Perhaps the most fateful occurrence in Columbus' unlucky career as Governor of Española was the collapse of the governmental arrangements established by him in April 1494. The actual events which led to, and immediately followed, this episode have been shrouded in doubt and confusion from that time to this. The accepted version, repeated by one historian after another since the early 16th century, is however, plain enough: it is to the effect that Columbus, prior to sailing from Española in April to search out the Mainland, appointed a Council of Regency to govern the infant colony until his return. After a wearisome and almost fatal voyage, he returned to Isabela in the following September to find that two of the leading members of the settlement, Pedro Margarit, his military commander, and Fray Boyl, one of the Council and the ecclesiastical head of the settlement, had treacherously deserted and returned to Spain.

One of the most striking features of the study of colonial urbanism and urbanization in Spanish America is the extent to which emphasis has been placed upon the sixteenth-century phase of urban foundations. In many recent works authors have presented details of the formal and functional characteristics of these primary foundations, as well as of the several interrelated processes of Indian resettlement, population change, and the spread of European culture. Though it has been estimated that more than 300 towns were founded in Spanish America between 1492 and 1600, relatively little attention has yet been paid to the changing spatial system of urban centres during the 300 years or more of colonial rule.

Even at first glance, one can see remarkable similarities in the topography, geography and patterns of land use of the west coast republics of South America and of the states of Australia which stretch along that continent's eastern and southeastern shores. Not only are the latitudinal parameters comparable, but similarities in climate and patterns of agriculture abound. The resemblances are particularly defined as we consider the geographical extravagance of Chile and compare it alone to the eastern edge of Australia.

The foundation of cities and the articulation of urban networks are a persistent theme in the history of colonial Spanish America. As administrative-social service centers and as foci of trade and, sometimes, manufacturing, cities were the meeting ground of the policies of the metropolis and the concerns of its subjects, the local creoles, castas, and Indians. This mediating position has influenced the kinds of questions asked about cities by Latin American urban historians. Those who, with this author, believe that the city's administrative function was paramount, consider the following questions most useful in determining the role of urban centers within the Spanish empire: was city government merely the agent of the Crown, was it the spokesman of a local oligarchy, or did it permit some degree of popular participation? Was the operation of municipal government characterized by co-operation or by conflict? What was the relative importance of formal institutions created by the Crown, such as the cabildo and the real acuerdo, and informal institutions, such as the family and the client system, in the conduct of city business?

Historians have long grappled with the problem of defining the precise nature of eighteenth-century Mexican society. Not only was the confused tangle of racial types which resulted from the three centuries of miscegenation vitally important in establishing social status, but special corporations further divided the population into privileged groups and jurisdictions. Society was split into three general categories: ethnic whites, criollo (American-born) and gachupín (European-born); Indians; and finally the castas (castes) who belonged to the many racial permutations.

In August 1933 a bitter revolutionary struggle reached its climax in Havana. Pressure from the United States during mediations conducted by American Ambassador Sumner Welles, a general strike and a military coup combined to topple the government of Gerardo Machado. National tensions made acute during the machadato and contradictions generated in the anti-Machado struggle converged in the newly constituted administration of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

The meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 was both the end of the series of inter-American meetings called in order to formulate an ‘American attitude’ toward the events in Europe and also the formalization of the war-time co-operation which followed. But, at another level, it was a clash of the foreign policies of Brazil, Chile, Argentina and the United States which both typified and shaped inter- American relations well into the 1950s. This discussion, which is largely based on United States goveernment documents, examines the inter-meshings of these foreign policies at the Rio meeting and the immediate aftermath of that conference.

The accession of Hipólito Yrigoyen to the office of President of Argentina on 12 October, 1916, was the long-awaited climax to a quest for political power that had begun 25 years earlier with the founding of the Unión Cívica Radical. Since 1891 the UCR or Radical Party, as it is usually called, had been condemned to the status of an opposition party, its leaders waiting impatiently for their chance to uproot completely what they deemed to be the corruption and mismanagement of the régimen, their pejorative term for the conservative establishment that had dominated Argentine political life for decades.

The economic policies that have been implemented in Peru since 1968 by the military government have been the object of considerable attention. By contrast, evaluation of Peruvian economic policy in the preceding two decades has received rather limited attention. It is our objective in this article to put into perspective the export bias of important elements of Peruvian economic policy in the period following World War II and to outline some of the consequences of that bias.

Lying at the heart of the problem in analyzing Colombian violence is the relative poverty of conceptual frameworks not only for dealing with violence but with the institutions and processes and traditions which form the social environment of the society. In the following pages I shall argue that a dialectic between violence and patron-client relations offers a useful analytical framework. The first part will deal with the historical dynamics of Colombian politics. In part two, patron-client politics will be looked at in a small town setting.

At a general level this paper is concerned with the problem of anthropological interpretation of kinship and its significance in peasant communities. In specific terms I describe and discusss a striking difference in interpretation by two observers, Forman and myself, with regard to the form and significance of kinship relations in two communities on the North East Brazilian littoral. The disparity between our conclusions brings up basic questions of a methodological and epistemological kind in much the same way as do Red- field and Lewis's findings in Tepoztlan.

Colombia has long been described as dominated by an oligarchy or elite that tightly controls the principal means of political influence and the avenues of social mobility. For example, in his recent study of Colombian political development, Robert Dix observes that ‘… the posts of leadership, the key decisions, and the principal social, economic, cultural and political resources of the society remain in elite hands’. Harry Kantor argues even more intensely that while Colombia has greatly changed since World War II, the traditional oligarchy clings to its power, illiteracy remains a major problem, transportation is still poor, and the eastern two-thirds of the nation's territory remains undeveloped '. At the same time, the resolution of these development problems, an unavoidable responsibility of contemporary Colombian governments, has illuminated rather than obscured observation of elite dominance over Colombian society.

One of the most striking features of recent writing on comparative politics, especially the debate on underdevelopment, is the contribution made by Latin American theorists. Living in societies so strongly characterized by a culture of dependency, they have energetically developed and refined the theory of dependency. Directly experiencing the impact of imperialism and imperialism, they have carefully scrutinized and reassessed theories of imperialist control, and have explored the mechanisms of class interest, seeking to understand how such interests are maintained and expressed through the state apparatus, in policy making, the role of the bureaucracy, the armed forces, in cultural control and in the whole fabric of internal and external power relations.

During the past decade, agrarian reform emerged as a panacea for the problems of Latin America, with a popularity which transcended political and cultural divisions. This apparent accord vanished, however, in the many meanings given to the term and the divergent policies claiming to implement its principles. In Chile where the hacienda system, with its large estates (latijundios) and satellite dwarf holdings (minifundios) has defined for three centuries the rural economic, political and social structure, agrarian reform has been endorsed by successive governments of very different political persuasions and viewed as the key both to rural revolution and its prevention.