As Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez strode to the dedication stand, confetti and rose petals filled the air; and upon raising the Mexican flag at the base of a 135-foot-high statue located in the middle of the Baja California desert, more than 5,000 peopled cheered, “Viva Mexico, viva la carretera” (the highway). The occasion of the recent dedication and praise was the completion of the first paved highway that effectively links northern and southern sections of Baja California. To North Americans who have been numbed by the dizzying pace of superhighway construction, this single, rather narrow, twolane highway may seem of scarce consequence. But for the inhabitants of the Baja California peninsula, one of the most desolate areas of land on this earth, the 1,061-mile highway heralds a new era. This paper intends to explore some of the economic and political consequences likely to evolve from the road's existence. More specifically, it examines the basic objectives Mexican officials bring to the highway, and posits the likelihood of the fulfillment of these objectives.

This paper explores the importance of patterns of urbanization and migration in Colombia for the design of appropriate policies for regional, urban, and intermediate-city development. An opening section reviews the growth of the nineteen major municipios over the period 1918 through 1964, the date of the most recent available census. When these cities are ranked by size from largest to smallest, one observes a high degree of stability of rankings over the fifty-year period considered. This stability supports the hypothesis that an articulated hierarchy and system of cities has developed. That development in turn owes much to the flow of migrants into these cities. Largely as a result of the intensive migration into the four largest cities, their share of the total population of the 19 urban municipios rose from 46 percent in 1918 to 62 percent by 1964.

The Commonwealth of the Bahama Islands entered the international system as a sovereign state on July 10, 1973. It did so by sponsorship, which is to say that as far as relations between the Bahamas and the imperial country (United Kingdom) are concerned, independence has been granted, rather than taken or seized, with a minimal amount of difficulty. The identification of various issue-areas related to the entry of the Commonwealth into the international system is one way of indicating the various components that have gone into making up the “national interest” of that country, at least in the perspective of the state's policy makers. More concretely, the peculiar problems arising from its character as an archipelago state with a relatively open economy, make the questions to be resolved before and immediately after independence perhaps more complex than those faced by the other independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean that have acceded to full sovereignty in the last decade.

We live in the shadow of an America that is economically benign yet politically malevolent. That malevolence, because of its size, threatens an eclipse of identity, but the shadow is as inescapable as that of any previous empire. But we were American even while we were British, if only in the geographical sense, and now that the shadow of the British Empire has passed through and over us in the Caribbean, we ask ourselves if, in the spiritual or cultural sense, we must become American. We have broken up the archipelago into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity. Everyone knows that these are pretexts of power if such power is seen as political. This is what the politician would describe as reality, but the reality is absurd.

The use of “group” as a unit of analysis has a long tradition in political science. Some proponents of this approach (Bentley, 1908; Hagan, 1966) define group in such a broad way as to simplify the study of politics little if any. An empirically more useful approach to the study of groups is that pursued by David Truman (1955), who concentrates his attention on interest groups. Although he never states that all of the politics of the United States can be understood through the study of interest groups, it is clear that Truman considers the study of such groups to be a central aspect and, in effect, hypothesizes that such would be the case in any political system. Whether this is in fact the case can be tested by cross-national studies. In one such study, Joseph La Palombara (1960) concluded that the important aspects of Italian politics are not explained satisfactorily by studying organized interest groups. This is in direct contradiction to Truman's implicit hypothesis, which would be refuted if numerous studies in other political systems concluded as La Palombara's did.

This paper presents data on the social and political opinions of junior college students in Belize (British Honduras) prior to independence. The data are intended to give a preliminary indication of current patterns of conflict and consensus which can be used as a bench mark against which future development in Belizean political culture can be measured. The organization of the data has been based on theoretical considerations of political development and socialization in transitional societies.

A major influence on political attitudes and partisanship is the impact of social identity. In the United States, a self-identification as a Republican or a Democrat usually carries connotations of a wider range of social characteristics. In fact, people often adopt the partisan identification most appropriate to their social situation. Once acquired, partisan attitudes tend to influence other political attitudes as people react to issues and events in a way that tends to support and justify their party choices (Dawson and Prewitt, 1969).

Canada became the odd man out in the Western Hemisphere when it declared war on Germany on September 10, 1939. Other than the Caribbean colonies of the various European belligerents, Canada was the only American country to become an active participant in the European war. The decision to go to war had been freely made by Parliament, but it was clearly determined by Canada's historic ties as a member of the British Commonwealth. As the only independent belligerent in the Americas, Canada's position clearly was anomalous, and the makers of Canadian foreign policy had to go to considerable effort trying to overcome the problems Canada faced as a nation at war in a hemisphere trying to avoid war.

One of the striking facts about the social and political history of Haiti from independence in 1804 to the present is the deep gulf separating the largely mulatto elite groups from the predominantly black masses. The war of the South in 1799 between Toussaint and Rigaud, and the conflicts between Christophe and Pétion, while not primarily caused by color factors, were reinforced by suspicions and hostilities between black and mulatto, with each group accusing the other of prejudice and discrimination. Politics in the rest of the nineteenth century can generally be seen as a tussle between a mulatto elite centered in the capital and in the cities of the South, on the one hand, and a small black elite often in alliance with army leaders and peasant irregulars, on the other. In the years following 1867 these groups formalized themselves into a largely mulatto Liberal Party, and a preponderantly black National Party.

This paper will attempt to evaluate the utility of exchange theory for analyzing and interpreting the currently available evidence about emerging campesino movements in Latin America. The focus will be on the transactions and exchanges campesinos engage in both horizontally (with their peers) and vertically (with the landlord and other patrons). My principal thesis is that in the past the gains campesinos could accrue from vertical exchanges have outweighed the actual and potential gains derived from horizontal solidarities within their own community; furthermore, the vertical solidarities between campesinos and landholders served to undermine the precarious horizontal relationships in the campesino community which did exist. As a result, the development of campesino movements, organized or spontaneous, has been directly related to changes in the relative outcomes campesinos obtain in exchanges with one another, with their landlord, or with alternative patrons.

One of the most curious phenomena ever to be recorded in the annals of Latin American church history was a peculiarly Brazilian institution known as the Catholic Electoral League. Lofty in its ideals but confused in their practice, disclaiming political party status yet directly involving the Church in every political campaign of the day, the League functioned between 1932 and 1937 as a political pressure group under the direct auspices of the Roman Catholic Church. It operated on a more national scale than the political parties themselves, which were still basically regional.

In the growing body of literature on the Cuban Revolution, the subject of Soviet attitudes and policy toward Cuba has been neglected. While this neglect holds true for the entire period since 1956, it is particularly evident in the period between Castro's landing in Cuba in December 1956 and the signing of the Soviet-Cuban economic agreements of February 1960.

The few works which touch upon this period describe the Soviet Union as having no interest in Cuba during Castro's struggle against Batista and as merely reacting to Cuban events and initiatives thereafter. In contrast to this view, the present paper will argue that the Soviet Union was actively concerned with Cuban affairs from 1956 to 1960. It was, at least partially, in response to Soviet policy that Castro began the negotiations with the Soviet Union that resulted in the economic agreements of February 1960.

Urban growth has been one of the most striking characteristics of twentieth-century Latin American history and the focus of considerable scholarly interest (Morse, 1971, 1965). For the most part the main academic concentration has been on the social and economic aspects of this phenomenon. Political considerations have been confined to speculations on the potential radicalism of slum dwellers or the spontaneous self-governing institutions of new communities. Little attention has been paid to the role of municipal politics and government in national life.

With these considerations in mind, the purpose of this paper is to trace the development of politics and the governmental process in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina between 1918 and 1930. This discussion will focus on a period when electoral reform opened up city politics for the first time to a large sector of the electorate and allowed, also for the first time, participation in municipal government of parties representing new social and economic groups.

It is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the Colombian population now lives in cities of 100,000 or more. Although the pattern of urbanization in Colombia is more dispersed than in most Latin American countries, the proportion of the urban population living in the four largest cities has steadily increased. Over the last 13 year period, this rate of growth ranged between 4.4 and 7.0 percent (Agency for International Development, n.d.: 17). For example, Bogotá had a population in 1950 of approximately 500,000, but estimates indicate that by 1975 it will have a population of 3,605,000.

There has been little systematic research of any kind on political leadership in Latin America (Welsh, 1970). This omission is regrettable because a study of political leadership indicates what types of men govern the political system, which institutions are most important in the recruitment process, and what careers are demanded of those leaders. In the Mexican political system, where local and national leadership is dependent upon the same organizations for power, studies of local politicians indicate what qualities characterize national elites.

The only monograph which is devoted in detail to a study of the backgrounds, origins, and recruitment of political leaders of a single Latin American country is the work of José Luis de Imáz (1970) on Argentina. However, even Imáz's (1970: 13) work makes only passing references to provincial governors, and his conclusions are based on the surprisingly small sample of eighteen governors from three states.

As Latin American nations begin to marshal their rapidly growing human and material resources, they frequently encounter organizational infrastructures which are incapable of supporting the rapid process of modernization. Yet, these inadequate infrastructures seem to persist over time, leaving behind unrecoverable losses. Attempts to understand the problems of modernization must not only consider questions of social and economic development, but also questions reflecting on the development of organizational and administrative processes.

The central theme of this paper is the argument that the organizational and administrative mechanisms of societal and institutional governance have never quite broken loose from the historic legacy of Spanish colonialism and that the needs of modernizing nations are basically being served by administrative dinosaurs. Other writers have addressed themselves to the theme regarding the influence of colonial institutions on modern life, but the tendency has been to select general administrative practices and trace them across many nations in various periods of time.

This paper is an attempt at an interdisciplinary analysis of some of the problems relating to financial activities, decisionmaking, and social structure among elite Latin American kin and business groups. It represents a cooperative effort by two economists and an anthropologist that results, we believe, in a view of these problems that is of significance to both disciplines.

As Kaplan (1965) has pointed out, the great difficulty in developing true interdisciplinary research arises in translating the concepts and theories of one field into those of the other, or in developing a new common conceptual framework. What this paper does, very briefly, is to take the basic Tobin-Markowitz model, which is an attempt to describe the decision-making process of an investor putting together a portfolio in a risky world, and modify it to allow for the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about the economic environment in Latin America.

Mexico's party deputy system, created in 1963, has just completed its first decade of existence; enough experience has now been accumulated to evaluate its impact on the Mexican political system. This essay will examine the system in its following aspects: origins, implementation, amendments, beneficiaries, and effects.

Since 1929 the government party (currently called PRI, Partido Revolucionario Institucional, but having existed under other names) has so completely dominated the electoral scene at the national level that only in the Chamber of Deputies has the opposition been able to take some electoral posts. Even in the Chamber, opposition groups have only been able to acquire a few seats by winning a majority of votes (Table l). PRI's success has been attributed to its superior organization, appeal, finances, and relationship with the government. The high point of majority-elected opposition in the Chamber came in 1952 when nine opposition deputies represented 5.5 percent of the Chamber. Between 1946 and 1964, no opposition party, of whatever ideological stripe, achieved more than six seats in the Chamber (3.7 percent).

University students in Venezuela constitute about ten percent of the corresponding age group (calculated from Universidad Central de Venezuela 1970: 19, Table 5), and leadership of the country's economic and social development is increasingly in the hands of university-trained professionals. University enrollment has quadrupled since 1958, and young professionals who have graduated over the past fifteen years already represent a majority among university graduates in Venezuela. Research on students and elites, however, in Venezuela as elsewhere in Latin America, has concentrated on their divergent political attitudes while paying scant attention to the transformation of university students into members of the elite.

This paper reports on an exploratory survey of student and elite attitudes toward higher education and professional employment in Venezuela. Our findings provide some insight on the extent to which employment of high-level manpower is influenced by modern, achievement-oriented criteria, as compared with traditional, ascriptive criteria.

The psychological development of most human beings leads to the emergence of feelings of “belongingness” vis-à-vis certain social groupings. I shall denote such feelings by the term “loyalties.” With the emergence of the state, and increasingly on into the contemporary era, an attempt has been made by these maximal-sized, territorial-based political units, to develop a state-focused civic sense within their respective societies. According to Geertz (1963: 156), the civic sense involves “a definite concept of the public as a separate and distinct body and an attendant notion of a genuine public interest, which though not necessarily superior to, is independent of and at times even in conflict with both private and other sorts of collective interest.” However, within the confines of already existing states may be smaller territorial units who view themselves as political communities with their own publics.

In 1943 a small group of ultra-nationalist Argentine army officers, including the youthful and ambitious Juan Domingo Perón, utilized its control of key Cabinet posts to achieve absolute dominance within the government of General Pedro Ramírez. Blatantly invoking fascist Germany as a model for national emulation, this clique launched an expansionist program aimed at creating an Argentine-dominated neutralist bloc in southern South America. The State Department, under the direction of Secretary Cordell Hull, responded to Argentine aggression by providing military aid to Argentina's neighbors, laying plans to impose stiff economic sanctions and threatening to publish intelligence data linking certain Argentine officials with Axis espionage and sabotage rings operating in South America. U.S. pressure produced immediate results: Ramírez broke with the pro-Axis, expansionist group within his administration and severed diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy, and their allies.