Suppose they gave a Latin American revolu tion and nobody came? Well, from April 4 to 9 the people came, but the revolution never quite got off the ground. The scene was not Bolivia, Peru, or El Salvador, but the Hyatt-Regency in Crystal City, Virginia, where 2,500 people gathered for the Six teenth International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Founded twenty-five years ago, LASA is very much a child of the Sixties. At previous meetings this much was obvious in details small as well as large. The uniform of choice tended to be radical fancy-dress (jeans and boots for both sexes; long, unkempt hair likewise; grubby native accessories); the principal activities were revolutionary theater and political posturing, the regnant ideol ogy an undifferentiated mixture of Marxism, anarchism, and and-Americanism.

This year, however, some things were dif ferent. Suits, ties, and dresses were every where in evidence. (“This is the first year,” one Chilean academic mumbled, “that the women look like women.”) Voices were low and so, by the way, were the energy levels. Civility was the order of the day: there were no catcalls or jeers at Bernard Aronson, who addressed a large meeting in his capacity as the State Department’s chief Latin Ameri can policy official. Even two American army officers at a panel on low-intensity conflict in El Salvador escaped unscathed.

Not that everythinghas changed: in the race for LASA’s presidency, Marxist econ omist Carmen Deere (of the University of