Although the 1970s witnessed a convergence of neoliberal economic policies and authoritarianism in the Southern Cone countries of Latin America, the 1980s gave way to a new combination of economic orthodoxy and democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Neoliberal economic projects emerged in these central Andean countries as they confronted broadly similar economic problems. Plummeting prices in the international market for key exports, decreased investment, and growing financial burdens imposed by the international debt created the parameters of la crisis—the topic that became a central focus of political discourse in these new democracies. At different points in time, each of the three countries responded to the crisis with neoliberal economic experiments. In Peru a turn toward neoliberalism occurred under the administration of Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980-1985), only to be completely reversed by the heterodox policies of Alan García (1985–). In Ecuador basic stabilization measures had already been undertaken by the government of Osvaldo Hurtado (1981-1984). León Febres Cordero (1984-1988) then committed the country to a monetarist and antistatist model. In Bolivia following the enormous instability and hyperinflation during the government of Hernán Siles Zuazo (1982-1985), the country adopted a neoliberal approach under the presidency of Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1985-1988).

In his acclaimed synthesis of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Alan Knight observed that “the social bandit's career in Academe has somewhat paralleled his life under the greenwood tree. Introduced by Professor Hobsbawm, he was initially welcomed, even feted, and he put in many appearances in academic company; but then (inevitably, after such uncritical acceptance) some academics grew leery, and the recent trend-especially among experts—has been to qualify, de-emphasise and even deny his role.”

The subject of industrialization has become almost an obsession with Argentines. The image of a belated, weak, incomplete, and truncated process of industrialization has become associated with the frustrated destiny of Argentina. At some moment in its history, the country must have taken a wrong turn and, squandering opportunities, set off on a perverse downhill, an inexplicable turn in the first place, and not only for those who think of the country as being richly endowed. In the search for some explanation, the issue of industrialization has always occupied a central place in the debate.

Whether and how the international trade and investments of less-developed countries affect their patterns of income distribution has long been a matter of interest and debate. Classical economic theory has tended to be optimistic on this count based on the assumption that when poor, heavily populated countries specialize in and export the labor-intensive goods in which they are expected to have an advantage, they will grow fast and improve their income distribution as well. But while trade's positive impact on distribution may be the natural expectation when a country's exports are mainly labor-intensive manufactures, no such generalization is warranted when primary products dominate the export mix, even though one might still expect some loose tendency toward labor intensity. The distribution of rents associated with an export-specific input or inputs may be very concentrated (often the case with mineral exports) or relatively egalitarian (as with exports produced by small family farms), but political factors also affect who gets them. Other, less-direct effects may also be important, including the type of linkages from the export sector, the demands created by the income they generate, and the direction of government expenditure of the fiscal revenues resulting from the trade.

The political tensions surrounding economic stabilization in revolutionary Nicaragua between 1979 and 1988 will be examined in this article. A review of the Nicaraguan case reveals that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass “national unity” created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation. After 1981, access to external finance became more restrictive, the payoff horizon for investment projects began to lengthen, and destabilization intensified. Failure to assess these internal and external tensions realistically contributed to inflationary pressures and de facto shifts in income distribution, which at times undermined the consolidation of revolutionary hegemony and required reconsidering alliance strategies.

Mexico as a nation has endowed education with magical meaning. From the moment when twelve Franciscans set foot in the New World in 1524 to evangelize, education assumed a transforming mission in Mexico. If schooling during the colonial period slumped into the less grandiose task of transmitting relatively fixed values and knowledge to new generations, it resumed its transforming role with the Enlightenment. Under the Bourbon kings, the first steps were taken toward introducing free primary education as a means of modernizing society. With independence, liberals and conservatives alike came to perceive primary schooling as critical to citizen formation, political stability, and economic progress. But the obstacles to realizing mass literacy have been multiple and prolonged. In 1910 an estimated 68 percent of all Mexican adults could not read. Yet even this limited proportion of literate adults were active and contributed significantly to the Revolution of 1910.

Culture, according to one anthropological formulation, is “the structure of meaning through which people give shape to their experience” (Geertz 1973, 312). Clifford Geertz's definition necessarily implies consideration of struggles over the politics of that meaning. Implicit and explicit in such struggles are political efforts to impose upon others a particular concept of how things really are and therefore how people are obliged to act (Geertz 1973, 316). During the process of nation building, history and the structure of meaning that it gives to contemporary “culture” are often manipulated so that socially, politically, and economically opposed groups are merged into putative harmonious “imagined communities” whose reality enters into public consciousness and social discourse as the authentic past (Anderson 1983). But consciousness of shared identity and common discourse centered upon that identity are not un-contested. In Mexico competing images of indigenous “tradition” entail just such a political struggle over meaning, a struggle over the definition of what constitutes indigenous culture—“real” ethnic identity, as it were—and a consequent struggle over what actions, if any, need to be taken (and by whom) to combat the second-class status of most of the country's indigenous peoples.

Recently, a number of scholars have begun to piece together the economic and social history of Indian women in the Andes during the colonial period. It has not been an easy task: too often quantitative materials, such as tributary censuses, mention women only as wives and mothers and then may not provide even minimal demographic data on them. Moreover, although court and notarial records can be rich sources of information about Indian women, they generally deal with those who lived in cities or who were familiar enough with them to know how to use the colonial legal system. Consequently, it is no accident that most research has concentrated on native women in urban settings, certainly a small minority of the female indigenous population.

The issue to be addressed in this article is the limited exploration thus far of how rural women in Latin America themselves define and interpret the world around them and what meaning, if any, they attach to key terms employed by researchers concerned with development issues. A review of the literature reveals that despite the great strides made in the last two decades in understanding Latin American women as rural producers, research to date has dealt with the questions of gender ideology and identity in an extremely limited way. Two potential directions for future research will be suggested here: a critical reassessment of some of the analytical categories that have been taken as givens, and a focus on the social-political construction of gender identity and experience from the point of view of rural women. To explore the possibilities of these suggestions, the phrase “division of labor by sex” will be analyzed in light of recent anthropological and feminist contributions to other (primarily non-Latin American) areas of the literature. A second point that will be discussed is how life stories, when collected self-critically, can reveal the potential tension between the active negotiation of meaning by analysts and by the rural women they interview. I will argue that these new directions in research are essential if scholars are to appreciate varying interpretations of development.

“Scholars and intellectuals, like human beings in other walks of life, need to interpret and come to grips with the crises plaguing the contemporary global political and social system. Indeed, their obligation to do so may be a particularly special and important one.” This credo might properly be etched on the minds of all those who study the politics of Latin America. Scholarship is not restricted to an academic preserve in which the principal, even sole commitment must be the intellectual task at hand. Rather, the study of Latin American politics requires a heightened sense of self-consciousness, which is linked in turn to the parameters and strictures of the several professional disciplines involved.

The formation of a “united front of all workers” has been a strategic goal for most labor leaders, but in reality, such coalitions have been more the exception than the rule. This kind of alliance requires workers in different sectors of the economy, who usually have dissimilar interests, to merge into a coordinating body, generally a new labor confederation. Therefore, regardless of whether they emerge in the core or on the periphery, confederations that aggregate the interests of the majority of organized workers have necessarily been preceded by fascinating processes of negotiations and mergers among unions. This study focuses on the formation of one such coalition in the Colombian labor movement.

In recent years, much of the discussion of North-South dependency relations has shifted from the role of capital flows and trade patterns to the importance of technology transfers. As in the earlier debate, two seemingly opposed positions have emerged, contesting in this case the long-range effects of technology transfers on the receiving countries in the developing world.

Attempts have been made at Latin American regional integration since the late 1950s, but on each occasion, high expectations have met with disappointing failures. In July 1986, however, a new phase began in the history of Latin American integration as Presidents Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina and José Sarney of Brazil signed the Argentina-Brazil Economic Integration Pact (ABEIP).

Prior to the recent reestablishment of democracy in Brazil, much attention was paid to the sudden proliferation of a variety of collective organizations in civil society that arose in opposition to the military regime. By the end of the 1970s, vocal and widespread opposition had materialized from middle-class professional organizations, elements within the Catholic Church, a relatively independent and combative labor movement centered in the industrial suburbs of São Paulo, and a burgeoning number of neighborhood associations being organized in the major metropolitan areas around the country.

During the early 1960s, when U.S.-Cuban relations reached their nadir and threatened to embroil this planet in the ultimate superpower showdown, a prophetic cartoon appeared in one of the then-popular U.S. feature magazines. It showed a bearded, fatigue-clad newscaster seated at the microphone in the Radio Cuba studios, telling his audience, “And now for the baseball scores from the hated imperialistic Yankee mainland.” The cartoonist had no way of knowing that a quarter of a century later, his whimsical sketch would exemplify the controversy over alleged U.S. cultural penetration of Latin America through its own mass media, in some cases transcending even political barriers. The purpose of this study is to examine what role, if any, the Latin American printed mass media are playing in the intrusion of foreign cultures.

For most of the past decade, Central America has been wracked by revolution, counterrevolution, military repression, and massive dislocation that have affected the lives of millions of people. Yet despite these dramatic events, little anthropological research has been directed toward Central America in the 1980s. Analysis of the contents of seven major cultural anthropology journals from 1980 to 1986 shows no increased attention to the area over a previous period, 1970 to 1976. Research published in the 1980s has been emphatically non-policy-based, even when fieldwork was conducted in the midst of crisis. This research report will analyze the underrepresentation of Central America in anthropology journals and possible reasons for it. I will suggest that the reticence of anthropology as a discipline to legitimate policy-based research in Central America stems from a tendency that has characterized the field since its beginnings: studying communities as isolated, timeless cultures that are unaffected by regional, national, and international events taking place outside their borders. This bias causes practitioners who wish to advance their careers to turn their backs on what may be considered controversial policy analysis and write instead about subjects endorsed by the discipline.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda's recently completed major work, the four-volume Historia doble de la costa, presents historians and social scientists studying Latin America with what the author calls a “revolutionary challenge.” In Fals's view, the Historia doble offers a way of researching, writing, and disseminating a history capable of stimulating the democratic transformation of Third World societies. This essay will take that challenge seriously and explore its implications from the perspective of the discipline of history. The first section will survey Fals Borda's intellectual and political development and his evolving critique of his own methods and results. The second section will develop a critique of the Historia doble in terms of the “internal logic” of history as a discipline. The essay will conclude by arguing that Fals's democratic goals are paradoxically subverted by his chosen means and that historians would do well to reconsider the democratic promise of their own methodology.