Latin America

Its Problems and Its Promise: A Multidisciplinary Introduction

Jan Knippers Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367097066
• eBook ISBN: 9780429974694
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Now in a fifth edition, Latin America has been updated to reflect the region's growing optimism as economies stabilize, trade diversifies, and political systems become more participatory. This multidisciplinary survey of Latin American history, politics, and society features invited contributions from authorities in a variety of fields. New sections address current events including deforestation in Costa Rica and Brazil, emerging social movements, Ecuador's new constitution, and Obama's stated objectives to repair U.S. relations with the region. In addition, key topics (such as women and Latin American politics, socialist governments and anti-American sentiment, Argentina's deteriorating economy, and Colombia's struggle with military and narcotics issues) receive expanded and revitalized treatment. Other updated material covers outcomes of recent elections in Bolivia, Brazil, and Nicaragua, among others. Through a hybrid thematic and regional organization, this text provides an essential foundation for introductory courses on Latin America.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Latin America Leading the Learning Curve

JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

LATIN AMERICANS AND Latin Americanists have become accustomed over many decades to hearing that “when the United States sneezes, Latin America catches pneumonia.” But in the fall of 2008, the United States came down with a bad case of pneumonia—and Latin America sneezed.

This is a good time to be a Latin Americanist. Never more than now in the near half century since, as a founding generation Peace Corps volunteer, I first began to focus on Western Hemisphere affairs, have I sensed among Latin Americans—leaders and publics alike—a greater inclination to optimism and activism, selfconfidence and social and regional solidarity. At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, most of the Latin American countries are moving in the direction of expanded popular participation in creditable elections and of public assertiveness with respect both to foreign policy and to domestic considerations in economic decision making. Trade patterns and partnerships are increasingly diversified, and a report released by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC) in 2009 indicated that between 2006 and 2008, except for Mexico, poverty had diminished across the region. The region did indeed sneeze in 2009 after exposure to the US crisis, but even the hardest hit, close-in neighbors approached 2010 with recovery prospects stronger than those of the United States.

The waves of hope and anticipation of change that were sweeping the region when I arrived in Chile in the early 1960s were soon to give way to tyranny and terror, in South America first in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Mesoamerica in the 1980s. The first edition of this book, appearing in 1984, had to report on ongoing struggles to emerge from a political and economic abyss and a pattern in Central America of insurgency and counterinsurgency without promise of resolution.

Shaky “democratic transitions” and sporadic “market emergence” in the 1990s brought relief for some, but upbeat major media storylines obscured the rumblings of discontent or desperation that lacked a forum and remained beneath the radar screen. Thus, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it may have appeared from a distance that Latin America was emerging from a deep sleep, as silent suffering acquired voice and became demand, and anomic protest became coherent, mobilized, focused pursuit of change, expressed in some cases in electoral outcomes and policy.

In the early 1960s the overriding concern in hemispheric affairs was whether or not a young and charismatic US president would be able to pressure each of the other Latin American governments to sever relations with Cuba. When Western Hemisphere presidents met in early 2009, the overriding issue was whether the Latin American governments, acting as one, would be able to pressure a young and charismatic US president to renew relations with Cuba.

This turn of events, accompanied by new expressions and manifestations of nationalism and regionalism, has been for the most vociferous of US pundits cause for alarm. Any metaphoric move toward the exit of the US backyard is by definition a move to the left, which in the absence of an all-defining cold war, has been relabeled terrorism. Cooler heads are inclined to see national self-assertion or opposition to US policy as evidence that the United States has not been paying enough attention to Latin America.

As US attention to Latin America has meant everything from stripping out the resources to sending in the marines, I’d be inclined to say that enough of the usual kind of attention is already too much. But there is indeed a sense in which we are paying far too little attention. US institutions have become accustomed over the past century to thinking in terms of what we should be teaching Latin Americans (on the basis, one presumes, of our vast experience in doing things right). In fact, we should be paying attention because we have so much to learn from Latin America—because, to misquote Pogo, “we have met the suckers, and they are us.”

Some of the lessons we should be learning from Latin America (elaborated in the conclusion to this book) include humility and lessons in development as seen from the bottom up (Latin Americans turned to self-help because it was the only help available); lessons in electoral democracy from those who have understood that defending the right to vote without defending the right to creditable electoral processes and credible outcomes amounts to complicity in fraud; lessons in democratic transition, in the importance particularly of prosecuting rights abuse and corruption in order to reconstruct the rule of law and recover national self-respect; and lessons in security for the unarmed and unaffluent—on finding security, for example, in truth, in numbers, and in rejection of control by fear.

LESSONS FROM THE FRONT LINES

Latin America, as the first region of what is now called the Third World to be thoroughly subjugated by European colonialism and the first to throw off that subjugation, has long been the Third World’s pacesetter and harbinger. It was first to adopt the trappings of a republic and first, in varying degrees and by varying means, to bring some reality to the rhetoric of popular participation.

Latin America was first to elaborate legal, institutional, and political bases in support of national economic sovereignty, and first to see those bases obliterated and constitutions shredded by military dictatorship. It was first then, particularly under the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, to be forced open for “free trade”—in fact, very costly debt, deregulation and dependence—and first, along with Africa in the 1980s, to experience shock therapy and economic meltdown.

A trend to limited redemocratization and sporadic economic growth that raised hopes in the 1990s gave way early in the new millennium to widespread cynicism, anger, and desperation, as prices rose, wages fell, and income gaps widened. In the short term, new manifestations of social discontent kept governments enfeebled and economies off-balance. Ahead of the curve at that time was not a very comfortable place to be. By the end of the decade, however, such conditions had generated in response new parties and new categories of social movements that have since led to more meaningful participation.

Meanwhile, the hope for change that was palpable in the South began to reverberate in the North as well. The United States, while lagging, found itself in 2009 on the same trajectory as Latin America, riding a new wave of optimism and activism. It must be noted, though, that from pole to pole in the Western Hemisphere, increased political participation had failed to bring about acceptable levels of government accountability. The label of “violin governments” that many Chileans had assigned to their coalition governments of the 1930s and 1940s—so labeled as they were said to be held by the Left and played by the Right—seemed an apt characterization for many Hemisphere governments in the twenty-first century. Those governments were more or less elected and more or less civilian, but public sectors in most countries were still largely overwhelmed by private sectors—by the global concentration and mobility of money.

Moreover, while some governments had done a commendable job of resurrecting economies and raising employment and wages, income gaps almost everywhere had continued to grow. And gaps in the Western Hemisphere continued to exceed those in most other world regions. By mid-2009, the US economic meltdown of 2008 had led to contractions in most Latin American economies as well, but in most the long-term damage was not expected to be so far-reaching as in the United States; according to UNECLAC, recovery in Latin America was anticipated to be stronger and sooner than in the United States. From the booming Brazilian economy to the badly damaged Mexican one, quite respectable growth rates were expected for 2010. It should be noted, however, that as in the United States, the first markets to make a robust comeback were the financial markets.

SCHOLARS IN CONTEXT

The same pressures and perceptions faced by US and Latin American policymakers set the agenda and the parameters that govern academic discourse. Thus to the student who must launch his or her exploration of Latin America through the eyes and ears, the assumptions and perspectives, and the theoretical and ideological filters of others, it would be useful to know something of the intellectual paths that have been traveled by the specialists in the field. Those paths have circled, deadended, and U-turned, merged and diverged; they are now, as always, subject to turns in new directions. The attempt to understand social relations, especially in an area so diverse and complex as Latin America, can never be a simple matter of learning “the facts.” There will always be many facts in dispute; answers depend on the nature of available data, on the interests of the sources consulted, and on how questions are asked. Confronted, as one must be in a multiauthored text with differing points of view and thus differing interpretations of the same historical and social data, the student may find it worthwhile to begin the study of Latin America with a study of Latin Americanists.

It is to be expected that interests and interpretations of social phenomena will vary from one discipline to another. The geographer may find, for example, that soil quality, climate, and topography determine settlement patterns and socioeconomic relations, which in turn configure political systems. The anthropologist may find explanation for social harmony or social conflict in ethnic and cultural patterns. The economist may find that political trends derive from economic ones, while the political scientist may see power relationships as overriding. In the study of Latin America, however, there has always been a unifying theme.

From the perspectives of US- and European-based scholars, as well as from those of Latin America’s own creative and scholarly writers, the study of Latin America has been approached as the study of a problem, or set of problems. The problems might be capsulized as underdevelopment and political instability or, more simply, as poverty or inequality and the failure of democratic systems to take hold. The search for the roots, causes, and progenitors of these problems has generally led in one of three directions: to the Iberians—the conquistadores and the institutions, attitudes, and cultural traits they brought with them to the New World; to the Latin Americans themselves—the alleged greed of the elites, absence of entrepreneurship in the middle classes, or passivity of the masses; or to the United States and the international capitalist system it promotes and defends.

Long before US scholars began to direct their attention to Latin America’s problems, the area’s own intellectuals were absorbed by the question of where to place the blame. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century intellectual and political leaders of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires blamed the cycles of anarchy and tyranny their newly independent country was suffering on Hispanic influences.¹ Sarmiento in later life directed his scorn toward Latin America’s own “melting pot.” Influenced by social Darwinism, he diagnosed “the decadent state” of Argentine society as deriving from its racial components of Spanish, mestizo, Indian, and Negro.

Turning the tables at the turn of the twentieth century, José Enrique Rodó, Uruguay’s foremost literary figure, urged the youth of his country—in his masterpiece, Ariel—to shun the materialism of the United States and to cling to the spiritual and intellectual values of their Spanish heritage. A strong current of Latin American social thought, reflected in art and music as well as literature, that gained momentum a few decades into the twentieth century has touted the strengths of native American cultures and blamed both Hispanic and North American influences for the prevailing instability and social injustice. Likewise, in the Caribbean, the black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s called Europe and Anglo-America to task for the region’s underdevelopment.

US Latin American studies as an interdisciplinary field in the United States and, by extension, the coming of age of analysis of Latin American social and political systems are clearly the illegitimate offspring of Fidel Castro. Prior to the Cuban revolution, historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars had generally pursued their studies of Latin American subjects in disciplinary isolation. Political analysis had been largely limited to formal legal studies, highlighting the fact that Latin American regimes rarely lived up to the standards, borrowed from France and the United States, embodied in their constitutions. Such studies generally drew their explanatory theses from the distinctive historical and cultural traditions of the United States of North America and the disunited states of Latin America and, in so doing, contributed to the mystification of the political process in both areas.² The Iberian heritage of feudalism, authoritarianism, and Catholicism was seen as the major obstacle to democratic and socioeconomic reforms.

The surge of interest in Latin America on the part of US politicians and academics (encouraged by newly available government-funded fellowships and contracts) that accompanied the Cuban revolution coincided with the acceleration of decolonization elsewhere and the expansion of attention to the Third World generally by the previously parochial disciplines of economics and political science. Thus, development and modernization theory, formulated to address change processes in other parts of the Third World, came to dominate the study of Latin America as well. Studies falling under these rubrics generally posited that either the economic and political systems of Latin America would increasingly approximate those of the United States and Western Europe or the area would be engulfed in violent revolution.

The invalidation of many of the assumptions of development and modernization theorists by the onrush of events—particularly by the fall of democratic regimes and their replacement by military dictatorships—resulted in a theoretical backlash as well as in long overdue attention to the work of Latin American theorists. The backlash was expressed in a reassertion of the tenacity of tradition, of the fundamentally conservative character of Latin American society. This perspective has been endowed with greater theoretical and conceptual sophistication in studies using the corporatist model. Corporatism stresses the hierarchical organization of modern institutions and the persistence of control from the top.

A large body of Latin American literature, dating back to “the black legend” of the cruelty and intolerance of Spanish colonial rule, supports the historical and cultural explanations for the failure of democracy. But the trends that had dominated the social sciences in the major Latin American countries were variations on the Marxist themes of class conflict and imperialism. One such body of thought, known as dependency theory, came to rival development and modernization theory for predominance among US and European specialists in Latin American studies. Dependency theory held that Latin American underdevelopment should be understood as a by-product of the international capitalist system.

With the end of the Cold War, that international capitalist system struck back with a force that suppressed all previously contending paradigms. Some Latin American theorists continued to urge attention to national and local markets, to social and economic democracy, and to a new kind of nationalism. But a triumphalist neoliberalism that stressed open markets, privatization, and elections-as-democracy and gave no quarter to social concerns came to dominate elite institutions throughout the hemisphere through the end of the century.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps, Tables, Figures, and Illustrations
• 1 Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve
• PART ONE: THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE
• PART TWO: HISTORICAL SETTING
• PART THREE: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL STRUCTURES
• PART FOUR: POLITICAL PROCESSES AND TRENDS
• PART FIVE: EXTERNAL RELATIONS
• PART SIX: MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA
• PART SEVEN: CUBA AND THE CARIBBEAN
• PART EIGHT: THE ANDES
• PART NINE: BRAZIL AND THE SOUTHERN CONE
• Acknowledgments
• About the Book, Editor, and Contributors
• Index