Since 1950, 28 developing countries have produced tanks, ships, aircraft, other major weapons systems, and infantry and artillery weapons for their own use and for export. Local input has ranged from assembly of imported components to completely indigenous design and manufacture. In 1967 exports from lessdeveloped countries (LDCs) were worth $194 million, as compared to exports from all sources of $201 billion. By 1976 world arms exports had increased to $398 billion and LDC exports to $820 million (ACDA, 1978). Even though the role of lessdeveloped countries in world arms production is still small, it is growing and can be significant in some local and regional contexts.

Nascent defense industries in the Third World raise important questions. Terrorists, insurgents, and governments everywhere may find arms more readily available as sources of supply diversify. The spread of weapons manufacture both reflects and promotes the diffusion of power within the international system at large.

This article presents an overall view of the performance of the Argentine economy under the policies inaugurated in April 1976. Section I describes the conditions prevailing at the beginning of 1976, the main goals and arguments of the new economic authorities. Section II explores the implementation of the economic program and how the government insisted on its basic goals under rapidly changing conditions. Finally, Section III summarizes the author's views on the consequences of the present economic program and provides suggestions on an alternative development strategy. A brief Statistical Appendix with basic data on the Argentine economy and relevant economic variables of the period under analysis is also included.

Any examination of the Cuban involvement in Africa should take into consideration the political conditions surrounding such involvement. Only by analyzing the objectives and motivations of those involved, while disregarding any arguments in justification, can one adequately demonstrate the complexity of the relations between Cuba and its African allies. An analysis of Cuba's assessment of its own political and ideological function in Africa or of the objectives of the Soviet Union in Africa is not as important as an examination of the African expectations arising from Cuban military and development aid.

Obscured amid the headline issues of illegal aliens, drug smuggling, and the Mexican petroleum bonanza, yet another controversy is nascent in U.S.-Mexican relations the dispute over common groundwaters underlying the frontier zone. This dispute, with roots in the recent salinity accords of 1973, emerges as the latest phase in the long history of water resource controversies exacerbating problems between the two nations.

Until recently, the history of U.S.-Mexican water relations had been one of preoccupation with the capture and distribution of shared surface waters. The present dispute thus marks a distinctive evolution in bilateral relations. Moreover, just as the groundwater issue is new, it also points to the complexity of the transboundary ecology and the special problems of interdependence. Only since World War II, for instance, have the full implications of the area's groundwater hydrology been appreciated with respect to such matters as quality, distribution, and movement.

There are a number of reasons why Mexico attracts students of economic development. Boasting an impressive rate of economic growth that has been sustained for four decades, yet plagued with discouraging and mounting problems of surplus labor and maldistribution of income, Mexico is one of the prime cases that has sparked the discussion over the distinctions between “economic growth” and “economic development.” Furthermore, Mexico affords a classic test of the validity of some dependency writers’ claim that periphery countries’ subjugation to external control varies directly with the length and intensity of contact with center nations (Frank, 1972: 10). The sudden revelation of Mexico's potential as an energy supplier, the growing concern with the magnitude and consequences of illegal Mexican migration to the United States, and the increasing recognition of the uniqueness and importance of the Mexico-U.S. border economy add further appeal for economists, political scientists, and sociologists.

Even a cursory review of recent writings on Latin American politics suggests an inclination by many to have done once and for all with the concept of populism. Either it is defined so broadly as to be useless or is relegated to a historical era presumably never again to be seen in the region. Yet the term shows a vitality and stubborn resilience in refusing to disappear, notwithstanding periodic revisions and redefinitions. This is scarcely unique to Latin Americanists. As a pair of European authorities contended more generally:

The growth of public enterprise is generally viewed as a product of the post-World War II developmentalist state. In late-developing capitalist countries, however, many important firms already came under state control during preceding liberal regimes. Because of the liberal context in which they operated, such companies frequently adopted policies that differed in important ways from those followed under the developmentalist state. The purpose of this study is to focus on the Banco do Brasil—the single most important publicly controlled firm of Brazil's First Republic (1889-1930) and today the seventh largest bank in the world—in order to examine the nature of state enterprise in a liberal regime.

Departing from other approaches in the literature of Cuban studies (Azicri, 1979) this article does not examine the current phase of institutionalizing the revolution as an unforeseeable event due to fortuitous circumstances, such as the regime's blunder of the 1970 sugar harvest. Indeed, ten years later, it seems simply inaccurate to explain so many epoch-making events that have dominated revolutionary politics as if they occurred just because the regime was unable to produce the remaining 1.465 million tons of its goal of 10 million tons of sugar. However, this is not to construe the 1970 sugar harvest and its surrounding events to be void of any significance in what followed later; more properly, it is meant as a rejection of the notion that the institutionalization of the revolution is the direct outcome of that single historical happening.

Since the late sixties, Guatemalans have murdered each other at an astonishing rate. This wave of politically related terrorism and assassinations began to grow rapidly in 1966 and has continued, fluctuating in intensity, to the present. In 1967, for instance, incidents of violence averaged 70 per month, causing some 30 monthly deaths; in 1971 the figures had risen 60%. This article describes the historical antecedents of this conflict, its development as right-wing terrorists sought to counterbalance leftist guerrilla insurgency and the subsequent evolution of violence. Seeking an explanation for why violence was greater in some areas than in others, the essay examines two structural theories which suggest that conflict may be most intense where the strength of contending political parties is most nearly equal and where socioeconomic change is greatest.

In the period following Brazil's 1964 military coup, many historians turned their attention to the Vargas years, especially the 1930s. For one thing, the period had not been thoroughly examined. For another, factors common to both “revolutions” intrigued them: interplay among civilians and military officers in the respective golpes; repression of dissent and the use of nationalistic propaganda; concern over Brazil's place in the international order; social mobilization to neutralize class conflict and promote growth; tension between liberalism and corporatism; and efforts to promote national integration. Many of the historical actors, as well, were the same.

Prior to the mid-1960s, there was little concern in Brazil for the relative size of different ownership sectors—state, domestic private and multinational (Baer et al., 1973; Baer et al., 1977). The main policy objective had been the promotion of import-substitution-industrialization (ISI). Because the Brazilian domestic private sector did not have the technological and financial means to create new industries with a high technology content or to help expand public utilities, multinational firms and state enterprises were relied upon to carry out those tasks. The National Bank for Economic Development (BNDE) was created in order to finance the state's direct participation in Brazil's economy.

Twenty minutes by jet or fifteen hours by bus northwest of Bogotá lies the department of Antioquia, with its capital, Medellín, second largest of Colombia's cities. Although the Andes serve as divider and incubator of a diversity oí patrias chicas, each with characteristic accent, folklore, and regional identity, the country of the Antioqueño, or paisa, remains one of the most distinctive. Unlike Colombians from other regions, the Antioqueño has typically been stereotyped as the alien. Whether he has been reviled as a Jew, lauded as a “New Breed,” portrayed as a Basque, a Swiss, a Yankee, or a Protestant, writers have used ethnic interpretations which minimize the Latin, the Catholic, and even the Colombian image of the paisa (Lipset, 1967:27,28).

In recent years Mexico has demonstrated the capacity to cultivate, process, ship, and transship vast quantities of illegal narcotic drugs. Such activity has traditionally been geared to the realities of domestic poverty, enormous profit, and American demand. Mexican marijuana dominated the U.S. market until quite recently. More importantly from the American viewpoint were the tons of Mexican heroin which saturated U.S. cities in the mid-1970s. Furthermore, Mexico is still the source of vast quantities of psychotropics and an increasingly popular conduit for South American cocaine.

According to Craig (1978), U.S. officials long sought to convince their Mexican counterparts that the key to any effective antidrug program lay in eliminating the illicit product at the source. Until such time that herbicides were applied on a massive scale against marijuana and opium poppies, they argued, the annual Mexican campaign would prove an exercise in futility.

Until 1968, state enterprises played a minor role in the Peruvian economy. The list of public sector enterprises was relatively small. It included the Central and sectoral banks, a merchant fleet, railways, a minor petroleum producer, hyroelectric power companies, a steel mill, monopolies over salt, tobacco, and guano, a few tourism projects, and a set of regional development corporations. From 1968 to 1974 the state moved swiftly to expand its role in order to direct and control the course of the country's economic evolution. The public sector increased both in size and scope to include most banking, basic industries, and most international and some domestic trade.

The persistence of long-term poverty among sectors of the urban and rural population in less-developed countries (LDCs), as well as in the so-called developed world, has resulted in the formulation of a diversity of interpretations by theoreticians and policy-makers seeking to comprehend the life of the poor, and for political, economic, and moral reasons to develop solutions to alleviate poverty. Recognition of the failure of the Accelerated Growth Model to produce adequate redistribution of resources and income throughout society through the “filter down” effect has led to changes in emphasis in poverty-related research during the past two decades. There has been a shift in focus away from measurements of absolute poverty, the insufficiency of basic needs to ensure survival, toward the clarification of the determinants of relative poverty, the social inequality experienced by those in the bottom segment of the income distribution within a given society.

In recent years, a considerable amount of scholarly research has been devoted to the analysis of public enterprise in Latin America. The number of individuals actively engaged in research and their output of materials has increased since the mid-1970s. Partially as a result of this heightened interest, several conferences have been organized to deal with public enterprises, and increasingly detailed information has been made available by governments. Most of this information still receives an extremely limited circulation and is therefore unavailable to the majority of scholars.