There are at least two reasons for United States and Latin American historians to bring their work together in a comparative thesis, the first being the need to maximize control of generalizations, and the second being the need to write the history of the social process by which a single world community has been developing since the sixteenth century. Recently, considerable progress with the first task has been made in the study of slavery and race relations, but little progress can yet be reported with the second.

One result of the work on slavery and race relations ought to warn and encourage us. Without entering here into a discussion of the specific points of view advanced by Frank Tannenbaum, Marvin Harris, Sidney Mintz, Stanley Elkins, Gilberto Freyre, Herbert Klein, and so many others, it could be demonstrated that the comparisons of slavery in the United States, South America, and the Caribbean have so far proven enormously important in clarifying issues and stimulating new research and yet have failed to yield some of the most sought-after generalizations.

Philippe Bunau-Varilla was a Frenchman who found a place in the histories of the United States and Panama as it was largely through his efforts that the United States undertook the construction of the Panama Canal. Beginning in January 1901 he spent the major part of eighteen months in the United States lecturing in Cincinnati, Chicago, Boston, Princeton, Philadelphia, and New York and lobbying before the American Congress to secure the adoption of the Panama Canal route. When the policy of the Colombian government threatened to prevent the implementation of this decision, he helped promote a secessionist movement at Panama that enabled the Panamanians to become independent on 3 November 1903.

Since 1941 United States relations with Latin American countries have fluctuated between the ofñcial cordiality of wartime cooperation, which provided the basis for the Organization of American States and the Rio Treaty, and deep-seated hostility and malaise, which erupted in the Nixon visit and in Castro's revolution, as well as in more recent unpleasant incidents. Latin American leaders have contended that the United States violated its wartime commitments, particularly in the economic sphere, by concentrating on the recovery of Europe in the first postwar decade and on Asian upheaval in the second. The history of U.S.-Panamanian relations since 1941 provides an excellent case study in order to test the validity of these contentions.

The period immediately following Castro's overthrow of Batista on New Year's Day 1959 was followed by a series of revolutionary trials that attempted to weed out and punish supporters of the fallen dictatorship and “enemies of the revolution.” One of the most unusual of these political trials became a cause célèbre that called into question the general nature of law and justice in Castro's Cuba. The analysis of this case allows us to see clearly the relationship that has traditionally existed between the ideas of law and justice in Latin American culture. This study also touches incidentally upon the ever present judicial problem of defining the responsibility of soldiers for their actions during warfare.

Chile has a housing problem but not in the traditional sense of something to be solved. Like any other country in the throes of modernization, Chile is producing an inadequate flow of housing services for low income families. Each family participates to some extent in the available housing services, but an estimated 600,000 families are not receiving an adequate supply. This analysis is concerned with the economics of the government response to this situation from 1965 to 1969.

The focus is on the economics of housing because the basic question that the housing policy decisions taken by the government must face is the more efficient administration of the scarce resources available for the production of improved housing services. Housing is a basic social need to which limited resources must be assigned by both the public and private sectors.

There has been no official population census of Cuba since the decennial count of 1953. The Castro government, which came to power in January 1959, has not seen fit to continue census-taking on decennial basis, which would have regularly called for an enumeration in 1963. Until 1958 Cuban government agencies, including the National Bank and the National Economic Council, published annual estimates, intending presumably to adjust them in accordance with what would have been a census in 1963. The revolutionary government has continued annual estimates, but until recently, made no official announcement of them. In 1967, for the first time, the year-by-year estimates became available in official statistical publications.

Much interest has been associated with the population trends by students of Cuba because of a number of factors which presumably would affect them, notably the extraordinary emigration from the island. There have been attempts to arrive at estimates independently.

Mexico's present political organization bears the imprint of regional fragmentation, which has strong pre-Revolutionary antecedents. Early Revolutionary governments reduced the weight of regional loyalties and divisions in the political equation without totally removing them. By attacking latifundia, caudillos, infrastructural deficiencies, and other underpinnings of regionalism, they advanced toward national integration. Nevertheless, the political pattern set by ancient conditions persisted in a new context. When President Miguel Alemán (1946-1952) institutionalized the Revolution, he also sanctioned a form of institutionalized regionalism. The ruling party (Partido Revolucionario Institutional or PRI) adapted the traditional mode of political participation to a new governing style. As a result, the regional recruitment of national leaders still depends more on the historical status of the states from which they come than on such modern criteria as the state's economic power or population size.

A “messiah,” as the term is used here, is taken to mean a person believing himself to be divinely called, as a result of a dream or a series of visions, to lead a group of people from some catastrophic set of conditions into a more perfect state of affairs. “Messianism” is a term used in a variety of ways but usually to characterize a religious movement led by a messiah. Sertão is a Portuguese word meaning simply “hinterland” or interior and is usually taken to refer to a region in Brazil known as the polígona das sêcas (drought polygon) which extends over an area of the states of Maranhão, Piauí, Ceará, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte, Sergipe, Alagoas, and Bahia subject to periodic and unpredictable droughts.

The role of the Latin American industrialist as a potential modernizing agent promoting social and economic evolution has received increasing attention in recent years. Yet discussions of the industrialist's role have been largely impressionistic; few opinion surveys of the industrialist's goals and values are available. This study was based on such an opinion survey of industrial trade association leaders in Argentina, a nation in which the debate over the role of the industrialist in social evolution has received wide attention.

The industrial trade association movement itself is split into two factions: the porteño-dominaied Argentine Industrial Union (UIA), created before the turn of the century, and the interior-based Confederation of Industry (CI), founded during the second presidency of Juan Domingo Perón. The ability of the sector to strengthen its political position hinges largely on the need to develop greater rapport between these two groups of industrialists.