Chile has gained a reputation as the Latin American economic success story of the 1990s. Domestic savings rates are high, foreign investment continues to expand, inflation remains single-digit, and economic growth has averaged 6 percent annually from 1984 to 1995. In the seven years of democratic government since 1989, the poor have begun to share some of the benefits of this growth. From 1989 to 1993, unemployment fell from 12.2 percent to 4.9 percent, and social expenditures increased by a third in real terms (Hojman 1995). But Chile's impressive recent record of sustained economic development coupled with improvements in social justice has incurred significant environmental costs that raise doubts about the ecological sustainability of the Chilean model (Meller, O'Ryan, and Solimano 1996).

In 1819 José Ignacio do Couto Moreno composed this sentimental poem about his adopted hometown, a small river port in the interior of Minas Gerais. He felt compelled to write it after suffering considerable ribbing by his colleagues during a festive occasion in Rio de Janeiro. Couto Moreno was homesick, and his fellow partygoers could not resist teasing him for demonstrating nostalgia for home and hearth. They challenged him incredulously, “What possible attraction could such distant and brutish backlands hold?”

Local politics in Latin America have been attracting a great deal of scholarly interest as of late (Fox 1994; Nickson 1995; Reilly 1995). This interest can be attributed in part to the simple fact that over the past two decades, the institutional weight of Latin American local governments has continued to grow, spurred as much by the popularity of decentralization policies as by the seminal crisis of the central states in the region. Faced with shrinking resources and painful structural adjustment programs, local governments were often left with no other choice but to divest themselves of responsibilities they could no longer meet.

In the early 1960s, the dramatic mobilization of rural wage laborers and small farmers placed the agrarian question at the top of the Brazilian political agenda. The question facing governing elites was how to modernize an archaic agrarian sector that was widely perceived as posing a major bottleneck for development and a breeding ground for agrarian radicalism. Until that time, wage laborers and small farmers in various forms of land tenure had effectively been excluded from existing labor legislation, social security, and coverage by national law in general. Instead, various traditional and clientelist forms of social control regulated rural social relations. The new rural movements were led by relatively moderate urban groups or individuals seeking to create a rural political base. Their appearance soon after the Cuban Revolution however, and in the larger context of the cold war, triggered fears of possible revolution. National debate quickly centered not on whether but on how the Brazilian state should intervene in the countryside. Attempts by the populist government of President João Goulart to address the agrarian question were cut short by the military coup of 1964. In its wake, the fledgling rural movements were brutally repressed in a wave of state-sponsored repression and private landowner violence.

During the dramatic wave of democratization in the 1980s, Venezuela stood out as South America's wise elder. While neighboring militaries had shifted in and out of power, sometimes ruling for decades, Venezuela had maintained a stable democracy since 1959. After a relatively brief period of adjustment, the country settled into a political system in which two dominant political parties alternated in power and the armed forces remained peacefully in the barracks. Yet twice in 1992, important sectors of the armed forces took up arms to displace what they and many other Venezuelans viewed as a decrepit and corrupt political system. The coups failed, but they left the political system shaken and the military's political subordination seriously in doubt. The coup attempts also raised doubts about Venezuelan strategies for military control that had been a model for the rest of Latin America.

This essay will report the results of research on the Río de la Plata clergy during the transition to Argentine nationhood, between 1806 and 1827. It will examine a database compiled from manuscripts, printed primary sources, and biographical dictionaries on 204 clerics residing in the Río de la Plata during those years (about 40 percent of the estimated 560 individuals). The database is analyzed according to descriptive and correlation procedures. The statistical analyses were undertaken to relate the demographic characteristics of the churchmen to their attitudes toward independence from Spain and the religious reforms initiated in the ensuing years by Bernardino Rivadavia, chief minister under Martín Rodríguez, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires. The quantification complements the secondary literature (mostly narratives) on the nineteenth-century Catholic Church in the Río de la Plata region.