Note: I presented the original version of this work at the “Seminar on History and Human Sciences,” held at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil, May 1975. In August 1975 it appeared as Document No. 1 of the series CEDES publishes for the “Working Group on the State” of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). The version presented herein was prepared in December 1976. Despite all that has happened since, I have restricted myself to corrections of style and to doing away with some unnecessary paragraphs, following the useful suggestions of LARR'S reviewers. In other words, I have overcome the temptation to rewrite this work, which I might have done, above all, to emphasize even more the attempts to stabilize economic variables (including but not limited to inflation) of the period I call the “orthodoxy” and expressly to admit the possibility that cases such as Chile and Uruguay may turn, in a socially even more oppressive sense than the “deepening” that I deal with here, towards a “re-agrarianization” or a “re-primarization” of their productive structure. I would also like to think that today I could present a more sophisticated approach to the theoretical problems surrounding the concept of state. But it is not a question of extemporaneously introducing these considerations here-considerations that owe much to criticisms received on the original version of this article–but, instead, of making timely presentation of them in future works. One explanation is necessary on a point that has led to some misunderstanding: when I speak of “mutual indispensability” I am referring to the relationship that exists between the bureaucratic-authoritarian state (once implanted) and international capital. In contrast, when in other works (above all, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism) I have dealt with the factors that tend to provoke the emergence of this type of state, I have speculated on its “elective affinity” with a certain type of capitalism and its crises. The difference is subtle but important, because it not only refers to two temporally different moments but also because it indicates the distance separating what is mutually indispensable (once the state has been implanted) from a strong but undetermined likelihood (before implanting it) that still leaves room for purposeful political action.

“Artists are originators who reflect their native land if they know how to understand the joys and sorrows in the soul of its people; if they interpret them in line, color, stone or clay, in music or by word. If they feel and comprehend its landscape. If they eternalize it.”

The pulperos were the largest group of small, independent entrepreneurial storekeepers officially categorized and supervised in Spanish America during the colonial period and the nineteenth century. There are no studies of them. There were other small storekeepers, such as owners of bakeries or fish stores, who were far fewer in number, or artisan storekeepers, who occasionally were many in number but who were craft oriented rather than purely business oriented. What follows is a preliminary report. A final analysis and presentation must await an intensive, long-term study of the pulperos and bodegueros in Caracas, Medellín, or Buenos Aires, as circumstances permit, that will not be completed for several years.

“We went to visit neighbors and found brothers.” So began the text of the Rockefeller report on United States-Latin American relations in 1969. The phrase captures not only a part of the governor's personal style, but also some themes of inter-American relations. Many scholars and public officials in the United States start their analyses and their policies from the following premises: there is a special relationship between the United States and Latin America, a positive, cooperative, warm, quasi-familial bond quite beyond the ordinary interstate bond; and there is a mutuality of interests among these countries of the Western Hemisphere that resembles family ties in the best sense. In case these premises are not self-evident, it is appropriate to use a rhetorical style more positively effusive than perhaps the facts may warrant.

La presente contribución es sólo una aproximación al tema propuesto. Suma de problemas más que respuestas. Catálogo de líneas posibles de investigación de un tema que adquiere, a veces, por motivos ajenos al interés científico, particular trascendencia. En la misma, se dan por supuestos, los elementos constitutivos básicos al igual que los aspectos meramente épocales, brindando los retazos multicolores de un cajón de sastre, sólo unidos entre si por un vertebral hilo conductor, la percepción de quien dedicara gran parte de su labor investigativa al período en análisis.

The history of the Argentine interior during the nineteenth century has often escaped the attention of researchers attracted to the dramatic economic and political growth of the eastern riverine provinces. Included in this oversight has been the plight of the rural laboring classes, unless associated with studies of immigrants. It has been easier to trace the impact and lifestyles of coastal elites—the estanciero, the merchant, the caudillo, and the politician—and the urban working class, than to reconstruct the life of the provincial peon. The study of the lower classes in general has been further impeded by the dramatic but stereotyped visions of the gaucho and other rural characters immortalized by writers such as Sarmiento, Hernández, Güiraldes, and Martínez Estrada. Finally, the illteracy of creole workers has left us with limited personal records of their existence. Yet despite all the inconveniences involved in the study of the rural working class, it is still possible to reconstruct aspects of its social, political, and economic conditions.

In March 1973, for the first time since the military coup of 1966, a presidential election was held in Argentina. It also was the first time since 1955 that Peronist parties were allowed to present candidates in every province. The present note originated in an initiative by Darío Canton to collect occupational and electoral data from polling places in several Argentine cities. He had the cooperation of Beba Balvé and Lucía Osvaldo of the Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales, Buenos Aires. The three were responsible for gathering data in Buenos Aires (Canton), Rosario (Balvé), and La Matanza (Osvaldo). Subsequently, collaboration with researchers Jorge R. Jorrat and Héctor Caldelari from interior provinces made it possible to include comparisons with data from Córdoba and Tucumán. The analysis of the data and, ultimately, this note are the sole responsibility of the two authors whose names appear above.

The “problem” of U.S. press reporting on Chile during the Allende period is by now well documented. What emerges from articles by journalists, journalism professors, and professors interested in Latin American affairs is a relatively consistent picture of U.S. news media performance: the U.S. press was openly hostile to the Popular Unity government in Chile; maintained its hostile perspective with astonishing homogeneity throughout the United States; and often reduced complex social, economic, and political issues to some of the most disturbing stereotypes found in the cold-war period. The same articles suggest, moreover, that reporting on Chile was not a total aberration but rather related to more general patterns of reporting on Latin America.

Nettie Lee Benson can be said to be without an equal and truly in a class by herself. She and the collection which today bears her name are widely known. Admired and respected as a builder and administrator of a collection that has become a standard by which others are judged, she is known not only as a librarian but as a teacher, an unfailing source of information about Latin American library materials, and a scholar of the history of Mexico.

A great deal has been written about José Martí as poet, patriot, and essayist. Much of his life and work has, however, remained almost completely ignored; by some, denied. Relatively little is known about his personal life except that he was Cuban, which for most has been sufficient. But recent research casts fascinating light on his little-known fondness for baccarat, his secret dream of acquiring a Caribbean monopoly of Thom McAn shoe franchises, and his tendency to walk into closed doors. Though all this information is useful and interesting, there has persisted yet another oversight in Martí scholarship, one which has led to an altogether unwarranted and almost totally inaccurate image of him as an inspired but rather inept artist of verse.

For the better part of the last fifteen years, scholars in the United States researching late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba have worked under severe handicaps. First and foremost, obviously the richest collections of Cuban materials—in Cuba—are beyond easy access. It is not without some irony that the very phenomenon that made Cuba the subject of intense interest also placed the vast corpus of sources vital to the study of the island beyond the reach of the researcher in the United States. The researcher has had to suffer a general paucity of sources, and has been forced to reconstruct the Cuban past from incomplete and fragmentary materials scattered in archives, libraries, and manuscript collections across the country.

When Kalman Silvert died of a heart attack, Latin Americanist scholarship lost its greatest protagonist; American scholars lost one of the most active opponents of intellectual technocracy, and, thereby, the American public lost an important proponent of democracy; the Ford Foundation lost a guiding figure in international social science planning; his family and friends lost an individual of inestimable and irreplaceable personal worth; and Kal, himself, lost the opportunity to pursue his own course toward the development of a humanistic politics for the Western world. In the fall of 1976, Kal and Frieda Silvert were to have taken up residence in Mexico, to continue to work for the Ford Foundation, but in a new direction and with much more time for him to dedicate to the problems that interested him the most. Leaving some part of his task undone was inevitable; it is difficult to imagine anyone being able to achieve the goals that Kal set for himself.

The impressive contribution of population history to our understanding of the past has generated extraordinary interest in new demographic methods and old population figures. Most research in the field of late colonial Latin American demography, aside from the studies of Cook and Borah and a few others, has been aimed rather modestly at enhancing our understanding of the population dynamics of a village or small community. This book may indicate a new trend: the attempt to establish the population structure of a large region by bringing together population reports for hundreds of parishes. Lombardi argues that through the development of a broad demographic context, analysis of the history of Venezuelan population can be most economically realized and the findings of micro-level studies properly interpreted.

Any scholar who has followed the ongoing debates in the profession over the use and misuse of quantitative data for the study of historical phenomena is well aware of the perils inherent in any attempt to use numbers to help explain the past. The controversy surrounding Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross is only the most visible manifestation of the continuing battle over the limits, usefulness, and standards of quantitative history. Closer to home, in the pages of this journal, we have witnessed the exchange between Wilkie, Smith, and Skidmore over the proper way to analyze and interpret Mexican budgetary accounts.

Fundamental issues are raised in Sigmund's attack on our book, concerns that pertain to what has probably become one of the most controversial policy debates in recent times: the role of the U.S. in the overthrow of the Allende government. Measured by the amount of time and space devoted to the issue by Congress, the media, and academia, this question certainly requires careful consideration. Unfortunately, Sigmund presently and in the past has not dealt adequately with either the pertinent questions or the relevant data. The numerous errors and distortions require a thorough response.

The Petras-Morley reply to my review is useful in bringing out the basic issues between us. I think they come down to two: one is on the nature of U.S. foreign policy in general, and the other is on the relation of U.S. policy to the 1973 coup in Chile. On the first point, Petras and Morley describe U.S. policy as that of “the imperial state” autonomously formulating a policy that is “largely the product of an integrated body of aggregate interests of the corporate world as a whole,” and in the Allende case involved “the combined and mutually reinforcing efforts” of the multinationals, the U.S. government, and the international banks. I see a variety of interests at work, including those of the corporations, which may and did differ among themselves; U.S. strategic or diplomatic interests, which may or may not coincide with those of the companies; bureaucratic interests within the U.S. government and the international financial institutions; and personal motivations and ideologies, which may make an important difference in the content and purpose of policy (as our limited experience with the Carter administration is already demonstrating). There is now full documentation of the divisions among the companies and within the U.S. government, and of the saliency of personal, ideological, and strategic motives in the decisions of Nixon and Kissinger. Indeed, the very quote from a U.S. government official that the authors cite with reference to ITT: “No country should sacrifice its overall relations or interests or other groups in the country for the sake of one interest group,” makes my point rather than that of Petras and Morley—not as Petras and Morley would have it, the need to subordinate ITT's interest to that of the corporate world as a whole, but the priority of considerations of the national interest over those of the multinationals.