Introduction to Latin America

Twenty-First Century Challenges

Peadar Kirby

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761973737, 9780761973720
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

`This excellent textbook provides students of Latin America with a rich and deep analysis of the processes and outcomes of globalization, past and present. Diversity and difference are explored using vivid and detailed country profiles. A strength of this textbook is its ability to explain complex issues in a way that is engaging and informative. It provides conceptual frameworks for students to engage in independent analysis of the complexities of global forces as they impact on, and interact with, the "local" in different contexts. It also, however, engages with the issues of crucial importance for the lived realities of Latin American people- poverty, development, the state and resistance under changing political, economic and ideological conditions. An essential buy for serious students of Latin America? - Anne Boran, Chester College, University of Liverpool

`This is an outstanding textbook which will appeal to a wide audience but especially those wishing to understand contemporary Latin America.... I have been studying Latin America for over 40 years and wish I could have written such a lucid and engaging book? - Dr Crist[ac]obal Kay, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague

Introduction to Latin America provides a completely new introduction to the political, social and economic forces shaping this essential region of undergraduate study today.

It is the first textbook to place Latin America within a genuinely global context and introduce the debates and impact of globalization, neoliberalism, democratization, and the environment.

It fully reviews the traditional literature in the postwar period (such as modernization or dependency theory) to demonstrate the way in which Latin America has often been misunderstood and introduces more recent theorizing to consider the longer-term prospects for equitable and sustainable development.

Encorporating maps, case study boxes, summary exhibits, and guides to further reading, Introduction to Latin America will be an essential text for all students of Latin America across politics, international studies, geography, sociology and development studies.

1

Introduction: Understanding Latin America

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Ever since Europeans first stumbled upon its shores on 12 October 1492, the region we now call Latin America has been seen by outsiders as containing something of the exotic, whether in its native peoples, its fruits and vegetables, its Inca, Aztec and Mayan civilizations or its daunting geography. This continued in the twentieth century as Latin America became identified with heroic guerrilla bands, brutal military dictators and the seemingly interminable struggles of its many poor people for greater equality and justice. During the second half of that century, a number of Latin Americans achieved international recognition as personifying these elements of the region’s makeup – Che Guevara, the Argentine adventurer who joined Fidel Castro and his companions in overthrowing the Batista dictatorship in Cuba in 1959 and who died in the highlands of Bolivia in 1967 during a futile effort to repeat the achievement; General Augusto Pinochet, the chief-of-staff of the Chilean armed forces who overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973 to usher in a 16-year-long repressive dictatorship which changed the face of Chilean society; or the Quiche indigenous woman from Guatemala, Rigoberta Menchú, who survived the grim poverty of her upbringing and the ferocious brutality of the Guatemalan army, which savagely murdered most of her family, to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 (for her own account, see Burgos-Debray, 1984).

While these examples help illustrate aspects of Latin America and its historical development, they also run the risk of oversimplifying the variety and complexity of the region. In other words, by highlighting some dimensions and neglecting others, they embody an interpretation. So, for example, the heroic figure of Che Guevara and the romantic interpretation of the Cuban revolution neglect the harassment of dissidents and of minority groups like gays which took place. Highlighting the repressive nature of the Chilean military regime may serve to minimize the regime’s economic successes which, in the 1990s, made Chile the economic showcase of the region. And appreciating the remarkable life history of Rigoberta Menchú must not avoid the responsibility of the US administration which organized a coup in 1954, overthrowing the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz and thereby helping unleash the grim terror which gripped Guatemala for the next 40 years. As can be seen from these examples, all accounts of any social phenomenon constitute an interpretation even where the basis for the interpretation is not made clear. In offering an account of the prospects for Latin America in a globalized world, therefore, this book devotes its first chapter to making clear the interpretative framework to be employed. The chapter firstly looks at the need for such interpretative or theoretical frameworks, and it then goes on to outline the principal frameworks which have been used for interpreting Latin America over the past half century. The following section highlights some of the main changes in the nature of the global order at the beginning of the twenty-first century that pose challenges for the theoretical frameworks previously used, before outlining in the final section the approach to be used in this book.

Need for Frameworks

In learning about distant parts of the world, most people rely on media accounts, whether newspaper and magazine articles or radio and television news reports and documentaries. The objective of such journalistic accounts is to communicate something of the reality of life in these countries, whether the subject is a particular news story or a more wide-ranging examination of, for example, the impact of the international debt crisis or drug production and trafficking. Often the story is told through reporting the lives of individual people who help to personalize and therefore communicate to a distant audience what can be a highly complicated and many-dimensional reality. At their best, journalists are masters of the art of storytelling, though the stories they tell can touch the great traumas of our times. However, the account offered by a journalist does not aspire to give the whole picture; instead, it selects some aspects because they are newsworthy and easily understandable to those not personally involved. Within the very limited length and time constraints of most media products, what can be offered is a snapshot or a series of snapshots of a situation.

The academic aspires to offer a more rounded and analytical account, probing the subject to discover causes and consequences in a more thorough way than does the journalist. After all, the academic is expected to have a more specialist knowledge of her subject to an extent rarely true of the journalist. In probing the subject, the academic will usually move away from the personal focus often employed by the journalist, devoting attention instead to categories of analysis that help to order a highly complex reality into an intelligible framework which distinguishes causes and context from effects and outcomes. In doing this, the intention is to offer an explanation of the phenomenon or situation that is incisive and enduring, moving beyond the surface impressions to the deeper reality beneath. Many academics are also concerned with the practical consequences of their analyses which they see as offering guidelines for action, whether through the policies of governments or organizations (such as the World Bank, for example) or through movements and groups that might challenge and contest such policies. As such, the academic account can be likened to an X-ray, often not as colourful or engaging as a snapshot, but uncovering far more that lies behind what is immediately observable.

Furthermore, many different types of academic account are possible. The historian offers an account that interprets the past, including at times the very recent past, often using a more narrative form of writing to describe and explain the forces that have shaped history. In contrast the social scientist is often more selective, focusing on particular aspects of society and developing analytical categories through which to examine them. The social scientist also works within particular disciplinary traditions, each of which have their particular focus of attention and analytical approaches. The economist is concerned with the production of goods and services and how they are distributed and exchanged and, if working within mainstream neoclassical economics, regularly uses mathematical models to understand the workings of the economy. Issues of power are what interest the political scientist, especially as it is institutionalized in forms of government, in political parties, and in other groups. The sociologist examines a wide range of social phenomena, such as social structure, poverty, the family, crime, religion, social movements, the media and many more. These divisions grew up in the nineteenth century as the economy, the political system and social problems began to be seen as discrete spheres requiring specialist approaches to understand them. Apart from these divisions, the twentieth century has seen the further fragmentation of the social sciences and the emergence of separate disciplines such as anthropology, psychology, cultural studies, feminist studies and development studies. Therefore, in looking at the same social phenomenon, such as Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century, each of these approaches has something distinctive to offer. The historian will offer an account of the main developments that have shaped the region over the period, with the economic or the political historian looking at developments in the economy or in politics. The economist or the political scientist, by contrast, while necessarily having to fill in some of the same general background, will focus in a more analytical way on the nature of the productive economy and how it has changed over the period, or on the political systems and such issues as the reasons for military interventions or the weaknesses of democracy.

This description of the work of the academic raises further questions, however – questions that do not apply to the work of the journalist. For any social situation is far too complex and multifaceted to be amenable to direct, personal knowledge of its many elements by any analyst. The journalist makes sense of it by selecting those elements which are considered newsworthy or which allow her to construct a good story that illustrates a wider social situation. But for the academic, the need to offer a more probing and analytical account raises particular challenges: what is the basis for selecting those elements of reality which are seen as significant and for discarding those many elements which are not? And, having selected elements, how are they linked together: what is cause and what is effect? So, for example, an academic analysis of the social conflicts in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s might concentrate on the situation of gross rural poverty and inequality which has long characterized these countries, showing how population growth exacerbated the difficulties for the rural poor in accessing a livelihood, thereby creating the conditions for the insurrections (as does Brockett, 1998), or it might concentrate on the failure of the political elites in these countries to introduce political reforms that would open the way for more peaceful forms of social change (as does Biekart, 2001). And what, for example, of the role of the United States on the one hand in offering support to the existing political elites, and that of Cuba on the other in giving at least moral backing, and at times more direct support, to their opponents? What weight is to be attached to such outside influences? It would, of course, be impossible to offer a full account of this bloody period without referring to all these elements, but there is no pregiven yardstick by which one can determine what weight is to be attached to each of the elements or to distinguish which are the more fundamental causes of the social conflicts and which are reactions to those causes. Obviously, one yardstick that can be applied (and sometimes is by academics) is a political one with the result that analysts with left-wing sympathies will tend to attribute greater responsibility to the United States as at least a contributory cause of the conflicts, whereas more conservative observers may be inclined to blame Cuba.

Such a resort to predetermined political positions is, however, something of a cop-out since it introduces elements extraneous to the study of society; in other words it imports its yardsticks from the outside.¹ Instead, the challenge and excitement of the social sciences is to elaborate yardsticks that derive from the field of study itself so as to deepen and develop our knowledge of how social phenomena operate and change, and of the nature of the challenges confronting them. This is the role of theory, since theory is the distillation of existing knowledge in the form of general frameworks of explanation which then act as a guide to exploring the nature of social reality. We will see in the next section some examples of the principal theoretical frameworks that have guided interpretation of Latin America at various times in the past. The general frameworks of explanation that constitute theory arise from the interaction of two fundamental elements – on the one hand those basic philosophical and value orientations which constitute the lens through which we view the world (these are sometimes called metatheory or grand theory) and, on the other, the actual empirical study of concrete situations. Two broad philosophical and value orientations have guided the development of Western social sciences since the nineteenth century – liberalism and Marxism. Liberalism is distinguished by its interest in issues of individual freedom which leads it to favour a free-market capitalist economic system and liberal democracy. It is the dominant influence within economics. Marxism emerged as the main critique of liberalism, placing emphasis on collectivities (especially social classes such as the bourgeoisie and the working class) and on their unequal access to material resources and power. It therefore places greater emphasis on issues of inequality and the struggles for emancipation by oppressed groups, and has been very influential within sociology. These differing concerns and value orientations have guided the empirical study of social scientists, influencing in great measure the frameworks of theoretical explanation that they have developed. Before giving examples of these theories, it is important to remember that there always exists what we can call a dialectical relationship between theory and empirical data – theory always guides empirical study in that it acts as the yardstick for choosing some elements over others, but theory is also changed as evidence emerges which seems to challenge or contradict generalizations expressed in the theory; if strong enough evidence emerges over time then it can give rise to a new generalization or theory. This process is rarely smooth and it often generates fierce debates among social scientists. Through such debates a new consensus can emerge.

Differing Understandings

Theory helps explain how different social scientists, looking at the same set of social phenomena, can arrive at very different or even contradictory conclusions. This is evident in examining interpretations of Latin America going back to the nineteenth century. Following the independence of most of the region’s countries in the 1810s and 1820s, a generation of Latin American writers sought to turn their backs on the past and find a new future for their countries by imitating what they saw as the progress of the United States and the great European powers. This was expressed as follows in reference to a famous book Facundo (1845) by the Argentine writer, educator and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88):

Thus there is posed a sort of choice between a past, characterized by the presence of the Indian, by the Spanish Catholic colonial theology and culture, and by the oscillation between anarchy and despotism on the one hand, and on the other a future that is thought of as the triumph of liberty within order, of democracy, of lay education, of science and general welfare, and of the civilized city confronting a retrograde and barbarous countryside. (Quoted in Davis, 1972: 98)

Sarmiento, as with many leading writers and statesmen of his time in Latin America, was influenced by positivism which identified progress with social order and institutions; these saw the main obstacles to such progress as being Latin America’s colonial and Catholic inheritance and its rural and native peoples. Positivism was the guiding philosophy of the long and, to many, tyrannical presidency of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico that began in 1876 and was only ended by the outbreak of the Mexican revolution in 1910–11. It was also the guiding light for many of the leaders of the Brazilian republican movement that toppled the monarchy in 1889 and it finds expression in the words ‘Ordem e Progresso’ on the Brazilian flag. Inevitably such a negative evaluation of what was distinctively Latin American and such a positive evaluation of the United States led to a reaction by a younger group of Latin Americans such as the Cuban, José Martí (1853–95). These were highly critical of US imperialism towards Latin America and sought in the region’s own culture a way to develop a distinctive society.

Some elements of these nineteenth century interpretations of Latin America find echo in the two principal theories through which the region has been interpreted by social scientists in the second half of the twentieth century – modernization theory heavily influenced by liberalism, and dependency theory, largely a variant of Marxism. Modernization theory emerged in the early 1950s within US universities as a way of understanding the path to be taken by developing countries (many of them in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean emerging into independence) to achieve development. Sociologist Talcott Parsons presented development as a move from a traditional society, in which individual achievement and initiative were constrained by community ties (such as the extended family), to a modern society characterized by individual achievement and mass consumption (Parsons, 1951). Economist Walt Rostow saw development as coming through imitating the example of the developed countries of the West: led by entrepreneurial elites, with the guidance of US advisors and the help of foreign investment, developing countries would move through the various stages of economic growth to industrialization and development (Rostow, 1960). Initially the theory saw democracy as coming hand in hand with this process of modernization; following military coups in Latin America, however (particularly the Brazilian military takeover of 1964), Samuel Huntington argued that democratization would have to be delayed until economic modernization had developed a strong enough middle class with an interest in defending a democratic system (Huntington, 1968). For many Latin Americans, therefore, modernization theory offered the goal of developing their own consumer societies in imitation of the United States through following US guidance and accepting US investment. It was presented with an air of inevitability and eagerly grasped by the region’s elites.

Modernization theory, however, was based on abstract theoretical models which bore little relationship to the complex realities of Latin American societies where, since colonial times, power had been concentrated in the hands of small elites. One expression of this is the gross inequality in income and wealth that characterizes the region. In this situation, modernization theory seemed to offer a way by which these elites could justify their continued reluctance to share their power and wealth with the majority of their compatriots. These realities led to the emergence of a counter-theory, called dependency theory, developed in Latin America to offer an entirely different view of how the region might develop (for an overview of Latin American theories of development, see Kay, 1989). As its name suggests, dependency theory identified the dependence of the region on the ‘core’ countries of North America and western Europe as being the main cause of its underdevelopment. This dependence led to a relationship of exploitation through which the region’s wealth was extracted for the benefit of local elites and the ‘core’ countries while the majority of Latin Americans benefited little from it. Meanwhile, the ‘core’ countries sought to prevent a local process of industrialization through which Latin American countries might break out of their situation of dependency and begin to develop their own resources for their own benefit. One way in which this happened was through foreign multinationals that set up in Latin American countries and which extracted more wealth than they invested in the region (Frank, 1967). Instead of following the advice of foreign advisors as recommended by modernization theorists, therefore, Latin America according to dependency theorists should, through state investment and guidance and through the struggles of its dominated groups and classes, develop its own industrial base by protecting its economies. Alongside this, as a means of developing a larger market for the goods produced by its n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Maps
• 1 Introduction: Understanding Latin America
• Section I Legacies
• Section II Neoliberal Reformation
• Interlude
• Section III Popular Responses
• Section IV Prospects
• Useful Websites
• Bibliography
• Index