Restrospective Consideration of United States relations with Latin America during the decade of the 1960s has centered on the Alliance for Progress and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The second of these has been analyzed and re-analyzed as a case study in decision making and as a critical point in the nuclear confrontation between the United States and the USSR. Recently, a series of meetings, both political and scholarly, was conducted with what amounts to a nostalgic atmosphere to reevaluate the crisis. All of the participants recalled the episode within the context of East-West relations. The fact that Cuba was a part of Latin America scarcely entered into their reconstructions of events. The scholars who took part in these meetings were specialists in national security issues, in Soviet affairs or in military affairs.

Once Blithely Dismissed as an Ill-Informed, inarticulate, and under-involved president, Dwight D. Eisenhower has come to be regarded with a great deal of admiration, particularly by historians whose ideological proclivities are considerably to Eisenhower's left. He governed in a time of prosperity; he ended one war and entered no other; he resisted pressures to increase dramatically the size of the defense budget and resurrected the summit as an instrument of diplomacy with the Soviet Union. Upon leaving office, he issued an historic warning about the perils of the military-industrial complex.

With But Few Exceptions (O'Donnell, 1984; Whitehead, 1986; Carleton and Stohl, 1987), the literature on regime change and consolidation has generally stressed the analysis of domestic variables in the larger countries (O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead, 1986; Drake and Silva, 1986; Baloyra, 1987; Lopez and Stohl, 1987; and Malloy and Seligson, 1987). The adoption of this approach is understandable because most of the literature extant focuses on large countries in which the impact of international factors is, arguably, less salient. However, this is not necessarily true in all cases. Smaller countries, such as Paraguay, are bound to be strongly affected by external variables, and, therefore, their examination becomes a task both more urgent and of greater importance.

The Process of Redemocratization, the “return” to democratically elected government, has been a major trend in much of the developing world in the 1980s. In particular, this trend has been strong in Latin America. The list of countries returning to the democratic fold is indeed impressive: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador and Peru. Even Haiti, in the Caribbean, witnessed the fall of the Duvalier regime and some initial movement, though halting, toward democracy. It appears in 1988 that Suriname could be rejoining the “democratic club” after several years of near-authoritarian rule, characterized by executions of opposition leaders, curtailment of press freedom, and a protracted insurrection.

Drug Trafficking has Become a central issue in Colombian- US relations. Washington has defined the phenomenon as a national security problem for the United States, and it has evolved, in practice, into a threat to both the regional and national security of Colombia.

This article examines the impact of the drug problem on the bilateral relationship between the two countries. First, it will present the divergent diagnoses which each country brings to this issue, based on the fact that each differs in its approach to the issue, in the thesis it has developed toward the drug question, and in its definition of the effect on national security.

When President Reagan Declared his “war on drugs” in the early 1980s, the United States entered a new era of drug diplomacy in its foreign policy toward Latin America.Control of drug trafficking currently ranks higher than immigration, foreign debt, and communist expansion in Central America as a priority issue in US-Latin American relations. In a March 1988 New York Times/CBS News poll, 48% of the respondents indicated that drug trafficking was the most important foreign policy issue facing the nation compared to Central America (22%), arms control (13%),terrorism (9%), and Palestinian unrest (4%). Equally revealing, when asked whether it was more important to stop the drug trafficking of Central American leaders or to support them in the fight against communism, 63% gave top priority to halting the drug traffic, compared to only 21% who felt that stopping communism was more important (Sciolino with Engelberg, 1988: 10y).

There are Several Reasons why the drug phenomenon has proved to be a difficult analytical puzzle for social scientists. One is that the field of study itself shifts depending upon the interest of the analyst, ranging from topics as diverse as drug abuse, the political and judicial impact of violence and corruption engendered by the illegality of drug trafficking, and the nature of the groups that generate revenue from drug trafficking—and the purposes to which they put that money. Another reason, of course, is the fact that hard data are often absent; measurement problems are severe. A third reason, compounding the second, is that generalizations decay quickly in this area, as zones of production, patterns of consumption, trans-shipment points, and methods and relationships among trafficking groups, state agents and local producers can all change quickly.