Abstract

Editorials

The article focuses on issues related to politics from the world. Huey Long, the Governor of Louisiana, once said that Henry Luce, the editor in chief of Time, was like a man that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to himself. The description is apt for U.S. President Ronald Reagan and President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union in their roles as proprietors of the world's great military establishments. They stock only what pleases their fancy and offer to sell only what they cannot profitably use. The history of arms negotiations over the past several years reads like a list of loss leaders and bad bargains. In 1982, Bolivia, the poorest nation in Latin America, ended eighteen years of brutal military dictatorship by electing a fragile center-left coalition government. The new leaders inherited the wreckage of a thirty-year effort to construct a populist state with a political base among peasants, who were bought off with small parcels of land; industrial workers, whose union, the Bolivian Workers Central, at times exercised quasi-governmental powers; and functionaries of state enterprises like the petroleum company.