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.

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).

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.

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.