ABSTRACT
Libraries, especially national libraries, constitute what are known in the sciences as "reduced models" of their country's social reality and ideological complexity. Peru's national library was closed because it was discovered that it had become a hideout for members of the Shining Path guerrilla movement. Public libraries and publishing houses appeared only in the nineteenth century. The chapter illustrates the Brazil's social inequalities and the perspectives for the twenty-first century. Brazil is a giant laboratory. It stands among the world's ten largest economies and is also among the countries displaying the world's worst income distribution patterns. The existing social and economic inequalities can be accounted for in different ways. The chapter presents paradoxical or contradictory scenes whose dialectical nature becomes clear when viewed from a broader perspective.
