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“For Long it has Been the Conventional Wisdom—Repeated ad nauseum without ever an attempt at careful empirical demonstration—that the quality of Latin American studies is the lowest of all area scholarship. This judgment is clearly false for anthropology, history, and language and literature. How true is it for political science, one of the most maligned of the disciplines?” Thus, the question posed by a leading political scientist during the disciplinary soul-searching which followed in the wake of the Camelot affair. Perhaps none of the disciplines concerned with Latin American studies have been so subjected to self-conscious evaluations and assessments in recent years. While much has represented professional cocktail-gossip and conventioneering punditry, it has generally reflected the less than edifying overview of Merle Kling in the early 1960's. Countless political science graduate students with Latin American interests have read his assessment:
“Scholars and intellectuals, like human beings in other walks of life, need to interpret and come to grips with the crises plaguing the contemporary global political and social system. Indeed, their obligation to do so may be a particularly special and important one.” This credo might properly be etched on the minds of all those who study the politics of Latin America. Scholarship is not restricted to an academic preserve in which the principal, even sole commitment must be the intellectual task at hand. Rather, the study of Latin American politics requires a heightened sense of self-consciousness, which is linked in turn to the parameters and strictures of the several professional disciplines involved.
As Latin America has moved through the second half of the twentieth century, both the public and private sectors have required increasing levels of technological skills and specialized expertise. In the public sector, this necessity has occasioned the rise to prominence of a sector known in Latin America as profesionales y tcnicos. This emergent elite has assumed a significant role in shaping and implementing public policy because its members command skills critical to the functioning of modernizing technological society. As a result, participation by professionals and tcnicos has become central to bureaucratic efficiency, economic development, and the manipulation of symbols that reinforce political legitimacy. Yet the political role of professionals and tcnicos has been little explored, and direct relationships between professional elites and national parties, often central to the democratization of developing nations, have received minimal attention.