Medina Echavarría and the future of Latin America

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.