Will the denouement of the current Latin American debt crisis be unilateral default or preemptive concessionary write-downs of the debt? If either outcome occurs, what are the implications for the U.S.–centered world trade and financial system and, in particular, for the trade and financial links between Latin America and the United States? The crisis containment strategy instituted by the United States in 1982 presumed a negative answer to the first question, thereby ruling out the second as irrelevant. But by 1986, fading confidence in that strategy has reopened both questions.

The Paraguayan War, or War of the Triple Alliance, fought by Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay (1864–1870), remains unique in the Latin American context in several respects. Dire in its duration and human toll, the war's underlying conflict was not directly related to specific boundary disagreements. Unlike other Latin American conflicts, the War of the Triple Alliance has stirred a passionate controversy involving heavy ideological connotations, with some analysts viewing it as a struggle between civilization (the Alliance) and barbarism (Paraguay) and others depicting it as a confrontation between British imperialism (the Alliance) and Latin American nationalism (Paraguay).

In revisiting Latin America to gather impressions for this essay, I soon convinced myself that the most conspicuous characteristic of the region's recent experience is diversity and that the most interesting stories to be told are about specific, often contrasting experiences of individual countries. So, except for the first and last sections, I shall not deal here with Latin America in overall terms. Rather, I shall present a series of loosely connected and necessarily brief “exercises” in comparative political economy. Not surprisingly, primary attention will be given to the four countries I visited this time: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. My endeavor throughout will be to gain some perspective on current or recent issues by tying them into events and discussions of earlier decades.

It was inevitable that after the demise of the series of military dictatorships that ruled Argentina so violently between 1976 and 1983, the return to democratic institutions would occasion an outpouring of the kinds of writing and cultural activities banned or censored by the generals. Movie distributors in Argentina today cannot keep up with the demand for films that could not be seen during these years (or were seen only with extensive and capricious cuts). Theaters are competing with each other to present works dealing with human rights violations and related themes. Television programming, which the military assiduously controlled, has now begun to evince some social consciousness. Meanwhile, the print media have filled bookstores and kiosks with myriad publications bearing witness to the attempt to recover a cultural tradition altered and fragmented by the so-called Proceso de Reorganización Nacional.

The Latin American middlemen known as caciques in Mexico and coronéis in Brazil are one of the most widespread sociopolitical features of Mexico and Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The pervasive institutional arrangements established by such political entrepreneurs at local and regional levels, within the framework of the most “center-dominant” polities of Latin America, are well documented in the literature. In this case, pervasiveness does not imply mere continuity. As changes in structure, meanings, and significance have occurred with the passing of time, the phenomena termed caciquismo and coronelismo have undergone social and semantic transformation. It would therefore be useful to begin by reviewing these historical metamorphoses.

Cocoliche, that curious dramatic character improvised under the circus tent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, is no longer a vital aspect of Argentine life today. Yet his caricatured presence over a period of fifty years proved critical in the creolization of Italians and natives as well as in the sociocultural redefinition of Argentina's “national character.” Creolization (the cultural redefinition negotiated by two or more diverse groups coming into contact—in this case, Italians and Argentines) yields a new ethic and aesthetic order wherein the presence of each group becomes integral to the national whole. As will be shown, Cocoliche became a key vehicle for this process of creolization.

Since the term Mesoamerica was coined in 1943, it has been used widely as an inclusive analytical unit. Paul Kirchhoff's original definition was based on “geographic limits, ethnic composition, and cultural characteristics at the time of the Conquest” (Kirchhoff 1943, 94). He employed these criteria to delineate an area from northern Mexico south through Central America to the Gulf of Nicoya (1943, 98).

Although the history of Latin American women has emerged only recently as a dynamic field of research, it is already shedding light on a range of social and cultural issues. Thirteen years ago, Ann Pescatello edited the first anthology of Latin American articles on gender issues, Female and Male in Latin America. One of her greatest contributions was a hefty interdisciplinary bibliography listing not only secondary sources but primary documents as well. In 1975 and 1976, Meri Knaster's excellent bibliographies appeared. “Women in Latin America: The State of Research, 1975” surveyed the research centers in Latin America with active publishing programs and assessed the state of the art. Women in Spanish America: An Annotated Bibliography from Pre-Conquest to Contemporary Times (1977) is an interdisciplinary bibliography that has become a standard reference on women in Spanish-speaking America. Asunción Lavrin's historiographic essay in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives charted the course taken by subsequent historical researchers and indicated new directions and resources (Lavrin 1978a). Marysa Navarro's “Research on Latin American Women” discussed the effects of economic development on gender roles in less-developed countries, pointing out that Marxist and radical feminist perspectives do not adequately analyze female society. June Hahner's article, “Researching the History of Latin American Women: Past and Future Directions,” briefly reviewed scholarly trends (Hahner 1983). Her most recent report in this journal identified research centers and important interdisciplinary studies on women in Brazil (Hahner 1985).

By 1920 the state of São Paulo boasted the largest coffee economy in the world and was leading Brazil's transition from export expansion to industrialization and “dependent development.” The state was well on the way to becoming a showcase of socioeconomic development in Latin America. This essay explores the role played by the São Paulo coffee elite in the politics of this development process, particularly with respect to the demise of the regime known as the Old Republic in the Revolution of 1930.

The tentative reemergence of democracy in Latin America in the first half of the 1980s has encouraged scholars and policymakers to take a new look at the “older” democratic experiences on the continent in their search for viable political models. Just as Chile and Uruguay were once considered the “Switzerlands of Latin America,” so Venezuela has now become the political darling of the development set. As Peter Merkl wrote in 1981, “It appears that the only trail to a democratic future for developing societies may be the one followed by Venezuela…. Venezuela is a textbook case of step-by-step progress.” Praxis, however, has produced a certain wariness toward “textbook cases” of this sort. The demise of past democratic regimes whose stability had been unquestioned for decades warns that the search for models is fraught with perils. Despite its having an established party system, Venezuela should not be expected to provide a formula for those who seek paths to democratization.

Since 1981 the Brazilian economic and political system has passed through a period of crisis and upheaval. The country's foreign debt has been at the center of its economic problems, and the debt crisis has defined many of the contours of the political crisis. This article will examine Brazil's accumulation of the Third World's largest foreign debt and the consequences of both the debt and the debt crisis for the Brazilian pattern of economic and political development. The article will focus on the role of economic interests, specifically the role of different sectors of the Brazilian business community, in the borrowing boom and bust.

This article will focus on the interactions between the Venezuelan government and FEDECAMARAS, the umbrella organization of most Venezuelan private-sector groups, while a strategic policy was being formulated and implemented that FEDECAMARAS regarded as seriously detrimental to the interests of the Venezuelan private sector. This policy was developed after the official devaluation of the Venezuelan bolívar on 18 February 1983 and consisted of two stages: first, the government refused to supply foreign currency at the rate of 4.3 bolívares to the dollar, the predevaluation rate (PDR), for any foreign debts contracted by private enterprises prior to 18 February, a decision that forced many debtor companies to obtain foreign currency at the floating rate. This rate increased from approximately 8 bolívares to the dollar in March 1983 to some 25 to the dollar in late 1986. Second, the government imposed a price freeze and then price controls. This policy, which was simultaneously regulatory and redistributive, was vehemently opposed by FEDECAMARAS. Yet the results of the organization's efforts indicate that its actual influence has been overstated.

It has been well documented that structural changes in the capitalist world system during the second half of the nineteenth century generated profound consequences for peripheral economies such as those in Latin America and Africa. Improvements in transportation and the increasing demand for tropical consumer goods in the industrializing countries caused unprecedented growth in the production of tropical export crops and a consequent international movement of agricultural commodities. This widespread emergence of export agriculture for Western European and North American markets is the one reason why researchers can still employ a broad concept like the “Third World” to divergent economies and cultures in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Production of such crops as cotton, cocoa, tobacco, and coffee, which had previously been grown in many regions on a limited scale, expanded enormously in the second half of the nineteenth century. The global character of these agrarian changes, however, should not obscure their regional peculiarities. Export agriculture (whether peasant-or plantation-based) arose within existing systems of social and economic relations, which had a decisive influence on the final outcome of this process of change.

Late in 1982, elections were held in Brazil for governors, congressional representatives in both houses, state legislators, mayors, and city council members. According to many observers, they were the first truly free elections in twenty years, the first unhampered by the ominous presence of an institutional act that had overridden the Brazilian constitution.

A heated debate has arisen over U.S. policy toward the large number of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who have come to the United States in recent years. The question is whether the U.S. government should continue to deport these individuals or should offer them some special protection. The key point of debate is the motivation of the émigrés. Officials of the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Justice have maintained that Salvadorans and Guatemalans who come here are merely economic migrants in search of a better life, and that as such, they are ineligible for any special treatment under U.S. immigration law. According to representatives of the Reagan administration, the fact that many Central Americans pass through Mexico on their way to the United States is evidence of their economic motivations.

The African influence on Latin American Spanish is undisputed, and yet the field of Afro-Hispanic linguistics is hampered by the lack of widespread Hispanic creole dialects, or even areas of widespread Afro-Hispanic language usage. A few tiny dialect pockets continue to exist, however, such as the palenquero dialect of Palenque de San Basilio in northern Colombia, and the special dialect of the negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast; until the first decades of the twentieth century, a partially creolized Bozal Spanish (spoken by African slaves who had learned Spanish as a second language, and only imperfectly) was still to be found in Cuba as well as vestigially in Puerto Rico and perhaps the Dominican Republic. Given the geographical inaccessibility of many areas of Latin America containing large African populations, it is possible that additional traces of vestigial Afro-Hispanic language may still be found or may have recently disappeared.