CEPAL Review - Volume 1988, Issue 35, 1988

Before all else, I would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to the government and people of Brazil for welcoming us to this beautiful and hospitable city. It has been 35 years since our highest intergovernmental forum last met here, but in no way does this mean that ECLAC has been foreign to the Brazilian experience. On the contrary, it has been our privilege to follow the evolution of the Brazilian economy with the greatest interest, particularly through the ECLAC office which has been functioning in this country since 1968 with the support of the government. Brazil, a melting pot of the most varied historical legacies, has enormously enriched our store of knowledge by, for example, pointing the way to a form of industrialization oriented towards world trade flows.

In this article the author presents a survey of ECLAC’s views on the subject of agriculture, starting with the direct references made to this topic in 1949 in some of the first documents issued by the Commission and continuing on up to its most recent analyses.

On 2 March 1988, the President of Peru enacted Law 24793 creating the Region of Grau, the first region in Latin America to have the status of an autonomous territorial entity endowed with a legal identity under public law. This is expected to have a strong impact as an example for other countries in which (territorial) decentralization figures prominently in political discourse and projects.

Although much has been written about the informal sector in Latin America during the past 15 years, the economic concept of informality continues to be more a matter of intuition than an idea having a clearly-defined analytical content.

The month of November 1987 marked the passage of 10 years since the death of José Medina Echavarría, who not only was the first member of ECLAC to tackle the social and political aspects of development, but also through his fecund labours and his influence on several generations became the most outstanding personality who has ever worked with ECLAC in this field, as well as one of Latin America’s most brilliant sociologists in the present century.

Of the diverse possible avenues of approach to an expose of Medina’s thinking, the one I have chosen on the present occasion, when we have met to reflect upon the future of Latin America in the light of some of Medina’s main ideas, opens with a question that probably he himself would have refused to answer: how ought we, as social scientists, to face the challenge of probing into Latin America’s future and guiding its course? In all likelihood his refusal would have been due not only to his modesty and his wellknown reluctance to give advice, but also to the fact that the complexity of the matter in hand would have allowed him to give only a schematic and perhaps superficial reply. At all events, perhaps as one of his disciples I may be allowed, at this time of commemoration, to exercise the freedom that he himself would have forgone.

The writings of José Medina Echavarria made a decisive contribution towards enabling a whole generation of social scientists, in the broadest sense of the term, to gain a more thorough grasp of the intricate realities of Latin America.

More than a decade ago, in the year of his death, what was to be José Medina Echavarria’s final essay was published in the CEPAL R ev iew . With his customary modesty, he referred to this article as “notes” on the future of democracy, even though the way in which he approached his subject and the scope of his analysis make this one of his best-conceived and most powerful works. Certainly, it was a subject that was very near to his heart for a number of reasons: his status as an exile from Francoism, his deeply liberal intellectual calling and his personal character, which was proof against any lapse into authoritarianism.

It is a serious commitment for an economist to take part in a meeting of distinguished sociologists, and all the more so when that meeting pivots upon the work and personality of so eminent a thinker as Medina Echavarria. The only valid explanation would seem to be that I am among those who followed his work with interest and profit, especially those studies based on political economy which, in some way and to some degree, are common ground for all the social disciplines.

At a meeting held in honour of the memory of José Medina Echavarría, it seems appropriate to begin our conversation concerning the role of ideas by relating an anecdote about this great man. At some point in the late 1970s, I once ran into him as, with a disgruntled look on his face, he was leaving a discussion held at ECLAC “How’s it going, don José?”, I asked him in greeting. “Oh, these people”, he sighed. “Do you know what they have just said? That we should come up with new ideas. What do you think of that? Just coming up with ideas of any sort is difficult enough...”

Medina Echavarria’s thinking on the subject of the University can easily be outlined. However, a detailed treatment implies the double task of dealing both with the variety of situations in Latin American universities and with the complexity of Medina’s thinking. Each of these tasks is difficult enough in itself; together, they constitute an almost insuperable challenge, at least for my abilities. I have therefore concluded that the most sensible method might perhaps be to examine what are or what were Medina’s main concerns with respect to the University, and the extent to which its subsequent development has met those concerns or to what degree they have lost their validity.

The concept of political legitimacy implies a debate about democracy and politics or, better still, about the possibility of democracy recovering control over the direction of politics after a period in which authoritarian régimes, which did not lack a certain technocratic flavour, discredited democracy to the point of rendering it ridiculous. This means accepting, of course, that the concept of political legitimacy contains an affirmation of principle, one moreover fundamental to any genuinely democratic thinking, which is the primacy of the logic of history over the logic of expediency.

The organizers of this seminar set me the topic of “social actors and development options”. I accepted without much thought, attracted by the opportunity of remeeting old friends in an intellectual setting in which I spent a good many years. Now, however, I feel misgivings at tackling such a topic from the remote perspective of Vermont, dependent for information about Latin America on the sporadic coverage of the press and the occasional arrival of ECLAC documents, and speaking moreover before a group of people who are veteran actors by their own right in the drama of Latin America. I am practically condemned to warm up ideas that have already become commonplaces.