In the study of agrarian politics in general and the history of rural Colombia in particular, four broad, interrelated perspectives are relevant to the understanding of rural politics: peasants and rebellion, the interaction of local and national politics, patron-client relations, and regionalism. Principal issues and trends within each of these areas are explored here, and an effort is made to generate specific questions for historical investigation. The present state of research on rural history and politics in Colombia is also surveyed, and observations are advanced on how new research orientations originating in these perspectives may contribute to our understanding of social and political developments in Colombia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As you know, we have an institution called the sexenio when everything changes.

And we're here now for six years. You know how we all come in and get thrown out at the sexenio.

If someone has a chief who is capable and has the prospects for a good future, then that person will probably think, “Perhaps I can go with him at the sexenio”; and it happens in reverse, too, if someone has a chief who is not particularly capable but who has influential friends, some will want to follow him. There are a lot of changes and it affects our program, especially when people stop working to pursue their futures.

They say it is impossible to re-create a poem in another language, and perhaps it is. It is also irresistible.

Translators may attempt the impossible because they want to share their enjoyment or because they need versions for teaching or because they like word games-translation is as much fun as DoubleCrostics. My own reason is the challenge of the irresistible; I am like the mountain climber who says, “Because it's there.” And in fact, mountain climbing and poetic translation have some points in common. The translator and the climber may find smooth stretches on their rough paths, and they both struggle upward, but at the goal the similarity disappears, for the climber may succeed absolutely. There are no absolute successes in translation, which John Ciardi calls the art of failure. On the other hand, the translator will never find himself in the anticlimactic position of having climbed Mount Everest. He always has more worlds to attempt to conquer, and his old worlds to improve.

Frederick P. Bowser has observed that: “Literature is perhaps as precise a way as any other to determine the attitudes held by racial groups toward each other, but for Spanish America very little systematic investigation has been done in this regard.” This field of investigation now is somewhat better off than the handful of items he mentioned would suggest. Most of this research has been carried out in the last ten years as an increasing number of scholars are realizing that blacks have participated integrally throughout the literary history of Spanish America, both as characters and as authors, and that unlimited possibilities exist for research on black themes in Spanish American literature in general and on Afro-Spanish American literary expression in particular.

The military coup that put an end to the government of Salvador Allende terminated a socialist experiment that drew considerable world attention. It also marked the demise of one of the most durable liberal democracies. Deviating sharply from the prevalent Third World pattern of political instability, Chile was able to establish a viable constitutional system by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the dominant feature of Chilean politics became its political system composed of strong party organizations spanning the ideological spectrum. This was unique in Latin America. Though parties have been banned by the ruling military junta, and the parties of the left have been subject to violent repression, there is little doubt that Chilean party politics will continue to draw the attention of political analysts. The study of the evolution of political patterns in a Third World country, which are strikingly similar to those of France and Italy, should contribute to our understanding of phenomena such as political participation, the historicity of party alternatives, and the social bases of party politics in polarized societies. Furthermore, a thorough understanding of the Chilean party system before the coup will help to clarify the conditions that led to the breakdown, and, more importantly, the prospects for party politics in the future.

One of the curious features of recent Latin American politics has been the closeness of the results of presidential elections. As shown by tables 1 and 2, the median gap between the two principal contenders in presidential elections taking place around 1970 was 4.93 percent, compared to 15.39 percent in elections taking place around 1950. Over half of the 1970 elections resulted in a smaller winning margin than the smallest such margin around 1950.

Two factors have been instrumental in drawing scientists and scholars to northwestern Peru: oil resources and the climatic phenomena known as El Niño. During the past seventy-five years many aspects of the geology, paleontology, geography, climate, botany, zoology, and archaeology of the region north of the Sechura Desert have become well known. Due to the attention that scientists and the Peruvian government have paid to this area, the departments of Piura and Tumbes are scientifically the best known regions of Peru.

Detailed analyses of ancient stone tools, or lithic analyses, were performed by archaeologists as early as the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe, the Near East, and North America. However, it was not until the past thirty years that lithic analysis became a standard part of prehistoric research in Mesoamerica. The reasons for this belated beginning involve the dominant humanities-art history orientation toward much of Mesoamerican archaeology prior to the 1960s; the extraordinary richness, complexity, and accessibility of other cultural components (particularly architecture, hieroglyphics, ceramics, and sculpture); and the lack of quantitative dating techniques. The paucity of reliable dating techniques until quite recently led archaeologists into elaborate attempts to date the past by using a variety of subjective ordering techniques. It is therefore not surprising that, prior to the last ten years, most Mesoamerican lithic analyses had as their major objective the isolation of chronologically significant classes. These were discovered and defined at both the typological and the attribute (or modal) level of classification.