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The adoption of neoliberal policies in Latin America comes at a time of questioning of the development assumptions of the past 40 years. Samir Amin suggests that after the great surge of state-led developmentalism in the 1950s and 1960s, which centered on industrialization, modernization, and the conquest of poverty, the 1980s brought disillusionment: "Developmentalism has broken down, its theory is in crisis, its ideology the subject of doubt" (Amin, 1990b: 17). In Latin America, the postwar pattern of import-substitution development had largely ended by the late 1970s, and the region lapsed into stagnation or negative growth during most of the next decade. In the 1990s Venezuela and its neighbors, heavily indebted and pressured by international financial agencies, cling to open-economy, export-driven development strategies in which the state plays a much less prominent role and the concentration of wealth intensifies. They must carry out these strategies within a global system in which capital, goods, and services flow more freely across the boundaries of sovereign states, particularly those on the periphery. Democratic governments struggle to contain the political fallout from diminished social services and rising poverty, often through authoritarian measures marked by a sharp increase in human rights violations. Domestic politics, however, are closely linked to international forces, rendering obsolete the theoretical perception of internal politics as a purely national matter (Perez, 1993: 4). Venezuela is in the throes of a transition from the populist political and economic model that prevailed until the early 1980s to a new model driven by neoliberal ideology. The political outcome of this transition is uncertain, but its negative impact on human welfare is already clear. Major policy decisions have been made and implemented that diminish the quality of life for a majority of Venezuelans. These decisions are inseparable from the country's democratic experience over 35 years.

This article explores the impact of globalization and neo-liberal reforms on the health of Venezuelans and Cubans during the 1980s and 1990s. It seeks to illustrate, through the lens of health care...

For too long, Canada has seen this Hemisphere as our house; it is now time to make it our home... That is the purpose of our policy.Joe Clark, Secretary of State for External Affairs (1990)Canada, Long-Oriented toward Europe and the Commonwealth, seeks to expand its involvement in Latin America. The development of a coherent Canadian policy for Latin America will depend on a variety of domestic and external factors, among them the Canada-United States relationship, rapid global change, and North American economic integration. Such a policy must reflect Canadian values and concerns — the importance of the collective welfare as well as individual good, the peaceful negotiation of disputes, and the acceptance of cultural, political, and ideological diversity.

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.