Columnist Alvaro Contreras Velez waved a blunt, black pistol. He held it with firm delicacy, his little finger extended elegantly. “I take this everywhere I go,” he said. He slipped the piece back into his desk drawer then seated himself on the couch. He talked about Guatemala, the most beautiful of the Central American states, the most populous, yet a dark and dangerous place. He said he thought his people were tired of military rule. It has been interminable in their history. They would probably vote against General Anibal Guevara and for one of his three civilian opponents in the elections of March 7, three days away.

General Romeo Lucas Garcia's time in office had run out and General Guevara was the government's hand-picked candidate. Urgent needs were pressing upon the regime: helicopters, possibly napalm, and weapons of a heavier order than they could get from Israel, their regular supplier.

People seeking a settlement of the Palestinian question have focused on several options during the past few years. These proposals cover a wide range of choices from annexation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza, to a Palestinian semiautonomy in the same territories, to some kind of union with Jordan. However, the only viable proposal is an arrangement that satisfies the population most directly involved; i.e., the Palestinians. And they will be satisfied with nothing less than true independence from both Israel and Jordan for the territories occupied by Israel since 1967. Just as other “peoples” have done before them, the Palestinians today are struggling for one thing above all else: the powerful idea of “self-determination” or “sovereignty.” In the twentieth century that means an independent state.

Throughout most of the twentieth century Mexico's rural sector has been an open sore. In the years following the 1910-17 revolution, large private estates were expropriated by the government and divided into tiny plots for distribution to landless peasants. But political power soon passed from the countryside to the cities. The peasants, victorious in the revolution, were largely neglected by subsequent “revolutionary” governments.

As a result, the near-feudal social conditions of nineteenth-century Mexico were perpetuated. Most peasants, lacking credit, seeds, fertilizer, machinery, and education, were scarcely able to feed their own families. With each new generation the tiny plots were further subdivided and more and more farmers were forced to migrate to cities or to follow seasonal crop harvests as far north as the United States.

In the early 1970s the international relationships that had been frozen since soon after World War II showed signs of decongealing. Sensing the historical moment, the Nixon administration aspired to be both the catalyst and the beneficiary of this time of rare opportunity. As national security assistant and then secretary of stale, Henry Kissinger was uniquely situated to participate in, shape, and observe these efforts. The first volume of his memoirs, White House Years, detailed his part in the early Nixon period, January. 1969, to January, 1973. Now he continues the story in a weighty second volume. Years of Upheaval (Little. Brown; 1,283 pp.; $24.95) takes us from 1973 to the Nixon resignation in August, 1974.