It has become rather common to say that the economic importance of Latin America for the United States has declined sharply, mainly owing to the fact that the region's relative position in the external trade of the United States has deteriorated progressively. While the figures do indeed reveal that the region now plays a lesser role in U.S. foreign commerce than it did some decades ago, it would be grossly misleading to assume that the overall economic importance of Latin America for the United States and other core powers also has declined. Economic relations between the Latin American periphery and the United States should not be analyzed merely in quantitative terms, on a bilateral basis, and only at certain points in time. It is necessary to shift attention to the structural level, to verify, for example, whether this decrease in the Latin American share of world trade necessarily implies a breakdown of the bonds that have existed historically between core and periphery economies.

The texts discussed below treat the problem of the relationship between economic and social development and the development of science and technology. The review is not proposed as exhaustive, but concentrates on the manufacturing sector; and it does not deal with specific literature concerning such important topics as agriculture, energy, transportation, and the relationship between science and technology policy and education (however, the first of these is treated in a complementary study [Albuquerque and Nascimento 1978]). Also, the description of science and technology policy measures and of the institutional apparatus that implements them is reduced to a minimum, although bibliographic sources in which more detailed descriptions can be found are indicated. Given these constraints, an attempt has been made to take into account the complexity of the topic and the variety of research that it has inspired. In this sense, contributions from noneconomists, notably sociologists and political scientists, are incorporated; we refrain, however, from any evaluation of the theoretical framework that guides such contributions.

This work will sketch some methodogical and theoretical guidelines for studying the historical process by which national states were formed in Latin America. It is a suggested method for studying this process, not a rigorous interpretation of it. Such an interpretation would be difficult without first having studied in depth the experiences of several nations from which to infer and generalize a pattern of historical development. Studies of this sort have been undertaken recently, so I will confine myself here to a discussion of certain conceptual elements and a research strategy that may prove useful in the work that lies ahead. Several hypotheses on the process of state formation will be advanced to illustrate the perspective from which I propose to undertake its study.

Brazil and Mexico occupy distinctive positions in the structure of the capitalist world economy. They bear little resemblance to the classic model of a “peripheral” country: they are too industrialized, having many of the modern industries typically found only at the center of the world economy; they supply themselves with too large a share of the finished goods consumed domestically; their exports are too diversified and include too many manufactured items; and they have developed unusually strong states with sophisticated administrative apparatuses capable of promoting and protecting local interests. But neither do Brazil and Mexico possess the characteristics commonly associated with “developed” or “core” nations. Their gross domestic product per capita is far below that of the United States, Japan, or almost any of the countries of Western Europe; their distributions of income are highly skewed compared to those of the developed countries; they are recipient rather than source countries of foreign investment; they are debtor rather than creditor nations; and they are on the receiving rather than the originating end of product innovation and new production techniques.

During the National Conference on Education, Science, and Technology, held in June 1976 as part of the political campaign just prior to the change of administrations, the spokesman for the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) stated, in the presence of the incoming president of Mexico, that:

It is presently impossible to doubt the need for a policy on science and technology in Mexico. Such a policy should not base the country's scientific and technological development upon the never-ceasing imitation of the research lines and technological solutions of the advanced countries. It is necessary for us to look for our own model of scientific and technological development.

The political expression of the Argentine working class has been a subject of concern to social scientists and other interested observers for some time. The country was one of the first in Latin America to have autonomous trade unions and political parties or ideological groups dedicated to the defense of labor interests. During the 1940s a major reorientation took place associated with the advent of Peronism. How did this change come about? Was it a totally new departure, or was it rather an adjustment of tactics on the part of the existing structures? How different is the Argentine labor movement—both in its trade unions and its political expressions—from others in comparable countries? This article seeks to explore this problem, based on a theoretical reassessment of the issues involved in working-class organizations as they emerged in the Argentine historical experience.

This study concerns the structure of power in Brazil during the early seventies, when economic growth, and political repression, were at their height. The objective is not to discover the power structure, as if there were serious doubt about its existence or even much mystery about its composition. For all the curiosity value of first-hand information about elites in a virtually closed political setting, there is a danger of confirming what is already known about the workings of authoritarian rule. The point of departure here is that “what everybody knows” about the Brazilian power structure is not so much wrong as it is limited and in some ways misleading. In order to understand this, it is first necessary to outline the common ground among scholars regarding interelite relations in Brazil and then to suggest how this view might be modified.

In recent years, a body of literature analyzing development and modernization since the world wars has emphasized the diverse tasks women perform in premodern agrarian societies as compared to incipient industrial economies. The greater input of women in many nonmechanized societies, compared to their role thereafter, has been seen as the key to understanding why the introduction of machine technology has often resulted in the subsequent general unemployment or underemployment of working-class women.

This article is concerned with the problem of reading and interpreting the Argentine literary magazine Sur, which was published regularly between 1931 and 1970 (and irregularly thereafter) as an elegant fusion of fiction, poetry, philosophy, plastic arts, and social commentary. That a magazine should be chosen as a research topic reflects the reality of Argentine literary life in the twentieth century. Such publications offered many writers their main opportunity to put forward ideas in the forms of works of literature and critical or general essays. Most magazines lasted for very few years, but Sur, thanks to the quality of its contributors and the sound financial base of its founder, Victoria Ocampo, was to have an important influence on several generations.

In two decades, Brazil has shed the image of a stagnant agrarian state and emerged as one of the world's largest agricultural exporters. The price of this metamorphosis has come high: land, resource, and capital concentration; massive rural-urban migration; shortfalls in domestic food supply; and ecological deterioration along the expanding agricultural frontier. Major transformations in the structure of agricultural production have accompanied these changes, and they have led to new patterns in the organization of agricultural work and associated social relations in production. Perhaps the most visible social product of agricultural modernization has been the temporary wage laborer, known commonly in Brazil as the boia fria.

The Soviet Union has established what has become the largest, and probably the most prolific, research center devoted exclusively to Latin America. Soviet progress has been especially dramatic because the USSR was so weak in this field in 1961, when the Institute of Latin America was established in Moscow. The Institute now has one hundred full-time researchers and supports the activities of many other Latin Americanists there and in other Soviet cities. It also has maintained ties with new Latin Americanist groups in Eastern Europe, particularly in East Germany and Poland.

La dictadura ha predominado como forma fundamental de organización política en la mayoría de las repúblicas hispanoamericanas, desde el logro de la Independencia hasta nuestros días. Las fuerzas democráticas, siempre presentes y muchas veces heroicamente activas, por lo general han llevado la peor parte en el conflicto con la tiranía. Por eso resulta comprensible que la novela hispanoamericana refleje, desde sus comienzos, esa característica básica de la vida social del Continente. El número de novelas que, directa o indirectamente, se refieren al tema dictatorial es enorme. Curiosa y (en apariencia) contradictoriamente, por larguísimos años el dictador no ha sido protagonista de estas obras. Aparece en ellas como un personaje más, importante, pero secundario, en el desarrollo de la trama. No es sino en la década del 70 de este siglo, con las novelas dedicadas a este tema por Alejo Carpentier, Augusto Roa Bastos, Gabriel García Márquez y Arturo Uslar Pietri, cuando el dictador ocupa el centro de la atención del autor y su personalidad es examinada en todas sus aristas. O sea que hasta 1970 no existió mas que el género (la novela de dictadura), de orientación sociológica y política, más que psicológica. Sólo en la década del 70 aparece la especie (la novela de dictadores), que además de retratar un régimen se concentra en el estudio de la compleja personalidad tiránica de un individuo. Al examen del proceso histórico y literario que explica ese fundamental cambio de orientación estética está dedicado este artículo.

Traditionally, Western scholars have spoken about “the” Soviet view of this or that question—even about “the” Soviet ideology with respect to it—and hence they have considered it legitimate to draw quotations from a wide range of persons and types of sources in order to assemble a composite summary of that view. Even if it has been recognized that there must be private differences of opinion among Soviet officials and specialists, it has usually been assumed that the censorship prevents any from being expressed in public. This assumption is simply incorrect. In the words of Brezhnev, “a party and state leader. cannot consider himself the sole and indisputable authority in all areas of human activity. ” While jealously guarding their own right of ultimate decision, Soviet leaders now talk about problems being solvable only by “collective reason,” and insist that “it is necessary to listen to specialists and scholars, and, moreover, not only of one orientation or school.”

The extensive post-1973 literature analyzing and comparing national energy policies across countries has generally excluded Cuba, purportedly because of the unavailability of appropriate data. As a result, very little serious work has been carried out assessing Cuba's current energy balances and the efficacy of its policies in adjusting to the new global energy situation. While it is incontrovertible that available official Cuban energy data are weak, it can be argued that, when supplemented with data from other sources and with reasonable estimates, they can serve as the basis for tentative analysis of energy policies. This note attempts to lay the groundwork for such future analyses by bringing together and evaluating energy supply and consumption data covering the first two decades of revolutionary government. While the emphasis is on the period 1959–78, pre-1959 data are introduced when appropriate in an effort to put recent trends in historical perspective. The first section focuses on primary energy production and considers the contribution of commercial and noncommercial sources to domestic energy supply. In the second section, imports of primary energy products are considered and their role in total energy supply evaluated. The last section examines tentatively some aspects of Cuban energy consumption and attempts to relate consumption patterns to policies that were in effect during the period.

There has been much controversy over the nature of the institution of slavery, the relative humanity or lack of it in those slave holding nations which practiced it, and its benign or baleful effects upon the blacks on whom it was inflicted. Much has been said about the harshness of Anglo-American slavery and the relatively mild nature of Spanish American slavery, which respected a slave's basic humanity and rights of person, property, and family. Yet little has been done to quantify and document how those attitudes applied in practice. We have had little precise information about the slave family as it existed in the Spanish American colonies and the extent or use of slave property, or about the slaves' access to the legal system that might protect and defend his person, his property, or his family. New sources and methodology have begun to challenge long-held assumptions about both Anglo-American as well as Spanish American slavery. If any conclusion is warranted, it may be that slavery varied widely from place to place and was influenced perhaps as much by differing economic circumstances as by differences in cultural attitudes.

It is generally agreed that the artistic world of eighteenth-century Brazil was dominated by the sculptor/architect, Antônio Francisco Lisboa—“O Aleijadinho” (“the little cripple”)—who has been called one of the most important artists ever to develop in Latin America. The peculiar circumstances of his life, combined with his obvious artistic genius, have resulted in considerable scholarly interest and study. The annotated bibliography that brought Aleijadinho scholarship from 1940 through 1973, in combination with the earlier bibliographies of Martins and Smith-Wilder, provides a relatively complete chronicling of works dealing exclusively with A. F. Lisboa.

Unlike other Latin American countries, the particular mode of dependent capitalist development that has occurred in Argentina has led to the emergence of a relatively large industrial bourgeoisie. Indeed, industrialists in Argentina have constituted an extremely important pressure group, in a society where the state has not been able to control the development and activities of societal organizations. Entrepreneurial organizations both of a general type, such as chambers of commerce and industry, and of a more specialized nature, such as trade associations, began to arise autonomously by the turn of the century. The events of the Perón years were particularly important in giving impetus to entrepreneurial organization. By the early 1950s, with the passage of the Law of Professional Associations of Employers, which granted them special legitimacy and importance, such entrepreneurial organizations became the most important means by which entrepreneurs attempted to influence government policy.

The cargo system is composed of a series of ranked offices, both civil and religious, that male members of indigenous communities assume. Usually the term for each office lasts one year. Adult men who are active in village affairs pass through the various “cargos,” as these offices are called, taking on civic duties one year, sponsoring important religious fiestas celebrated in the community the next, and so on. Finally, as old men, they attain the status of elders, or “principales,” and have considerable authority in local decision-making (see Cancian [1967] for a concise, traditional interpretation and Smith [1977] for a more critical appraisal of the literature).

Since 1973, Venezuela has had extraordinary oil revenues. These go to the government and from the government to its employees and contractors. The monies have filtered into the Venezuelan economy, where large profits have been made in selling imported goods, construction, banking, and light industry. There are opportunities for investment in Venezuela, but the affluent Venezuelan is already a participant in a multitude of businesses; thus, when Florida real estate brokers sold properties in Caracas, Venezuelans, who had been looking for places to invest monies, were obvious customers. Indeed, so great had been the number of purchases of Miami condominiums that the Venezuelan government, in November 1977, put restrictions on sellers in Venezuela of foreign land and real estate, but not on the buyers. Monies have continued to flow out of Venezuela, which (at the time of this writing) has no restrictions on the capital exporter.

The employment growth rate during the last decade is one of the economic topics that has stimulated great attention in recent years. The absence of data that may be used for national level comparisons, however, has led to a number of inexact statements and positions on the problem. The purpose of this study is to fill in this informational vacuum in order to ascertain the data relevant to changes in employment in Chile for the period 1974–78.