The publication of the English edition of Cardoso and Faletto (1979) is a “happening,” an “event.” Consider the following:

Of all the approaches to development, particularly Latin American development, of the last fifteen years, none has had deeper or more pervasive influence, especially in the United States, than the dependency perspective.

Latin American historical research in France is limited, although interest is increasing. The evidence of this is readily apparent. For instance, the proposed book, Guide des sources de l'histoire de l'Amérique Latine conservées en France is still in draft and more than ten years behind schedule. An examination of articles on Latin America in French journals indicates the limited use of sources available in France. The National Archives receives only a few requests for archival searches, its files indicating only three such requests on the topic South America (Amérique du Sud). These include inqueries for materials on commerce between France and Latin America in the first half of the nineteenth century, sources for steamship packet-boats to America in the nineteenth century, and Anglo-French diplomatic relations with Latin America, 1836–48. There were no search requests for Brazil or Argentina, but six for Mexico. Yet archival sources of information about Latin America in France are abundant and provide materials not available elsewhere. This is particularly true for material on the former French colonies and on Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.

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.

Dependencia y Desarrollo en América Latina se ha constituido, sin duda alguna, en el análisis de los procesos sociales y políticos latinoamericanos que más impacto ha tenido en los círculos académicos e intelectuales de dicho continente en los ultimos quince años. Asimismo, la versión en inglés publicada en 1979 ha alcanzado una difusión semejante en los Estados Unidos y Canadá, habiéndose transformado en una referencia obligada de todo curso sobre sociedad y política en América Latina.

AFSSAL was created in June 1978 for “the promotion of research in the social sciences on Latin America, the establishment of a link between public and private research organizations and social scientists who work on Latin America, and the representation of those organizations and researchers with regard to national and international institutions.” The creation of AFSSAL responded to the need of many researchers and academics in France who work at centers whose primary focus is not Latin America. Before 1978 there was no permanent structure for discussion and debate; neither was there a medium that would allow for the circulation of interdisciplinary information on research on Latin America undertaken in France. There was an obvious need to be able to examine together the possibilities for promoting interest in Latin America and developing the means available to social science researchers dedicated to the study of that region.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's now-classic analysis of Latin American dependent development is perhaps the most important synthesis of the shifting alliances between classes and interest groups that have been cause and consequence of nation-building, state formation, and capital accumulation in Latin America. The book is admirable in many ways, but especially in the scale of its focus across time and space. Rather than telling us every detail of a particular country or period it uses an analytical perspective based on class analysis to compare “situations of dependency” across Latin America from the period of decolonization in the early nineteenth century to the 1970s. I am not a Latin Americanist and so I cannot evaluate the many interpretations of political events in the book. Rather my comments will focus on its theoretical implications, its special strengths, and its possible limitations from the point of view of the capitalist world system as a whole.

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.

At the end of almost a year and a half of activities of the International Relations Program of IUPERJ, partially funded by The Ford Foundation, it is possible to identify qualitative as well as quantitative growth in these studies in Brazil, principally in the area of Rio de Janeiro. This growth is remarkable if we take into account, on the one hand, the few attempts at progress made during the decade of the seventies and, on the other hand, the expectation generated at the beginning of the program.

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.