolution,” while the prócer, Bernardo O'Higgins, also played an important role.

Una de las características de los países de reducido ingreso real percapita es la alta proporción de la fuerza de trabajo ocupada en las actividades de tipo primario, la muy reducida proporción de ocupación en el sector industrial y la baja participación del empleo correspondiente a los servicios. En relación con esta mencionada característica varios economistas han puesto de manifiesto la marcada correlación estadística existente entre la distribución ocupacional y el desarrollo económico. Entre ellos se destacan Colin Clark, A. G. B. Fisher y Jean Fourastie, quienes han sostenido la tesis de que cuando la economía de un país pasa de la primitiva etapa agraria a un estadio urbano-industrial, la estructura del empleo sufre un cambio característico: la fuerza laboral pasa primero de las actividades primarias a las secundarias, y en una etapa posterior a las actividades de tipo terciario.

The Latin American and Caribbean countries are facing a serious financial crisis. External debt in the region is over $360 billion, and seven South American countries are among the ten largest debtors in the world. Interest payments alone required, in the years of 1982, 1983, and 1984, more than 35% of total regional exports of goods and services, a percentage which reached the extreme level of over 50% for one country. To be sure, this problem mostly affects the largest economies, since most of the Central American and Caribbean countries apply to interest payments less than 20% of their exports. The debt problem is a reality for the entire region, and it makes it difficult for all the countries to obtain new external financing.

Chile's military government replaced the country's universalistic social policy system with a set of market-oriented social policies. Taking evidence from three areas (pensions, education, and health care), this study seeks to explain why the military advanced a policy of deep retrenchment and why reform of health care was less thorough than it was in pensions and education. The radical transformation of policy relates to the breadth of power concentration enjoyed by General Pinochet and his economic team, the policymakers' ideological positions, and the role of veto players. The more limited reform of health care is linked to the actions of a powerful veto player, the professional association of physicians.

On December 9, 1964, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, Cuban Minister of Industries and the most powerful man in Cuba under the Castro brothers, flew from Havana to New York to address the United Nations. He lashed at the United States and predicted continental revolution, “That wave of heightening fury, of just demands, of rights that have been flouted, is rising throughout Latin America, and no one can stop that tide.” From New York Guevara flew to Algiers, and thus began a trek that would take him to countries in Africa, Europe and Asia. For three months Guevara traveled, talking to leaders of nations, preaching revolution and communism wherever he went.

In July 1989, as Carlos Menem awaited his inauguration as president, Argentina was experiencing a situation very different from that of the early days of the Alfonsín administration. Much water had passed over the dam since the transition. The crunch of economic crisis — and the failure of the Radical administration to overcome it even minimally — had brought economic questions to center stage and relegated political claims to second place. In this setting, Argentina's new foreignpolicymakers put aside the practice, set by their predecessors, of standing on principle. From the beginning, their rhetoric emphasized three keywords realism, pragmatism, and “normality,” — as the basis of a policy which focused on the economy (Argentina, 1989a: 1).

According to Domingo Cavallo:

In 1874, a group of Frenchmen in revolt against the academic rules of their profession was dubbed “Impressionist”; this attempt at destruction by ridicule failed when the painters turned the intended insult into an honored label. The inflated value put upon their work since has not diminished the honor of the title. Another type of blowing up has had the opposite effect: Anarchism, whose modern emergence was contemporary with Impressionism, has pejorative connotations today. Too often, it is used as a synonym for “anarchy,” and we have been encouraged to think of it as merely a revolutionary creed like communism with, if anything, more nihilistic and destructive overtones. In the empty dialogue of political denunciation, the epithet “anarchist” has become the countercharge to the accusation “fascist,” without the protagonists having much idea what either term means. The height of absurdity was reached when long-suffering Polish workmen were described as “anarchists” by their socialist masters after the economic crisis of Christmas 1970.

When James Baker, US Secretary of the Treasury, took the rostrum at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Seoul, in October 1985, and told 9,000 delegates from 149 countries that the debt crisis could only be solved by an even closer cooperation of all parties concerned, more money from commercial banks, an enhanced role for the World Bank, and more growth in the developing world, everybody sighed with relief.

The Baker declaration was significant as it had taken three years of muddling through crises for the Reagan Administration to recognize the debt crisis for what it is: a long term economic and political barrier to development that is slowly strangling world economic growth.

Under what conditions may a social scientist legitimately pass judgment on the geopolitical climate of a region? The question is not easy to answer. First, it presupposes acknowledgement that there are value issues embedded in such judgments. Second, while a value-free attitude may indeed be attempted, such an attitude is difficult to achieve. All too frequently, evaluation of a region's “climate” is based on the values of the evaluator (and often without disclosure of this fact to unsuspecting readers).This is especially likely when the observer adopts a theoretical position, taking insufficient account of the tension between society and actors. Unfortunately, such theories give social scientists the false feeling that they have some sort of preferred cognitive vantage point. Theories which incorporate an “oversocialized conception of man” (Wrong, 196l) or, alternatively, an “overly psychological conception of society,” ignore the fact that people act and make decisions about those actions, both of which are based upon value-judgments, and which do not have a one-to-one correlation with any given social situation.

In this concluding paragraph of a paper on Brazilian women, Blachman (1972) charts two major areas of significance to those interested in the study of women—the ideological dimension and the institutional reality. At the same time we are reminded that the link between the two, a dialectic of structures and values, may still be the most confounding and frustrating obstacle to an analysis of women in society and, for our interests here, women in politics. (For an excellent overview of the material on women in Latin America, see Pescatello, 1972.)

Creio na existencia de um ciclo folclórico da Guerra da Tríplice Alianga, Guerra do Paraguai ou aínda Guerra Grande (1865-1870). Ñao por haver colhido dados de campo expressamente a respeito, pois Ñao tomei essa deliberacáo durante os dois anos que vivi em Asunción (1950-1951). Mas devido às fontes bibliográficas que reúno, dia a dia. Se isoladas não são realmente expressivas, em conjunto, Ñao obstante, revelam-nos, inequívocamente, dito ciclo. Mediante o alarme déstes fatos — um simples síntoma — chamo a atenção dos estudiosos, sugerindo- Ihes a importância de urna pesquisa a fundo, não só nãs bibliotecas como entre informantes.

The growing frequency of conflicts in the Caribbean and Central America reveals some new and significant aspects of the old problem of intervention. Failure to recognize these new and significant aspects accounts for much of the confusion evident at the Meeting of Consultation of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American States held at Santiago de Chile, in 1959.

A number of strains have been placed upon the principle of nonintervention and it is important at the outset to note the forces behind them. Two developments which have been proceeding in opposite directions are basic here. The first of these is the mounting exactitude and breadth of the non-intervention doctrine itself. It has been applied to collective action as well as action by individual states; to indirect action such as diplomatic protests and economic pressure as well as to more direct action.

La América Latina no sólo ha sido un laboratorio bullente en que se han producido los más complejos procesos de la sociedad humana en forma perceptible, sino que ha sido asimismo un “Continente con contenido” — como se ha dicho felizmente — en que la teoría sociológica se ha formulado, en un primer momento, en forma espontánea y tácita. En ella el estrato más profundo del alma se ha manifestado no por la razón abstracta sino a través de intuiciones, de sentimientos y de enunciación de realidades e ideales, expresados verbigracia en la novela sociológica o en el doctrinal político. A virtud de un dilatado proceso secular nuestra América ha llegado a su madurez, y el ingente drama que ha vivido y vivenciado ha contribuido a desarrollar su genio creador. El dolor es espuela de la razón.

Los estudiantes de la Universidad de la Habana, al igual que los de la mayoría de las universidades latinoamericanas, se han caracterizado por su participación en la política nacional. En la etapa independentista, a finales del siglo pasado, la Universidad de la Habana se convirtió en el centro de agitación contra España. El 27 de noviembre de 1871 la colonia ordenó el fusilamiento de ocho estudiantes de medicina acusados de haber profanado la tumba de un militar español. De las filas estudiantiles surgieron los dirigentes de la guerra de independencia. El propio José Martí, a edad muy temprana y siendo aún estudiante, comenzó a luchar por la libertad de su patria. Martí, con su prédica constante, hubo de unir a sus compatriotas conduciéndolos a la guerra emancipadora contra España.