As the recent decade of violence and tyranny slowly recedes into the past, few signs have yet emerged that Argentines are making headway in coming to terms with this troubled heritage. Although the memory of these years is less omnipresent, it still evokes a repulsion as intense—and as fascinated—as when these matters were first allowed to come out into the open. Some reasons for the exceptional depth and scope of the Argentine crisis have become clearer in retrospect, but this clarity does not make the remembering any less painful. The extreme savagery of the country's turn toward violence makes even the most insightful historical exploration of its causes pale in comparison with the memory of having experienced the consequences.

The Maya of Guatemala are today, as they have been in the past, a dominated and beleaguered group. Few have expressed this enduring reality more poignantly than the late Oliver La Farge. Commenting forty years ago on why Kanjobal Indians take to drink, La Farge observed that “while these people undoubtedly suffer from drunkenness, one would hesitate to remove the bottle from them until the entire pattern of their lives is changed. They are an introverted people, consumed by internal fires which they cannot or dare not express, eternally chafing under the yoke of conquest, and never for a moment forgetting that they are a conquered people.”

This article will examine the efforts made by Argentina and Brazil to attain a measure of technological autonomy in the fields of computers and nuclear energy. Grieco's study of the Indian computer industry and separate studies of the Brazilian computer industry by Evans and Adler have shown the inadequacy of the arguments raised by the dependency literature, namely, that in areas of highly sophisticated technology, owned mainly by multinational corporations, the developing country will fail in any attempt to achieve domestic technological development.

In much of Latin America during the 1950s, Raúl Prebisch, then Executive Secretary of the Comisión Económica para América Latina (CEPAL, known in English as the Economic Commission for Latin America, or ECLA), was recognized as a progressive and innovative development theorist and policy activist. In certain government circles in the United States, meanwhile, he was viewed with suspicion as a leftist critic of standard economic wisdom. Yet in his home country of Argentina during the same period, Prebisch was commonly identified with both conservative groups and liberal economic thought.