The post-World War II period in Latin America, as elsewhere, has been marked by the presence of two somewhat contradictory phenomena in the field of armaments. On the one hand, most of the countries have continued their long-standing tradition of devoting a substantial portion of their national budgets to the military and have expanded their arsenals of weapons and stocks of military equipment. On the other hand, several governments have suggested various arms control measures for the Latin American countries. The aim of some of these suggestions has been a reduction in the level of armaments, equipment, and force size; the aim of other suggestions has been more modest—to freeze armaments and forces at existing levels; and the aim of still other suggestions has been to ban nuclear weapons from the region.

From 1912 until the late 1920s Argentina faced an agrarian social and economic crisis of proportions unprecedented in the republic's history. Trapped between unstable prices and the exactions of landlords, thousands of tenant farmers organized, went on strike, and at times sabotaged agricultural production. This unrest swept across the cereal belt, a 160,000,000-acre zone of extremely fertile soil in the provinces of Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires, and in the national territory of La Pampa. After 1919, rural unrest acquired new complexity when tens of thousands of landless workers employed by the tenant farmers began strike movements of their own. The purpose of the present article is to analyze the origins and characteristics of this rural upheaval and then to examine the responses to it formulated by the republic's national political leaders.

En aquella remota época, cuando la mayor parte de España estaba en poder de los árabes, cuando bajo el yugo de los sarracenos innumerables fieles cristianos sufrían en tierras moras amarguísima esclavitud, con grave peligro para la salvación de sus almas y seguridad de sus vidas, la Augusta Reina de los Cielos, atenta a tan graves males, ocurrió en su infinita caridad para redimir a los cautivos.

Como el célebre San Agustín, famoso Obispo de Hipona, autor de las Confesiones, en sus fecundos Soliloquios, el bienaventurado Pedro Nolasco, cuyo corazón estaba lleno de piedad, meditaba en los medios a escoger para librar a los cristianos cautivos o disminuir las penas de su cautividad. Y se consagró de tal manera, que la Santísima Virgen, apareciéndosele, expresóle que tanto Ella como su unigénito Hijo, aceptaban se fundase una orden de religiosos que se encargara de la liberación de los cautivos cristianos del poder otomano simbolizado por la Media Luna y guiado por los principios de Mahoma.

Amazonia is once again the nouvelle vague. Object of intense but ephemeral attention at the turn of the century and intermittently thereafter, the region now confronts a concerted and multipronged program for its de facto integration into the nation.

A special issue of Desenvolvimento & Conjuntura in March 1967, devoted to Amazonia, editorialized: “O atual interêsse pela Amazônia resulta de duas cadeias causais, de grande profundidade, e que são; primeiro, a consciência nacional da necessidade de acelerar o desenvolvimento de todo o territorio nacional, visando à terminação dos desniveis econômicos; e, segundo a compreensão que temos atualmente de fatôres de âmbito internacional. Estamos cônscios de que chegamos a era do desenvolvimento regional.”

Scholarly interest in student political behavior has grown markedly in recent years. Among those who have done research and written on Latin American students a good deal of effort has gone into attempts to develop some generalizations about bases of student activism. A major objective of these efforts has been to try and explain why students become politically active and what differentiates the politically active from the inactive students. Several hypotheses have been advanced in this research attempting to explain high degrees of student political involvement by relating it to factors in the students’ backgrounds or environment. Some of the hypotheses which stand out in the literature have been selected for analysis here. They will be examined in relation to data gathered during recent research on university students in Guatemala.

Paraguay has a relatively open (for Latin America) class structure, a strong national consciousness, a two-party political system, and mass involvement in national politics, all of which are features that some writers believe should be associated with representative democracy of the North American type. In Paraguay, however, these features are associated with, and in fact reinforce, a political system which for most of the past century has consisted of a series of conservative and unstable dictatorships.

It will be suggested in this paper that this association is made possible by the development of certain kinds of interpersonal relationships which have been called “dyadic contracts” since they bind two individuals in either patron-client relationships or colleague relationships. They take various institutionalized forms in many peasant societies that lack corporate descent groups, having been described for Italy, Spain, and the Philippines, as well as Latin America.

When the educated natives of the capital city of Ecuador are questioned about social class and the power structure of their country, the answer comes unhesitatingly and with little variation. Everyone, and of course the educated are as yet few in number, knows who is who and what is what. The sampler of random opinion concludes that the real power is no longer in Quito but in the port of Guayaquil. This has been documented by Díaz, who claims that the traditional aristocracy today owns only about 50 percent of sierran acreage, most of it impoverished and ruined, and that this class is declining steadily with the growth of various coastal “bourgeoisie” classes which stem from the commercial and banking interests of the coast. Politically, too, according to Lang, the coastal influence is undermining that of the sierra, the deposition of the military junta in 1966 being attributable to pressures from the Guayaquil commercial oligarchy.

The controversial Mexican literary periodical Contemporáneos (1928-1931) has recently received considerable attention from literary critics who view it as a significant document in the history of twentieth-century Mexican belles lettres. The journal was not, however, exclusively a literary review but, as the subtitle (Revista de Cultura Mexicana) clearly indicates, a magazine of varied cultural pursuits as well. It contained a number of important essays in which the members of Mexico's post-revolutionary intelligentsia attempted to define and interpret national problems. It will be the purpose of this essay to discuss the role played by the journal in Mexican intellectual history.

In June 1928 the first issue of Contemporáneos appeared in the bookshops of Mexico City. The events leading up to its publication and the reasons for its sudden cessation in December 1931 can be traced to the activities of a group of young Mexican intellectuals later to be classified by the title of this their most significant literary review.

On the occasion of a meeting of Mexican and United States historians a discussion was scheduled to deal with the historiography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of New Spain. For the purposes of this paper, the period will be extended to the 1760s or about the time when the Bourbon reforms became effective. Although the following reflections were prompted by this topic and the illustrations are drawn from that period and place, the frame of reference is largely incidental to the discussion of a problem which is typical of all narrative history. New Spain serves here only as a convenient base to supply a structure to the inquiry and to give a convenient support of detail.