Half of all urban dwellers and eight out of every ten rural inhabitants in developing countries live in inadequate and badly equipped housing, crowded together and subjected to unacceptable environmental conditions. This means that in the countries of the Third World alone more than 2,300 million people live in housing that is without (or has only insufficient) services and that is marked as well by varying degrees of deterioration. The need to construct new units to absorb the natural increase in the population, to overcome gradually the qualitative deficit indicated above, and to renew existing stock makes housing and complementary services the major investment that must be made if one of the basic needs of the population is to be met. “A house is something more than a simple or complex construction, detached or grouped, forming an agglomeration that might have diverse forms and functions. Defined as a dwelling, this construction is converted into an essential aspect of man's existence as a social being and his way of life on earth.”

In the open-air markets of Northeast Brazil, folk poets still sell the stories in verse called folhetos or literatura de cordel, which came to Brazil from Portugal almost five centuries ago. Until only about a hundred years ago, most cordel stories found in the Northeast originated either in Portugal or Rio de Janeiro. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, Northeastern poets began publishing large numbers of booklets with a distinctly regional flavor. These authors would then suspend their verses along strings for display in local marketplaces, chanting one or another story out loud in an effort to attract potential customers. Although the tales were known to rich and poor alike, the great majority of the poet's customers were always associated with subsistence agriculture. These persons, who were often illiterate, might choose a story on the basis of the poet's oral presentation or an appealing cover illustration. They would then take home their purchases to a friend or relative who would read aloud the tale for the group.

A little more than fifty years ago, French medievalist Marc Bloch (1928) tried to persuade his fellow historians of the importance and usefulness of the “comparative method.” Explanations, he argued, based on “those proverbs of common-sense psychology which have neither more nor less validity than their opposites” had to be replaced by causal explanations arrived at with the help of systematic comparison. In response to these exhortations, most historians, as Bloch himself noted, “express polite approval and then go back to work without changing their habits.” Nevertheless, the last decades have seen a remarkable growth in comparative studies in history as well as in the social sciences in general. Since 1959, the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History has played a crucial role in this regard. Yet the results of comparative historical studies have not been such as to challenge the skepticism of many historians who associate comparative approaches with facile analogies, pseudo-similarities, and questionable generalizations. Comparison too often seems to imply the sacrifice of the unique and differentiating features of each situation in the past for the sake of some broad scheme. Many historians are put off by social scientists, such as sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt (1963), whose ambitious comparative schema seem marked by typologizing with little empirical basis. To quote Bloch once more, the empirical historian will probably never become a philosopher of history or a sociologist although “he may, according to his state of mind, grant them admiration or a skeptical smile.”

The social and psychological consequences of economic development have frequently been ignored in social science research in Third World countries, and most comprehensive analyses of the problem do not attach much importance to individual-level characteristics, such as the psychopathological outcomes of modernizing experiences. Migration and cultural change, which are closely related to the broader development process, traditionally have been viewed by social psychiatric research as independent variables associated with mental disorders (Murphy 1976).

The “energy crisis” has often been advanced as the most important explanation of many Latin American nations' economic and political behavior during the 1960s and 1970s. Low oil prices led Venezuela to join in founding OPEC in 1960 and to take an active role in reaching its decisions. The fear of an oil embargo in 1973–74 forced Brazil to shift to a pro-Arab foreign policy. The increased oil prices of the past decade permitted, but did not ensure, rapid growth of Latin American oil producers, and are associated with massive increases in foreign borrowing and the search for new energy sources by both oil consuming and producing nations. The expenditure of increasing shares of national income on energy production and distribution influences life styles by leaving fewer resources for other activities, and will continue to do so at least until substitutes for current energy sources become available at attractive prices.

Economic historians are accustomed to treating 1930 as a landmark date in the development of Latin America. The onset of the Great Depression was an abrupt external shock to every country in the region, cutting off traditional export markets and making it exceedingly difficult to secure consumer goods, replacement parts, and new capital equipment in return. Many countries began experiments in national self-sufficiency, turning to policies that came to be identified, especially after World War II, as import substitution industrialization (ISI). Although these experiments were sometimes disappointing, they represented a watershed in the evolution of national economic systems.

Present conditions in the international energy market and the problems they pose for Latin America hardly need emphasis, especially the uncertainty with respect to the availability and price of specific forms like oil. These concerns are, of course, aggravated by the need to respond to the short-term severe dislocations in the energy market, while at the same time taking coherent steps toward long-term solutions of national energy problems. Indeed, how should oil importing countries offset price increases, which exacerbate national deficits and debt service; deal with inflation, which raises the cost of developing indigenous resources; and successfully increase exports, when a number of other countries around the world are pursuing similar export expansion policies? While in broad terms the international energy market imposes a set of constraints upon all Latin America, there is a wide variety of responses among the countries themselves. The oil importing countries (Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Brazil) face a set of problems different from that of more-or-less self sufficient nations (Argentina, Colombia), which is in turn quite different from the major oil exporter (Venezuela). The needs of each country are, therefore, a combination of the international context and the specific situation within a country, and this is reflected in the nature of their energy planning and policy institutions.

The study of Latin America in Japan prior to World War II was centered on the issue of migration, but as an area study field it is a product of Japan's economic expansion and relations with Latin America in the postwar period. After the war, a new wave of Japanese migration to Latin America was soon followed by the first government-sponsored team of social scientists who studied the living conditions of immigrants in Brazil. But the principal boost to the field was provided by the phenomenal economic growth experienced by Japan and the rapid development of trade, investment, and economic cooperation with Latin America. In 1958 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took the initiative of establishing, with corporate support, the Latin American Society of Japan, whose main objectives were to gather and disseminate economic information on the region and to publish economic and business reports. As has been typical in other countries, economic ties were soon followed by an increase in university activity. In 1964, the first true area study program on Latin America was established at Sophia University; in the same year the first Japanese association of social scientists (mostly economists) working on Latin America was founded; and in the following year a Japanese association of Brazilian studies was organized. In 1967, the Research Institute for Brazilian Culture was organized at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies, and the Institute of Developing Economies (which had begun its operations ten years previously as the Institute of Asian Economies) expanded its coverage to promote economic cooperation and trade with Latin America.

Every five years a survey of this sort is attempted with the goal of reflecting the “democratic weathervane” of Latin American politics. Since Russell Fitzgibbon launched the experiment in 1945, regular attempts have been made to tap the minds of expert panelists in a reputational evaluation of which countries are the most and least democratic. Many Latin American nations claim that political democracy is their goal (my understanding of democracy in theory and practice is alluded to in the notes below), although they choose to reach it via contrasting routes. Blatant dictatorships often use the plebiscite as a means of demonstrating that they enjoy popular approval and acclaim, and single-party “democracies” regularly give the appearance of popular support via controlled elections. Latin Americans may feel that North Americans have an excess baggage of ego and ethnocentricity in pretending to evaluate democracy to the south according to our criteria; that is probably a just reaction. But the Latin Americans do boast constitutional structures and theoretic pronouncements patterned after ours. They have also accepted considerable North American assistance and financial largesse in the alleged quest for the democratic “good life.” And Latin American scholars frequently evaluate the status of political democracy in the so-called Anglo-American parliamentary states. Evaluating democracy is thus a two-way street, and the enterprise may yield mutual rewards and pitfalls.

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1968 as a “living memorial” to the twenty-eighth president of the United States. Its aims are to support advanced research and writing on national and international issues by scholars and practitioners from all over the world, and to bring together the realms of scholarship and of public affairs, which Wilson himself combined.

Roberto González Echevarría's recent article in LARR, “The Dictatorship of Rhetoric/The Rhetoric of Dictatorship: Carpentier, García Márquez and Roa Bastos,” though elegantly written and full of ideas, seems to me to have confused almost every issue it raises and to have evaded other equally important issues rather than confront them. The persistent, largely unspoken promise of his text is that it will illuminate both history and literature by separating and contrasting them, whereas in fact it surrenders completely to the latest version of the literary critic's traditional means of escape. Where previously it used to be said that history was the realm of mundane reality and literature the realm of the imagination, critics now tell us that the twentieth century has proved that all reality is fictive and that the borders between reality and what used to be called fiction are impossible to draw, all men's actions and reactions forming and being formed from a seamless web of invisibly structured discourse. This is evidently RGE's view, and the influence of French structuralism is apparent in his text.