La violencia in Colombia, from 1946 to 1965, the largest armed conflict in the western hemisphere since the Mexican Revolution, was one of the world's most extensive and complex internal wars of this century. The study of the violencia strains at the limits of all the social sciences.

Peru has a durable tradition of peasant rebellion, most recently described by José Matos Mar (1967) and Oscar Cornblit (1970), which dates far back to the eighteenth century movements led by Juan Santos Atahuallpa and José Gabriel Túpac Amaru. Twentieth century guerrilla leaders have tried to identify with this tradition by echoing their predecessors' concern for the Indians' right to work their own land and to be free from exploitation. They have named their fronts for Túpac Amaru, Pumacahua, Pachacutec, and other native revolutionaries of an earlier era, and they have proposed fundamental changes in Peruvian society, notably agrarian reform, in a conscious effort to complete a struggle that has gone on for more than two centuries to secure land and dignity for campesinos.

University students have long played an important role in latin american politics. Preceding by several decades the first signs of youthful protest in the United States, student activism in Latin America has been persistent and often decisive. For example, student groups were instrumental in the overthrow of regimes in Cuba (1933, 1959), Guatemala (1944), Venezuela (1958), and Bolivia (1964). At one time or another, virtually every governing strongman in the region has had to contend with varying opposition from student groups. Indeed, as Robert Alexander has noted, “in the past four decades they have constituted one of the most important pressure groups in twenty republics.”

The past two decades have seen an enormous proliferation in writings on economic development, planning, and programming. Equipped with the aggregative tools of economic analysis acquired since the Thirties, economists have searched for methods and policy measures by which to further economic development. In many developing countries the government has assumed the responsibility of pursuing a deliberate, rational, and consistent economic policy in achieving the objectives of development, in accordance with established priorities, by direct and/or indirect interventions into the performance of the economy. With this expanded role of the public sector, the budget has come to acquire an important role as a policy instrument, since it reflects the qualitative and quantitative aspects of public policy, and puts into effect public policy measures influencing economic activity.

The pacific region contains two of the countries of the world with the highest GNP. The United States dominates the Americas; Japan comes closer every day to achieving the same position in regard to the countries of Southeast Asia. At one conference of Asian Ministers of Foreign Affairs, Japan promised to raise its aid budget to the developing nations to 1 per cent of her GNP by 1975, but at the same time called upon the other countries to try to solve their problems on their own, by making adequate use of economic aid.