As Latin America has moved through the second half of the twentieth century, both the public and private sectors have required increasing levels of technological skills and specialized expertise. In the public sector, this necessity has occasioned the rise to prominence of a sector known in Latin America as profesionales y tcnicos. This emergent elite has assumed a significant role in shaping and implementing public policy because its members command skills critical to the functioning of modernizing technological society. As a result, participation by professionals and tcnicos has become central to bureaucratic efficiency, economic development, and the manipulation of symbols that reinforce political legitimacy. Yet the political role of professionals and tcnicos has been little explored, and direct relationships between professional elites and national parties, often central to the democratization of developing nations, have received minimal attention.

Jauja, rinconcito de mi valle.

Andean folk song, Juan Bolvar

The military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) coined the phrase, Campesino, el patrn no comer ms de tu pobreza! (Peasant, the patrn will feed no more on your poverty). Clearly a favorite slogan of the self-described Peruvian Revolution, this saying appeared frequently on posters and in newspaper notices. Although linked to Velasco's agrarian reform program and peasant organizations like the Confederacin Nacional Agraria (CNA), which emerged from the plan, this aphorism was said to have originated with Jos Ga-Meja, La reforma agraria en el Per (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1980). I take the agrarian reform process into consideration because of its impact on my generation, which experienced all of its effects intensely.

Carolina Maria de Jess was a fiercely proud black Brazilian woman who lived in a So Paulo favela with her three illegitimate children (each with a different father). She had learned to read and write by continuing to study on her own after only two years of primary school. In 1958 fragments of her diary came to the attention of an enterprising journalist, Audlio Dantas, who helped her get it published. For a brief period, Carolina Maria de Jess became an international celebrity as the author of the best-selling book in Brazilian publishing history. For many reasons, however, Carolina fell from favor: the rise of a military dictatorship in 1964, which led to an accompanying reaction against social criticism, and especially the ways in which she handled her fame and related to the press and the literary elite. Within a few years, she was forced to move back into the favela and scavenge for a living. A brief flurry of publicity in 1969 about her fallen condition prompted a slight improvement in her circumstances, but she was soon forgotten again. Carolina died in 1977, on the verge of indigence. Her complete life story has never been told, and most Brazilians today are unaware that a black favelada in the 1960s became the symbol (to foreigners, at least) of the struggle to rise above poverty. Most Brazilians neither read her books nor consider them noteworthy. Evidently, the author of what The New York Times called a rarely matched essay on the meaning and the feeling of hunger, degradation, and want touched no nerve in the Brazilian sensibility.

En 1931 un diplomtico alemn destac las razones debido a las cuales su pas estaba interesado en prestar asistencia militar al extranjero en los siguientes trminos:

Del empleo de instructores militares en servicios extranjeros se espera, en general, dos provechos: uno no material y otro material. Aqul reside en la expectativa de alcanzar, mediante las tareas de organizacin y enseanza en base a preceptos alemanes, una cierta influencia entre los militares en favor de Alemania. Una ventaja de esta naturaleza no debe subestimarse, sobre todo en Suramrica, donde la Fuerza Armada suele ser un factor importante en la poltica interna. La utilidad material reside en el supuesto que con instructores alemanes tambin el armamento y equipamiento del ejrcito extranjero se realizar conforme al modelo alemn, y consiguientemente, los pedidos se realizarn en Alemania beneficiando a su industria y comercio.

Las traducciones de citas al castellano en el texto y las notas son del autor. Los nombres de los archivos se han abreviado del siguiente modo: Bundesarchiv-Militrarchiv, Bund.-Militarch; Politisches Archiv des Auswrtigen Amtes, Pol. A. des AA. Las Memorias del Ministerio de Guerra y Colonizacin de Bolivia se han abreviado con Memoria.

Activities commemorating (positively or negatively) the Columbian quincentenary have moved the story of this encounter out of the libraries, off the dusty shelves of nineteenth-century museums, and back into the political arena where it began. In the United States and Canada, as in Latin America, the search for a usable history that would include Native Americans has prompted reassessment and revision of the historiography of Indian-white relations. This research note will review some of the more important ethnohistorical issues raised in North America and comment on possible comparative studies for the Southern Cone.