Insurgency has largely subsided in Central America, but the academic debate over the causes of the violence in the 1980s waxes hotter than ever. As scholars, we have an obligation to subject our theories to the acid test of reality. As individuals interested in the policy process, we must evaluate the outcomes of those policies, even though they are sometimes based on faulty readings of our theories. The increasingly rich body of literature and data available on Central America compels observers to move away from the speculation that dominated early scholarship on the region and toward serious empirical tests of our theories. In doing so, scholars will be in a position to evaluate the policies pursued by the United States and various Central American governments. My article in this journal on land tenure in El Salvador attempted to address both theory and policy with new data (Seligson 1995). Judging by the reactions of Martin Diskin and Jeffery Paige, the conclusions that I drew have succeeded in stimulating a rich debate.

The region most often associated with Guatemalan history and culture is the western highlands, known locally as Los Altos. Only thirty miles from the hot Pacific coast, the highlands are located where the sierra rises rapidly to an altitude of three thousand meters, an area of painful beauty captured in Jean-Marie Simon's telling phrase, “eternal spring, eternal tyranny.” Amidst volcanoes, lakes, and cloud-covered mountains, Guatemalans struggle to rebuild civil society in the wake of what may have been the worst repression in the hemisphere, eking out a living by farming exhausted corn plots. The majority of Guatemala's twenty-three ethnic groups reside in these western highlands, where anthropologists have catalogued and attempted to interpret Mayan culture. Here also historians of nineteenth-century Guatemala have constructed a national history outlining the commercialization of land and coercion of labor that accompanied the growth of the Guatemalan coffee industry.

Several databases now provide information on large-scale companies in Latin America. This information is being made available on a commercial basis to clients (mainly financial institutions interested in emerging markets in Latin America). The information is also available to academics, however, and promises to be a rich source that thus far has been undervalued by Latin Americanists. This research note will explore the possibilities generated by one database, Economática in São Paulo.