La violencia in Colombia, from 1946 to 1965, the largest armed conflict in the western hemisphere since the Mexican Revolution, was one of the world's most extensive and complex internal wars of this century. The study of the violencia strains at the limits of all the social sciences.

This essay reviews and analyzes recent north american writing on united States-Latin American relations, particularly on the Alliance for Progress. It does not attempt to summarize or evaluate the Alliance's history as such, nor does it deal with Latin American perspectives on the Alliance (or more generally on inter-American relations), though I hope to treat these subjects in future works. What this article does instead is to analyze the dwindling North American literature on the Alliance for Progress, as a means of illuminating the state of scholarship in this country on United States-Latin American relations. I shall draw on available writings to illustrate my major theme, which is that United States analysts of inter-American relations tend to adopt either of two alternative perspectives. These perspectives, which I will call “liberal” and “radical” (using both words without quote marks hereafter), differ sharply in their sets of assumptions about the nature of United States-Latin American relations and, more generally, about politics in America, North and South. Each perspective provides insights for interpreting the Alliance and for explaining other aspects of inter-American relations; neither, by itself, seems to me satisfactory. In the final section of this essay, I shall attempt to sketch out a complementary “bureaucratic politics” perspective, one that is usually missing from both liberal and radical accounts, and suggest that this third perspective may be useful for analyzing United States policy toward Latin America.

Had massive migration of mexican labor to the southwest not taken place in the twentieth century, it is probable, as Ruth Tuck observed in Not with the Fist: Mexican-Americans in a Southwest City (N.Y., 1946; 29-30), that “side-eddies” of native Spanish-speaking would have been gradually swept into the mainstream of American life, as they almost were in California by 1900. Or perhaps these Spanish-speakers would have remained a picturesque folk in such isolated areas as northern New Mexico and South Texas. But massive migration from Mexico did occur at the opening of this century, adding a new chapter to Southwestern settlement and development, a chapter that differs from the old romanticized Southwest as much as a Chicano barrio or migrant camp differs from a restored Spanish mission or a New Mexico adobe. And yet this chapter—now so important to the ethnic study movement—has been almost totally neglected by Latin Americanists both in the United States and Mexico.

Peru has a durable tradition of peasant rebellion, most recently described by José Matos Mar (1967) and Oscar Cornblit (1970), which dates far back to the eighteenth century movements led by Juan Santos Atahuallpa and José Gabriel Túpac Amaru. Twentieth century guerrilla leaders have tried to identify with this tradition by echoing their predecessors' concern for the Indians' right to work their own land and to be free from exploitation. They have named their fronts for Túpac Amaru, Pumacahua, Pachacutec, and other native revolutionaries of an earlier era, and they have proposed fundamental changes in Peruvian society, notably agrarian reform, in a conscious effort to complete a struggle that has gone on for more than two centuries to secure land and dignity for campesinos.

The Catholic Church in Latin America was until the mid-1960s one of the most ignored topics of research in a neglected continent. It was not only overlooked by North Americans and Europeans; stranger still, it received only cursory attention from Latin American scholars. The meagre consideration it did attract was overwhelmingly historical in nature and frequently came from authors promoting or attacking particular religious beliefs and institutions. The controversy in Colombia over the persecution of the Protestants (Goff, 1965), and the dramatic events caused by the reactions of the Church to the Mexican revolution (Brown, 1964), stimulated a literature that was at times extremely biased.

Yet, it is not easy to explain the neglect of the Church in the literature since, unlike peasant leagues or guerrilla movements, it is not a novelty in the region. The Church was founded simultaneously with the Iberian societies; much of the culture of Latin America derives from within the Church and has evolved in relationship to it; social fields such as education and charity have always been heavily influenced by Church doctrine and organizations; and the vast majority of the population are declared Catholics. In addition the Church is a highly structured organization in a region of low organizational development; in all countries Catholic groups have been politically active and in some cases assumed the form of Christian Democratic parties (Williams, 1967) which have held power; and the political models currently being formulated in Brazil and Peru would appear to owe much of their content to traditional Catholic principles of hierarchy, paternalism, and corporate identity.

The International Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, or International Institute of Social History, located in Amsterdam, is well known as one of the world's leading centers for research on the history of labor movements and leftist political parties. It is also a major depository of archival material. However, scholars have largely neglected the Institute's extraordinary collection of Latin American materials. The purpose of this article is to describe the two largest bodies of Latin American holdings, those pertaining to Argentina and Brazil. For reasons of space, we have kept annotations to a minimum and have included only materials published before 1940, since they constitute by far the most significant portion of the Institute's Latin American collection.

The historiography of the nineteenth-century political process in latin America is in trouble. With the burgeoning of Latin American history as a professional activity, historians are increasingly “moving beyond” past politics to study social and economic themes. The traditional treatments of the nineteenth century, dedicated to glorifying or debunking heroic leaders, to perpetuating old partisan and ideological struggles, or even to presenting in a more detached way a minutely-detailed political narrative, have lost their allure. It is true, to the obvious consternation of the editors of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, that items in the traditional mold still abound. In Mexico, for example, the celebration of the centennial and sesquicentennial of the two heroic ages of liberalism, the Revolution for Independence and the Reforma, gave great impetus to political writing. Analogous historiographical stimulants can be found in other countries, sometimes where the heroism of the anniversaries is less clear. Yet the value of even the best of such work is increasingly called into question by professional historians.

University students have long played an important role in latin american politics. Preceding by several decades the first signs of youthful protest in the United States, student activism in Latin America has been persistent and often decisive. For example, student groups were instrumental in the overthrow of regimes in Cuba (1933, 1959), Guatemala (1944), Venezuela (1958), and Bolivia (1964). At one time or another, virtually every governing strongman in the region has had to contend with varying opposition from student groups. Indeed, as Robert Alexander has noted, “in the past four decades they have constituted one of the most important pressure groups in twenty republics.”

The past two decades have seen an enormous proliferation in writings on economic development, planning, and programming. Equipped with the aggregative tools of economic analysis acquired since the Thirties, economists have searched for methods and policy measures by which to further economic development. In many developing countries the government has assumed the responsibility of pursuing a deliberate, rational, and consistent economic policy in achieving the objectives of development, in accordance with established priorities, by direct and/or indirect interventions into the performance of the economy. With this expanded role of the public sector, the budget has come to acquire an important role as a policy instrument, since it reflects the qualitative and quantitative aspects of public policy, and puts into effect public policy measures influencing economic activity.

It requires a lot of temerity to analyze in a few pages such a great and complicated topic as “The Study of Latin American History Today,” especially if one is not Richard Morse. My only vantage point is a rather varied experience. A European historian, I am an autodidact in things Latin American. Since the late 1940s, I have visited and done some research in most of the countries of Latin America, and Spain. I have had the privilege of teaching Latin American history at five major United States universities during a total of five and a half years. At the present time I find myself once again in Europe. Thus I am familiar with the increased European interest in Latin American studies during recent years as well as with the various factors which still hamper us in our job. From the psychological point of view I have probably become a kind of mestizo, a Swedish-Latin-North American blend. Though at ease in any of three environments, I have the feeling of being to some extent an outsider even in the country of my birth. After this presentation-confession I shall first survey the current situation in broad terms. The second point will be to discuss the purpose of the study of Latin American history and finally, to recommend some norms of policy.

The study of history in Ecuador is still in its infancy. Too few foreign scholars have ventured into the country's past and most Ecuadorean historians have failed to produce well-researched studies. Consequently, generalization and bias have passed for scholarship. Although there are many reasons for the backward state of Educadorean historiography, perhaps the most important has been the poor condition of the nation's archives. During the last decade, however, libraries and repositories in the country have improved tremendously. While not yet the equal of research facilities in many other Latin American nations, still it is now possible to do historical research with relative ease in Ecuador.

The pacific region contains two of the countries of the world with the highest GNP. The United States dominates the Americas; Japan comes closer every day to achieving the same position in regard to the countries of Southeast Asia. At one conference of Asian Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Japan promised to raise its aid budget to the developing nations to 1 per cent of her GNP by 1975, but at the same time called upon the other countries to try to solve their problems on their own, by making adequate use of economic aid.

As all good social scientists know, to analyze a problem properly one needs hard data, the harder the better. The United States government thinks so too, and is a prolific producer and consumer of statistics. If one wishes to do research on the military expenditures of the Latin American countries, for example, one has available not one but at least four sets of statistics complied by or for the federal government.

At this point, however, difficulties emerge: these sets of statistics not only are not identical, but often differ so drastically that they lead to diametrically opposed conclusions.

In recent years there has been an upsurge in what has come to be called “quantitative history.” Despite the enthusiasm for this approach, however, some of its critics have validly claimed that its payoffs have all too often failed to live up to its promises of new and more accurate findings. Perhaps a central reason for this criticism is that although the quantitative historian may have been sufficiently thorough in collecting his data, he has often failed to apply to them the sensitive techniques of modern data analysis. Rather, he has continued to rely on more traditional methods of description such as means and percentages. As a result, quantitative works are often long on tables and short on analysis.