Since 1950, 28 developing countries have produced tanks, ships, aircraft, other major weapons systems, and infantry and artillery weapons for their own use and for export. Local input has ranged from assembly of imported components to completely indigenous design and manufacture. In 1967 exports from lessdeveloped countries (LDCs) were worth $194 million, as compared to exports from all sources of $201 billion. By 1976 world arms exports had increased to $398 billion and LDC exports to $820 million (ACDA, 1978). Even though the role of lessdeveloped countries in world arms production is still small, it is growing and can be significant in some local and regional contexts.

Nascent defense industries in the Third World raise important questions. Terrorists, insurgents, and governments everywhere may find arms more readily available as sources of supply diversify. The spread of weapons manufacture both reflects and promotes the diffusion of power within the international system at large.

Even a cursory review of recent writings on Latin American politics suggests an inclination by many to have done once and for all with the concept of populism. Either it is defined so broadly as to be useless or is relegated to a historical era presumably never again to be seen in the region. Yet the term shows a vitality and stubborn resilience in refusing to disappear, notwithstanding periodic revisions and redefinitions. This is scarcely unique to Latin Americanists. As a pair of European authorities contended more generally:

Departing from other approaches in the literature of Cuban studies (Azicri, 1979) this article does not examine the current phase of institutionalizing the revolution as an unforeseeable event due to fortuitous circumstances, such as the regime's blunder of the 1970 sugar harvest. Indeed, ten years later, it seems simply inaccurate to explain so many epoch-making events that have dominated revolutionary politics as if they occurred just because the regime was unable to produce the remaining 1.465 million tons of its goal of 10 million tons of sugar. However, this is not to construe the 1970 sugar harvest and its surrounding events to be void of any significance in what followed later; more properly, it is meant as a rejection of the notion that the institutionalization of the revolution is the direct outcome of that single historical happening.

In recent years Mexico has demonstrated the capacity to cultivate, process, ship, and transship vast quantities of illegal narcotic drugs. Such activity has traditionally been geared to the realities of domestic poverty, enormous profit, and American demand. Mexican marijuana dominated the U.S. market until quite recently. More importantly from the American viewpoint were the tons of Mexican heroin which saturated U.S. cities in the mid-1970s. Furthermore, Mexico is still the source of vast quantities of psychotropics and an increasingly popular conduit for South American cocaine.

According to Craig (1978), U.S. officials long sought to convince their Mexican counterparts that the key to any effective antidrug program lay in eliminating the illicit product at the source. Until such time that herbicides were applied on a massive scale against marijuana and opium poppies, they argued, the annual Mexican campaign would prove an exercise in futility.

The persistence of long-term poverty among sectors of the urban and rural population in less-developed countries (LDCs), as well as in the so-called developed world, has resulted in the formulation of a diversity of interpretations by theoreticians and policy-makers seeking to comprehend the life of the poor, and for political, economic, and moral reasons to develop solutions to alleviate poverty. Recognition of the failure of the Accelerated Growth Model to produce adequate redistribution of resources and income throughout society through the “filter down” effect has led to changes in emphasis in poverty-related research during the past two decades. There has been a shift in focus away from measurements of absolute poverty, the insufficiency of basic needs to ensure survival, toward the clarification of the determinants of relative poverty, the social inequality experienced by those in the bottom segment of the income distribution within a given society.