On 13 January this year, Brazil suffered a shock which, if you listen to some commentators abroad, shook it to its very core. In São Paulo the following week, however, the locals were unfazed. By Latin American standards, a devaluation of 25 per cent (later 45 per cent) is not much to get excited about. In the bustle of São Paulo's business district, in its universities and medical schools, in the halls of Congress and government buildings across Latin America, and, most significantly of all, in the military barracks, life continues much as it did before.

That new stability is the story of Latin America at the approach of the millennium. For the first time since the nations of the region were founded by Spanish and Portuguese colonists, most enjoy the political and economic conditions that could enable science to prosper. Although some of the military governments that used to govern in the region were quite generous to science — the last Brazilian regime of the early 1980s, for example — their hostility to free thought in general and to universities in particular made it impossible for this to happen.

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