Many Latin American countries face important socioeconomic dilemmas as they attempt to demilitarize, scale down government services, restructure their economies, and make the transition to democratic pluralism. The pressures are both internal--political formations from the authoritarian past and unaddressed social cleavages--and external--the global economy and international demands for neoliberal reforms to stabilize economies and reduce inflation. This project will produce a comparative study of foreign aid policy and practice with the goal of showing the different kinds of development discourse and initiatives supported by the three major international donors to Latin America--Japan, the European Union, and the U.S. The research will involve anthropological interviews in their home countries of policy makers, researchers, and NGO administrators who establish priorites for Latin American projects in the social sphere. A second phase of this project, field research which I have already begun, will look at the ways Latin Americans combine foreign aid from different sources for specific social projects.