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Latin America and the Origins of Its Twenty-First Century

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Latin America and the Origins of Its Twenty-First Century MICHAEL MONTEÓN

PRAEGER An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC

Copyright 2010 by Michael Monteón All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Monteón, Michael, 1946Latin America and the origins of its twenty-first century / Michael Monteón. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-313-35249-2 (acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-35250-8 (ebook) 1. Latin America—History—20th century. 2. Latin America— History—21st century. I. Title. F1414.M576 2010 980.03—dc22 2009046181 14 13 12 11 10

1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details. ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

For Betty, who loved and endured And for my students, my teachers


Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Structure of an Interpretation

xi

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

The Long Nineteenth Century, Caudillaje, Power, and the People City and Countryside Labor: Indian, Slave, and Free The Origins of National Governments Pax Britannica

1 3 15 27 36

Oligarchy and the Impact of New Wealth, 1880–1914 The Newest City Boulevards and Streetcars The Working Class Buenos Aires Peasants and Landed Power The Challenges to Oligarchy Imperial Shift

49 52 52 60 63 70 75 84

Revolutions and Modernization, 1910–1955 A Different Direction Chilangolandia The Mexican Revolution

91 94 95 108

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Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Contents

Populism and the Oligarchies Peronismo Populist Frustrations The United States as a Hegemonic Power The Anticommunist Crusade Two Revolutionary Movements: Bolivia and Guatemala

125 130 141 160 161

Modern Life and Modern Conflicts, 1956–1985 Santiago and the Pinochet Dictatorship The Population Explosion Causes and Consequences of the Population Boom The Misinterpretations of Urban Poverty Arts and Communication The Cold War and Guerrilla Dreams The Cuban Revolution The Brazilian Model Guerrilla Warfare The Dilemmas of Development

175 176 187

Launched into the Present São Paulo, the Newest City The Collapse of Military Capitalism The Shock Treatment The End of the Guerrilla Left Mexico Revisited The Latin-Americanization of the United States Blowback Migration

165

188 194 196 199 201 207 214 228 233 237 245 249 255 269 280 290 297

Conclusion: The Twenty-First Century Has Begun

303

Notes

319

Bibliography

363

Index

407

Acknowledgments My debts in writing this work are lifelong and range from my parents, who began taking me to Mexico, their homeland, from the time I was twelve, to my students of today who continue to ask questions that require my looking up the answer. I specifically want to acknowledge my colleagues who have worked with me over more than three decades at the University of California, San Diego, and the many visitors in Latin American studies that have visited our campus from all parts of that region and from our own nation, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies and the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies have been the focal points of an active community discussing what had happened and what was occurring in the region. I am also indebted to my colleagues in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile who have permitted me to present my work at their universities and institutes and often invited me into their homes—much of my understanding of Latin Americans as a people comes from our shared moments. My colleagues in the History Department shared their insights into their fields and so forced me to reconsider generalizations about my own; it is amazing how reading “cutting-edge” work in another area of historical study creates insight into why things have happened as they did in Latin America. I am most indebted to David Ringrose, who shared his many ideas of Spain and America and their parallel developments. I am proud to be part of a team that has created one of our nation’s best programs in Latin American history.

x

Acknowledgments

Ramón E. Ruiz started this program and was instrumental in recruiting me to my first and, it turns out, my last professional position. The late James Scobie gave it a gravitas in South American history. Christine Hünefeldt, Everard Meade, and Eric Van Young, and I have taught students who now hold positions in some of our most prestigious research universities and liberal colleges. To all, my deepest gratitude.

Introduction: The Structure of an Interpretation Latin America’s complexities require a scheme of interpretation rather than an encyclopedic listing of qualities. The scheme of this work grows out of teaching the field for over thirty-six years. In that time, I have taught numerous national histories, although most of my courses involved the region’s major nations: Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Topical courses focused on urbanization, U.S. behavior in the region, and dictators. Even so, writing this work has been a learning experience for me: a means of revisiting topics that had accumulated mounds of new research and exploring those required for the coherence of the work’s arguments. This is not a survey, and many topics and issues of importance have been omitted. An interpretation must have a theme, and this one focuses on power and the Latin American people who have developed and endured its uses over the last century and a half. Power seems a tricky subject, but it is fairly straightforward. It is also somewhat old-fashioned in the American academic world because the social sciences broke it down into discussions of “fields” and “variables.” Although this work does summarize various approaches to the subject of Latin American history, it takes a broad view of how the region has emerged from the twentieth century. It stresses elements internal to the region—its political forms, shared cultural values, racial disparities, and the grotesquely uneven distribution of wealth and income. Power, as seen here, also has a form, and its principal geographic arrangement is the city, especially those centers of authority and commerce that became in the course of the

xii


twentieth century the region’s primary cities. The mutation of these cities shaped the countryside by authorizing who would be allowed to control the nations’ agrarian zones, their mines, their transport systems, and their labor. The decisions made in earlier periods roll into later ones. For example, Latin America had large estates in the colonial era, and it has had them in the national one. This does not mean that the former are the same as the latter. National capitals shaped economic policies and aligned their countries with foreign powers and their markets, thus developing their agricultural policies to meet the needs of urban growth. The confusing and consistent element in the early phases of national development in Latin America is that landowners governed the nations, and so, obviously, they used national power to foster their own wealth. They did so in league with merchants and sometimes with mine owners, forming a commercial-agricultural nexus, a commercial-mining nexus, or a commercial-industrial nexus, or some combination of the three that facilitated urban economic growth. This attitude that urban life represented civilization— whereas rural existence involved the uncivilized, the ignorant, and the barbaric—is in sharp contrast with American sensibilities, which often praised the bucolic life over that of vice-ridden cities. It is an attitude far more European than is that of the United States. Thus, each chapter begins with a description of a city in some way representative of its nation’s power nexus. It explains how the city operated, how it looked, and how its people lived. In dealing with cities and countryside, each chapter also looks at the impact of technology, the prevailing ideology, the interactions of urban and rural populations, and the extent to which rural populations could avoid urban dictates. Power has rarely been exercised on behalf of the poor, the native, or the Black in Latin America—of course, the same could be said of the United States. The major difference is that the poor and non-White populations made up the majority of Latin America, and the powerful were White—or thought they were White—and had to control their inferiors. Racism was endemic: European cultures were superior to all others, and modernization became equated with Europeanizing everyone. The other shared quality is the role of Catholicism in the foundations of the colonies and the early nations. Power, therefore, is something more than politics, although it is often distilled into political conflicts. Latin American nations all


xiii

became constitutional republics, yet not a single one has effectively empowered its inhabitants. Indeed, they must be called inhabitants or people, for they have rarely been citizens. Citizens have rights and the suffrage, and with both, they can shape what party or faction holds office. Periods of effective citizenship are the exception and not the rule in Latin America, which has had more than its share of dictators, corrupt figureheads, and incompetents as chief executives. A ruling class that did not see the majority of the nation’s people as civilized and capable often resorted to autocratic or oligarchic rule to preserve itself. This does not mean that people did not have any power over their lives. In the political arenas or the cultural ones, Latin Americans had political consciousness and resisted authority that aimed to exploit them or seize their resources. They acted on their own ideals, often democratic. The history of Latin America is not just that of presidents but also of laborers, peasants, and activists favoring education, public housing, public medicine, and social welfare. It is also about those who opposed empowering the people. When popular movements were stopped, Latin Americans resorted to guerrilla warfare and even revolution to win what they hoped would be a better future. Holders of office, laborers, and peasants did not function in a global vacuum. External powers saw riches to be had and their own geopolitical goals to be advanced by aligning themselves with interests within Latin America. On the whole, those powers, especially Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth, helped the already rich and powerful in Latin America to become more so. When acting in the region, they brought their own racist attitudes, technology, and commercial networks that altered the power structures within the region. They did not run everything, but they influenced a good deal. An Argentine landowner who sold beef to England in the 1880s could evolve into a cattle baron, with wealth well beyond his ancestors’ dreams. A Mexican town located on the rail lines built by British or American capital could become a city; towns without rail lines often withered in the early twentieth century. Most of all, Great Britain and the United States supplied capital to Latin America and set conditions for its use. After 1898, the United States made first the Caribbean and then the region as a whole part of its sphere of influence, subjecting them to economic ideas it favored and demanding that the region’s nations treat its enemies as their own. To enforce its views, it often deployed its military or supported militarism in Latin America.

xiv


The confluence of domestic issues and foreign demands changed in each era discussed. Within each Latin American nation, elites used forms of power taken from abroad—capital, firearms and military technology, industrial machinery, and political and legal ideas—to alter or, as they preferred to call it, “reform” their nations. As they did so, they expanded their cities at the expense of their countryside. As the population in Latin America increased, the disparity between urban and rural life became so great that development in the twentieth century became synonymous with greater urbanization. As cities—particularly the largest ones—grew, the populations within them demonstrated and rioted to gain better accommodations, wages, and prospects for their children. The class struggle in Latin America did not evolve as Marx would have predicted, but it was real enough. It grew in such intensity that, fearing revolution, elites turned to military rule to silence dissent and stop demands from the labor force. The official violence that took the lives of several hundred thousand and ended the effort to mobilize workers and peasants into state-supported institutions leads to the work’s climax in Chapter Four. Chapter Five closes the twentieth century and begins the twentyfirst. It had seemed since the end of the Cold War that liberalism— the belief that markets should decide the allocation of resources and labor, with little regard to state intervention or regulations to protect laborers and provide the general population a life of dignity—had won the struggle. The triumphant liberalism of the late nineteenth century had ended in the Great Depression. An earlier historiography had foreseen some of what would follow—the increase in the size of the middle class, the modernization of life, the rise of a consumer culture, and greater government spending on public goods and services—as the portent of a more democratic and prosperous region. The economy grew but not as expected. People lived longer but poverty lingered and affected half or more than half of the population in most Latin American nations. Far from establishing a better age, the crisis of economic growth and social needs led to military rule, mass murder, mass exodus from a number of countries, and neoliberalism. The struggle for public welfare now seemed sandwiched between one liberal era and another. But now we are obviously at the end of the neoliberal period. Capitalist excesses have led the United States to abandon any thought that the crisis of 2008–2009 can be resolved


xv

without massive government spending. If this is true of the most successful capitalist country in the world, how can we expect that Latin America will not find some way to revive a form of a political economy that emphasizes social needs as much as it does profits and the current indifference to the poor? At each stage of misdevelopment—what else can it be called?— Latin American cities have grown and its rural populations have struggled. It has now passed through a series of changes that cannot be undone. It has become urbanized, which has enormous ramifications for its future. Its nations have increased their populations by multiples as high as ten times what they had been in the late nineteenth century. The age-old issues of massive poverty, social injustice, and the lack of effective citizenship remain. How Latin America changed so much and still has such a pressing agenda is the subject of this interpretation.


CHAPTER 1

The Long Nineteenth Century, Caudillaje, Power, and the People Latin American societies, for all their distinctions from one another, have some qualities in common. They are societies created as preindustrial colonies, that is, peoples whose cultures and racial makeup were largely determined by having been conquered by Spain or Portugal. Argentina and parts of Uruguay and Brazil are exceptions to this pattern, but exceptions only in the racial sense. One of the great mysteries of Latin American history is why Argentina, a nation that began the twentieth century with such economic success, ended the century a crippled shadow of what it might have been. In all these societies, a colonial heritage created political and social attitudes that were not conducive to the construction of democratic civil societies. And yet, Latin America has a public life, not merely governments, but activists who are trying to improve their lives and the welfare of their people. An account of their past must first admit that their societies announced republican values in the nineteenth century, and it must also explain why these announcements were not fulfilled. This contrast between the colonial and national societies extends from the French Revolution up to World War I, but it is strongest in the nineteenth century. In Latin America, the chronology is somewhat shorter but strongly related to changes in Europe. It is likely that the region would not have broken with Spain and Portugal when it did had the French Revolution not taken a specific course. Even though most of the nations of the region were born in the aftermath of events in Europe, their evolution had a great deal to do with changes within the Americas. It is a cliché in the literature of the

2


region that Latin America was not ready to become a series of nation-states, let alone republics, in the early nineteenth century, but this is true of most postcolonial societies. The Spanish and Portuguese empires did not want their colonies to develop autonomous political institutions. The need to create such institutions thus came in the same shock as the break with the imperial overlord and involved a crisis of politics and culture of the first order. Those institutions—particularly the Spanish aristocracy, the merchant guilds, and the Church, all of which had exercised economic and cultural power in the colonial era—suddenly found themselves on the defensive. Individuals who had hardly counted in colonial societies used military force to put themselves forward as national leaders. The meaning of the nation became bound up with the issues of who should lead and for what purpose. For most Latin Americans—living in small towns, scattered hamlets, plantations, haciendas, and homesteads—such questions seemed distant at first but quickly struck home. People who had never been consulted about colonial politics suddenly were recruited into armies on behalf of the new nations or the king or emperor. In the Spanish colonies, the result tore apart the political and social fabrics that the empire had been at pains to repair and strengthen in the late eighteenth century. In Brazil, the outcome was much less violent but still disorienting. We must draw at the beginning of this narrative a sharp contrast between popular mobilization and democracy. All types of regimes recruit the populace to do their bidding and all types provoke popular demonstrations against them, but democracy requires an accepted set of political rules, among which are a sense of inclusion as a citizen, free and open elections, and civil rights. Most Latin Americans had none of these things in the nineteenth century; in fact, many Latin Americans did not experience an effective civil society even at the end of the twentieth century. Instead, mobilizations took place around established or created loyalties, particularly in the name of religion or of republican nationalism. But these mobilizations were intended to impose minority government, whether by a person or a group. The language of freedom was often used, but the reality was that Latin American politics would never generate the respect of citizens for one another that is the heart of a liberal, constitutional order. Instead, power would be rearranged geographically into national units while maintaining certain cultural continuities from the

The Long Nineteenth Century, Caudillaje, Power, and the People

3

colonial past. To explain how that happened requires looking always to the cities, which in the late colonial era had been the centers of imperial administration. Cities created in the colonies tried to become new national capitals; their efforts to impose their will involved a struggle not only against imperial rule but also against the colonial elements that preferred localized, rural authority. To look at the origins of the twenty-first century, attention must be paid to how Latin America turned colonies into nation-states.

CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE Latin America in the twentieth century grew out of a long crisis in the nineteenth century. The crisis involved the collapse of imperial systems in Spanish America and Brazil and the attempt to construct national political systems. All this seems straightforward, except that postcolonial societies are never simple and the collapse of empires had far-reaching consequences that would disrupt every layer of society.1 Understandably, the societies that emerged in the 1820s were led by elites on the defensive, anxious to find the means to pay for governments and the armies they required, and to maintain what remained of colonial networks, both social and economic. Just as understandably, those who were not in the elite saw political opportunity—a chance to seize office, to assert a regional or rural independence, to break colonial patterns that they resented, or to hang on to colonial privileges and rights that they felt were threatened. The best place to begin a narrative of this crisis and its outcome— namely, the construction of national oligarchies—is in the colonial cities. Most of the major cities of the Spanish and Portuguese empires had been created by the late 1600s, although many in the late colonial era were still extremely small. The nucleus of Buenos Aires, which became the seat of a viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata in 1776, looked like a pueblito, a place with a plaza surrounded by mud huts. Prior to the arrival of the Prince Regent Dom João in 1808, Rio de Janeiro was the viceroyal center of Brazil but with little to declare its importance. Two of the major urban centers of Latin America stood out in size and beauty, Mexico City and Lima, respectively the centers of the Viceroyalties of New Spain and of Peru, each of which had been established in the early sixteenth century. Indeed, Mexico City at the end of the colonial era, with 250,000 inhabitants,

4


was larger than Madrid, nominally the center of royal authority, which had about 180,000. The Spanish and Portuguese empires had created trade grids that turned on sea power and mule trains. The transatlantic powers shipped slaves from Africa and manufactures from Europe to the Americas, but a major part of the trade was internal within the colonies. The Portuguese in Brazil relied on coasting vessels to tie their various regional economies together. The Spanish Americans had extensive trade networks that moved silver, mercury, and gold to some areas in return for grains, hides, domestic textiles, and such items as yerba mate (Paraguayan tea), which was the staple beverage of most of Spanish South America and used extensively in Brazil as well. A rivalry existed between the Spanish and Portuguese Americans in the regions adjoining their colonies, but even so, the Americas were more bound by trade links, however loosely knit, than by fear of attack. Spanish America had a common currency, the silver peso, valued throughout Europe and its trade routes. Cities served in these colonies, as they had in all preindustrial societies, for the social organization of power. They contained within them the centers of political administration (the royal bureaucracy), the judiciary, the Roman Catholic Church’s administrative apparatuses, and the centers of merchant authority, that is, the guilds. Their architecture reflected the Baroque era with its elaborate ornamentation, but most buildings were constrained by the small size of the populations and the fact that a good part of Latin America sits astride zones known for earthquakes or hurricanes. Late in the eighteenth century, the imperial centers of Lisbon and Madrid had begun reorganizing state power, and their efforts reached the colonies in major ways. The Church’s power was slightly curtailed and the Jesuits, belonging to the richest and most powerful religious order in the Americas, were expelled from the region. The empires also created new administrative centers, moving the capital of Brazil from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro in 1763, and creating new viceroyalties in Spanish America. Bogotá became the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada as early as 1717, and Buenos Aires became the center of the Viceroyalty of Rio de La Plata in 1776. Trade and immigration became easier between the Iberian peninsula and the Americas, and new taxes were imposed, thus improving the colonial capacity to protect major centers from attack by other European powers and to administer ever larger areas.


5

The colonies had complex societies, but in form, there was an imperial aristocracy and a mass of commoners. However, a commoner could rarely encroach on imperial authority. A few bought their way into the upper level of society. What would seem to us minor differences in social origin carried great weight in the colonial world, and the upper ranks were often merciless in their snobbery. Most people, of course, had little to worry about in this regard because they did not live in cities and were rural, poor, and illiterate. Nonetheless, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America and the changes instituted by the Marquis de Pombal, Portugal’s minister, triggered such rebellions against authority as that of Tiradentes in Brazil (1789) and the Comunero Rebellion in Colombia (1780–1781). In each instance, changes in administration and taxation caused resistance. The most serious and violent rebellion was led by Tupac Amaru II (as José Gabriel Condorcanqui had renamed himself) and involved tens of thousands of Native Americans seeking to undo recent administrative changes; the rebels even thought of independence from Spanish authority. The uprising began in 1780 and gradually was contained after its leader’s brutal execution the following year. However, none of the rebellions succeeded, and as the Americas entered the 1800s, it seemed that neither Spanish America nor Brazil would join the United States in breaking with Europe.2 The decisive event in the future of Latin America took place in Europe, when in 1808 Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Spain and Portugal in an attempt to block the British from trading with Europe. Britain and France had been hostile to each other since the beginning of the French Revolution; in 1808, the British came to the rescue of the members of the Portuguese royal family of Bragança by having their ships carry them and a significant part of the Portuguese aristocracy to Rio de Janeiro. Napoleon captured the Spanish royal family and then put his brother on its throne. War broke out over the Iberian peninsula, and the Spanish people waged guerilla warfare against the invaders. All this plunged both Brazil and Spanish America into political crises, with broad ramifications for the preservation of imperial power. The move of the throne to Brazil meant that Rio now became the headquarters of the entire Portuguese Empire—a contest for office and influence began within Brazil between the new arrivals and the Brazilian elite. At least this change did not involve extensive violence. In Spanish America, Napoleon’s invasion created

6


political instability by raising the question of who should rule in the absence of the legitimate king. No one entertained recognizing French authority, but should the Spanish Americans pledge allegiance to the Spanish rebel forces or reconstruct the bases of imperial authority in the New World? Many have argued that the wars of independence in Spanish America did not really change the social structure of authority. This cannot be true. No society that has gone through the process of colonization anywhere else in the world has come out of it unaffected whenever there were wars of nationalism or liberation. Indeed, every former colony confronts two simultaneous realities: there is no going back to any period before colonization and there is no going forward without reorganizing the basis of politics, a process that itself changes social outcomes. Although a Europeanized elite based on color remained socially dominant in all the new nations, the changes triggered by Latin American independence were profound. None of them resolved the crisis created in 1808, some in fact made that crisis worse, but Latin America began a new course that would not become clear in its direction until the second half of the nineteenth century. At the outset of independence, political leaders intended that the old imperial centers would become the new national ones. To an extraordinary degree, they got their wish. Not a single new city became the political capital of a nation until Brasília was inaugurated in 1960. Everywhere else, national power devolved to the old colonial centers, but not in the manner the leaders of independence had imagined. Independence raised the critical issues of political legitimacy and administrative continuity. Leaders in one city often refused to recognize the authority of those in another, beginning a process of political fragmentation. Thus, Asunción broke with Buenos Aires and carved Paraguay out of part of the viceroyalty Buenos Aires had governed; Montevideo (with British support) broke away as well and became the capital of Uruguay. The Confederation of Gran Colombia broke down into Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador; the Viceroyalty of Peru divided into Peru, Bolivia, and Chile; and Central America became a series of smaller countries. The outward form of government was quickly established, and all the new states, except Mexico and Brazil, became republics. Mexico established an empire in 1822 and 1823 with a military man, Igustín de Iturbide, at its helm. But the empire collapsed with his overthrow


7

and Mexico became a republic as well—completing the sweep of republican government in Spanish America. Brazil retained an imperial structure but established a constitution even before independence. When the war with France ended and the King Dom João returned to Lisbon, he left his son, Prince Dom Pedro I, in charge of Brazil. In order to renew their control of Brazil, the Portuguese legislature ordered Dom Pedro to return as well, and when he refused, he began the process of independence in 1822. Skirmishes occurred but Dom Pedro had the support of the cities and promised constitutional guarantees that made him seem quite liberal. He also had the support of British naval officers led by Lord Cochrane (who had earlier taken part in the Spanish American wars of independence). By 1823, Brazil’s independence was a fact. Even though Dom Pedro’s quarrels with Brazilian elites led him in 1830 to abdicate to his son Dom Pedro II (who was then four years old), Brazil remained an empire, with a formal aristocracy, a legislature, and elections.3 In Spanish America, aside from Cuba and Puerto Rico, which remained colonies of Spain, most of the heads of the new governments were the leaders of military units. Politics collapsed into armed rivalries. Barracks uprisings with the inevitable man on horseback and his list of justifications (the pronunciamento) made administrative continuity in many areas almost impossible. Coups and civil wars proliferated in the 1820s in most of Spanish America; even the Brazilian Empire faced armed conspiracies. Many of those who seized power looted the treasuries and ran up foreign debts to pay their forces, thereby weakening any future administration. By the late 1820s, Latin America was in its first debt crisis, in which British bankers refused the new nations any further credit (these debts persisted into the late nineteenth century). The financial problems of the national administrations in turn limited their military effectiveness; the use of force became localized and even based on private wealth. Thus, the end of European domination had destroyed or seriously weakened aristocracies in Latin America. In many areas, Spanish and Portuguese merchants had been driven out as well. The imperial trade was ruined and never recovered; the internal trade patterns of Spanish America were also broken by the imposition of new, national tariffs; in Brazil, local tariffs harmed interregional links. The major cities lost more than political power; they often suffered severe economic reversals. The network of imperial taxation broke

8


down, and so did the imperial monetary systems. The absence of an effective state meant that public investment and communications collapsed. Until well into the nineteenth century, it took weeks to travel in Chile from Santiago to the southern agricultural areas near Concepción. Going by ship from Mérida, in the Yucatán peninsula, to London was much faster than traveling by horse or mule to Mexico City. An ineffective state also meant that crime flourished in many areas—a pattern that was set loose in the looting during the wars of independence. The administrative reach of cities shrank into itself, so much so that by the 1830s many of the national capitals are better described as city-states that controlled their hinterland and little else. Many regions in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru had little to do with their national capitals and were instead nucleated around regional centers or even large estates and villages. Elites continued to run regions, but they ran “nations” only by creating pacts to respect one another’s terrain; in some areas, life broke down into a type of feudalism in which local populations counted on armed landlords to secure their survival. The most decisive events in the early crisis were the rise of armed, rural powers and the fact that rural authority could often overwhelm and control political capitals. If a visitor to the late colonial cities of Mexico City, Lima, Santiago de Chile, or Caracas had been able to return to those cities in 1860, he or she would have recognized the same places. Industrialization had barely touched them. Each city was organized around a central, square plaza with sides dominated by a cathedral, an administrative center, and a market. The cities’ sights and sounds were still preindustrial. In the larger cities, there were shops enclosed in established buildings, but many cities, even into the twentieth century, had markets of tents, pitched up during the day and taken down at night. Street peddlers and vendors on mules—selling food, water, milk, and small manufactures and singing out their wares— rounded out urban commercial life. The city had to be supplied every day, for there were few means of preserving foods. Most things were handmade, and artisans played important roles, socially and politically. Women produced cloth using foot looms and made enormous pottery jugs to haul milk and water. Also, they made up a major part of the vendors; in many smaller cities, vending from tents or mules was dominated by women—in Lima, it was dominated by Black women.


9

Throughout Spanish America, in a pattern imposed during the Conquest, the city spread out from the central square in a regular grid pattern. Brazilian cities, although often organized in a grid as well, had winding streets that followed the contours of the land. The cities themselves seemed small, even those with populations in the tens of thousands. Most of the “urban” residents lived in the countryside surrounding the city, and so urban life was not strikingly different from rural existence. What is more, because there were few means of public transportation and most people were poor, a city had to remain a place that could be walked easily and quickly. Rio de Janeiro could be crossed in about twenty minutes. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the major cities were in a sense occupied by their countryside. Hacendados and plantation owners had wielded enormous influence on the crowns of Spain and Portugal. Freed of imperial control, landlord power became even more assertive. Formally, politics moved along two axes: the liberal/conservative one and the federalist/centralist. We can imagine them by creating a square with four quarters: liberal federalist, conservative federalist, liberal centralist, and conservative centralist (see Table 1.1). These rough divisions appeared in the wars of independence and continued through a good part of the nineteenth century. Although liberals led the fights for independence, they lacked the financial means and ideological support to consolidate their rule in the 1820s. In state after state, they gave way to conservatives, whose viewpoints dominated the region until the second half of the century. The conservatives were closely identified with the protection of Catholicism TABLE 1.1 Political Axes of Latin America, 1820–1914 Federalist

Centralist

Liberal Porfirio Díaz (1876), Mexico Simoń Bolívar (1820), Liberator of Northern South America

Cipriano Castro (1901), Venezuela Bernardo O’Higgins (1820), Liberator of Chile

Conservative Juan Manuel Rosas (1828), Argentina José de Iturbide, (1820), Emperor of Mexico

José Antonio Paez (1830s), Venezuela Diego Portales (1833), Chile

10


as a state religion, and they wanted to maintain social practices and forms of labor inherited from the colonies. The liberals claimed that they wanted to break with colonial practices and the forced labor systems; they blamed Spain and Portugal for their nations’ backwardness and looked to Great Britain and the United States as models of progress. The single greatest element dividing liberals and conservatives was religion, with liberals wanting a toleration of Protestants and even a separation of church and state. But the rift between liberals and conservatives was more than ideology or religion: it involved a cultural divide of feelings, especially among men, that triggered passionate political stances. Worse, the persecutions practiced by liberals against conservatives in the 1820s, and the retaliations by conservatives by the 1830s and thereafter, led to political loyalties based on clan, regional identities, and a desire for revenge. The other axis involved the power of cities over the nation. Would Latin American nations be organized into political administrations with one major city writing the rules for each country, or would power be distributed to provincial and local governments throughout each nation? The federalists demanded that power be localized and a national administration should consist of collective decisions made by local interests. Exactly how all this would be done varied from nation to nation; in general, federalists wanted a pattern of government similar to that of the United States or to that of Spain, which acknowledged regional rights. The fights between federalists and centralists contributed to national subdivisions and the regional fragmentation already noted. Here, the experience of Brazil is instructive. The Portuguese colony of Brazil became a single nation, but the country had no strong leader. A regency run by a committee held effective royal power while Dom Pedro II was growing up. Regional dissension in the 1820s threatened to splinter the nation, but Whites had to consider what might happen if political dissidents mobilized Blacks (free and slave). In 1835, a slave uprising, led by Muslims in the city of Salvador, Bahia—the historic center of sugar plantations—seared White fears into political acquiescence.4 Rio gave each zone in the country over to the control of its major landlords and slave masters sealed regional loyalty to the crown. No caste society in the Americas forgot the example of Haiti, where slaves rebelled and Blacks thereby acquired political control of the new nation in 1804. In Latin America as a whole, the centralists wanted one national set of rules for all, with one major center of power. The federalists


11

wanted each province to have considerable autonomy from the national capital. In the first half of the century, centralists did not have the financial means to create strong, national governments, and liberals faced rural populations that saw themselves as Catholic and had little interest in liberal doctrines. As a result, conservatives gained power, but local leaders usually had considerable autonomy. The most centralized government of the early nineteenth century was that of Chile, where an alliance of landowners and merchants ran a conservative regime from 1833 to the 1860s, and where no federalism was allowed. Confusion evolves out of these two axes because there was no necessary link between a position along one axis and the other. Nor were political labels always clear. In most of the new nations, two parties emerged and could, for example, include centralists and federalists under a liberal label. Similarly, there were conservatives that were federalists or centralists. Even more confusingly, those in power tried to impose their will on the entire nation whatever their ideology. For example, Juan Manuel de Rosas began his federalist career in opposition to liberals who were called Unitarios; their federalism was so strong that they formed a confederation (not a nation) of the Rio de la Plata, and Rosas never claimed any title higher than that of Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires. He and his rancher allies seized power in that province in the civil war of 1828, and Rosas remained the dominant leader of the Argentine region until 1852. However, he used his control of the port of Buenos Aires (and the armed forces it could finance) to weaken his fellow federalists. They rebelled and joined with liberals to destroy his reign at the battle of Caseros; his rule, however, paved the way for a stronger state system after him.5 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the liberals succeeded in taking and holding office in a majority of the national capitals. The nation-states, however, remained highly fragmented. Liberals gained from the growth of export economies (those geared to selling abroad) and the ideological weaknesses of a conservatism inherited from the colonial era. However, power on the ground remained in the hands of local notables, making the nineteenth century the era of the caudillo and the local boss. Hacendados and plantation owners kept private armies to control their labor forces and the areas around their estates. Frequently, they turned themselves into justices of the peace, claiming that their forces had state legitimacy. In Brazil, plantation owners usually assumed some military rank, a practice that became so common that

12


local bosses were known as coronéis into the late nineteenth century. In Mexico, they were called caciques; in Argentina, caudillos; and in Peru, gamonales. But the general principle was the same: those who controlled the land controlled the people and coupled their economic power with some political office. There were extensive exceptions to this generalization of landlord rule that involved geographically isolated populations, often of mixed descent or of Native Americans. In major parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, Native American populations governed themselves and in such numbers that they were able to resist simple incorporation into landlord rule. In all of these countries, Native Americans controlled towns and their hinterlands, and their central problem was that they often fought with each other. Still, they had the economic and political resources to evolve in their distinct cultures. Recent research indicates that early in the nineteenth century Native Americans in Peru even defended the possible return of Spanish rule and rebelled against the new republic in an attempt to defend their customs and the economic control of the coca trade.6 In Colombia, they often sided with conservative politicians—again to defend customs and resguardos (communal lands) of the colonial era.7 Several different arrangements existed between national and local governments, but national regimes rarely meddled in local politics, except to put down a provincial rebellion. Unfortunately, these were common. Impoverished national governments could not sustain the patronage required for political continuity. Bolivia fell into such disarray that some presidents lasted less than a year, one of them for only a day. Mexico collapsed into the colorful and disastrous career of General Antonio López de Santa Ana, who lost Texas in a civil war and half the territory of the nation in another war with the United States. Not all the countries, of course, fell into cycles of rebellion. Rosas has already been mentioned, though even he had to put down a liberal uprising in 1840. Most of Brazil’s nineteenth century consisted of the reign of Dom Pedro II; from 1831 to 1840, the nation was under the aforementioned regency, and from 1840 until 1889, he was emperor. It was once believed that political turmoil within Latin America led to economic stagnation; now generalizations about politics and economics are more nuanced. Regions of Mexico recovered quickly from the wars of independence; the Bolivian mining economy (silver and tin) continued to grow, for no president antagonized the


13

mine owners.8 Overall, the economies of Latin America grew. But the absence of political continuity and the early indebtedness of the new nations meant that political leaders found it difficult to organize public projects of national (or even regional) improvement. Here, the evolution of Chile is enlightening. The conservative regime was highly repressive but effective in creating legal continuity. As a result, the nation went through a series of export booms (silver, wheat, and copper) that fueled agrarian expansion; exports per capita in 1850 were nearly five times what they had been in 1800.9 Caudillismo lasted in many areas well into the nineteenth century and, in Central America, into the twentieth. Our image of caudillos is strongly colored by the Latin American writers, especially the Argentine Domingo Sarmiento, who believed in a simple formula: civilization was based in cities and barbarism in the countryside. Thus, Sarmiento’s most famous work on Facundo Quiroga, a caudillo in the province of La Rioja, compares his gaucho followers to the Turks who once threatened Western civilization.10 More recent studies put this very differently: gauchos and their families followed caudillos out of necessity and religious sentiment, believing that liberals were the enemy of their faith. Caudillos rewarded them with wages, gifts, a sense of belonging, and the feeling that their provincial allegiances would protect them from outsiders. The source of their wild qualities, which Sarmiento dwelt on at some length, came from poverty and the harsh conditions on the South American plains.11 Nor is it the case that gauchos frustrated economic progress. The Confederation of the Rio de la Plata expanded, economically and geographically, throughout the 1830s and 1840s, and when it did run into problems, these had nothing to do with the gauchos. As a social type, the cowboy existed throughout the Americas: he was called vaquero in northern Mexico and charro in most of the rest of the country, huaso in Chile, gaucho in Argentina and Uruguay, gaúcho in Brazil, and llanero in Venezuela. Far from being a drag on civilization, the cowboys were the labor backbone of ranching, and the frontiersmen who battled nomadic Native Americans. They endured into the early twentieth century in many areas, and as their importance and numbers declined, they, like their counterparts in the United States, became mythologized in these countries as symbols of masculinity and national fortitude.12

14


Caudillismo was more than just cowboy practices. It involved a political style, and most caudillos had charisma. They embodied machismo, were folk heroes, and were celebrated in popular song. In the late nineteenth century, liberal caudillos appear—they take part, for example, in Mexico’s War of the Reform (1859–1861)—and come to power in Venezuela and Colombia so that caudillaje was hardly confined to backwardness. The problem of this style of government derived from its strength in a particular region and patterns of charisma; it was hard to turn a provincial following into the basis of a national government or to project a rurally based charisma into an urban political setting. The more urban Latin America became, the less it would need or want caudillos. But the pattern of strong-man rule would continue as a political heritage and that, unfortunately, could be urbanized. Even during the era of caudillos, urban areas in many parts of Latin America continued to grow. As Table 1.2 demonstrates, some of them were substantial well before 1850. Mexico City, despite political instability, grew throughout the nineteenth century. Although the cities in Latin America were not growing as rapidly as the major centers of the North Atlantic, not a single one of them became smaller in 1850 than TABLE 1.2 Major Cities in the Atlantic World, 1790–1890 City Bogotá Buenos Aires Guatemala City Havana Lima London Madrid Mexico City New York Paris Rio de Janeiro São Paulo

1790 18,000 22,000

53,000 675,000 109,000 131,000 33,000 576,000 29,000 8,000

1850 30,000 99,000 37,000 2,000 70,000 2,605,000 281,000 170,000 696,000 1,053,000 166,000 15,000

1890 96,000 433,000 72,000 28,000 101,000 5,638,000 470,000 327,000 2,507,000 2,448,000 523,000 65,000

Source: B.R. Mitchell, International, Historical Statistics, 1750–1993. The Americas, pp. 47–57; and Europe, pp. 74–76.


15

it had been in 1790, or failed to continue expanding into 1890. The most striking urban growth took place in a slave center, Rio de Janeiro, a sign of the impact of the coffee export economy through the century. Nonetheless, before 1880 these cities were dependent on human and animal labor for everything they produced, processed, and transported, and they were already notable for importing manufactures from Europe. Although conservative and rural cultures influenced and even controlled the capital cities of Latin America, they were generating the basis of liberal success. For one thing, it was only in the liberal capitals of the world that these cities would find the technology and the ideas to continue expanding. The faster the pace of urban growth, the stronger liberal cultural forces became. There was a tendency toward creating one major urban center in each nation, and that center found ways to turn its needs into national projects. Thus, even capitals expanding under the rule of slave owners and caudillos questioned the cultural assumptions of conservative rule. By the late nineteenth century, the central political questions seemed to still involve a liberal–conservative axis, but they were turning more and more on the capacity or incapacity of expanding national capitals to impose rules on rural regions.

LABOR: INDIAN, SLAVE, AND FREE As soon as the Europeans arrived in the Americas, they began to exploit the natives and import slaves from sub-Saharan Africa. This was as true of the French and the English as it was of the Spanish and Portuguese. The major difference in colonial zones was that there were many more natives in Meso-America and Spanish South America, and the Portuguese brought in many more slaves than any other European power. Native American slavery existed in Brazil; in Spanish South America the crown tried but failed to prevent it.13 The key factor in limiting Native American slavery in Spanish areas was that other servile forms of labor were cheaper. Natives suffered more from tributary systems than from enslavement. They were forced to pay set amounts to the crown and its officials, and the tribute varied widely in payments—from gold to cloth to foodstuffs. The early Spanish colonies also imposed the encomienda (a system in which natives within a particular zone given to the conqueror owed him their labor) and the mita (an adaptation of Incan tribute in which a

16


certain number of men were handed over to work, usually on roads or in the mines). In the eighteenth century, natives were forced to buy goods at prices demanded by those holding crown licenses to exploit this right. Black slavery also existed throughout Spanish America; slaves and their mixed-blood descendants were commonplace in the colonial capitals, the mines, and the plantations. With tribute and slavery came racism. In the 1930s, a Brazilian sociologist—Gilberto Freyre, trained in the United States in the 1920s— went back to Brazil and began asserting that his nation had not been as cruel in its behavior toward slaves as the United States, and that the harshness of slavery had been softened by the Portuguese use of Black women for sex and as nannies.14 This theme became part of Brazil’s national self-image. Indeed, by the 1950s Freyre’s name became associated with the phrase “racial democracy,” taught in Brazilian schools and widely believed. A North American specialist on Latin America, Frank Tannenbaum, also argued after World War II that racism had not been as exploitative in Brazil (and by implication, the rest of Latin America) as in the United States. He believed that the Catholic Church had often acted on behalf of slaves.15 Historical research has demonstrated, however, that little of this is true. Slave systems were no nicer in some areas than others; indeed, the technologies of buying slaves in Africa, shipping them to the colonies, and creating a slave market spread throughout European zones in the Americas. Miscegenation occurred in all slave zones; the control of slaves’ sexuality was part of the entire labor system. The very term Negro, used in the United States, came from the word negro, which means black in Spanish and Portuguese. Everywhere, caste systems were created that declared white the ideal skin color and that defined Europeans as a distinct race, whose religion and rationality entitled them to rule over Native Americans and Blacks.16 The size and characteristics of colonial populations shaped the racial composition of nineteenth-century nations. In areas with substantial native populations, Whites exploited them first and turned to Black slavery as a secondary strategy. Natives required little outlay of capital, and slaves were expensive. In areas with fewer natives, populations were sometimes completely exterminated by overwork and disease. Then, only high-value commodities could finance the costs of slavery.17 The commodity most identified with African slavery was cane sugar. The development of sugar plantations throughout the Caribbean and Brazil accounts in large part for the density of the Black populations in


17

those areas today.18 In Haiti, slaves and free people gained independence from France in 1804, after a two-year war. Their victory, however, led to greater sugar production in the Spanish colony of Cuba and the expansion of slavery there in the mid-nineteenth century. In Brazil, the great importer of slaves in the Americas during the colonial era and the nineteenth century, slavery moved from the older sugar-producing zones of the northeast to the coffee areas in the southeast around Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. In a tragedy that paralleled events in the development of cotton in the Southern United States, the coffee frontier offered new profits to slave masters and so refinanced a labor system that had become uneconomical in other nations. Mexico ended slavery early in its republican history, but many Latin American nations did not: it remained in Colombia until 1851, and in Peru and Venezuela until 1854. Cuba abolished it only after efforts at independence from Spain became enmeshed with a slave rebellion in a war that lasted from 1868 to 1878. The external factor in ending slavery in the region was the rise of abolitionism. The abolitionist movement began among Quakers and spread to other Protestant faiths in Great Britain. Abolitionist sentiment ended the slave trade in the British colonies in 1807, and in 1833, Great Britain began to free Blacks in its most important sugar plantation colony, Jamaica—a task completed in 1838.19 The British then launched an abolitionist crusade in the Atlantic and used their navy to carry it out. France, the Netherlands, and Spain abolished the trade in their colonies between 1814 and 1820, although, as noted, this was not immediately enforced in Cuba. Unlike the slave population in the United States, which banned the importation of slaves in 1808, slave populations in Latin America never reproduced in numbers that would have extended slavery without continuing to import new victims from Africa. By the 1850s, British naval harassment of slave ships dramatically reduced the number of slaves coming each year to Cuba and Brazil. Then came the defeat of the most prosperous slavocracy in the world in 1865. The outcome of the U.S. Civil War meant that the most successful example of forced labor—the one practiced by the Southern planter class—had come to an end. Although this defeat of American southerners is rarely discussed in the literature on Brazil, it certainly influenced the Cuban planter class, which realized that African slavery had no future. Even so, it took the ten years’ war (1868–1878) to undercut the system in Cuba, which began to dismantle it in 1880; complete emancipation came only in

18


1886. Brazil became the last nation in the Americas to formally end the practice in 1888; the very next year, the Brazilian Empire, so closely tied to the existence of slavery, collapsed, and Brazil became a republic.20 Unlike the Jamaican planters, those in Brazil and Cuba received nothing in return for the loss of their “property.” The fate of native populations in the nineteenth century varied widely within Latin America, even within particular nations. Much depended on local as well as national policies and on the relation of specific populations to commodity markets. In many nations, there still existed extensive areas in which natives were free of any White control. In general, however, natives often gained greater control of their own affairs and resources in the early nineteenth century because of the weakness of central governments. In Paraguay, the very unusual government of José Rodriguez Gaspar de Francia (1814–1840), who in 1820 assumed the title El Supremo Dictador, based its rule on the support of native peoples: he forced Whites to marry natives, thereby blurring the boundaries that established the latter as a distinctive caste, and tried to control contact and economic ties to other nations. He succeeded in breaking any control from the outside, reducing the influence of Brazil and of the Argentine and Uruguayan provinces in his country; so he can be said to have created a nation that might not have survived without his efforts.21 At the same time, he so terrorized the Whites and upper class and did so little to educate the natives that no civic life ever formed while he was alive. His efforts ended with his rule, but Paraguay remained a Native American nation in many ways, and even today it is officially bilingual, with Guaraní and Spanish. Other nations with predominately native populations remained caste societies in which natives might have control of their own affairs but had little say in national or provincial governments. This was true of Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Natives remained divided by different languages and by competition for resources, particularly land and water. Thus, Whites (and usually mestizos) had a set of racial attitudes and political policies toward natives, but natives as a whole did not have a uniform response to White impositions. They were repeatedly forced to act defensively, trying to hang on to lands and rights from the colonial era; and whenever they resorted to open rebellion, they usually suffered terrible retaliations. Generalizations, however, must be carefully circumscribed. In many ways, we probably know more about Native American


19

societies in the colonial period than the nineteenth century. Mexico illustrates the enormous variety of situations among Whites, mestizos, and natives. In the north, in the states of Chihuahua and Sonora, Whites and mestizos waged a frontier war on tribes such as the Yaqui and Apache. Natives fought back tenaciously, and open warfare lasted until the late nineteenth century, when most native populations, aside from the Yaqui, were exterminated or reduced and brought under Mexican control.22 To the south of Mexico City, in the state of Oaxaca, a variety of Mixtec and Zapotec populations lived in complete peace with Mexican authorities; in fact, they had local political control in the form of municipal autonomy. Municipalities in this context were, of course, local pueblos and their rural environs. Natives traded extensively with one another and provided food and goods to Hispanicized trade routes as well. The natives of Oaxaca were an important political base to the liberal presidencies of Benito Juárez (1861–1863 and 1867–1872), who was born Zapotec but was educated by a Franciscan, and Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880 and 1880–1911), who had a strong Mixtec background. Neither came to think of himself as Native American, and each identified with the liberals of the United States and northern Europe. In the Yucatán peninsula, the Mayan populations lost their land and control of their own labor to the spread of commercial agriculture, especially to plantations cultivating sisal, used to produce rope and twine. Natives rose in a desperate caste war in 1847–1848, and when they were suppressed, they turned to the millennial vision of the “speaking cross,” which first appeared in 1851 and told them to keep fighting and that it would protect them from White bullets. The fighting resumed and continued into the early 1860s, until the Maya suffered such devastation that they gradually accepted White domination. The cult of the cross, however, endured.23 No single national policy could cover all these situations, and national governments, aside from helping to suppress any native rebellion such as that of the Maya, left the treatment of natives to state governments and local authorities. In the broad span of the nineteenth century, however, the natives lost ground, often literally, as liberal politicians legislated their communal lands away from them and awarded them to individual purchasers. Dr. Francia of Paraguay notwithstanding, most politicians—whether White, mestizo, or even Juárez himself—had little sympathy for native cultures and did little or nothing to protect or

20


extend native populations. Indeed, the best policy natives could hope for was to be left alone. As late as 1850, native communities controlling their own lands extended throughout Meso-America and the Andes. In Bolivia, they made up about half the total rural population of 1.2 million; landholding was broken into 5,000 haciendas and 4,000 free native communities.24 To the extent that governments invested in education and rural development, these investments went to the expansion of Hispanic or Luso cultures. Many liberal politicians believed the “cure” for native societies was their Europeanization. The vast majority of Latin American peoples were neither slave nor native. The miscegenation of the colonial era continued in the nineteenth century, creating by the end of that century mestizo and mulatto nations. Unlike in the United States, where someone having a small portion of African ancestry was labeled Negro, in Latin America, political and religious authorities created a myriad of racial labels. A population with so many labels is obviously preoccupied rather than indifferent to the relation of race to status. Once independence was established, many of the new republics—most notably Mexico, Costa Rica, and Chile—insisted that everyone was now a citizen and that colonial status no longer mattered, but in practice, the Church kept track of racial identities in its baptismal records. Still, no one doubts that Latin American racial systems were different from those of the United States. Why did Latin American nations open a political and social space for free Blacks, mulattos, and mestizos that did not exist in the United States? We do know that the proportion of free Blacks and mulattos in Brazil was some two-fifths of the total rural population, a much higher percentage than the U.S. South. In 1840, a census counted a little over a million people in Cuba: 418,000 were labeled White; 436,000 were Black slaves; and close to 150,000 were something else.25 White was an expansive term in Cuba, and most people of mixed heritage and lighter skin claimed it. The best hypothesis about the differences in race relations between the United States and Latin America, although it has been sharply debated, is that of Carl Degler, who in studying racial systems in the United States and Brazil noted that any slave system needed a free population that would help the master class carry out all the other tasks that slaves could not perform. In the U.S. South, Whites were so numerous that they could perform these intermediary jobs; in Brazil, the White population was not large enough, and the master


21

class needed free Blacks and mulattos to serve as their allies in controlling the slave population.26 Recent studies of Brazilian slavery point out something that is equally important in explaining racial and abolitionist attitudes: people of relatively modest means often owned slaves. Thus, the slave-owning class included Blacks and mulattos who were not rich. Zephyr Frank has documented the life of Antonio José Dutra, who was himself enslaved and freed as a young man, and who came to own others before dying in 1849. Frank concludes that of all the ironies about urban slavery, “foremost is the fact that slavery was both a horrible institution built on exploitation and coercion and a powerful avenue for social advancement.”27 Manumission (setting slaves free) was much more common in Brazilian and Spanish American slave systems than in that of the United States. So was the practice of allowing urban slaves to earn money and buy their freedom and that of their relatives (including their spouses and children). All this must be put on one side, however. On the other are such facts as the higher mortality rate due to poor diets in Brazil and Cuba, and the male-female ratio, which so favored the importation of males that Blacks as a whole declined in numbers in slave zones. Slavery was a dehumanizing experience in every zone it was practiced, but historians have demonstrated that no social institution, not even slavery, can function only on the basis of coercion—there must be labor incentives as well.28 So slavery’s legacy includes a complex pattern of narrow racial distinctions. People of color who were the objects of discrimination by the ruling class had status groupings within and among themselves and never saw themselves as belonging to one group. The mestizo served a related role in Native American nations to that of mulattos and freed Blacks in slave zones. In Mexico, on the eve of independence, natives probably made up three-fifths of the population, but mestizos were the majority of the population by the end of the nineteenth century. This mestizaje would become central in the early twentieth century to a reimagining of the racial past in such countries as Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile. Here, however, it is important to note a major difference between native and slave nations. Slaves never owned land or had their own local governments unless they lived as runaways. They had no collective resources that could be taken. Natives, however, did and still controlled extensive areas in the nineteenth century. Mestizos (often

22


called ladinos in many areas) lined up generally with Whites and developed a common racial interest in despoiling natives of their lands. A study of natives in Veracruz, by Emilio Kourí, demonstrates that as native lands were divided into parcels by liberal legislation, some Native Americans joined a commercial class in exploiting natives.29 The expansion of the mestizo population, like that of the White, came at the expense of natives. Thus, the rise of the mestizo was a major factor in further dooming Native Americans, even as mestizos began to extol their Amerindian descent. The last element to consider in evaluating Latin American racial systems was their code of honor. This code, developed in Europe over centuries, had been transposed to the Americas during the colonial era and remained an essential element of Latin American societies throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. It considered gender, race, and income. As the Brazilians put it so neatly, “money whitens.” The scale of honor and virtue paralleled the racial scales in the New World. White, educated people had honor, and dark-skinned, poor people did not (or they had very little). In Mexico, even today, to call someone an indio is a profound insult and, among men, likely to lead to a fight. The insulting term for a mulatto in northeast Brazil is goat, after the varied spots of that animal. A woman who remained in the home and had sex only with one man and within the framework of marriage had honor; a woman who had sex out of the bonds of matrimony did not. Men of the household were supposed to protect the sexual virtue and physical safety of women; husbands or brothers who failed to do so were disgraced along with the entire household. To protect his honor, a man might beat his wife or, if she betrayed him sexually, even kill her and fear little legal reprisal.30 In this sexual double standard, a woman was supposed to accept her husband visiting prostitutes or having another lover. She had grounds for divorce only if he abandoned her. Men who were challenged on their opinions in politics or culture were also challenged in their honor; duels remained common in many Latin American cities through most of the nineteenth century and occurred occasionally after 1900. The honor code and racial attitudes pervaded all social strata. They created emotional bonds and social dichotomies; liberals as well as conservatives subscribed to them. As factions elaborated their goals, they incorporated these dichotomies into national politics—civilized–barbaric, white–non-White, rational–ignorant,


23

urban–rural, men–women—to which the liberals would add scientific–superstitious. Within these associative terms, it became easy to stigmatize the majority of the population. Manual labor was seen as demeaning, something that non-Whites did. Educated Chileans looked at the poor working people and referred to them as rotos, “broken ones.” For a woman to work outside the home— something many women had to do—was a disgrace; working women were automatically assumed to be engaging in casual prostitution or promiscuity. Workers had few if any rights. Whereas the United States in the nineteenth century encouraged homesteading and created a middling class of rural property owners, Latin America had collections of peones. People who played roles comparable to that of American homesteaders in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico could often not secure the rights to the land that they had cleared. Brazil, in 1850, actually curtailed the landowning rights of settlers or squatters. In Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, governments preferred to subsidize European immigration rather than helping their mixed-blood populations. Sarmiento and others thought the natives had to be exterminated— and by implication the nativeness removed from the nation—if a “new man” was to develop. A vicious cycle became accentuated in which the poor were considered barbaric, unworthy of public action, and fit for exploitation. As nations developed and poverty became more extensive, Latin America became more “backward” in relation to the northern United States and Western Europe. In law, most Latin Americans were free. At independence, substantial islands of free Blacks, mulattos, and mestizos existed. One would never know the importance of Blacks in many countries to read their national histories. Who were these free people and what type of life was available to them? We have travelers’ accounts and the reports of government officials, but these have obvious biases. Historians have begun exploring rural social complexities of this era only in the last two decades. People were deeply religious, just as they had been in the colonial period. These feelings were not just a matter of Church teachings, but of community and inner beliefs that governed all social life. Parents named their children after saints, and people gathered in a community for specific religious festivals, especially for the patron saint of the town. Within small towns, lay associations were essential to social life; one of the most common was the cofradía

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(brotherhood), dedicated to the veneration of a saint, of the Virgin Mary (usually in one of her apparitions), or of Jesus Christ.31 The local priest and the elders of communities often quarreled over the control of religious images and the money gathered from festivals and devotions. Even communities aligned with liberal leaders believed in God and life after death. Ordinary people believed in miracles and visions, and created entire social movements around apparitions that had just occurred.32 At the level of communities, the faith was not just maintained but reinvented. The example of the Maya and the speaking cross has been mentioned, but most miracles did not call for a social rebellion so much as a new pilgrimage and a new chapel. Trips to these sites made up a tourism that helped finance particular towns. Although a folk Catholicism was triumphant, a closer look at regions reveals many practices that the official Church never accepted. In many parts of Latin America, priests were so scarce that lay preachers—sometimes illiterate or semiliterate—led believers. Nominally Catholic societies continued practices from the preColombian or African pasts. At times, these became entirely different religions. Santería and candomblé are respectively the Hispanic and Brazilian versions of fundamentally African beliefs. In candomblé, whose later forms include macumba and umbanda (its contemporary urban version), Brazilian slaves took over their own spirituality. The focus of the religion was obviously not the afterlife but this one, and the central events involved rituals of drums, dancing, and possession. It is in these rituals—often led by women and which involved trance states signaling a “saint” had entered that person—that the believers communed with spirits. African-derived music, often originating in these religious sessions, is a key element in most of Latin America’s famous dances. A belief in possession ran well outside of African populations. Native Americans and their descendents had their own versions. In these communal practices, ritual prayers were an essential part of healing (along with herbs). Thus, societies were nucleated around local amalgams of folk beliefs, bossism, and trade, and the dominant attitudes strongly reflected regional and ethnic affinities rather than having much to do with nation-states. The majority of people found ways to enjoy their lives somewhat. They had religious festivals or patriotic holidays, with the latter becoming more important as the century wore on. In Mexico, the


25

Day of the Dead is still celebrated and is not a mournful affair, but one in which children eat sugared skulls, and families visit their dead and share a meal with them. The festivals called for colorful costumes. It would take a lengthy catalog to list just the forms of dancing and singing that existed in Mexico, let alone the rest of the region. There were no national dances or songs; these are conventions invented in the twentieth century. The guitar and brass instruments brought from Europe in the colonial period had long since joined native and African rhythm instruments. Just about any small town had its own band. The folk song was ubiquitous and an important source of news. From Mexico to Brazil to Chile, people loved to make up ballads about bandits and love affairs, and to ridicule politicians. They had puppet shows and, in the larger towns, concerts of local musicians and in the larger cities, theaters. A great deal of social entertaining occurred in people’s homes. Educated young women were expected, just as they were in Europe, to play the guitar or piano and to sing nicely. And, in an era when gossip still reigned, most politics was gossip, a gathering of friends in taverns or at a house party. Gambling was an essential male pastime. There were card games, cock fights, dog fights, and horse races. Bullfights, especially involving men on horses lancing the bull, existed throughout Spanish America. The production of food as well as trade in food and basic cloth were the centerpieces of almost every local economy. Most food was locally produced and consumed, but there were important commercial items, such as teas and tobacco, that crossed substantial distances and even national borders, but these were few. The rise of the export economies began in the nineteenth century, but such items as sugar, coffee, wheat, sisal, and hides did not occupy the majority of the population even after 1880. Commercial life based on money, an essential component of export economies and the modernization of agriculture, played only a minor role in local life because most people had little currency and traded in goods rather than in cash. The evolution of Latin America’s foods has never been properly recounted. Mexico alone had more than 300 varieties of peppers and numerous local cuisines, distinguished by differences in geography and native ethnicities. On a day-to-day basis, people relied on basic staples: corn tortillas and beans with some peppers in Mexico, beans and rice in Brazil, stews and soups everywhere. Meat, outside of cattle zones, was scarce and expensive. But just as every region had its political climate and its religious peculiarities,

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every region had also its delicacies. The most profound new influence on diets was the spread of French cooking from major cities to the countryside. Alcoholism was widespread (as it was in Europe and the United States). Selling liquor, made of cheap rum from sugar cane or brandies from common fruits, was a source of income for hacendados. Home brews used everything from corn to potatoes to cactus sap. The production of beer began in the mid-nineteenth century, as Germans came to the region, fleeing the politics in their homeland. Although rural populations were often isolated from national politics and the cultural changes occurring in the cities, knowledge of political alignments and the laws affecting the poor was widespread. One could make the case, as Carlos A. Forment has done, that at the local level Mexicans, for example, had numerous associations: religious confraternities, Masonic and political clubs, guilds, and commercial societies. As Forment admits, these were divided by race and class, and they were geographically fragmented.33 In sharp contrast to views a generation ago, we know that communities of even poor natives were not politically passive. When conditions permitted, as happened in the 1820s and 1830s in Mexico, poor mestizos and natives voted and sponsored local political movements.34 In Colombia, in the 1840s, free Black men joined with mixed bloods and formed democratic societies, demanding the establishment of liberal, civil rights and the distribution of lands, before being suppressed in the 1880s.35 Communities responded to legal changes and often petitioned their helpless national governments. Most of the population was illiterate, but the few could read to the many, and by mid-century most towns of any size had a newspaper, even if it was published irregularly. Sermons also provided news of social events and politics. The illiterate used scribes to write each other and officials. After the 1840s, however, interactions between rural populations and national governments became more common. The law was beginning to matter. Given the distribution of landholding, many people lived by shuffling around from estate to estate, engaging in plantings and harvests, or adding to their subsistence by working in the mines or the estates for periods of time. Landowners now invoked the law to control their movements. As agricultural markets expanded, landowners called on the government to ban “vagrancy.”36 New statutes fined natives and cowboys in Spanish America for moving around without a permit or passport, or for not having a visible means of support. Those fined could pay what they


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owed to the government by working it off—governments began to sell their labor to landowners. Free men were now legally obligated and controlled; the vagrancy statutes were crucial to Guatemalan coffee growers and Argentine cattle barons.37 Another tactic was to contract with a laborer by advancing him funds to work a tract of land or mine a piece of ground. Variations on such contracts had existed in the colonial era. Once contracted, the interest would accumulate or the worker would not earn enough to pay off the debt, thus becoming an indebted peon. A classic example is that of the mestizos called peones acasillados, peasants tied to the land, on Mexican estates; and another occurs in Chile, where inquilinos, tenant farmers, were expected to supply the big house with the servant labor of their wives and children for no additional wages.38 To increase their profits, mines and estates ran company stores where they monopolized supplies and sold their employees liquor. It was in these interstices between subsistence farming and labor legislation that regional bosses began to demand support from their national governments. The law was an essential instrument of emerging national elites—that is, the oligarchies. Through national law and their continued importance to local markets, they would retain control of labor and consolidate their chances for even larger fortunes.

THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS On paper, Latin America—with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico, which remained colonies until 1898—was governed by constitutional law. The empire of Brazil had a constitution. Political practice, however, was strongly shaped by the religious, racial, and gender assumptions inherited from the colonial era. The idea of constitutional law grew out of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. As Thomas Jefferson put the definition of liberal democracy so well in America’s Declaration of Independence, it assumed that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights,” and that to secure these rights “Governments are instituted among Men.” Latin Americans were trapped in a legal and historical dilemma with far-reaching consequences for their development. Although their constitutions generally proclaimed the ideals of the Enlighten-

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ment, their societies proclaimed other values that directly contradicted the basis of constitutional rights. No one in Latin America, including the liberals, believed that all men were created equal. (One might say that because Jefferson owned slaves all his life, neither did he. But he certainly believed that most White people should have legal rights, and that no democratic republic could exist without them.) Those who gained political power in the new Latin American states, whether liberal or conservative, did not feel bound by the rights of others or by democratic procedures. Everything in their cultures—the appearance of military cliques, the acceptance of social hierarchies embodied in Catholic doctrine, the importance of racial distinctions, and the weaknesses of local governments—argued against it. Conservatives who wanted to retain colonial religious and social practices lost ideological ground to the liberal attack. If the liberals could never realize their ideas in illiberal societies, the conservatives faced the problem of making rules behind the façade of constitutional republics. For one thing, outside of the Brazilian Empire, they could no longer create an aristocracy. They were stuck with the republican and constitutional idea of the citizen. They resorted to some of the legal tactics that have parallels in the United States but with the important distinction that different ratios among the races which created very different political outcomes. Slaves could not be citizens in either the United States or Latin America, and in most Latin American societies, neither could natives. In a moment of liberal enthusiasm in the 1820s, Mexico had not only abolished slavery but declared that natives no longer legally existed; everyone was now a citizen. In most nations, however, racial exclusions operated, and those in office could manipulate the suffrage to keep some citizens from voting. Everywhere in the Americas, women were denied the vote (as they were in the electoral systems in Europe). Adult male suffrage was restricted by property ownership or income, and literacy. Curiously, one of the most racially stratified nations, Brazil, had throughout the era of the empire widespread male suffrage. A large army of smallholders could vote under the 1824 Constitution. This, however, made little difference to political outcomes because smallholders were economically dependent on the owners of plantations, who expected political loyalty in return for small favors. Once slaves were freed, the nation invested heavily in prisons to contain any social threat.


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The secret ballot was invented in Australia in 1856, but voting in Latin America was a matter of public record. In addition to social pressure, political factions could control voting registers, stuff ballot boxes, and as became common in Argentina, use armed gangs to seize the polls. Peaceful elections were public festivals, with the expected winners entertaining the voters with food and liquor.39 National governments used the fact that fraud was widespread to intervene in local elections and replace the victors with their own supporters. When all else failed, and sometimes before legal remedies were even considered, factions resorted to force. Governments could be overthrown. What one caudillo could do, another could undo. The frequent resort to force meant that no property right or moral right was ever completely secure. In two important respects, Spanish American legal practice underlined the use of force to define political life. The Spanish Empire had maintained separate legal systems for the military and the Church. The military had a fuero (privileges and rights), which meant that any issue involving a soldier had to be dealt with in a military court; something akin to the U.S. courts martial. Military officers felt themselves immune to civil authority. In constitutions they were charged with protecting the civilian government; this meant that military rebels could denounce the existing government and attempt to overthrow it in the name of returning the nation to constitutional rule. Worse, constitutions contained clauses that established the right of authorities to declare martial law or temporarily suspend civil liberties to preserve social order. Once in power, any dictator could declare that civil rights were temporarily in abeyance, and as one student of this process notes, this was the legal rationalization for “regimes of exception.”40 The ruler justified his arbitrariness as a means of attacking the nation’s enemies and then restoring the constitution and democratic rule. All of this was helped by the simple facts that military factions were fighting one another within countries, and that war was an instrument of national extension. Caudillismo continued after the Spanish American wars of independence as a means of controlling regions and exterminating natives, and so extending the area available to “civilized” people. Wars between nations helped create cohesion within them, stifling dissent and demanding loyalty in the form of patriotism and military service. Although Uruguay had its own caudillos of independence, the most famous of which was José

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Gervasio Artigas, it was Great Britain that created the nation in 1828 as a buffer between Argentina and Brazil. Nonetheless, caudillos fought one another from the River Plate area to southern Brazil into the 1860s. Mexico and the United States fought in the 1840s. Chile fought Peru and Bolivia in the 1830s and again between 1879 and 1884. Guatemala tried to impose a Central American federation in the 1880s. Mexico lost the most territory in the nineteenth-century wars, but the bloodiest conflict—one fraught with the symbols of honor, racial purpose, and military grandiosity—was the War of the Triple Alliance. This horrific event began when the Paraguayan dictator Carlos Solano López, thinking himself the “Napoleon of South America,” tried to intervene in Uruguayan politics. Brazil was already involved in Uruguay, and its intervention in the country was decisive, creating a government hostile to Paraguay. Brazil and Argentina also negotiated a secret treaty against Solano López, which was triggered in 1865, when the dictator sent his troops across part of Argentina in order to reach Uruguay. The Paraguayans fought an alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay for the next five years. Paraguay, a predominantly native nation, lost almost half its population. It was literally emasculated because its 200,000 dead included most of its adult males.41 Not surprisingly, liberal goals included efforts to reduce the role of the military in politics and end the fuero. They also sought to curtail the legal rights of the Church. Canon law, whose ultimate authority was the Vatican, governed much of social life well into the nineteenth century. The Vatican in this era never accepted either liberalism or republican government. It adhered to the doctrine that the best form of government was a monarchy such as itself. The dispute of Church authority ran in two directions throughout the century: one involved the wealth and power of the Church; the other, the social governance of the population. In practice, a conflict over one involved both issues, and the Church fought a battle to preserve its lands and its legal and moral authority. The outcome of this conflict shaped the everyday life of Latin Americans. During the colonial era, the Church became the major property holder and banker in the Iberian colonies. The institution, however, was not monolithic. Major differences existed between those at the top of the Church hierarchy and ordinary priests. Differences also existed between priestly beliefs and practice and those of communities. Formally, the Church was divided into religious orders and


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secular parishes. The orders, in turn, were divided by gender into monasteries and nunneries; the monastic priests in one order often competed with and despised those of another. The competition was usually over the testaments of the well-to-do, who in their wills often left substantial sums of cash and even estates so that the Church would continue praying for the soul of the departed. The religious orders reflected the general characteristics of the various colonial societies: the rich, White members of monasteries and nunneries lived very differently from the darker-skinned, who usually were their servants. The richest parishes were in the major cities, and the Church owned considerable real estate as well as plantations, haciendas, and other large estates. It also owned slaves and exacted tribute (in the form of tithes) from natives. The Church officials never wavered in their support of the Iberian empires, even though there were many liberal clergymen who supported independence and resented Iberian-born residents. During the wars of independence and the time of the early republics, a good part of the Church’s wealth was looted and destroyed. The Church also suffered from the fact that it had lent funds to municipalities and these loans were ignored by the new nations. Impoverished governments imposed forced loans on the Church or took over the collection of tithes and used them to finance their own needs. The Church also fell into a legal quandary that involved who should control it. The papacy had conferred the patronato—the appointment of bishops and other high officials—on the Iberian crowns in order to establish Catholicism in the New World. This novel arrangement meant that the crowns rather than the Vatican ran the Church, making key colonial appointments and overseeing its conduct. The newly independent governments declared that the patronato now fell to them, whereas the Church insisted that if Iberian control had ended, the power over the Latin American Church reverted to Rome. Conflicts between Rome and the republican governments over the appointment of bishops meant that the national churches were sometimes without titular leadership. To compound the Church’s difficulties, conservative as well as liberal heads of state demanded that state law prevail over each national church, whereas bishops often insisted that the national governments had no business meddling in religion. There is the affair of the sacristan in Chile to serve as an example. During the conservative government of President Manuel Montt Torres (1851–1861),

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the archbishop of Santiago fired a sacristan (someone who took care of the sacred vessels and clothing) who later appealed to the national court to be reinstated. The court did so and the archbishop denied the court had any authority in the matter. When President Montt backed the court, the public outrage in Santiago split his conservative supporters, and this was the first sign of the Church’s weakening before the state. The divisions among conservatives helped bring liberal presidents into office in the 1870s.42 As the liberals gained political ground, however, their attack on the Church became unrelenting. They wanted the Church out of education and an end to its social authority. In this, there was more than a hint of sexual anger—in male resentment of priests’ influence over women. Most of all, the liberals argued the Church contained within it the unscientific beliefs and fanaticism that retarded change and progress. In Mexico, the liberals led by Benito Juárez imposed the reform laws—a series of constitutional changes in the 1850s that separated the Church and state, ended Church control of schools, ordered the sale of Church properties, and even prevented clergy from wearing their religious garb in public. The Church fought back. It answered the liberals of Argentina by backing the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas, even allowing Rosas to put his portrait on its altars. It supported the empire of Brazil and voiced open fear that Dom Pedro II was too liberal. It backed the conservatives in Chile. When all else failed, it resorted to war, calling the faithful to end the liberal regime in Mexico in the War of the Reform (1859–1861) and to finish off the “Reds” during Colombia’s War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902). When it lost the Mexican conflict, it welcomed the French invasion of 1861 and the establishment of a French-controlled empire under the Austrian Maximilian. When the liberals finally defeated the French in 1867 and returned to Mexico City, they vented their rage on the Church, which became tagged as an unpatriotic institution.43 After these events, the Church never recovered its former glory. Although events in Mexico were unusual, they represented the polarization running through the liberal–conservative divide. Finally, the Church itself was changing. Republicanism had spread within Western Europe, and the papacy replied with a deepening sense of monarchical rage and isolation. It condemned liberalism, republicanism, and freemasonry in virtually the same breath. The various regions of Italy were combining to become a nation in 1861,


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and although a monarchy, the country had strong republican sentiments. In 1870, as the nation was annexing Rome, the Vatican called its bishops together into a council (Vatican I, 1869–1870) and declared that the idea that the Virgin Mary had been free of original sin and the doctrinal infallibility of the Pope were now articles of faith; to question them was heresy or, as it put it, “anathema.”44 Although most Latin American governments retained an official tie to the Church, they also created space for Protestants (who were instructed not to be too visible). After 1850, decade by decade, governments extended their social control, replacing canon law with civil codes and creating civil registers for births, marriages, and deaths. The Church retained a profound moral influence but could not invoke any state authority to impose its will. Its role as the provider of social services weakened as it lost its economic ability to maintain many of the charities, orphanages, hospitals, and schools it had once run. By the 1870s, the Church almost everywhere was thin on the ground, concentrated in the larger cities and unable to evangelize much of the population. In Catholic doctrine, believers were supposed to attend church every Sunday and regularly receive communion. In practice, many rural people could not reach a church, and some never saw a priest. In law and in fact, this had a fundamental impact on moral life. Women were governed in the colonial era and the early nineteenth century by the honor code and canon law. A historian of nineteenthcentury Peru has demonstrated that women in general understood many of the provisions of canon law, especially as these applied to marriage.45 They were in the eyes of the Church and the state under the control of fathers or husbands. Even women who were too poor to fulfill the ideals of honor and law recognized the importance of these social rules. Households operated under patria potestad—the man had the responsibility of taking care of his wife and children and could, in return, demand their obedience. This was often reinforced by differences in the age of spouses. Marriages, among people of any means and even among families with a steady income, were arranged. Men in general married in their mid-to-late-twenties, and women sometime between fifteen and twenty. An unmarried woman in her midtwenties was in danger of being considered an old maid. Women could own property but could control it only if they were widowed, which was quite common. Early in the century, the dowry still functioned as a central part of marital exchange. When

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women married, even in modest circumstances, they brought money and goods into the marriage. The new husband took charge of the dowry, but in the event of a divorce, the woman and her family could demand it back. Marriage was a sacrament, and a divorce, which had to be granted by a Church court, meant only permanent separation; neither husband nor wife could remarry. The costs of marriage—the dowry on the part of the woman, the assets expected of the man, and Church fees—discouraged many from marrying. The general poverty meant that many men could not sustain a family in any event. The outcome was serial concubinage—men and women in one relationship and then another—and illegitimacy. Illegitimate children were banned from many professions, and this disgrace (lack of honor) was lifelong; they, for example, usually had no rights of inheritance.46 The encroachment of the state on marital relations moved quarrels between spouses out of Church law and into civil courts. Here, one of the most influential thinkers was a conservative, a Venezuelan émigré to Chile, Andrés Bello. Bello, who was not a lawyer, had been asked by the conservative leader Diego Portales to give Chile a new civil code, and twenty years later, he did. The Chilean code of 1852 (not passed until 1856 and not enforced until 1857) was readily adopted by Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Venezuela, and Ecuador, and it influenced the codes of many other nations. It retained canon law as the basis for adjudicating marriage.47 In general, however, women did not gain from the development of civil, social statutes, and in many capital cities, they openly sided with the Church in opposing them. Liberal men assumed that women were ignorant of politics and too influenced by priests. In fact, the Church had consistently backed marriage and the duties of spouses within marriage. It sponsored the lay organizations, usually associations of devotion, which tied women together in a community. It also provided women their only broad institutional link beyond the family. As the dowry disappeared in the late nineteenth century, women lost leverage within marriage, and they had no other social institution to protect them. There are now numerous studies of Latin American women in the nineteenth century, and none have argued that, in practice, women gained from liberal changes in the law. The final area of government intervention, and one closely related to the Church and the law, was education. On this issue, the record of achievement was dismal. The Spanish Empire had established the


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first universities—all of them run by the Church—in the New World, and so a few can claim to have existed for centuries. The wars of independence and the weakening financial base of the Church hit education hard; the few who could obtain advanced schooling were usually White men in major cities. Brazil did not establish a single university either during the colonial era, or under Dom Pedro I or Dom Pedro II.48 Public schooling existed, especially in the capital cities, but graduates of secondary schools such as the Colegio Nacional of Mexico were rare. Most people continued to receive their education from Church schools (schools run by nuns remained essential for the education of women) or from private tutors. Rates of illiteracy in most nations ran over 70 percent. Census records, whose unreliability has already been noted, mention illiteracy rates of 48, 56, 65, 66, and 75 percent in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, respectively, as late as 1900.49 Rates were higher among women than men, and in rural areas than urban ones. Widespread illiteracy, in turn, underlined elite fears of the general population already based on race and class. Upper classes viewed their populations as ignorant, degenerate, and ruled by rumor and superstition. The absence of technological innovation was another outcome. England, Scotland, and the United States demonstrated early in the nineteenth century that steam-driven machinery could dramatically alter the processing and transportation of food and raw materials as well as the manufacturing of consumer goods, especially cloth. AngloAmerican cultures openly encouraged capitalist industrialization. These innovations—machines, railroads, steamships, new textiles, and processed foods—had reached many parts of Latin America by 1840, as imported goods. Though diligent research has uncovered some exceptions, on the whole, Latin America did not develop any technical innovations that might transform its possibilities. For all the liberal rhetoric of republicanism, the vast majority of the population remained excluded from national public life well into the 1870s. Many could not vote, or their votes did not decide who won; and much of a locality’s political sentiments depended on ethnicity and who dominated the area. There were, of course, three stratagems left to an excluded majority: to join a rebellion, to demonstrate, and to riot. These were the same behaviors that the populace had used in the colonial era. Popular concerns remained fairly similar to those in the colonial period: personal

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freedom, access to the land and water required for survival, help from the government in times of famine, and relief from extortionate taxes. Indeed, one of the chief characteristics of Latin American politics is that a national public life was slow to develop—to the extent that ordinary people became involved in politics, it was at a local level as vecinos, residents of a particular municipality. One of the most crucial issues in popular life has thus often been misrepresented along the conservative–liberal axis, when it belongs on the centralist–federalist one. As national governments became stronger, local authority (not to be romanticized) gave way. People did not expect to take part in peaceful politics and were often drawn into or victimized by war and rebellion. This began to change after the 1860s, as political factions, often liberal, discovered a means to expand government without imposing new taxes, and to use the revenues to prevent riot and rebellion. These means were closely linked to selling raw materials to the already industrializing areas of the Atlantic world. And the link to that change was Great Britain.

PAX BRITANNICA In the 1920s, the communist party decided that Latin America was a neocolonial area, meaning it had its own national governments but was economically dominated by other powers. To this idea, the great Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch added another in the late 1940s—namely, that the region was on the periphery of the capitalist economic system with, obviously, Britain and the United States at its center.50 The melding of these two concepts by the 1960s led to a set of ideas loosely called dependency theory. Some dependentistas believed socialism would cure the region of its problems, whereas other dependentistas argued that strong states needed to lead peripheral nations and build successful market economies. Looking back at the nineteenth century, they argued that Latin America had never broken free of foreign domination—it had traded Spain and Portugal for control by Great Britain. They noted that two major propositions followed from this series of events: Great Britain had controlled Latin America’s terms of trade, despoiling it of gains from international sales and, as a result, the region had not developed economically so much as it had gone from one stage of under-


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development to another—never to catch up with developed countries at the center.51 The first proposition is not always true. The terms of trade are simply the general value of one product in relation to another, let us say wheat for railroad engines; if those terms deteriorated in the nineteenth century, then a wheat-producing nation would need to export more bushels to pay for a single engine. Studies of Latin American trade have shown that Latin America’s exports often had superior terms of trade in relation to manufactured goods from Great Britain, and it is easy to look up trade statistics that show some Latin American nations selling more to Great Britain than they bought. Other studies have also demonstrated that the dependentistas were mistaken in believing the region’s economies had not grown; economic growth could be demonstrated between 1860 and 1910—that is, during the peak of British economic influence—for most countries: Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Chile, among others.52 Nonetheless, the general feeling that Latin America had little say in its own development has persisted, among not only historians in the region but the general population as well. But Prebisch and his critics sidestepped an important issue related to; but not the same as, the terms of trade, the balance of payments. The balance of payments involves not only trade but the flows of money for any reason. Many financial elements of Latin America’s involvement with Great Britain have been poorly researched because they involve what was then called “invisible trade,” the flows of payments to cover insurance, business repatriation of profits, interest on loans, and so on. The balance of payments, if we only knew it, would provide a better guide to Latin America’s relations with Britain because it would allow us to compare the relative gains accruing to each Latin American nation from all its exchanges with Britain. It is clear that Latin American nations, even in the best of years, had trouble maintaining their gold reserves—a fact that led to an almost constant depreciation of the national currencies. In this, a major factor was that governments preferred borrowing funds abroad or printing more money to raising domestic taxes. But a general Latin American dependence on British capital is not in doubt; Latin American nations were slow even to develop their own banks. David Joslin noted in a study of British banking in Latin America that “in 1914, the British banks controlled approximately a

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third of the deposits of the Brazilian banking system and over a quarter in Argentina and Chile.”53 The second proposition is trickier. Is it the fault of a nation at the center, in this case Great Britain, if a nation on the periphery never attains the same level of development in a given era? Aren’t there other possible explanations? The role of Latin American political and military conflicts in harming the region’s economies has already been noted. It is hard to develop a successful economy in the midst of profound insecurity. Here, the most radical dependency attitudes also had an explanation. The British had used their economic clout to manipulate the laws and politics of Latin America. British historians of Latin America tend to dismiss dependency root and branch. One of them noticed correctly that British capitalists should not be confused with the British government.54 Who was it that manipulated whom? The government was not to blame for what British entrepreneurs and investors did in far-flung regions, and the businessmen were hardly in charge of British government policy toward the entire region. What is more, most Latin American events—the cuartelazos, the coups, and the uprisings by slaves and natives— were obviously internal, carried out entirely by peoples within the region. An essay on Latin America in the nineteenth century cannot untangle all the issues in this debate, but it is important to mention them aside from their influence on the author’s perspective. Dependency theory is one of the few bodies of economic writing to have influenced Latin Americans as a whole, shaping the views of politicians and segments of the population. The other is economic liberalism, a set of attitudes and practices closely related to political liberalism but not entirely tied to it. There are economic liberals—people who believe in open markets as the best way to run an economy—who are not believers in the rights of man. They existed in the nineteenth century as well, and it is important to turn to them now because they believed, just as Karl Marx did, that Britain was the future and no nation could hope to succeed if it ignored that fact. Indeed, British early success in Latin America (and some elements of its subsequent failure) is closely tied to the fights between Britain and France, and particularly the Napoleonic Wars. Britain, Spain, and France were intertwined in the eighteenthcentury world of empire. As already mentioned, the wars that engulfed them and reshaped the fate of Latin America grew out of


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dynastic collapse and nationalist expansionism. The French Revolution and the destruction of the Bourbon monarchy in France after 1789 pit the new republic against British and European monarchical reaction. Until the French invasion of the Iberian peninsula there was little sign that Latin America was to be free of Spain and Portugal. The uprisings of Tupac Amaru II in Peru, the Comuneros in Colombia, and the rebellion of Tiradentes in Brazil had already been suppressed. The first sign that the conflicts of Europe would disrupt Latin America occurred when British troops landed near Buenos Aires in 1806. Militia organized in that city drove them off, but from that point on, the militia became a political element in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. Had Napoleon not invaded Spain and Portugal, most of Spanish America and Brazil might have remained in the colonial world well into the nineteenth century. Even before the French invasion, London was seen as an outpost of liberal sentiment and drew schemers planning Spanish American independence. In 1806, Francisco de Miranda launched a ludicrous plan to seize Caracas with a couple of ships; royalist forces ran him off, but by 1810 he could draw on nominal British support and return to Caracas and become its head of state. (This expedition also failed, and he died in a Spanish prison.)55 After extensive warfare and numerous intrigues, Mexico achieved its independence in 1821; Argentina, in 1816; Chile, in 1818; and Peru, in 1824. In 1823, Sir George Canning, British foreign secretary, promised that Britain would not try to seize territory in the New World and demanded that other European nations not try it either. This, and not the Monroe Doctrine of the United States, assured the new nations of their independence. President James Monroe drew up his famous doctrine in 1824, in response to the Canning initiative, but the United States could do very little to protect Latin America from European aggression, whereas the British navy was supreme throughout the Atlantic. After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain dominated world trade and commerce. Thus, its concerns in Latin America were secondary to those in other areas, and its policies were tied to its strategies as a great power. The relationship was, in the coinage of Albert Hirschman, asymmetrical: the British needed little from Latin America, whereas the British had what Latin America needed if it was to expand its trade in the Atlantic world.56 The British had a strong currency—the pound—and a capacity to organize lending from their nation to other areas; they had control of the seas with the

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world’s greatest navy and merchant marine (shipping in the early nineteenth century was still the quickest means to trade within as well as among nations); and they had begun the industrial revolution and so had a surplus of manufactures to trade for Latin America’s raw materials. British merchants and mercenaries arrived during the wars of independence. Lord Cochrane, a naval commander, remains a hero of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil for the role he played in their struggles. British merchants also established themselves in Brazil after the Portuguese court moved to Rio de Janeiro. Recall, the Portuguese court had needed British ships to escape Napoleon. Once it arrived in Rio, it declared Brazil’s ports open to world—that is, British— trade. By 1810 the court and London had signed agreements giving British residents freedom of conscience, the right to cut Brazilian forests to recoup losses suffered from Napoleon’s invasion, and a legal jurisdiction in Rio distinct from that of the Brazilians. The Portuguese crown also promised to limit its trade in slaves to its own territories (not to ship slaves elsewhere in Latin America) and not to bring the Inquisition to Rio. The sweeping agreements provide the tone of the British exercise of power elsewhere in the region.57 To make sense of Latin America’s ties to Great Britain, the British interest should be divided into three distinct interests: those of the government, of British finance, and of British residents in Latin America. The government pursued a policy of demanding open trade. Latin American governments had revenue tariffs (taxes on imports and sometimes on exports) but not many protective tariffs. By the 1850s, Britain was pressing Latin American governments to keep their tariffs low and they did; Latin American rates in the nineteenth century were well below those of the United States, even though the region was much poorer. As a result, Latin America’s major cities, and sometimes its hinterland, became consumers of British goods; British china could be bought in Buenos Aires by 1830, and so could ponchos. So long as the rules of trade permitted British merchants and manufacturers to compete on an equal footing with Latin American ones, the British government was relatively satisfied. It did flex its muscles, for example, in the Rio de la Plata, where it created Uruguay and joined France in imposing two blockades (1838–1840 and 1845–1850) on the River Plate government of Juan Manuel de Rosas. In the 1850s it suppressed the slave trade from Africa to Brazil and Cuba—an event that helped end slavery in


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the Americas. It also took part in the invasion of Mexico in 1861. Latin American governments, however, did not generally fear British military action against them—on the contrary, they looked up to Great Britain as a model of political and economic development. British emissaries sent to Latin American capitals became the leaders of British residents in those cities. Although they looked down on the locals, they saw their role more as commercial attachés than as representatives of military power. They were there to see to it that British interests were treated “decently.” British financial links to Latin America involved both public and private lending. The great British merchant bankers, notably the Rothschilds and the Baring Brothers, organized British lending to Latin American governments and sold the bonds on the London market. After 1825, however, the Latin American governments defaulted on debt payments, making it difficult for them to borrow again until the late 1870s.58 British trading companies also invaded Latin America and lent funds to local entrepreneurs. Their major contribution to Latin American development was in the organization of export credit. Latin American producers were dependent on merchants, foreign or domestic. A British merchant in Rio, for example, would extend credit to a coffee producer in the form of a commercial note. The amount extended would not be the full amount of the export price; it would be discounted for the fees and interest due at the end of the loan. The advantage to the exporter was that he got his money immediately and did not run the risks of actually taking his product to London. (It is useful to remember that loans to governments were also discounted.) The note would specify the amount due (usually in ninety days) when the note was presented in London. The length of time in which the note could be presented and the amount of the discount shaped the profitability of the trade. The note would often circulate as currency within Rio or appear in its speculative markets. To continue this example, by the 1850s the United States was the world’s biggest coffee consumer, but coffee prices were set on the London commodities market. By speculating in commercial paper, buyers of these notes were gambling on everything from the relative value of their national currency to the price of coffee. Indeed, export prices and the value of national currencies were so closely bound that both were usually quoted in British currency within Latin America.

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British merchants and banks also became involved in Latin American internal developments, particularly in organizing new companies and selling their shares in London, and most importantly, in financing railroads. Often the two practices were related because British-owned railroad companies were organized to transport goods in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Railroads, whose development came slowly in the 1850s and then began to explode as exports rose in the 1870s, changed everything. They shortened the travel time between major cities and created new markets within nations. Mexico City by the 1880s was dotted with pulquerías, stores that sold fermented cactus sap. That sap would have spoiled before getting to the city without the railroad. Railroads made it possible to live further from the city centers, extending the urban transport systems of streetcars and permitting the cities to draw food and other supplies from more distant regions. Railroads rearranged each nation’s winners and losers, a fact that connected the construction of new lines to national politics. Rail lines cut across regions, reducing the power of caudillos and other local bosses. They cut across Bolivia, reducing native control of wheat markets and other foodstuffs, and so reducing native political leverage near the country’s major cities. National governments put themselves in the center of the rail grid: all lines led to Buenos Aires. British entrepreneurs were hardly limited to railroads. Young men with an education and some mechanical skills turned up in the mining towns as well as the ports. They often became managers of enterprises owned by Latin Americans. By the 1860s and 1870s, many of these men had made fortunes in mining, financial speculation, and merchant activities. Successful foreigners married local girls and began economic dynasties within the region. The Edwards and Ross clans emerged in Valparaiso to become bankers as well as merchants. The Edwards also became owners of Chile’s major newspaper, El Mercurio. British residents began to reshape Latin American urban cultures, bringing new tastes in architecture and a fondness for gardening. It is difficult at some points to separate their impact from the broader Latin American contact with Britain and Western Europe, and this involved Latin Americans who had gone abroad and brought back with them a concern with all that was “modern.” But the cultural impact of Britain began well before the age of oligarchy. The English within Latin American cities saw themselves as a class apart, sending their children to private English


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schools and maintaining whatever ties they could to their emotional homeland. It is hard to imagine how the integration of Latin American national markets and of Latin America within the Atlantic economy could have occurred without British involvement. Until the 1880s few alternatives existed. Germany and the United States had not yet become major players in the world (Germany was only unified as a nation in 1871). French merchant bankers could and did lend some money to Latin American governments. Its entrepreneurs tried to build a canal in Panama in 1878, but the fiasco, which included massive financial fraud, underlined the limits of what the French could do. No other nation could supply massive quantities of capital, credit to governments, railroad technology, shipping, and marketing know-how with the ease of and on the same scale as Great Britain. What is more, when export opportunities appeared, they would need to be developed quickly. No Latin American nation could have gone it alone. There was not a single country in the region that had a banking or exchange system, was developing new technology, or had a successful national economy not dependent on ties to Britain. To be dependent on ties to a major power is, of course, not the same as being controlled by it. No doubt that any state refusing to trade on terms the British wanted would have risked their displeasure, but the greater risks were internal rather than external. Merchants within key ports and producers tied to them wanted that trade link and could see no reason why they shouldn’t pursue the profitable sale of hides, grains, and salted beef. Rosas paid dearly in political support the second time he stood up to British force. As time went on, Latin Americans wanted the goods Europe had to offer. They wanted closer cultural ties to England and France, so much so that Mexicans began referring to their young men as afrancesados—Frenchified. Educated families viewed young, White adventurers from Western Europe, whether Catholic or not, as good prospects for their daughters. Latin American elites, conservative and liberal, accepted the key axiom of British economic liberalism; that there was an international division of labor and their role in it was as primary producers. The key link between the various British interests and Latin America ran through Latin American governments. The run-up of national debts in the 1820s has already been mentioned. More important was the reliance of national governments on indirect

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taxation tied to commerce, especially tariff revenues. All kinds of governments—led by either federalists, conservatives, or liberals— promoted trade as a means of raising the government’s capacity to spend and to borrow again. Very much like the Portuguese in 1810, the Spanish American governments permitted the British to create trade enclaves, where Europeans were also welcome. Valparaiso, about fifty miles from Santiago, Chile, became by the 1850s a British city for all ostensive purposes, with shops full of imported goods. Rising government revenues permitted the organization of larger armies, making it more difficult for caudillos from the interior to attack the capitals and seize power. A military alliance of federalists and liberals brought down Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852; the liberals soon consolidated control of the capital and fought off all subsequent federal attacks. By the 1860s, what had been a confederation of provinces was becoming the nation of Argentina. Another element was the new rich. Fortunes were made growing coffee in Brazil and Guatemala (where natives were reduced to conditions that often seemed like slavery). The silver mines of Mexico brought in new technology and capital and expanded output. So did the copper mines in Chile. Trade generated a commercial consolidation that created new landed estates and made old ones more profitable. Cattle ranching grew in most countries as cities increased in size. Although Latin America lacked the middling class of homesteaders, the number of small farms increased, rising to meet the needs of laborers in the export sectors, the expanding ports, and the capital cities. The pitfalls of a trade-based prosperity are best illustrated by the case of Peru, which had one of the earliest and most dynamic export experiences of the nineteenth century. Over millennia, birds had deposited mountains of their excrement, called guano, on the Chincha Islands. Guano was used by pre-Colombian peoples as fertilizer, but its commercial possibilities occurred largely by accident when it was sent as ballast on a ship bound for Britain. The stuff sold well because it increased output of commercial crops. The guano boom was on. British ships loaded up in the Chincha Islands, bringing much of the food and equipment used on the islands from their home ports. British merchants in Callao (the principal port for Lima and the center of British interests) signed the first guano export contract in 1840 with Ramón Castilla, then


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minister of finance. Guano exports soared and were ten times as much in 1853 than in 1845 (316,000 tons versus 24,000 in the earlier year). The Peruvian government went on a spending spree, building a new prison and making improvements in Lima. And in 1854, under President Castilla, the government abolished slavery and Native American tribute, thus undercutting sources of rural rebellion.59 Numerous internal taxes were ended, and foreign debts, accumulated since the 1820s, were paid off. Imports doubled, driving Lima’s remaining artisans against the wall. What one historian has called a plutocracy grew up in Lima, making fortunes off government contracts and urban expansion. As the plutocrats and government employees spent their new incomes, the poor rushed into Lima to become servants and day laborers. Voices were raised in the 1860s calling for higher tariffs and incentives for farmers and manufacturers. But government officials and the new rich did not want to pay a single sol more than they had to, and their statements sound as free-trade–oriented as anything from Britain. Peruvian legislators and officials said manufactures were not for all countries, and “’tis better to pay for manufactures than know how to make ’em.”60 In the 1860s, the Peruvian presidents, particularly Manuel Pardo, gambled on railroads instead of on higher tariffs. Guano was a classic enclave economy—a dynamic export that was weakly linked to domestic economic sectors. To dig it out of the ground, contractors brought in Peruvian natives and Polynesians, who suffered chemical burns and even blindness from the work. When these sources of labor were inadequate, British ships hauled indentured Chinese laborers to the islands, where conditions were so bad that many committed suicide (a common tactic was to eat guano). The coolie trade in the Pacific flourished in the very decades in which Britain used its naval power to end shipping Black slaves in the Atlantic. The growth of Lima and Callao did stimulate Peruvian agricultural production, but the railroads built during the boom ended up going nowhere because much of Peru’s rural output could not compete with imports even with cheaper transportation. As emblematic of the type of decision making that occurred, the key railroad contract went to an American hustler, William Wheelwright, who brought in Chileans to do the labor and who failed to complete his line.61 At the end of the guano cycle in the 1870s, the Peruvians had a large state in fiscal crisis, a civilian party establishment (the

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Civilistas) dependent on dwindling tariff revenues, and agrarian societies in which natives were treated as brutes and grew their food using digging sticks (and little guano). The collapse of the guano trade in the 1870s shifted the Peruvian government’s attention to a new fertilizer in the Atacama Desert, salitre (sodium nitrate), and led it straight into a war with Chile. The problems of export-oriented development, however, were outweighed by its benefits for these governments. Chief among them was political consolidation. After independence, the national capitals had been little more than city-states, but by the 1850s and 1860s, they were using the prospect of export development to favor one group over another—national power began to count even in the provinces. Internal barriers to trade and commercial expansion, from forced labor systems to multiple taxes, were collapsing between 1840 and 1870. By 1870, the liberals held the high ground in many countries. They had extended the suffrage and ended the Portalian era in Chile. They had put down the last of the caudillos and launched the nation of Argentina. They had fought the Church and the French and created a system of elected governments, albeit with rigged elections, in Mexico. They retained office in Peru, despite the economic crisis that followed the guano era. Exports expanded the fortunes of conservatives as well as liberals, but conservatives increasingly accepted the new rules of the game, however much these rules upset them, for civil turmoil interfered with trade. In those areas in which the conservatives did not accept a new framework, civil wars erupted. Uruguay seemed plagued indefinitely by quarrels between liberal and conservative factions until José Batlle y Ordoñez put an end to them. Conflicts in Central American nations retained a caudillista tone. Two nations, or rather one nation and one colony, remained in which conservatives held the political upper hand: Brazil and Cuba. In both, the export economy was still tied to slavery. In Brazil, Dom Pedro II presented himself as a citizen-monarch, filled with liberal sentiments. The cynical reality is that his nation was trapped in a social and economic vise. The end of the slave trade in the 1850s meant that slavery alone could not supply the labor needed to expand coffee production, but the presence of slaves discouraged European immigration. The regime’s involvement in the War of the Triple Alliance was the beginning of a drawn-out end. In that conflict, Brazil’s White officers led largely Black troops and began to


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recoil at the thought that this same army was used to enforce slavery. The professional officer’s school became a hotbed of republican sentiment. Imperial political maneuvering and the fact that no one quite knew how to dismantle slavery without ruining a major part of the planter class meant that the regime and slavery continued almost two decades after the war’s end.62 Cuba had remained a colony and became, along with Puerto Rico and the Philippines, a segment of Spain’s remaining claim to imperial glory. Here as well, the opposition to monarchical rule would become fused to abolition. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, who led an effort at independence in 1868, freed his own slaves, as did other rebel leaders. The rebellion launched the Ten Years’ War. The rebels were openly liberal as well as nationalistic. In a manifesto, they promised to gradually emancipate all slaves while indemnifying masters. It was enough to entice slaves into joining the rebel army and to attract free Blacks as well. The two most famous and successful military figures of the rebellion, Guillermo Moncada and Antonio Maceo, were Black and mulatto, respectively. The Spanish defeated the rebellion, in part by promising freedom to slaves and by scaring colonial Whites with thoughts of a race war and a nation run by former slaves. And so, colonialism and slavery remained intertwined as the sugar export era reached its height.63 These exceptions did not change the general pattern of development. By the 1870s, regional elites were regrouping away from provincial bases and uniting in national cities—the oligarchy was poised to take power. It varied in character from one country to another, remaining more regionalized in such nations as Brazil and Colombia, and more centralized in the national capitals in Argentina and Chile. Every Latin American nation remained racially stratified, with White elites at the top. In general, of course, the term oligarchy refers to the rule of the few; in the Latin American context it referred not only to rulers but also to a collection of landowners, merchants, mining magnates, and political leaders whose families intermarried and who thus dominated government, the economy, and the cultural rules of their society. They were convinced, whether in Cuba or Mexico, that the non-Whites in their societies were unfit to govern. So, economic liberalism did not bring with it the fulfillment of political liberalism. When Porfirio Díaz, a Mexican liberal, rose up against the liberal government of Sebastián

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Lerdo de Tejada in 1876, he proclaimed that the government had betrayed its ideals. Díaz promised no presidential reelection as well as protection of municipal autonomy—that is, to keep the national government from encroaching on local rule. But the era he began would be most notable for the manipulation of elections and the expansion of Mexico City’s power. In every single nation in which exports expanded, national governments began to break down regionalism and to impose new rules from the capital. Political fights began to shift away from caudillismo and rural bosses and toward controlling the capital as a means of controlling the nation. Those fights would be won by oligarchies, the new social formation financed by the export era.

CHAPTER 2

Oligarchy and the Impact of New Wealth, 1880–1914 The cities that emerged in Latin America after 1880 and before World War I were, with the notable exception of São Paulo, Brazil, built upon the old. They were redesigned, considerably enlarged, and filled with the progressive energies of the age. A colonial resident, had that person been able to return to Mexico City in 1910, would have recognized the central plaza and its adjacent older buildings but would have been startled at the changes. This was no longer a walking city—its size required the use of streetcars within its boundaries and railroads connecting it to its suburbs. New technologies had brought paving, electric street lamps in place of the old gas ones, three-story townhouses, and the first automobiles. The streets in the downtown area were often packed with horse- and mule-drawn carts, and the congestion, smell, and pollution sometimes made the eyes tear. These new old cities were either the capitals of their nations or centers of foreign trade near the coasts. Often the major city was paired with a smaller seaport that was also expanding: this was the case between Santiago and Valparaiso in Chile; between Lima and Callao in Peru; and between São Paulo and Santos in Brazil. Some provincial cities boomed around a distinct export product as happened with Mérida, in the Mexican Yucatán peninsula, whose development was based on sisal (henequen), and with Medellín, Colombia, which grew around coffee. The optimism of that time remains in the ornamental, architectural styles borrowed from France and Italy. If life was hard for the vast majority, the cities also

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contained the beginnings of a middle class and even some laborers with expectations of a better future. People believed that these booms and the constant construction they financed would continue indefinitely, and that the benefits would flow not only to the elites but also to other sectors. The basic questions many of the intellectuals raised revolved around how best to develop their nations. What new tasks should the government undertake? How could government or elite leadership bring the general population into the modern age? How were morals to be preserved in cities of increasing anonymity?1 A historian of Rio de Janeiro refers to this era as the belle époque, the same label used for the Paris of the period.2 Politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals looked to Europe for their models of change, and most wanted to blend their Iberian cultural inheritance with the more modern styles of life that were evident in major European capitals. Aside from foreign trade, the growth of cities was based on two striking developments: a flow of people from abroad or from the countryside, and the beginnings of a rapid increase in the population—a change that would characterize the entire twentieth century. Populations were increasing around the world. Efforts to explain these changes have focused on the spread of general hygiene, the decline in the number and intensity of epidemics, and a rising standard of living. Each of these factors is hard to measure in specific Latin American countries, but the new cities (and many smaller ones) now had better sewer systems and larger platoons of street cleaners. Urban changes cannot explain the overall growth in population because the region was still predominately rural and changes in health conditions came slowly into the countryside. There were more doctors, and at the turn of the century authorities began inoculating people against smallpox. But we are reminded of popular perceptions (and religious authority) when we remember that the introduction of smallpox vaccinations caused riots in Rio in 1906. The broadest generalization that can be made is that there must have been an increasing capacity to resist existing diseases and no new ones came along that found the population defenseless. Native populations in many zones were still in decline, and the mixed blood populations everywhere from Mexico to Chile were rising. In turn, the recovery of population had consequences well outside of cities, and these are described in the section on rural life. As a summary, we can say that virtually all nations in Latin

Oligarchy and the Impact of New Wealth, 1880–1914

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America had two or three times as many people in 1900–1910 as they had a century before.3 Immigration to Latin America is part of the great wave of the European diaspora to the New World, when Italians, Russians, and Poles came in large numbers to the United States. The same population groups were involved in Latin America. As part of their efforts to whiten their populations and in admiration of what immigration was doing to the United States, many Latin American governments set up immigrant recruiters in Europe, but these efforts came to little. The connection between immigration and population changes was the familiar one of push-and-pull factors. The push, especially for those leaving Italy and Spain, came from their population pressures on rural life and the declining price of grains, fostered in part by rising output in the Americas. The pull came from the higher wages and apparently greater opportunities in the Americas. Many migrants were hoping to strike it rich and return to their native land. Many actually did this. Most, however, stayed in the New World because few became rich and, after a while, there was little reason to return; whatever gains had been accumulated were rooted in Latin America. The greatest influx of immigrants came to Argentina and completely repopulated the nation; the impact of immigrants on Buenos Aires is one of the most closely studied topics in Latin American history and will be detailed below. Uruguay was also transformed by arrivals from Spain and Italy, and Montevideo grew as well, although on a much smaller scale than Buenos Aires. One can draw an arc encompassing southeastern Brazil around São Paulo and moving south across Uruguay and Argentina and capture the major zones of European migration to Latin America. Everywhere else, immigrants added to the existing White populations and were generally welcomed by politicians and pundits. Their status was so high in many cultures that, unlike what happened in the United States, immigrants resisted full integration into Latin American societies. Colonies of Germans, English, and Italians ran private schools in their own languages; over time, these schools often became quite prestigious. In Brazil and Chile, Germans employed public funds to sustain schools taught in German and with Germany’s national symbols and leaders on the walls.4 The English had schools in the major cities throughout the entire region. This whitening of the population sharpened racial differences and, along

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with the introduction of European sciences, gave new rationale to many racist attitudes. Overseeing and aggrandizing all these changes was a shifting coalition of rich families, the oligarchy, in each of these countries. It melded the old and the new rich, although the most prominent members came from families with a national lineage. Literally, oligarchy is rule by the few. These few now gathered in the national capitals, although some nations such as Mexico and Brazil could be said to have regional oligarchies that moved to the capital to hold office but whose real power was in a home state. Everywhere, the oligarchies had seasoned, landed wealth with investments and speculation in commerce. They remained divided along lines inherited from the nineteenth century—that is, between liberals and conservatives. Their ascendance, however, signaled that the age of the caudillo had passed, albeit some of the families proudly descended from that period—or proudly survived it. They controlled the flow of new technologies and capital into their nations through their control of government, and they rewrote the rules governing all the means of production to suit their needs. They were an interesting mixture of the old, often aristocratic in bearing, and new, hustling to use the trade-based opportunities to add to their fortunes. They were greedy, experimenting with new government initiatives, and had little intention of sharing power.

THE NEWEST CITY BOULEVARDS

AND

STREETCARS

The cities consumed and controlled larger amounts of terrain. Centralism began to win a decisive battle against federalism as provincial centers fell further behind the economic and cultural resources of trade-based urbanization. The growth of provincial cities was often tied to the expansion of the large, primary centers.5 The new cities marked the decline of preindustrial attitudes and the arrival of modernity as an objective of intellectuals, artists, and politicians. Economic ideas that had been propounded by liberals earlier became generally accepted by the oligarchies, which were still divided over religious issues. Artists traveled extensively in France, Germany, and Italy looking for techniques and styles to bring back


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home; the novel began to flourish, first in translation from English and French and then in national literatures.6 Politicians regularly studied regulations governing everything from crime to traffic that had been developed in Great Britain and continental Europe—often the fact that “this is how France does things” was enough to win passage of new legislation. Although England was the center of Latin American commerce, the region generally copied France (and to a lesser extent, Italy) in its cultural evolution. France, after all, was Catholic. French clothing became required of the elite—to the extent that prosperous women wore lengthy woolen dresses with full, puffy sleeves in the semitropical heat of Rio de Janeiro. Prosperous men abandoned the varied costumes of ranch owners, cowboys, and merchants in favor of suits and ties worn in Paris. French food and French wine were served at elite banquets. French pastries became commonplace in the largest cities. During festival days and Sundays, men and women dressed in their finest garb and, instead of strolling around the central plaza, rode along the new boulevards in imported carriages. These boulevards—the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the Avenida de la Reforma in Mexico City, and the redesigned Alameda in Santiago, Chile—brought rich and poor together; the former to parade and see each other and the latter to watch and gossip about the rich. The model of the new city was Paris. Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, under the rule of Napoleon III, was prefect of the Seine and the official who redesigned Paris. He had almost twenty years in office by 1870, and he pushed wide boulevards through the city, demolishing the complex warrens of the working class within the old city. His goals were to beautify Paris and permit the freer movement of troops to suppress any civil uprising. He opened up new spaces for urban development, including the star-shaped Place de l’Etoile, around the Arc de Triomphe, with its twelve radiating avenues.7 His successors continued his general intentions, and by 1890 Paris was the envy of urban planners and elites throughout the Atlantic world. By that time, Latin American elites, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, earnestly copied Haussmann. The tree-lined boulevards were paved; motorized streetcars operated along them, permitting elements of the elite and the middle class to move out from the city center and still have easy access to urban amenities. The poor stayed near the expanding warehouses and small industrial zones, living in makeshift housing or the new tenements.

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The elite also copied Paris and London in the development of new, secular activities. The upper-class and the upper-middle-class residents had new entertainments: theaters, museums (often featuring French and Italian paintings and statues), an opera house or symphony hall, or both. Universities, although still relatively small and largely confined to White people, began to grow and to incorporate an educated, male middle class into the new prosperity. There were horse race courses, designed in the European style of hippodromes and new stadiums. Elite women remained essential supporters of the Church. Men had political clubs, immigrant societies, and Masonic lodges in an open copy of the lifestyles abroad. Businessmen gathered in these clubs to socialize and strike deals involving commerce and politics. The clubs were a home away from home, where women and plebeians did not intrude. The major cities also had stock markets; the stocks quoted were usually familyowned industries or dominated by very few stockholders, which made insider trading common. Having access to such information was often crucial to financial survival. The market thus operated as a sort of gentlemen’s casino, with tips based on club rumors. Aside from politics and business, men had new sports. The arrival of European and American sports signaled not only the greater leisure available in cities but also a new form of social identity. Before World War I, tennis became popular among well-to-do men and women, and golf began to make some inroads. Aside from social clubs, the wealthiest families had urban estates with ample grounds on which to build tennis courts, and the richest even took up polo and European forms of equestrian competitions. Those areas influenced by the United States before World War I are easy to trace, for they are still devoted to baseball (béisbol). Baseball leagues sprouted up throughout the Caribbean area and became major passions among Cubans, Dominicans, Venezuelans, and the people of northern Mexico and the Yucatán. Soccer (fútbol) had not yet become the region’s popular obsession, and most teams were still affiliated with well-to-do clubs and universities or limited to impromptu games among the dockworkers, who picked up the game from merchant sailors. With new streets and neighborhoods to move to, the rich designed palatial estates. They had fine gardens; townhouses often had the splendid qualities of other turn-of-the-century cities in Europe and the United States. It would have been easy to tour well-to-do areas in Santiago, Chile, and imagine oneself in Boston. Gone was the adobe


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of simpler days to be replaced by two-story residences, with iron grillwork, tall windows, and elegant brick and stone. The interiors frequently continued the pattern of rooms around a courtyard but with new, stronger materials—parquet, imported tiles, and marble. There were numerous fireplaces, with those in the main areas often sculpted. Furnishings were imported, of course, from gold-gilded chairs to candelabras, ornate drapes and carpets. Elaborate sets of silver and china complemented the best homes, and even some of the middle class. All this required more servants to clean, shop, and cook. The nouveau riche were just as tied to land as the elites before 1880. Fortunes made in mining, merchant activities, and finance were invested back into land: farms, new haciendas and plantations, and urban real estate. Land remained the hedge against inflationary government policies, and it was the ultimate collateral for loans. Social attitudes within the elites therefore changed slowly or not at all. It is easy to argue, as many interpreters of Latin America have, that feudal social relations prevailed.8 Outside of some areas in which Whites dominated natives or very isolated populations of peasants, this is not true and is a serious misreading of what was happening. Latin American societies had never been feudal in the manner of European manors; estates had supplied many of their own needs but had never been self-sufficient. People could be treated like serfs without the existence of serfdom. Market relations governed events within estates as they did within towns.9 We have seen that a central problem of Latin American societies in the nineteenth century had been the disruption of colonial markets and the long time required to build political economies within new republican rules. Now, new markets, both within nations and involving foreign trade, favored the few over the many. Not surprisingly, the few grabbed not only income but also existing markers of status, and invented new ones. As they did this, they thought themselves quite progressive. They viewed those without the new forms of status and dress— natives, Blacks, and small farmers—as unprogressive. One marker was in decline—and Church leaders knew it—and that was the Catholic faith. Both the rich and poor remained Catholic, but the liberals had succeeded in weakening the Church as a social and political institution. The Church continued to back conservative political parties, but conservative elites distanced themselves from the Catholicism of their parents. For example, they were becoming nuns and priests but at a lower rate than before.

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Rather than being at the center of elite life, religion was becoming a cultural complement to the rich. The Church no longer dominated higher education. Aware of what was happening, clergy set out to evangelize the people. The Jesuits, banned from Latin America by the Iberian crowns in the late eighteenth century, returned. They and other religious orders launched a school-building program that included the creation of new universities. The Church reformed its seminaries, insisting—usually to no avail—on priestly celibacy.10 It now attacked liberal positions through its own newspapers and by creating new spiritual movements among the laity. It had greater success than is usually mentioned in histories of the era, which tend to focus only on modernization and secularization.11 For example, it waged a campaign against any change in the social practices of young women.12 But underlying all its efforts was a difficult set of facts: it had lost its central economic role in the nineteenth century, and the oligarchies, although interested in bolstering its moral authority within the population, were not going to recapitalize it on the scale required. There were new churches and schools but not enough to reach the burgeoning urban population, let alone reconstruct ties to rural areas. Challenging the Church was a beguiling faith in progress. In this respect, the leaders of Latin America were similar to those in Europe and the United States. Most of their concerns were political and involved the building of state power, but many of them were cultural: they did not want to be left out of new possibilities. And so, the oligarchies, and the educators and bureaucrats who catered to their leadership, turned to science, a very fluid term. Everyone could see the outcomes of material science and engineering, as new inventions came annually. At the beginning of the age of oligarchy, basic transportation still consisted of sailing ships, mules, horses, and oxcarts. By World War I, there were steamships, rail lines, automobiles, and the beginnings of human flight. In Latin America, all of this stuff was imported and reinforced the image of White, northern cultures over Latin American ones. Science in this era included the “social sciences,” and these were imported and adapted within Latin American cities as well. Science brought a glorification of the ancient past, in both national histories and literatures. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, archeologists from the United States began to find remnants of preColombian civilizations. John Lloyd Stephens found Palenque in the


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Mexican state of Chiapas in 1840 and wrote a famous study of these Mayan ruins, setting off a hunt for others. Another U.S. explorer and archeologist, Hiram Bingam, hunting in Peru in 1911 found Machu Picchu (the “lost city” of the Incas). These discoveries placed Latin American sites among the most important treasures in the world. It led to conjectures about why some of these cultures had collapsed and reminded Mexicans and Peruvians of past achievements, which could now be incorporated into a modern national identity. There was an obvious contrast between the intelligence and sophistication required to create these sites and the culture of existing natives: if natives had once been so brilliant, why had they fallen so low? A complex response developed among the educated and usually lightskinned authors and artists of the era, announcing what came to be known as indigenismo, which was both an appropriation of past glory and a reflection on present problems. Within elite circles, it often meant acting as if the Incan and Aztec civilizations had been like the ancient Greeks and Romans, only with feathers. In 1889, the Mexican government of Porfirio Díaz sent an exhibit to the World’s Fair in Paris representing the pre-Colombian Aztecs as Greek-like figures with pyramids.13 National literatures began to explore the world of contemporary natives. In her classic novel, Aves sin nido (Birds without a Nest) of 1889, Clorinda Matto de Turner presented the natives of Peru as fully human but brutalized—victims of exploiters.14 Important as it was, indigenismo did not change the direction of any government policies, which continued to exterminate natives culturally and physically. The influence of the other social sciences, including some that are no longer seen as such, was profound. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, penology, and eugenics began to reshape Latin American laws and self-perceptions. Brazilians wondered openly if they were not suffering from racial degeneration.15 Racial attitudes developed in the colonial period were now reinterpreted through the lens of new social sciences. Instead of renouncing miscegenation, as happened in the United States, many Latin American men rationalized such behavior as in the national interest. Brazilian theorists argued that White blood improved an otherwise hopeless African race, and so White men should generate more mixed-blood offspring.16 (The honor code, of course, denounced sexual relations between White women and Black men.)17 Everywhere, liberals used the argument that national progress required heavier investment in

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education and that non-Whites, once properly taught, could be Europeanized. The most pervasive influence in the intellectual and “scientific” attitudes of the region came from French positivism, and particularly the ideas of Auguste Comte. The nineteenth century produced many system builders, men who believed they could discover the key to human behavior just as Newton had found the laws of physics. Comte was one of them and is a foundational figure in the evolution of sociology, a term he coined. He was born in 1798 and died in 1857, by which time his ideas were passé in France and Europe. But they were coming into their own in Latin America. Comte believed that all societies evolved in set patterns, which related to their intellectual development. Societies began as theological entities, explaining events in terms of the supernatural, and then became metaphysical, in which men explained reality in terms of laws not based on any systematic study of cause and effect but on assertions of human rights. Finally, advanced societies entered the scientific or positive stage in which men study facts and derive conclusions from them, thus progressing, as their formulations based on better evidence and reasoning improve. People who had read Comte’s voluminous writings and understood him had obviously entered the scientific stage; unfortunately, that was only a minority of any population. Comte had spent his youth in the tumult of the French Revolution and was completely distrustful of mass politics. Instead of supporting democracy, he argued that social science must support a religion, which he developed, so that people could participate in advanced society and have a sense of belonging. The religion curiously had many of the attributes of Catholicism, substituting great minds for the saints.18 Comte’s ideas became the basis for reconsidering Latin American liberal tenets. Intellectuals born after his death became enthralled with his views; they did not need to suffer the consequences of democracy, for which the masses were unfit in any event. They needed instead to carefully borrow from the social sciences developed in Europe and the United States and reconstruct their societies in the prescribed manner. Positivists from Mexico to Brazil argued the necessity of imposing social order as a condition of any economic growth, and growth and education as conditions for the eventual creation of new republican societies.19 In Mexico by the late 1890s, an intelligentsia came to hold high offices under President Porfirio Díaz. Called científicos (scientists)


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and personified by his minister of the treasury, José Yves Limantour, they demanded that the rule of economic markets—as economics had been developed in Britain and the United States—take precedence over any other considerations, whatever the social consequences. Limantour refinanced the foreign debt and put the peso on the gold standard—acts that stabilized the nation’s finances and the value of its money. The científicos also helped set the stage for the Mexican Revolution, to be discussed in the next chapter. In Brazil, republican sentiment spread through the ranks of young army officers, who helped overthrow the emperor in 1889 (he was sent to Portugal) and created the First Republic. The motto of the new government— Ordem e Progresso (order and progress)—came directly from Comte and is still stenciled on the Brazilian flag. A few Brazilians went so far as to develop Comte’s religion, setting up a distinct Church of Humanity, which endured—with internal, theological conflicts—well into the twentieth century.20 A second influential figure was the British social theorist Herbert Spencer. Born in 1820, Spencer was a social radical in his youth, supporting such causes as the nationalization of land and women’s rights. He borrowed from Comte the centrality of social order to any human progress, and from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) the view that species, including human beings, evolve by passing on learned behaviors. He rejected the idea that there was any “human nature,” and posited instead a theory of “the survival of the fittest”: individuals with the greatest intelligence and gifts could thrive only if free of government restraint. Indeed, he had greater faith in the joint stock company than in any parliament. Although he is often seen as a social Darwinist, in fact ideas between Darwin and him ran in the opposite direction, with Darwin, who did not agree with Lamarck, being a strong admirer of Spencer.21 Spencer lived until 1903 and cast a long shadow throughout the Americas, including the United States. One consequence of his thinking was to blame the poor for their poverty; they were obviously unfit. Just as Comte owed the core of his thought to a bastardized Catholicism, with its emphasis on cosmic hierarchies and social stations, so Spencer (who was not religious) owed much to a bastardized Protestant ethic, in which success became proof of being one of nature’s elect. The blend of positivism and Spencer’s admonitions proved potent throughout Latin America. On the one hand, they made the rich

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comfortable about the increasing gulf between themselves and the poor. On the other, they armed liberals with the means to argue for public education, and by the early twentieth century, illiteracy had dropped sharply in the region, especially in such countries as Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. Everywhere, however, writers worried that Latin American nations were in crisis and needed to be guided into the modern age. In general, they did not interpret this as a result of poverty caused by their liberal laws and economic change, but as a consequence of a population’s backwardness—its racial faults or rustic stupidity. These analyses ran into a hard reality. The oligarchies were not about to tax themselves to fund social improvements. Those funds would have to come out of indirect taxes, and that meant that government spending was closely tied to foreign trade. In the meantime, social problems demonstrated to the educated that the poor were unfit for the new world but were becoming more numerous and more dangerous, being infected with foreign ideas of class struggle. Like the French of the mid-nineteenth century, elites in the larger countries began to import better firearms and professional training for their armies.

THE WORKING CLASS The new city produced a new social phenomenon: the working class. The working class can be defined either as an industrial proletariat, à la Marx, or in this case, as an urban social segment engaged in manual labor. There had always been manual laborers in the city; they were, after all, the majority of the urban population from Latin America’s beginnings. Its great colonial cathedrals are dramatic testaments to the skill of Native American craftsmen and artists. But those distant societies had very different social structures. Through the colonial period, major parts of the urban populations had consisted of coerced labor—natives and slaves. In the nineteenth century, outside of Brazil and Cuba, nominally free laborers provided the cities with its basic goods and services. In that period, urban artisans made up a crucial part of the labor force and saw themselves as a cut above ordinary workers, whether free or not. But the city of the artisans withered in the economic transformation of the export economies, and something else took its place. It is best to approach the working class in terms of functions. Workers in Latin America were part of an industrializing culture but


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one not based on national industry. There were industrial workers— men, women, and children—who, by 1910, manufactured textiles, shoes, clothing, and other consumer goods. Some of these factories were substantial, with thousands of laborers each, in and around Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Lima, and Santiago.22 But their efforts in most sectors other than textiles supplemented imported manufactures rather than being the central element of their national economies. The largest part of the new labor force gathered in the service sectors, construction, transport, and export refining. Although the discussion of Buenos Aires will serve to illustrate their variety, it is worth noting a few points about laborers elsewhere. In Mesoamerica, Peru, Chile, and Colombia, the working class drew on mixed-race populations. It is rare to find many Blacks or natives in their ranks. And although there was a strong cultural objection to women working, poverty drove many women into industrial labor. Certain activities—manufacturing cigarettes in Mexico City, for example—were considered women’s work and lowly paid even in comparison to other industrial wages. The majority of the labor force was in the service sectors and so did not see itself as working class. The rich and the as-yet-small middle class hired more household servants and relied on an expanding army of casual laborers who did everything from selling newspapers to cleaning the streets. Women made up a major part of this service sector, as they always had. Being a household servant was the most common urban, female occupation in the Latin American colonies, and it remained so in many cities throughout the twentieth century.23 Women were also part of another essential activity, retailing. Although the new cities had more shops, the provisioning of most people consisted of men and women hauling in foods and milk from the surrounding areas, and of women selling tortillas, bread, sandwiches, meat pies, and tacos on street corners. Street vendor was the second major job category of urban women. A final service category, one common in all cities large and small, was prostitution. Most Latin American societies before 1910 considered the sex trade inevitable and tried to regulate it (unsuccessfully) to reduce venereal disease.24 It was a common male assumption that working women were prostitutes or sexually available. They and the growing army of urchins shining shoes and selling gum and candies never had the dignity of being considered members of a class.

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Construction labor, a male occupation, soared in the new cities. As also occurred in Europe and the United States, important distinctions remained between the craft laborers—carpenters, masons, etc.—and those who supplied the muscle to haul and lift things at a construction site. Craft laborers had their own associations—although in 1910 these were just beginning to be unions—that is, sindicatos, rather than guilds. Within the crafts, workers were classified into a variety of skills with each being paid a different wage. Those at the top were often paid two or three times more than those at the bottom. This segmentation of the work force was common in other sectors as well. Laborers who were at the bottom had few associations or assistance of any type. The best-positioned laborers were in transport, although again labor hierarchies made for enormous differences. Although mules and horses were still used, the best transport jobs involved mechanized technologies. Railroad engineers and firemen were among the highest-paid laborers in every country. They had an essential skill: without them both the cities and the export sectors would grind to a halt. Streetcar conductors were also well paid. Other crucial laborers were machinists and mechanics. But the rail lines usually employed dozens of skills, and those who did the maintenance jobs of the rail yard were paid a pittance. The other well-positioned laborers were the dockworkers—in a number of nations they became very well organized and ideologically radical. In every trade-based economy, there existed workers that produced the exports and refined them: plantation laborers, mill workers, meat packers, and miners. Analysts of export economies have noticed a difference in agricultural exports (sugar in Cuba, coffee in Brazil, wheat in Argentina) and minerals (copper in Peru, tin in Bolivia, nitrates in Chile). Laborers in agriculture could almost never be organized—their labor unions do not even begin until well into the twentieth century. It was possible to organize workers in specific industries such as meatpacking. However, mine workers, grouped in a number of different jobs in a single site, often acted together in any work dispute. Radical miners are part of the diffusion in Latin America of leftwing, particularly socialist, ideas.25 In Peru, the miners at this time were isolated from the political currents of the nation but often acted in local conflicts. In Mexico, they were caught up in the revolution of 1910–1920. In Chile, the nitrate workers participated in a broad movement that began the formation of a distinctive, leftist tradition within the working class.


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BUENOS AIRES By 1910, Buenos Aires was Latin America’s finest city. It was the center of the export booms in Argentina: the hub of its railroad system, its central port, a financial center with both foreign and domestic banks and an elaborate stock market, the nation’s educational and cultural center, and a city literally devouring its surroundings. It had over 1.5 million people, making it the nation’s primary city—that is, several times the population in the second largest, Córdoba. It became the envy of its South American neighbors, and people came from Chile and Uruguay for much the same reason that Europeans visited Paris: simply to see its famous boulevards and shops. The ideas promulgated in its newspapers, whether in favor of free trade or working-class radicalism, influenced South American legislators, intellectuals, social reformers, and labor organizers. In a cultural sense, Buenos Aires became a continental transmission belt, copying the best it could find in Europe, developing it to its own needs, and exporting the vision of that development to its interior and to other South American nations. One of the most famous historians of the city called it an “administrative commercial” center.26 It had industries, large and small, but its economy was not based on industrialization. It organized, processed, stored, and shipped the nation’s exports to Europe. This role had developed gradually, although it was clear even in the time of Rosas. In 1879, a general in the army, Julio Roca, organized a military expedition, which he called “the conquest of the wilderness”: using contemporary rifles and telegraph lines, he exterminated the native population. This genocidal act, still celebrated in Argentine historical narratives, opened vast tracts of land to settlement and agriculture—some 381 people gained 8.5 million hectares (over 20 million acres).27 British capital financed the railroad lines to bring products to market, and Argentina, already a major producer of hides and grains, now developed a sophisticated fresh-meat industry as well. The Argentine economy had a relatively diverse base producing wines, mutton, wool, wheat, and frozen as well as fresh beef. Wheat production, based on tenant farming, expanded rapidly within three decades of Roca’s conquest.28 Buenos Aires was built around the task of exporting wheat and meat, importing European manufactures,

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and building Argentina’s national administration. As one student of the era summarized: By 1911, Argentina had a per capita foreign trade six times the Latin American average; the Argentine imported over 35 percent of its GDP and exported more than half of its rural production. Buenos Aires controlled three-fourths and one-third of these imports and exports respectively.29 The dreams of Sarmiento now came true, Argentina in general and Buenos Aires in particular became European: mulattos and mestizos were marginalized, and the city that had been one-fourth AfroArgentine in 1820 now had very few Blacks.30 Immigrants came every year, and although most went to work on the pampas, several hundred thousand ended in the capital. The largest number of immigrants came from Italy and Spain. In 1895, some 80,000 came to the country, some 41,000 left—a balance of 39,000 for the year; in 1905, 221,000 came in, 82,000 left, with a balance of 138,000.31 They spoke their own dialect of Spanish inflected with Italian—lunfardo—and developed many of the activities of any European city: libraries, restaurants, bars, dancehalls, popular theaters and, since most of the immigrants were male, an extensive series of brothels.32 To a degree that surprised and alarmed many members of the elite and middle class, Buenos Aires became a working-class city. It contained some ethnic neighborhoods, such as the famous Genoese section of La Boca. But the flow of immigrants mixed the population in most of the new urban areas, and by 1910, this mix included people from Poland, Russia, and Lebanon. The Jews from eastern Europe became crucial to Argentina’s later intellectual and cultural life.33 All of this left its mark on Argentina, and indeed, the nation’s international image evolved in this era around the changes in Buenos Aires and was complete by the 1920s. By then, porteños disdained any link between themselves and those “Indian” nations in the rest of the continent. They gave the Atlantic world its first dance craze, the tango, which originated in the brothels of the city, paralleling the development of jazz in New Orleans. Its sensuality—the male stance and the woman’s passionate poses—embodied a type of vertical sex, and into the first decade of the twentieth century, it was considered scandalous for decent women to dance it. Of course, upper-class dandies cruised the brothels for entertainment, and a male youth culture flourished in


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the streets and bars of the city. The compadrito, the well-dressed pimp and gangster with a knife in his belt, represented its underside. Men hung out along the sidewalks and made sexual remarks—piropos—to passing women, a pastime that was cheap and a sign of the machismo they had brought from Italy. Working-class women found themselves outnumbered and very welcome. Popular dances literally took over the street corners on Saturday afternoons. It was not until the tango became a dance craze in Paris that it became more acceptable in Argentina. Its foremost interpreter was Carlos Gardel. Born in France in 1890, his single mother brought him to Argentina when he was two. He became famous in 1911–1913 in partnership with José Razzano. Tango culture, like jazz and the blues in the United States, was an emotional escape from hard and monotonous labor. Its lyrics covered the usual in popular music: the faithlessness of women, the loss of true love, the ways in which working people are tricked and abused by employers, the pointlessness of it all. Tango life was often violent—Gardel was shot early in his career. He and Razzano remained together until 1925, when Gardel, by then internationally famous, went out on his own. He died flying around Colombia in 1935, a tragedy still commemorated in Argentina much as Elvis Presley’s death is remembered in the United States.34 Working people also brought their politics. Europe already had radical agrarian and labor movements. Karl Marx died in 1883, but it was not Marx but the French radical Jean-Pierre Proudhon (1809–1865) and the now relatively obscure Russian anarchists Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Prince Peter Kropotkin (1843–1921) who most influenced Argentine labor. Proudhon’s famous remark that “property is theft” summarized their attitude. The greatest influence in Argentina was that of the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta (1852–1932), who in his long and colorful flight ahead of the police in several countries worked in Argentina between 1885 and 1889. Unlike Marxists who emphasized the role of the industrial proletariat as the class that would overthrow a capitalist ruling class, anarchists appealed to both urban and rural laborers. They believed that constituted authority was illegitimate because it grew out of the exploitation of common people.35 If public intellectuals had come to believe in social-scientific control of the populace, a substantial segment of laborers was attracted to the thought that it did not need any ruling class or social guidance. As Malatesta put it, “Change

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opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.”36 The anarchists taught that, if freed of the manipulations of religions and ruling groups, ordinary people were decent and could build a society without violence and poverty. In an attempt to deal with the complexities of urban, industrializing societies, anarchists modified their ideas in the early twentieth century to include the view that workers could form syndicates that would run economic sectors and that through cooperatives could run a technologically sophisticated society. Anarcho-syndicalism believed that workers should form associations as sources of social support and coordinate the eventual revolution. Their chief weapon was the general strike, when everyone stopped working and labor would shut down contemporary capitalism, its government, and its religions. Laborers would then seize the means of production and fulfill their own needs. In the meantime, anarchists had to resort to acts of violence against heads of state and capitalists in order to sow fear in the ruling class and break the social patterns of deference instilled in the general populace. Anarchists killed a czar and other leaders, shot industrialists in the United States, and threw bombs in Buenos Aires that rattled its elite. Part of their appeal to immigrants in Argentina was their internationalism: many immigrants had little interest in national politics. Here was a doctrine that could be used to demand better wages and working conditions through direct action rather than petitions and political brokering. While waiting for the revolution, laborers formed collective federations of unions and mutual aid societies that threatened to play a major role in the economy. Anarchism seemed effective. It fomented major peasant movements in Russia and Spain and created the First International in Europe. Later, it led to the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), with influence in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Buenos Aires also developed another social segment, the middle class—a mix of creoles and immigrants in the administrative and commercial sectors. This was the largest middle class in Latin America, and it demanded the schools and social improvements that would offer its children even better opportunities. Middle-class


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young men followed the same fads as the working class, but they also had a café society—an imitation of Paris, Rome, and Madrid. The sheer size of the class, numbering tens of thousands, created a consumer culture that was deeper and more developed than that of any other Latin American city. Buenos Aires had department stores, including a branch of the famous Harrods on calle Florida, and it had extensive commercial zones in numerous neighborhoods. Along with the consumer culture came an array of magazines, including those that specialized in women. The middle class was included in politics as elite allies. Although Argentina had regular elections, money ruled. National government was run by members of an elite gathered around the leadership of Julio Roca. The dominant party was the PAN (Partido Autonomista Nacional, or the National Autonomous Party), which had liberal doctrines.37 Like other liberal parties, it circumscribed the Church and established civil marriage; it also sustained a very effective effort at public education. Roca, who served as president after 1880 and again in 1898, and his landowning supporters ran an efficient political machine with ward healers throughout Buenos Aires and a national government that intervened in the provinces. Roca was born in Tucumán, thus his career embodied not only the rise of a modern military but also the inclusion of provincial leadership in national politics. He successfully merged factions of provincial conservatives, often led by state governors, into the national senate, and so reduced the conflicts over federalism that had characterized the nation before 1870.38 The party had middle-class members involved in it but with little role in any of its decisions. The alliance of the oligarchy and parts of the middle class was based on export prosperity, and it split when the economy briefly unraveled. To please its urban clients and subsidize its control of the provinces without taxing the rich, the national government regularly spent more than it took in and borrowed the difference. Its major lender was the British merchant bank of the Baring brothers. In 1890, another loan from the firm to Argentina failed to attract bond buyers on the London market. Because Baring held a great deal of Argentine debt, it was threatened with ruin—and it could have brought down other major British banks. Instead, the Bank of England stepped in and renegotiated Argentina’s total debts, forcing the national government to cut back on its spending. The debt crisis rippled through the entire Argentine economy—for several years,

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people leaving Argentina exceeded those coming in.39 The combination of political corruption and economic reversal was too much, and young middle-class men in Buenos Aires took to the streets, denouncing the administration of President Juárez Celman. Celman resigned but not before the demonstrations turned into riots and armed confrontations between Argentine youths and the military. Opponents of the regime even drew in Bartolomé Mitre, the aging liberal warhorse from the age of caudillos, as part of the attempt to bring down the Roca machine. Soon after, political dissidents of the PAN formed the Unión Cívica Radical (the Radical Civic Union, usually called just the Radical Party). The Radicals— first under Leandro Alem (a former ward healer for the PAN) and then under his nephew Hipólito Yrigoyen—mounted a morality campaign, demanding universal male suffrage, honest elections, and an end to meddling in provincial affairs.40 So, the oligarchy after 1891 had a middle-class opposition, but one that could not win elections. Although Radicals attempted to recruit labor support, they were unable to mount a multiclass front against the regime, which meant the PAN remained in power. In desperation, the Radicals attempted to recruit middle-class military officers in an uprising of 1905; that, too, was crushed. The oligarchy’s greatest difficulties were within itself, for although the elite could unite in defense of its privileges, it was divided geographically and in terms of its interests. Segments of the party in the provinces resented the national largesse in regard to the capital. Although the elite remained Catholic, it adhered to liberal economic rules. It referred to Argentina as a world ranch and was proud of its ties to Great Britain. British goods and manners often had as much cachet as French ones. The elite was generally opposed to protecting industry with high tariffs, and not a few economic historians have blamed this attitude on the slow development of national industry. Its faults were many, but the generation of ’80, as it is often called, brought Argentina within the reach of a European existence. On the eve of World War I, the nation had higher wages and greater prosperity than most of southern Europe—hence the massive migration of Italians and Spaniards—and was one of the fastestgrowing economies in the world. Its political failings would be the oligarchy’s undoing, and it is worthwhile to reflect on its problems, for if Argentina was the most successful Latin American nation in 1910, it also contained within it the pitfalls of this type of success.41


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The elite could unite socially in the jockey club and in its elaborate balls and banquets, but it could not administer its success very well. It had no sooner gained its predominance than its social characteristics led it to fritter away its good fortune. Part of the elite began spending a major part of its life in France, pioneering life on the Riviera—hence the phrase “rich as an Argentine playboy.” At home, its financial leaders were in merchant capital, a form of firm that was quickly eclipsed by the industrial capitalist organizations in the United States and Western Europe. Argentina was a major exporter of wheat and other grains, but its principal export in those years became refrigerated beef. With the exception of some enterprising experiments in cattle breeding, the elite was remarkably shortsighted, and it confused a resource-rich situation as a permanent and earned condition. It thought neither strategically nor, in any profound sense, politically. Strategically, it failed to consider how it might reduce reliance on a few commodities or continue to enhance its temporary success; it simply followed a liberal economic model wherever it led. Politically, it overlooked the consequences of rapid growth and a concomitant population increase. A careful study of Argentina and Canada demonstrates that the Argentine elite’s refusal to invest in public infrastructure was directly related to the pattern of landholding. Argentina became a nation of rural tenants whose landlords collected massive rents and enjoyed a rise in their wealth from the simple appreciation of their holdings. Canada became a nation of middling farmers who pressured their national government for improvements in transport, warehousing, and other facilities that made them competitive on the world market. Argentina in 1880 could produce and export a bushel of wheat much more cheaply than Canada; by 1910, it was Canada who was the more efficient exporter.42 Another failing occurred in its meat sector. Argentina had become a major exporter of frozen beef by the 1880s; then improvements in ships, railroads, and refrigeration allowed it to move into a new market. Fresh meat could be kept cool in rail and ship containers and reach the British market before it spoiled. Argentine experiments in breeding British cattle into their own herds dramatically improved the meat’s quality. By 1910, however, a rift developed between those cattlemen in the interior who focused on generating calves and those nearer Buenos Aires who specialized in fattening the cattle for final

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market. Instead of drawing all cattle interests together in a common network, the national government allowed the fatteners to gain at the expense of the breeders, a division that deepened existing resentments between the area of Buenos Aires and the nation’s interior.43 Prosperity sometimes intensifies social conflict. No capitalist economy grows without widening the division of rich and poor, and incomes within the Argentine economy followed land rents, with returns concentrating in the hands of a few. Many of the working poor became comfortable, returned to Italy, or bought a small home in Buenos Aires, but most did not. Photographs remain of small armies of garbage pickers, surviving—as many do today in Buenos Aires and other major Latin American cities—on prosperity’s refuse. Basically, however, Buenos Aires became the home of a struggling working class with a relatively optimistic middle class that counted on political change and the arrival of an enlarged electorate to move oligarchic politics in a progressive direction. Downturns, which occur in any economy, caught the working class without any recourse and turned it in the radical direction of anarchism. Rather than incorporate the population into the party system, elites ran the risk of open class warfare and invested in the police and military required to control this possibility.

PEASANTS AND LANDED POWER The study of Buenos Aires shows us a land-based oligarchy building its urban dream. But most of Latin America’s population remained rural, struggling as peasants, tenants, and impoverished ranch and farm hands. The export economies also transformed their lives, sometimes not for the better. Armed with currency derived from selling to Britain, continental Europe, and their growing cities, speculators bought up land—even when it was not for sale. Governments instituted liberal land laws, turning all collective properties into individual landholdings; natives throughout the Americas were defrauded in massive land grabs. When they resisted they faced armies packing new weapons. The period between 1880–1890 saw the end of Native American freedom in the United States: by 1900 all natives lived on reservations or without any land at all. The same fate awaited most of the still-free natives in Latin America. Chile destroyed the independence of the Mapuches in 1888, and the


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natives continued to be robbed of the lands ceded to them in peace treaties. The Yaquis fought on in northern Mexico until the 1920s. The Amazon became the last refuge of Native American independence, often because its zones remained almost impenetrable. But Native Americans were not the only people put on the defensive. Mestizo and mulatto freeholders, who had carved out ranches and farms from the wilderness, often in the face of conflicts with natives, were now also in line to lose land.44 Under liberal rules, they had to prove legal possession. Those too poor to afford the documentation or the bribing of officials were pushed out. Landlords did not hesitate to act as they always had: using private armed forces to gain whatever could not be acquired legally. These white guards also enforced control of hacienda and plantation labor forces. Many in the displaced rural populations drifted into cities, but most could not do so, and commercial agriculture absorbed them on harsh terms.45 Agricultural products as different as rubber and vanilla expanded commercially. Here, to simplify matters, are a few key commodities that can be discussed.46 That of wheat in Argentina has already been mentioned. Sugar and coffee, well established before 1880, now entered new stages of production as did cattle ranching and meat production. Although the export booms were important in triggering the expansion of commercial markets, they are also reminders of what can happen to nations that become tied to one or two primary products. As an opening example, the cultivation of sugar in the Caribbean and northern Brazil employed the former slaves of the zones and their descendents, but with few gains for poor Blacks. A cycle of rural poverty, low wages, and intense periods of harvesting followed by prolonged ones of unemployment left the Black populations uneducated and with little to show for their newfound freedom. In Cuba, the sugar economy fell into the hands of U.S. capitalists, and Black veterans of the struggle for independence received very little for their efforts.47 In Brazil, sugar passed from being the major export of the country to supplying the domestic market. In general, plantation owners made this transition without investing in any new techniques. They, like their counterparts in Cuba, relied on keeping wages low to make their profits.48 As a result, sugar cultivation became synonymous with Black poverty, and the concentration of Blacks in sugar zones meant no major domestic market would develop in rural areas. Black veterans in Cuba became an important

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source of political instability. The poor of northeast Brazil would have little choice after 1920 but to live in poverty or move to more prosperous, southern areas. This movement did not assure Blacks a better life: they generally encountered severe discrimination in the zones around Rio and São Paulo. Students of racism and the civil rights struggle in the United States often point to the period immediately after the Civil War as one of disappointment for Black America. Former slaves were promised land, the vote, and civil dignity. Whatever the shortcomings of reconstruction in the United States, however, it is important to remember that in Cuba and Brazil no reconstruction was even attempted. Blacks received no lands and no promises of any. There was no Freedman’s Bureau and so no national attempt in either country to enfranchise Black voters, who in most areas were excluded from political participation. Finally, and contrary to the racial myths in both countries, Blacks in more commercially developed areas encountered severe discrimination. In the state of São Paulo, immigrants protected themselves by supporting racist hiring practices. Blacks in the state had grown militant near the end of slavery and remained vocal in making demands on planters thereafter.49 The planters silenced them by shutting them out of all but the most menial jobs. A telling indicator of how bad conditions became is that the number of Blacks in Brazil declined after abolition. Another example of commercial, agrarian development is that of coffee in Colombia. The nation had been politically divided from its origins, when the Confederation of Grand Colombia came apart in 1832. Civil wars between the liberals and conservatives had characterized the mid-1840s and the mid-1860s. As evidence of the balance of forces, the country went through six constitutions in the nineteenth century; in one, in 1853, the liberals separated church and state. One of the basic causes of conflict was that each party was divided into regional factions, so that fights between the two parties in particular provinces tended to spread to others.50 Coffee income did not end this strife but only accentuated it as the politicos in the capital, Bogotá, looted revenues generated in the provinces. In 1899, the conservatives controlled the national government and had locked out the liberals. However, coffee prices went against them, and the conservatives printed money to cover state deficits. The liberals thought that they could unseat President Manuel Antonio Sanclemente with a coordinated rebellion because they had both


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money and military experience. They were mistaken. The conservatives broke liberal forces in two key battles, and the liberals resorted to regional civil war. The War of a Thousand Days lasted until 1903 and devastated the country.51 A generation earlier, under the constitution of 1863, the liberals had despoiled the Church of its properties. The Church became a major recruiting arm of the conservative forces. The conservatives prevailed, although it took three peace treaties to finally calm the guerrilla warriors. As a signal of what was to come, the combatants brought in the United States as a neutral power and signed a key treaty aboard the USS Wisconsin. The central government was so weakened that when President Theodore Roosevelt engineered an uprising in Panama in 1903 to claim the canal zone under U.S. control, Bogotá was helpless to respond. Curiously enough, coffee prices rebounded on the world market and Colombia’s dependence on this product deepened in the boom that began the twentieth century. The horrors of the War of a Thousand Days, with some 100,000 dead, drove both sides to peace. Combatants used the German Mannlicher rifle, but many were killed by machete. During the conflict, both sides resorted to indiscriminate killing and recruited boys known for their ferocity and fearlessness into their ranks. Women were often victimized but also took part as messengers, and trooped after the armies carrying provisions and cooking meals. They also created, among the liberals, a system of medical clinics in ranches to handle the wounded; and, of course, las Juanas, las Chonas, and las Rabones supplied sex and liquor.52 All in all, the war was a prelude rather than a conclusion: liberals and conservatives renewed their violence in the 1940s with even greater loss of life. A final example of agricultural change is cattle ranching, which expanded in every country, responding to the demand for meat in growing cities and the spread of railroads and cheaper shipping. Lands that had once been considered marginal could now be used for grazing. Only Uruguay underwent a transformation as profound as that of Argentina, and like the stories about sugar, that of cattle mixes politics and racial conflict. As in Argentina, cattle rearing in Uruguay refinanced a landed society that took in immigrant tenants from Italy and Spain to increase production. Like Argentina as well, the immigrants created a primary city, Montevideo, and the modernization of the city was based on foreign trade and linked directly to Great Britain. By 1908, the nation had a million

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inhabitants, 30 percent of them in the capital city. Unlike the landed oligarchy in Argentina, the one in Uruguay lost control of the national government, and the outcome is illustrative of both the best and the worst of Latin America. Uruguayan politics pit the familiar rivalry of liberals and conservatives, who in this nation were and are still called Colorados (Reds) and Blancos (Whites), respectively. Very much like political parties in Colombia, those in Uruguay were more or less evenly matched and bent on killing one another, until the export-based economy created new political forces in Montevideo. There, the Colorados began to link a new middle class with traditional liberal interests. The genius of this mobilization is too often skipped over, because Uruguay is a small nation and because its progressive course ran into severe economic obstacles and came apart. Nonetheless, one man deserves to be remembered for his transforming political imagination. José Batlle y Ordoñez, president from 1903 to 1907 and again from 1911 to 1915, was certainly the greatest Latin American political intellectual of his time and one of the greatest in the history of the region. Batllismo ended the political stalemates of the nineteenth century in Uruguay, promoted a national civic life based on elections rather than on caudillismo, and turned the nation into the region’s first social democracy with substantial expenditures on education and public health, and a national takeover of key utilities. Uruguay developed a social security system and was the first Latin American nation with the eight-hour day and guaranteed health care for the poor. Women, through various pressure groups, won access to divorce, the university, social assistance, and in 1932, the vote—the first suffrage movement to do so in Latin America.53 The central problem of Uruguay later appeared in the rest of Latin America: a modern metropolis with a backward countryside. Uruguay’s rural laborers were left out of the reforms, aside from improvements in education, and a bargain was struck between the ruling Colorados and the minority Blancos. The Blancos did not have to fear that land would be redistributed and, of course, did their best to dismantle Batllismo. A nation that was heavily dependent on grain and beef exports began to undercapitalize its rural production and to spend the export gains in the form of social welfare policies and government jobs in Montevideo. No political leader in Latin America emerged who was comparable to the progressives and liberals in the United States and Canada, where


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movements fought for small farmers and rural improvements. Modernization in Latin America seemed to stop at the boundaries of its major cities. Roads remained dirt tracks, and railroads generally favored exporters and connections to the primary cities. Those struggling to raise products on a small scale had little help and were often oppressed by larger landowners. Patterns of rural deference to landed power continued as economies grew, and the urban belief that the countryside was feudal began to take hold.54 In fact, rural oppression went hand in hand with market expansion as natives, small farmers, freedmen, and the White poor swelled the ranks of a rural proletariat in each country. Everywhere, rural zones continued to contain the poorest elements of each nation—and the darker the skin, the greater the poverty.

THE CHALLENGES TO OLIGARCHY The deepening social divisions became obvious. Latin America was evolving into four social segments that included the rural poor and the working class. The latter was becoming a distinct interest group, and as it did so, it developed attitudes and ideas apart from the demands for land of the rural poor. The urban middle class also evolved along a new trajectory, one deeply enthralled with consumer goods, clothing, and entertainment from Europe. The elite remained divided to some degree, with liberals more attached to cities and often supporting middle-class political mobilization, but outside of Central America the flow of export money was creating a more homogenous upper stratum. The great landowners created new homes in the primary cities, and those who made money in the cities diversified their investments. Within the cities as well, the liberals began to expound on social improvements, which could mean everything from controlling slums to promoting public hygiene. Certainly, the most visionary liberal was José Batlle y Ordoñez, but there were others, notably the leader of the Radical Civic Union in Argentina, Hipólito Yrigoyen, who reached out to urban laborers as well as the middle class. The rhetoric of democracy and particularly of universal suffrage posed a very specific set of problems for the conservative parties and landed interests. On the one hand, it was difficult to oppose the spread of democracy; on the other, democratic practice threatened their social position and

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wealth.55 Written into the code of democracy is the possibility that the vote will be used to change rules governing property, to raise taxes on wealth, and to shift control of political resources. It would take several decades for the ruling groups in liberal societies to indoctrinate the general populace with the thought that using the vote to redistribute property was somehow bad. Until then, democracy seemed a very radical doctrine, especially in areas where Blacks and natives were numerous. Before World War I, monarchies and landed aristocracies ran most of Europe, and Latin American conservatives could look to them as a bastion of beliefs. Even so, by the 1920s, conservatives were increasingly on the defensive. In framing a response to liberal demands, conservatives drew upon European contemporaries to denounce the spread of suffrage. But spread it did. The number of voters was growing in every single republic; what is more, the percentage of voters was rising and seemed linked to modernization itself. Women, of course, did not get the vote anywhere in the Americas until 1918 in the United States. (Some Canadian provinces gave women the vote during World War I; but it was not universal in Canada until 1925.) No other Latin American nation followed Uruguay’s lead. Thus, universal suffrage meant male suffrage until about the middle of the twentieth century. A clear strategy existed before 1914 for parties such as the Radicals in Argentina and Chile, and the Colorados in Uruguay, a strategy that would appear later in the rest of the region: mobilize the new middle class and the urban and trade-based working classes, and one could transform the political spectrum. The votes in the primary city plus those in a few other larger areas would counter the rural control of votes by landed elites. When it came time to turn this possibility into action, the liberals hit upon a rhetoric developed in 1840s France: they did not speak in terms of class warfare, but of a “social question.” Basically, they argued that government had to ameliorate working and housing conditions. They developed commissions, most of them through the executive office of the national government or through governments in the primary cities, to investigate prostitution, disease, crime, slum housing, and the treatment of women and children in the workplace. They incorporated the social science jargon of industrialized nations, introducing the language of psychology, pediatrics, sociology, and penology as well as such fields as phrenology, already discussed.56 By comparing conditions in the primary cities with those in major


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European centers, the commissions mapped out an agenda for government and a new kind of state. It was not hard to find problems. The increasing size of cities—especially Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Montevideo—led to the classic difficulties of crowding, violence, and filth. Space for the rich had expanded in the form of boulevards and new chalets, but public goods lagged far behind. The market was not supplying food, housing, transportation, or electricity in the quantities the cities needed or at prices people could afford. The dispersed poverty of the countryside was being concentrated in the major cities and endangering the health and welfare of all. Between 1900 and 1920 official reports abound on unmet social needs that demanded public concern and action. Conservatives were hardly quiet in the face of liberal demands. They fought against public spending in general and social welfare expenditures in particular. The one modernization that they and the liberals both supported was professionalizing the military, which did not threaten such values as racial and economic hierarchy and the honor code. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and other nations invested heavily in training soldiers according to German military standards; Argentina and Chile also used British officers to train their navies. Army units were enlarged and equipped with artillery, machine guns, and contemporary rifles.57 As a result, caudillos became something limited to the provinces and the smaller Latin American nations in the Caribbean and Central America. Ad hoc armies, as the liberals had discovered in Colombia, were no match for modernized troops on any battlefield. For the conservatives, the problem became not how to stop modernization, but to keep its social consequences from spreading outside the cities and disrupting the control of their estates. The divide between liberals and conservatives and between centralists and federalists continued to change in favor of a liberalism that centralized power in the presidency. No single formula, however, contained all the possibilities for conflict. Liberals often fought with one another as they mobilized against authoritarian leaders or vied for political spoils. Three nations illustrate the potent mix of new money and old conflicts leading to civil wars. That of Colombia has already been discussed. Those of Chile and Venezuela move in very distinct directions, distinct from Colombia and from one another. In Chile new riches weakened presidential authority for several decades, without creating effective government.

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Chile in the first half the nineteenth century had been dominated by conservatives, but it became a centralized, liberal regime late in the 1870s and, within a decade, began to unravel into a diffuse set of interest groups and a multiparty system. Venezuela had a liberal federalism that ended in repression and dictatorship. In each nation, foreign interests played a major role in shaping political outcomes. The Chilean nitrate boom began in the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), when Chile seized sections of the Atacama dessert belonging to Bolivia and Peru. At the start of the period, the formerly Peruvian province of Tarapacá was the center of production; at the end, in the 1920s, the formerly Bolivian zone of Antofagasta was the more important. Nitrate production relied on technology imported from Great Britain, in which the raw ore was taken to large vats and subjected to a steam process that removed impurities. The crystallized solution was sodium nitrate, or salitre, which replaced guano as the world’s most important commercial fertilizer. (It was also used to produce explosives and iodine.) Chilean liberals made two decisions that shaped the course of the industry and its importance to their political system. They opened the zone to foreign development—the British soon came to dominate the region. The Chileans also taxed nitrate exports, and this fee became the single largest source of public revenues, amounting at times in the early twentieth century to 50 percent of all income. Foreign and domestic interests were soon in conflict. John T. North, a speculator of the first order, led a series of nitrate “combinations”—associations of nitrate producers that raised prices by reducing output. The Chilean government tried to increase production by selling off new areas for exploitation. The money raised was used to pay for the War of the Pacific and to embark on expensive public improvements: new port works, roads, and schools. Within Chilean politics, three factions appeared. The first was led by President José Manuel Balmaceda (1884–1890), who wanted to carry out a program of liberal modernization based on the chief executive’s traditional control of the government. The second consisted of other liberals—including a relatively new Radical Party—who favored weakening presidential control and strengthening Congress. The third was made up of the conservatives, who hated the Balmaceda liberals for attacks on the Church and for raising the cost of labor with public works. Balmaceda confronted John T. North over sovereignty in the nitrate fields just as he faced a


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serious conflict with Congress over control of the budget. A civil war began in 1890. Many historians of Chile, especially the Marxists, insist that the congressional rebellion was financed by British capital. In fact, the British had little reason to want war. The conflict threatened their nitrate investments. But once the rebellion began, the British did everything they could to help the rebels; the modern rifles the rebels secured led to a massacre of Balmaceda’s forces. Balmaceda took refuge in the Argentine embassy and when his term ended, he wrote a letter condemning foreign capital for having overthrown his government, and then committed suicide.58 The congressional victors rewrote the political rules and formed the Parliamentary Regime (1891–1924). Chile continued to have a centralized republic, but now power was distributed throughout a Congress divided into five or more parties. Political coalitions— involving the distribution of spoils and led by landowners, miners, and merchants—became the only way to win elections. For the next thirty years, presidents spent the nitrate revenues trying to hold together congressional support. When the revenues fell short, they turned to the printing press, and inflation followed. Goaded by inflationary cycles and falling incomes, laborers repeatedly rebelled in the ports and in Santiago. The “social question” turned nasty as the modernized military cut down workers with cannon and machine guns. These slaughters began in 1902 and were most intense before World War I, although the last labor rebellion followed by a military massacre occurred in the nitrate fields of Antofagasta in 1925. Labor’s response to all of this official violence led to left-wing militancy and the development of both anarchist and socialist movements. The most interesting figure in the Chilean labor struggle is Luis Emilio Recabarren. Born in 1876 to a poor family, his life straddles the nitrate era. He had only four years of schooling and went to work in his early teens as a typographer, someone who set type in printing presses. When he was fifteen, Balmaceda’s forces caught him distributing propaganda against the regime, and he was almost executed. When he was eighteen, he joined the Democratic Party, and in his early twenties, he began to combine his knowledge of printing with his love of radical politics. He would create eleven labor newspapers and run for Congress and eventually for president in 1920. He became a key link between the nitrate zone and the Chilean left because he lived in Antofagasta and Iquique,

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propagandizing in both cities. When he was first elected to Congress, he was quickly expelled from the House of Deputies for refusing to mention God in his oath of induction. He was among the first in Chile to tie labor struggles to the writings of Karl Marx and to a prolonged class struggle. He repeatedly called on the left to conquer power by democratic means—an attitude that continued on the left long after his death. Even before the Russian Revolution, Recabarren created the Chilean Socialist Party. During World War I, he pulled the numerous labor unions into the Chilean Federation of Workers, the nation’s first such grouping. In 1922, he began Chile’s Communist Party. Throughout his life, he advocated public education, labor reforms, women’s equality, and an end to elite rule. His most important achievement, however, was in the realm of labor consciousness, in that his hard life and numerous writings reflected what was happening to the Chilean workers, who identified with him. He suffered imprisonment and exile and the brutalities the Parliamentary Regime could hand any worker. In 1924, tired and fearing physical deterioration at the age of 45, he took his own life.59 The striking element in Chilean politics is that the liberalconservative struggle continued even as social issues came to the fore. There was a consistent denial on the part of both factions within the elite that much social reform was needed, and although on the eve of World War I Congress passed laws protecting women and children in factories in general, the laws were not enforced. Women made up 20 percent of the industrial labor force in Santiago, and their conditions remained the worst: low pay, sexual harassment, and no unions.60 Chile moved during the export boom from a presidential, centralized republic to a congressional, centralized one. Venezuela demonstrates what would happen when the boom arrived late. Regional bosses, who fought one another in a series of conflicts, governed the poor nation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the major figure was José Antonio Páez, a caudillo often compared to Argentina’s Rosas. After Páez, one could say that Venezuela consisted of dictatorships interrupted by civil wars. The country is large, but in the nineteenth century, it was not so much a nation as a series of regions held together by the simple fact that no province outside of that surrounding Caracas could survive on its own. Most of the population hugged the coast near Caracas and fanned out into the countryside. To the south of the major city was the ranching land


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with its llaneros (cowboys), once the ferocious arm of Páez. The nation spread to the west and south along Colombia and to the east against Guinea, and a part of it included the Amazon—all zones lightly inhabited or with no Europeanized people at all. The export that would transform Venezuela was oil, and its major site of development was Lake Maracaibo. But oil did not boom until the 1920s, meaning that the incessant infighting between liberals and conservatives raised the national debt, while barely beginning any civic institutions in the capital. During the nineteenth century, the coastal zone had switched from depending on cocoa to coffee as its major export. But coffee earnings could not play the role in this country that they did in Brazil and Colombia: the scale of cultivation was too small. The government became so weak that it was attacked by provincial liberals from Táchira, a coffee-growing state bordering Colombia. The region was tied to German merchant houses in a business chain leading all the way back to Hamburg. During the 1890s, German trade in Venezuela, financed by British banks, increased over 1,000 percent: Germany supplied two-thirds of Venezuela’s imported manufactures as well as designed and produced the country’s railroads.61 As is often the case in Latin America, the provinces produced the means to fuel national politics but had little say in government. It was a setting made for a provincial adventurer like Cipriano Castro. Castro had begun as a provincial political schemer, newspaperman, and convict. His life would be worthy of a picaresque novel. Born in Táchira in 1858 to a family of solid circumstances, he entered a seminary, but influenced by liberal political rhetoric, he plunged into his state’s internecine conflicts. In his mid-twenties, he was jailed for getting into a fight with the local priest; after serving six months, he escaped and fled just across the border into Colombia. There he married a young girl, Zoila Rosa Martínez, who would become one of the legendary political matrons of Latin America, the famous Doña Zoila. After two years, he joined an armed force of Venezuelan liberals invading the provincial administration of the state of Los Andes. He won two battles and was promoted to general. In 1888 he became a member of the Los Andes provincial administration in a land as spectacular as it was poor. He recruited a regional armed forces and provincial civilian supporters, and by 1890 he had become a congressman for Táchira, being thus pulled into national politics. He began forming political-military

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associations—in one he drew in Juan Vicente Gómez, the most important figure in twentieth-century Venezuelan politics. But Castro, at one point, supported the wrong caudillo and spent seven years in exile in Cucutá, Colombia, just across the border from Venezuela. In this isolated zone, he rebuilt his military forces, and in 1899 he launched one of the most daring seizures of power in Latin American history. He invaded Venezuela with sixty men, including Gómez, drew in more supporters as he went, and eventually took the capital, in part because the national army chose not to fight. The circumstances when he came to power could not have been worse. Coffee prices were falling, and Castro’s insurrection had reduced trade. The national treasury had little in it but debts. Castro had no real base of support in Caracas and faced a hostile public, which he alienated even further by doling out commercial monopolies (including a few to himself) and repressing any dissent. He staffed his cabinet with old liberals from Caracas but won over few of the capital’s existing factions. His morals did not help, because he quickly became famous for forcing girls to be his concubines—a practice his successor continued. He and Doña Zoila also held elaborate balls that included large meals of “turkey, duck and pork.”62 By 1901, he faced a rebellion, which cost dearly to suppress.63 He also eliminated many of his provincial opponents—whatever federalism he had preached to create a provincial army now disappeared in the rhetoric of national unity—but caudillismo was slowly dying in Venezuela. Castro’s major crisis came not from within the nation but from foreign powers. The nation’s debts became due and in a major change in its Latin American policy, Britain decided to exercise gunboat diplomacy and collect. One factor in its calculations was that Venezuela and British Guiana were in a border dispute over a zone that contained almost no trace of European settlement. Germany also wanted to collect on its loans to build the Greater Venezuela Railway, a financial albatross from the onset. In order to force Castro into paying, Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded its coast near Caracas (December 1902–February 1903). The confrontation led to one of the famous moments in Latin American diplomacy. The foreign minister of Argentina, Luis María Drago, issued a public warning to Washington in which he cited the Monroe Doctrine, claiming it meant no foreign power could collect debts by force. Drago got exactly the opposite of what he had intended.


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The United States, under President Theodore Roosevelt, refused to send ships to stop the blockade but did recommend that the international court at The Hague arbitrate the dispute. The conflict would involve the United States in another way, with disastrous consequences for the entire region.64 In 1904, when the court issued its judgment in favor of the creditor nations, Roosevelt issued his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. He explained that he did not want to be misunderstood and the United States did not feel “any land hunger,” but that chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.65 In his presidential statement in 1905, noting the reaction in the rest of the Americas, he added that his previous comments were not to be interpreted by South Americans as rationalizing anything “inimical.” There were “orderly” nations in the Americas, and all the United States wanted was for other nations to “be happy and prosperous; and they cannot be happy and prosperous unless they maintain order within their boundaries and behave with a just regard for their obligations toward outsiders.”66 Everyone understood that the United States was claiming the right to be the debt collector and ultimate police power within Latin America. Castro remained in office—in some respects the confrontation with foreign powers strengthened his hand in dealing with political opponents at home. Although the government remained impoverished, Castro became adept at crushing his opponents before they could act, an indication that no oligarchy had yet consolidated its power in Caracas. The one man he needed but feared was his subordinate, Gómez, who steadfastly refused to become part of any conspiracy against him. When Castro became ill with syphilis and left the country for medical treatment, Gómez solicited approval from the United States, which was only too happy to help. Castro would become a permanent exile, dying abroad in 1924. It was Gómez who struck oil (U.S. oil companies

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became his financial and political allies), another story that involves the 1920s.67 The Andean group surrounding Castro and Gómez provide an interesting test case of export-based politics. It had enough wealth to seize power but not enough to finance a national government. Nor did a coffee oligarchy emerge in Venezuela capable of forging control of the country—the nation was still too fragmented. But Castro established a political fortress of cronies and military men capable of stopping any other regional uprising. Absent a strong political party in Caracas, his opponents had no institutional means of recruiting lower-class support. Despite his geographic origins, his rise and that of Gómez has a Caribbean flavor. It is easy now to see the failings of the liberal oligarchies: their economic nearsightedness, their rapaciousness, and their contempt for their own populations. And yet, the era of the export booms would become one of the most promising in Latin American history. The fate of the natives and freed slaves was grim, but there were islands of progressive change: the spread of education, the extension of the franchise in such nations as Peru and Chile, and the creation of modernizing cultures in many of the primary cities—most of all, in Buenos Aires. One important marker of improvement was the growth in population. Had these progressive trends continued, who knows how the narrative of the region would read? Many turn-ofthe-century liberals expected an outcome different than what followed. Although they were not democrats, like Karl Marx they thought that Europe, particularly Britain and France, would provide the economic and cultural direction of their future. They were mistaken on several counts. The future of Europe itself was not what they imagined, and global power would shift away from Europe and toward the United States, a change with momentous consequences for Latin America. Their export-based prosperity would end with the collapse of European and particularly British imperial power.

IMPERIAL SHIFT The decisive events creating the long nineteenth century and British predominance had been the Napoleonic Wars. The event that ended the era was even bloodier, World War I. Just before 1914, Europe was enjoying a cultural and economic golden age


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characterized by elite excess, new architecture, new arts, new technologies, and most of all, peace.68 Peace became ever more problematic: new empires were contesting the power of old ones. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the British Empire were established concerns: growing economically but beset by rising nationalism within each. The British had a taste of modern warfare when they fought the Dutch settlers in South Africa, in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). A nationalist within the Austro-Hungarian Empire would assassinate Archduke Ferdinand (of the Hapsburgs) and set off events leading to World War I. As an outlier to Europe, the Ottoman Empire (based around Turkish rule) was falling apart. It was held together by an agreement among the European powers, which rightly feared that a conflict over that empire’s remains would lead to massive warfare. Three European powers contested the power of Britain: Russia, Germany, and the United States. The United States was correctly seen by the others as Anglo-Saxon, and as such, no cultural threat. The contest between old and new powers ranged over three interrelated zones: military might, territorial extension, and world trade. In it, the United States would ultimately gain superiority because of its economic dynamism and the size of its internal market. This outcome was not obvious at the turn of the century, although all major powers assumed the United States would join them in administering the globe. Each of the major powers had carved out its spheres of influence, and that of the United States was to be the Caribbean and Central America, the “American Lake.”69 The U.S. presidents and secretaries of state saw this area as an essential zone for the country. A foreign power in control of any major Caribbean or Central American state could use it as a launching pad for other imperial adventures in Latin America. North Americans could hardly overlook the aggressive imperialism of Britain, France, and Germany. As early as 1895, in Britain’s border dispute with Venezuela over British Guiana, Secretary of State Richard Olney told Britain that the United States was “practically sovereign” in Latin America. Thus, the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine rationalized an attitude that was already well developed. The corollary was often cited in an era of gunboat diplomacy—an era that overlaps the mature years of liberal oligarchies in Latin America—to justify landing the marines throughout the Caribbean and Central America. The combination of U.S. economic investment, U.S. bank loans to weak Latin American

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governments, and the U.S. desire to protect a monopoly in the Panama Canal led to turning Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic into little more than protectorates whose governments dare not defy U.S. power. The United States demonstrated itself one of the world powers by going to war with Spain. In 1895, a Cuban poet and political essayist, José Marti, began the second effort to free his nation from Spanish rule. The first had run from 1868 to 1878 and despite defeat, the threat of another conflict, with strong racial overtones, remained in the island. Blacks were an essential element in the armies of the 1895 rebellion, which quickly turned into a war of attrition. The insurgents waged economic warfare by attacking plantations and disrupting the island’s major export, sugar. Spanish troops and colonial royalists resorted to a policy of reconcentración in which anyone caught in insurgent zones was liable to being shot. Tens of thousands died of disease and hunger in these conditions, and public opinion in the United States began to be influenced by the new national newspaper chains of Hearst and Pulitzer. In 1898, the US warship Maine blew up while docked in Havana. The American public believed it had been hit by a mine or torpedo; the Spanish asserted that it must have suffered an internal explosion. The Spaniards did not want a war, but soon, inflamed by a belligerent press, U.S. politicians pushed for the conflict. The death of 260 sailors set off a public outcry to revenge the ship by invading Cuba. President William McKinley resisted pressure for war until he faced a Republican congressional uprising. The U.S. Navy began the war by destroying the Spanish fleet in the Philippines and taking that Pacific possession from Spain. This was followed by a blockade of Cuba and the invasion of the island near Santiago.70 The Spaniards, worn down by the prolonged guerrilla conflict and facing a much more capable fleet of U.S. ships, quickly folded their cards. Then, just as Cuban veterans planned a celebration in Havana to mark the war’s end, they were told by an American general that they could not do so. All veterans, most of them Black, had to disarm immediately. The treaty ending the conflict involved only U.S. and Spanish officials. U.S. historiography called it the Spanish-American War, with no mention of Cuba.71 The United States established control of Cuba and fastened legal conditions that limited the country’s ability to make treaties or tax American firms. Puerto Rico became a formal protectorate. Other


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expeditions soon followed. The United States felt free in the Caribbean and Central America to intervene whenever it wanted. In 1902, the army was sent back to Cuba; in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt engineered the “independence” of Panama from Colombia; in 1909, marines landed in Nicaragua and destroyed a government run by the liberals. Adventures occurred in Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti as well. Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated marine of his day, would write in retirement that “war is a racket” and that in his many incursions in the Caribbean, he had been “a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”72 The quote is a favorite among Latin American historians, not least because of its close relation to the truth. Until 1914 the United States had gained economic hegemony in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, but the British remained predominant in South America. World War I enhanced the U.S. position in the southern continent. U.S. business interests worked with the State Department to advance on a broad commercial front as the war disrupted the entire Atlantic economy. In 1914–1915, the opening of hostilities in Europe and a British blockade against ships going to Germany cost Latin America a significant part of its export earnings. Then, Allied demand rose and sent the price of raw commodities soaring. When the war ended, a general depression settled in from mid-1919 through 1921. As this panic-boom-bust wave of activity hit South America, New York and Boston banks replaced British merchant bankers on the continent. The British cashed in a major part of their South American loans to finance their war effort and never regained the prominence in Latin America that they had once enjoyed.73 The United States also began selling products to replace European and British goods cut off during the war. Once the United States entered the conflict in 1917, it also increased its demand for Latin American commodities. Two major differences stand out in the relation of U.S. capital in Latin America to the role that British capital had played earlier. The first was the size of business firms. Most British firms in Latin America had started out small and could not count on consistent support from their embassies, which were also small. The British with any reach into the government were the substantial merchant firms—Baring Brothers and Antony Gibb and Sons—or the London and South American Bank.74 They relied on embassy intervention

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only in a crisis. Before about 1900, American firms in Latin America resembled those of Britain. There were a few large ones, but in general, Americans were simply part of the foreign adventurers that risked their lives and undercapitalized businesses in Latin American ports, mines, and farms. The turn of the century had led, however, to a new stage in international business: the creation of the massive corporation.75 The first billion-dollar firm was U.S. Steel, organized in New York in 1899, but it was not alone for long. Railroads, mining, oil, automobiles, finance, and even bananas soon grouped into corporations dominated by a handful of American oligarchs, whose critics called them “robber barons.” It was their firms—the United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, the Southern Pacific Railroad, the Guggenheim’s companies, Ford Motor Company, Kennecott Copper, J.P. Morgan, and the First National City Bank—that invaded South America between 1910 and 1930 and displaced British and other foreign capital as they came.76 In some sectors such as automobiles, the British were well behind technologically, and so they never mounted much competition to Ford or General Motors. In others such as mining, the transformation was stark. In 1910, British firms such as Antony Gibb and Sons dominated Chilean nitrate; by 1930, the Guggenheim brothers controlled the entire industry in partnership with the Chilean state. The major new competitors in the 1920s became the Germans and Japanese, with the latter mounting a push in textiles. But all in all, just before the Great Depression, the United States controlled the major imports, government financing, and commercial opportunities in Mexico, Cuba, Central America, and most of South America. Argentina remained dependent on exports to Britain and tied to the British railroad owners, but it began to import considerably more from the United States than it exported to that country. U.S. tariffs against Argentine beef and wheat meant that by the late 1920s Argentina was counting on exports to Britain to offset imports from the United States. This became a serious problem for other nations as well. High American tariffs prevented Latin Americans from selling their foodstuffs or minerals to the United States. Only Mexico and Venezuela, with sharply rising exports of oil, secured any substantial part of the U.S. market, and American and British firms controlled oil.77 World War I altered the fate of Latin America despite the fact that no Latin Americans fought in it. The war would permanently


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destabilize the global financial system that existed before it, and the war’s aftermath created the conditions for the Great Depression and World War II. It also led to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, as czarist Russia crumbled from a succession of military disasters, thus setting up the capitalist-communist struggle that endured through most of the rest of the century. In Italy in 1922, the political career of Benito Mussolini switched from left to right and established the first fascist state. The successes of communism and of fascism, in turn, reduced the liberal democratic hopes of the transatlantic world as political factions deployed new strategies and political techniques that might bring them power. Little wonder that in the 1920s, Latin American thinkers turned away from liberal assumptions and began to discuss why the region was so dependent on decisions made in other centers of political and economic authority. But the region could only adapt to world conflicts that it did not start and influence the great powers at the margins. Liberalism would wane as a political gospel, but no other doctrine could be used as an alternative strategy of government. It was inconceivable that the region would return to monarchy or some formal aristocracy. Nor would the United States allow the adaptation of doctrines as alien to American sensibilities as communism and fascism. Even dictators in the region paid lip service to constitutional rhetoric. Latin America went on being a region of republics with constitutions but little hope of democracy.


CHAPTER 3

Revolutions and Modernization, 1910–1955 In 1950, the decisive elements in the cities were urban migration and new technologies. Europeans and people from other lands still moved to Latin America but not in the intense wave that had characterized the period from 1880 to 1930; they were not reshaping the racial makeup of any nation, although Europeans remained welcome in the upper and middle classes. Most migrants to Mexico City, Santiago, Buenos Aires, and other primary cities came from the countryside or from much smaller cities. Some moved first from a village or a small town to a middle-sized center, such as Córdoba in Argentina or Morelia in Mexico, before making the jump to a big city. In the case of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, a massive wave of impoverished and darker-skinned migrants came from the sertão, an ecologically devastated region of Brazil’s Northeast. With them came all the problems of the countryside: higher rates of illiteracy, malnourishment, and as a result of their desperation, higher rates of crime. One French specialist of Brazil referred to two nations: one modern, the other backward or even retarded; this specialist worried openly that the flood of the poor would destroy the modernizing success of the established urban residents.1 Latin American countries had used technologies developed in Western Europe and the United States to transform their own societies. From having been nations dependent on manufactures from more advanced economies, they were becoming or trying to become societies with their own industries. In part, this had become a conscious choice, a new model of economic development, national

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capitalism. Largely, it was the result of necessity. The Great Depression had interrupted Latin American exports to such a degree that the previous trade-based strategy had collapsed in a few years. Cuba’s dependence on sugar left it devastated, with a population so angry that it rose up against President Gerardo Machado and drove him from the country in 1933. Elements of the labor force seized abandoned sugar mills and tried to run them as workers’ soviets.2 In Chile, unemployed nitrate miners were warehoused in the ports at Iquique and Antofagasta and in the capital; in 1931, they supported the overthrow of the military regime led by President Carlos Ibáñez.3 Revolution and riot followed the Depression almost everywhere; in the entire region, only two governments, those of Mexico and Venezuela, remained intact from 1929 to 1933. This series of shocks forced governments to try something else—something not in the liberal economics textbooks—to revive their nations. No single strategy emerged, but all the major nations moved in three general directions: they passed new laws regulating commerce of all types; they tried once again to centralize administrative authority in the hands of the national governments, more specifically, in their presidencies; and they played up nationalism and national symbols as a means of undercutting possible opponents as unpatriotic. The commercial regulations moved Latin America into unknown waters in which domestic production would try to replace foreign imports, thereby increasing native employment and national savings. The administrative changes weakened the entire project of federalism, cutting state and provincial power to borrow abroad and to impose taxes or labor regulations on their own, and ending their ability to maintain provincial militias. The nationalist crusades took every form: promoting official propaganda and official histories; deploying the radio as a major means of personalizing politics and bringing presidents closer to national constituencies; and encouraging films, new buildings, and murals to depict the heroic image of each nation. The shocks of World War I and the Great Depression, and the general instability of the 1920s made leaders believe that nineteenth-century liberalism had run its course. Latin American elites had never been fond of democracy; their liberalism had always restricted access to the vote by the poor, the illiterate, and the darker complected. In 1929, the Argentine democratic regime of President Hipólito Yrigoyen was overthrown in a military coup: the cattle and grain

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barons united with the military to rig elections and prevent a revival of the open democracy that had existed between 1912 and 1929 as a result of universal male suffrage.4 Many of those involved in the coup and in the subsequent fraudulent regime openly admired Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy. But disenchantment with democracy did not always move to the right. When Ibáñez was overthrown in 1931, one of the short-lived Chilean regimes that replaced him called itself the Socialist Republic and attempted to change labor conditions and even mobilize workers into militias.5 The general disorder and social fears coming from the Depression led successful youths to look to the paramilitary styles of governance in Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union. In the 1930s, there were Golden Shirts in Mexico, Falangists in Brazil, socialist and fascist militias in Chile. A liberal, civic culture that might have opened its doors to new, social elements as educational levels improved was instead under a cultural as well as political assault. Some of the greatest poets, novelists, and painters of Latin America flourished between 1920 and 1950, and many of them were on the left. They spoke of their work as a counterpoint to the conservative mentality that still ruled everyday life, and they wanted a revolutionary break with the past. Even so, several progressive changes occurred in the midst of a recovery during the Depression and the substantial changes in urban life. In so many respects, the 1920s through the 1940s seemed an era of social hope, just as the trade-based era before it had seemed one of economic transformation. Latin America remained linked to the dominant world economies, and when the United States emerged from World War II as the major capitalist power, the region had little choice, despite its many misgivings, but to draw closer to the Colossus of the North. These decades were the years of a populist flowering that would transform the region. Populism is now a dirty word in Latin American politics. The region’s educated technocrats denounce it as a mental disorder, and the U.S. experts on the region treat it as a tragic turn in its political development. It is neither. Populism is fundamentally a politics of distribution, a view that the rich have too much and the poor too little. Although there are populists who are Marxists, these are rare; but when pushed, populists will open up with the language of class warfare, denouncing the native oligarchy, and with economic nationalism, denouncing the dominant foreign power in the economy—usually the United States.6

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As events in the first decade of the twenty-first century have demonstrated, Latin American populism is alive and an essential part of the range of political styles employed by the region’s leaders. In its original forms, populism was closely linked to urban mobilization and to the use of the radio and newspapers to promote a society that offered laborers a better life. Populists promised public goods—such as better schools, public housing, public medicine, and urban sanitation—while offering a social safety net of a minimum wage, paid vacations, and social security. They often invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal in the United States. They also emphasized that they were trying to knit fragmented societies into one nation: such different men as presidents Getulio Vargas of Brazil (1930–1945 and 1950–1954), Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico (1934–1940), and Juan Perón of Argentina (1946–1955 and 1973–1974) are the classic figures of populism. They shared many qualities with the liberals they rejected, especially the ideas that the state should reconstruct society, and that government reforms should be imposed from the top down and from the major cities outward to the provinces. They also, however radical their rhetoric might become, believed, like FDR, that a market economy was essential to economic progress. They wanted the state to gain a greater strategic role in managing the economy but not to end capitalism. Their efforts left one great impression on Latin Americans, just as FDR left the same impression in the United States: it was the government’s task to improve economic performance and socioeconomic opportunity. It was not right to let the capitalist market destroy the hindmost or to allow the gap between rich and poor to become an obscene contrast between mansions and shanties.

A DIFFERENT DIRECTION The populists came out of an era that economic historians call ISI, import-substitution industrialization. The era began with the Great Depression and ended in the 1970s, coming to its own crashing conclusion in the debt crisis of 1982. Too often, historians of every stripe focus on its problems, but here, the emphasis will be on industrialization as a logical outcome of the crisis that overwhelmed economies based on exports of primary materials. The growth of industry created the urban proletariat that Marx claimed had


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revolutionary potential. In Latin America, just as in nineteenthcentury Europe, workers who came together into the lockstep of industrial production acquired a different set of attitudes. Many also took up radical ideologies. It was the role and sometimes the genius of the populists to turn that radical potential into the basis of new regimes that would politically dethrone the oligarchies and bring their nations into the twentieth century.

CHILANGOLANDIA Anyone who had lived in the colonial era and somehow returned to Mexico City in 1950 would have recognized the central plaza— the Zócalo. The heavy, gray administrative heart of the Viceroyalty of New Spain still stood but was now the presidential palace. The tall, ornate cathedral remained on the corner—a massive reminder of colonial baroque influence. The city center contains the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (Plaza of Three Cultures), also called Tlatelolco, with the remains of an Aztec temple (an ugly housing block, unfortunately, represents modern culture). That colonial traveler would have been struck by the large number of street vendors, selling everything from clothing to food, a continuity from his own era. Women throughout the center still sold tacos—tortillas wrapped around fresh chicken or pork meat, chopped onions and tomatoes— and cooked their ingredients on charcoal grills. Men, women, and children ran around offering the passerby fresh, cut fruit—including jicama, a juicy slice of heaven flavored with lime (or chile). Cars and buses zoomed through every angle of the city center, spewing smoke. Only a small part of the population owned automobiles, and most rode the diesel burning buses. U.S. automakers Ford and General Motors shipped parts into Mexico, where cars were assembled. The city reeked of fumes, and smog obscured sight of the mountains to the south. The lake on which the Aztecs had built their city had been drained down to a few canals in Xochimilco, well to the south, and the boats in them were largely for tourists and for hauling some flowers. The city was the major site of Mexican modernity. Its rich had moved in the nineteenth century to the Paseo de la Reforma, built to represent the progressive goals of President Porfirio Diaz, and many mansions remained along its course. But the new rich from industry and commerce were moving south into what had been the city’s farmland. Trains and paved

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highways connected the city to outlying urban centers in the states of Mexico, Morelos, and Hidalgo, making travel from the capital to surrounding zones relatively easy. Cuernavaca, in Morelos, was already the well-to-do’s escape when the summer heat of “la capital” became too intense. Like Buenos Aires, Mexico City was a primary city; three times the size of the next largest, Guadalajara, in Jalisco; it and a handful of cities nearby contained the country’s major concentration of industry. It also had the nation’s largest banks, its principal cultural sites and best schools—including the National University, called UNAM, for Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The colonial traveler would probably have recognized the nation’s political mores, had he read a newspaper, but the organization of state and society would have seemed strange. The cathedral was there but the Church was no longer the cultural leader of public life. The government and its one-party state now controlled official morality. Within the city center, the natives were greatly reduced but made up a large part of menial laborers (including those vendors and a substantial number of women begging with their children in tow). Instead, the city center was filled with lighter-skinned men in business suits and women in dresses, nylons, and high heels. Whites and mestizos ran the city’s institutions and numerous shops, and the natives had been pushed to the city’s outskirts. Mexico City embodied changes that left colonialism behind. There were continuities in all societies, and those in Mexico, like much of the rest of Latin America, were strongest in rural zones; but Mexico City was the nation’s modern hub and representative of the future. The nation was on its way to becoming predominately urban—ten million lived in a “city” of some kind. Argentina and Chile had already crossed the threshold of having more than half of their populations in cities. This journey can move only in one direction; there is no going back to a rural society once it happens. Those with power in Mexico, even its landowners, wanted modernity, and the quicker the better. Of course, in Mexico as elsewhere, the rich and the educated feared the changes in social customs and sexual behavior that urban anonymity brought, and they called on the government to regulate public morals, prevent crime, and improve the young. The government was more than happy to do so and ran campaigns to clean up the nation’s film industry and its comic books (similar campaigns were being run in the United States), and to hold youth to a higher standard of morality than their parents practiced.7 Activists in


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these campaigns became alarmed as the popularity of Elvis Presley and rock and roll invaded urban youth culture in the mid-1950s.8 There had also been campaigns against gambling and brothels; the city’s police had since the early twentieth century been trying to apply the new technologies to identify and confine criminals.9 The transformation involved the rapid growth of the population. In 1910, there were about fourteen million Mexicans; in 1950, there were twenty-five million or about the same number that existed before the Conquest.10 Urbanization and population would undermine Latin American oligarchies everywhere, but in Mexico, oligarchic rule had already been undone by a revolution and the creation of a unique political system. The revolution began in 1910, and the major part of the fighting was over in 1920. The winners in the conflict wrote Mexico a new constitution in 1917 and then gradually established their supremacy until, in the mid1930s, they ran the country as a one-party state with a market economy. That party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), began in 1929, as the victors consolidated their political hold on the nation. It was first called the Partido Nacional Revolucionario—National Revolutionary Party—or PNR. Then in 1936, Lázaro Cárdenas reorganized the party to suit his populist needs and renamed it Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM); in 1946 it was renamed again as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which has been its name ever since. It was a civilian regime that steadily weakened the military men that had done most of the revolutionary fighting. By 1950, most of them were dead or too old to have much say. The major opposition party, the PAN— Partido Acción Nacional, or National Action Party—never held any major offices in either Mexico City or the provinces. The PAN supported big business, and it wanted to reduce the growth of government and government services, and to establish state recognition of the Catholic Church. Each party could trace its origins and development to populism—one in support of it, and the other in opposition. At the heart of the PRI’s political system was the president, who ran the nation and dominated the capital. As the real head of the party (which had its own hierarchy), he approved the list of candidates in every state. In 1946, the official candidate was Manuel Alemán Valdés, an attorney and once a distinguished labor lawyer who had become a party hack, like all of his successors. In 1952, President

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Miguel Alemán Valdés chose Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who was not a lawyer but had been involved in politics since the revolution. Each president picked his successor, usually the man who had served as his minister of the interior. The announcement of the official choice, kept secret until near the beginning of an official campaign, was called dedazo (finger pointing) or destape (the uncovering). There was never any doubt that the chosen one would win. Each president had six years to carry out his favorite projects, enrich himself and his friends, and promote those friends to the top of the party and the government. Then he would stage a destape, and the new president could remove as many bureaucrats and officials as needed to promote his supporters—a group called his camarilla or clique. These sexenios avoided the twin problems of most one-party states: dictatorship and an ossified bureaucracy.11 Although the nation was divided into states, effective federalism had ended in Mexico. The concentration of power in Mexico City also meant that the city took over the national agenda. To a certain degree, this had been true of the late nineteenth century—that is, national revenues had been spent on the capital out of proportion to the population in the city. That disproportionate expenditure, in turn, drew more migrants into the city, fueling further national spending on urban infrastructure and institutions. Every president until 1950, however, spoke of developing Mexico, and this hope for progress included spending more on the countryside: more roads, schools, communications, and so on. Although the rhetoric of the government continued to invoke the promise of land distribution, with a brief exception in the 1970s, such acts ended during World War II. Money was spent instead on supplying la capital with more electricity, extending and paving more of its roads, and improving its water supply and sewer system. Money spent on the states seemed an afterthought. The cycle of expenditures acted as one of several pull factors, drawing the rural folk into “the urban leviathan,” as one author called it.12 Mexico City had better schools and offered better life chances, with more medical clinics and greater sanitation; and it had also the good paying jobs in industry and urban services. The success of migrants from one pueblito would draw others from the same place and often to the same urban neighborhood.13 The push factor was simple: rural life in Mexico had always been harsh, and now, in many places, it seemed impossible. Migrants moved into places where the city had


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few resources, squatting on public land or rural areas near the city. These squatter settlements infuriated those who owned the land and frightened urban residents—a flood of the urban poor could undo all the efforts to make life agreeable in the city. In the 1940s and 1950s, Mexican police acted just like the police in Rio and Lima and forcibly removed squatters, seized the goods of street vendors, and did all they could to keep the rural poor rural. They failed but they never stopped resorting to such tactics. The political evolution of Mexico was unique, but its social unfolding resembled that of other Latin American nations. The rate of urbanization was an important factor in what happened to the rural migrants in each country, and so was the size of the industrial base. Aspects of Mexico’s experience are reflected in most of the region. The government openly promoted national industry, but industrial development never became the driving force of the economy. In 1950, manufactures made up 17 percent of the nation’s production, but commerce made up 31.6 percent, and services, 19.4 percent.14 This was still a nation of small businesses, small farms, and the corner grocery store. The government did little to advance the prospects of small farmers and instead built its rural programs around modernizing large estates. It did nothing at all to control a population boom. The combination of these decisions meant that an enlarging population put downward pressure on wages—rural and urban—and that rapid economic growth ameliorated poverty but left the bottom half of the society in misery. The social as well as economic distance between rich and poor increased—the rich lived in a different world, albeit one with many servants. But in 1950, it seemed that modernization was going to lift the nation out of its backwardness and hurtle it successfully into the twentieth century. Its politicians dropped most of the radical language of social revolution, heard so often in the 1920s and 1930s, and replaced it with the promises of development. The country was more prosperous than ever before. It had 626,000 industrial laborers, its largest number since the beginning of the country’s industrialization, and the economy was booming—Mexico was at the beginning of a “miracle,” as its leaders often bragged. The factors that pushed urban growth in Mexico City also appeared in São Paulo, Rio, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima. These main centers now offered salaries and public amenities unavailable anywhere else in their countries. They almost

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monopolized the meaning of modernity. The Chileans put this quite simply, “Santiago es Chile”—that is, “Santiago is Chile.” There was nothing outside of it. The people living in Mexico City—called chilangos, an uncomplimentary label created by other Mexicans— referred to the capital as La Ciudad (the city), as though there were no other. Others, looking at them, called it chilangolandia, a place of the fast-talking hustler and sophisticates who sneered at those outside of its environs. Most of Mexico City was still laid out in a grid pattern, with the occasional boulevard in a diagonal. It was the hub of the national railway system that had begun under President Porfirio Díaz (1876–1880 and 1884–1910), and it had the national airport as well. Traffic was congested, for the city had no freeways, but the streets remained navigable. The city was well contained within the Federal District, the zone set aside for the national government. The drive from the city center to the airport—then in empty fields—took over half an hour. But already, the city had the acrid smell of modernity— the result of fumes burned by its buses, trucks, and industries. Other smells came from residents burning their refuse and from the large number of animals—from stray dogs to chickens and other fowl being raised for food—whose waste was dumped in the streets. The official party and the national government controlled the city. The mayor was appointed by the national government; the ayuntamiento, or city council, formed in the colonial era, still existed but was dependent on the national government. From the mayor to the lowest urban officials, everyone supported the PRI, turned out to its rallies, and voted for its carefully chosen candidates. The PRI’s reach seemed omnipresent. Anyone who joined a labor union had to join an organization approved by the government and its official party. Any civic association needed to register with the government and so receive some official stamp of approval. Newspapers functioned under government scrutiny. The radio was strictly controlled—not that the owner of the principal communications network, Emilio Azcarraga Viduarraga, would ever offend the PRI. His business associate was the former president of the nation, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–1946), who had given Azcarraga a good deal of official help in the 1940s. In 1950, Azcarraga began broadcasting a television signal, and the company that grew from it, Televisa, is still the major media power in the country. The PRI also oversaw religious activities and maintained a strained


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but increasingly tolerant relationship with the Church, but the Church knew it could not support any social or religious movement that confronted the government. And finally, the party-state controlled business licenses, a crucial factor in operating legally in the urban economy. Industry in the 1940s and 1950s sustained an astonishing pace of expansion, 6 percent a year. The overall economy grew at about the same pace. In 1950 values, the overall economy expanded from 16.4 million pesos in 1930 to 39.7 million in 1950; industry made up about 13 percent of the economy in 1930 and over 22 percent by 1970—the year “the miracle” began to falter.15 The total number of industries in Mexico City rose between 1930 and 1950 from 3,180 to 12,704. Most of these establishments were small, having fewer than fifty workers, but the city contained massive establishments in textiles and other consumer goods, and it had a near monopoly on automobile and electric appliance production. This had created a massive industrial labor force of 156,000 workers, a substantial minority of which was linked to government-run unions.16 Industry usually huddles near major cities, but this tendency was reinforced in Mexico with government policies. High tariffs were instituted to keep foreign goods out of the country; industrialists also got tax breaks—to pave roads and to make other improvements—and statesubsidized credit. The party controlled the CTM (or Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos)—the umbrella organization of numerous unions organized by sector—by controlling its leadership. Only those who were charros (loyal cowboys) had a union career. Mexican labor has never been passive. Workers staged shop-floor actions that would explode into civic turmoil. In 1948–1949, inflation started during World War II and its aftermath provoked labor turmoil in support of higher wages; workers also wanted greater union independence from the government. Their efforts were brutally suppressed. The combination of union subservience to the government and the flood of migrants meant that from 1940 to 1950 real wages dropped 43 percent. Real wages would not reach their 1940 level until 1969.17 The rich now had automobiles and, aside from a slightly darker skin tone, resembled the wealthy Europeans of the era in manners and dress. For them, it seemed the revolution had never occurred. Contrary to the opinion of a famous American historian of Mexico City, the wealthy in the private sector got along increasingly well and

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certainly did mingle socially with government officials.18 Nominally, the wealthier businessmen belonged to the PAN and stood apart from the antireligious priistas. The PRI went on talking about how Mexicans should be faithful to the revolution even as they crushed anything resembling what it had happened between 1910 and 1920. The party members suppressed the efforts of Rubén Jaramillo in 1940s to organize laborers and farmers in Morelos—the homeland of the agrarian radical Emiliano Zapata—and when he persisted in the 1950s, they murdered him and his family.19 The rich of La Ciudad had their vacation homes in Cuernavaca, Morelos. They sent their children to the same private schools as successful priistas sent theirs. To accommodate their cars and get away from the pollution, the wealthy also began moving to Coyoacán or the even more exclusive San Angel, both to the south of the city. There, they had ample room to install swimming pools and tennis courts. Businessmen played golf with President Alemán and greeted President Truman, who became the first U.S. leader to visit Mexico. Private and public capital promoted a major new sector, tourism, creating a flood of Aztec calendars, embroidered sombreros, lacquered bowls, and clay figurines. The favorite “development” of the prosperous was the city of Acapulco, in the impoverished and largely native state of Guerrero. This mecca of suntans and ocean sports became the site where the rich of Mexico greeted movie stars and the well-heeled from the United States. In fact, the rich and merchant capitalists were developing a new economic sector. The net tourist and border trade rose from 21.7 million dollars in 1939 to 156.1 million by 1950, and 385.4 million in 1961.20 As inflation eroded workers’ wages, the rich secured their future as they always had, through land ownership. Some still had estates, but it was clear that the speculative future belonged to those who owned urban real estate. Below them was the middle class. A middle sector had existed in Latin America since the colonial era, but this phrase only denominates those who were neither rich nor poor. They were usually literate and in some white-collar profession; in earlier times, the priesthood had been a significant part of this social segment. So had doctors and lawyers.21 By 1950, one could speak easily of a middle class in the primary cities. It included not only professionals— UNAM spit out lawyers in record numbers, and these ran the affairs of corporations and of the state—but also a growing army of public


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and private administrators, clerks, small industrialists, owners of larger shops, etc. They and their wives dressed in a European fashion: the men in suits, ties, and hats; the women in clothing that looked as though it had been imported from Europe or the United States. Dress remained as important a signifier of class as it had been in the colonial world—what had changed, of course, was fashion. Laboring men and women dressed in simple clothing and both often still wore huaraches, the traditional sandals of the countryside. A woman in European dress, with makeup, nylons, and raised-heel shoes was obviously not of this class. The rich and the middle class created an audience for all types of literate entertainments, and the sales of books, newspapers, magazines, and even comic books were on the rise in the early 1950s. In general, the middle class did not yet drive cars, but they rented and increasingly owned nice apartments. Many were joining the rich in their move to the southern sections of the city or outlying suburbs. One of the key moments in the relation of the middle class and the government occurred in 1946, when the official party was renamed PRI and retooled to eliminate the military as a party sector. The middle class was included in something called CNOP—Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Populares, or the National Confederation of Popular Organizations. Like the CTM and the CNC (Confederación Nacional Campesina, or the National Confederation of Peasants), the point was to group middle-class associations into an umbrella organization the party could control. Thus, all class segments but the rich would “belong” to the party. This never happened. There were certainly middle-class associations in the party, but the middle class, especially that part of it that worked outside the government, tended to have little to do with politics, which it saw, correctly, as corrupt. It did have institutional strengths, including numerous societies and associations that were apolitical. Middle-class women remained closely tied to the Church, joining it in denouncing birth control and Tonga dancing, a craze that swept the city in the early 1950s and involved women with little clothing performing in night clubs.22 Its other middle-class anchor was UNAM, an institution proud of its political and intellectual autonomy, even though the government paid its professors and kept the university free of fees. Much of the faculty was part-time because the university could not afford a large professional core of teachers and because many professors worked for the government. No matter—its economics faculty veered

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to the left and included Marxists. Its teaching school produced idealists who wanted to continue the transformation of the country in literacy and in civility. The university often served as the general social conscience of the country. To all this must be added a growing list of distinguished essayists, historians, poets, and novelists who chronicled what was really happening to the country and parted company with the government view that everything was improving and the political order still drew its legitimacy from the radical agrarian goals of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, or the hopes for a true democracy of Francisco I. Madero. Octavio Paz wrote his Labyrinth of Solitude (El laberinto de soledad) in 1950, outlining the distance between public pretensions and social reality, and explaining why Mexicans endured this discrepancy.23 The work, though it had a greater impact in its day, is not as original Samuel Ramos’s El perfil del hombre y la cultura de México (Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico), written sixteen years earlier and to which it owes so much of its psychoanalytic interpretation. Late in the 1950s, the prolific Carlos Fuentes would scorch the nouveau riche and the middle class in La región más transparente (translated as Where the Air Is Clear)24, and in his masterpiece of the 1960s, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz). Paz and Fuentes became accommodating with the regime as they grew older. They were given ambassadorships (the PRI knew how to treat its intellectuals), but their criticisms remain moments of clarity. Juan Rulfo was even clearer. In Pedro Páramo, his protagonist describes journeying to a small village to find his father, but instead, he finds himself in the midst of ghosts haunted by what happened to them. This is the real Mexico. Although the work is not political, it is a parable of how greed turned a nation of villagers into those who have died under the brutality of a malevolent landlord or have lived by fleeing to the city.25 Unlike the works of Paz and Fuentes, it has lost none of its narrative power. The historian Daniel Cosío Villegas argued that by the late 1940s, the regime had lost all contact with its revolutionary origins; and then, in the mid1950s, he edited the multivolume Historia moderna de México (A Modern History of Mexico), which presented the belief that the decisive changes in the country occurred before the revolution, and that the governments that came after it built on the structural changes instituted by the regime the revolution loved to hate—that of don Porfirio Díaz.26


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Below the middle class was the mass of the city, with its own gradations of status. Skilled workers and laborers in the larger industries with ties to the CTM were far better off than the platoons of street vendors and day laborers that filled the city. This mass included many with some education, at a time when even a high school degree set one apart from all others. For all the talk of progress and growth, the mass of the people lived on a diet of tortillas, beans, potatoes, some chile, and occasionally some meat— often in the form of a taco sold in the street. Before 1940, most people in the city rented rooms—one room to a family—in tenements, called vecindades in Mexico. (In Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina they were called conventillos; in Brazil, cortiços; in Peru, callejores; in Colombia, inquilinatos.) After 1950, people camped on public lands or on privately owned but unoccupied areas and built “self-help housing,” or what we would call shantytowns. Such housing would evolve over time into complete neighborhoods—with paved streets, potable water, and small stores—but it always began with the simplest materials of wood, metal roofing, and even cardboard. These shacks were an invasion of the city with rural housing. It was only when neighbors acted together in lobbying urban administration or congressmen that authorities provided the city services. This was as true of Mexico City as of other locations. As the geographer Alan Gilbert notes: Most [urban] planners would probably agree that the distinctive characteristics of self-help housing is that it always begins as a rudimentary form of shelter lacking all kinds of service and is developed on land which either lacks planning permission or which has been invaded. The adjective “self-help” stems from the fact that the occupier has built some or all of the accommodation, even if some form of professional help has almost always been involved. The typical architect is the local jobbing builder or bricklayer, and the building manual is the advice received from family and friends.27 It was easy in the 1950s and 1960s to look at the urban poor with despair. The most famous American anthropologist of Mexico, Oscar Lewis, referred to them as living “in a culture of poverty.”28 The Mexican essayist and poet Octavio Paz looked at what was happening and worried that the Mexican was far too passive and

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accepting to deal with modern life.29 Looking back on the era provides a very different perspective. The poor were making a rational choice. Their children became better schooled, better informed, and more skilled laborers than those who stayed in rural areas.30 When cousins of urban and rural children gathered, those from the city were always taller. Far from representing passivity and hopelessness, a good many families would look on leaving rural life as the beginning of greater prosperity. Life was more interesting in the city. The city had movie theaters in numbers, and Mexican cinema was in its golden age. The country began producing films in the silent era, with its earliest productions dating to the revolution.31 In 1946, President Ávila Camacho exempted film production from income taxes.32 During the 1950s, Mexico turned out 100 films a year, most of them forgettable. But the Spanish director Luis Buñuel did some of his greatest work in Mexico in this decade, including his path-breaking portrayal of the abuse of street children in Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned) and El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), a surrealist masterpiece that hilariously dissects the new middle class.33 In the early 1950s, it had such stars as the singer Pedro Infante and the comedian Cantiflas—the Charlie Chaplin of Mexico. Cantinflas created the perfect representation of Mexico’s dilemmas, playing the pelado, a man of the lower class whose rapid and often nonsensical pronouncements got him out of one scrape after another. Mexico also had María Félix and Dolores del Río, international beauties who worked in Western Europe, and Katy Jurado, who worked in Hollywood as well as Mexico.34 There was live theater of every kind, from the risqué to formal productions of opera. Street life itself was colorful with its parade of classes in the Zócalo and the rest of downtown. There were bookstores galore. Everyone listened to the radio. A broad cross-section of the population mingled at horse races and bullfights. The poor still had their dogfights and cockfights. Professional boxing was a national obsession, and fights in the middleweight and lightweight classes drew interest from every class (as they still do). The country, especially in the north but also in Mexico City, had professional béisbol teams; many of them hired African American players from the United States long before they were hired here.35 The sport that drew the nation together, that represented the new culture of modern life and its extension to the rest of the nation, was the most popular sport in the world: what we call soccer, what


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the English call football, and what the Mexicans and other Spanishspeaking nations call fútbol. Students of soccer agree on its evolution. It is a variation of games that go back to at least thirteenth-century China. Its contemporary form began in the private boarding schools of England—schools the English call public—which emphasized sports in developing masculinity. This happened in the 1840s and 1850s. By the 1870s and 1880s, clergymen had turned to sport to instill labor discipline and provide an outlet for working-class emotions; a decade later, some soccer players became professionals.36 By the turn of the century, the game had spread to Western Europe—about the same time it arrived in Latin America. Latin Americans, when they first saw it, thought soccer part of a pattern of English madness: the British gentlemen who had come to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and São Paulo played it even when it was hot. Sailors and British working on Latin American docks also brought their style of less gentlemanly play. Soon after World War I, soccer had been an obsession in the immigrant centers, played by the upper and middle classes of Argentina and Uruguay—the major soccer powers of Latin America before 1950. After 1950, Brazil came into its own and has won the World Cup—five times. Mexico turned to soccer fairly late, after 1930, and has never been a power at the world level, but like most other nations, it follows its games with total passion. Its soccer teams were incorporated into an already elaborate hierarchy of associations administrated by FIFA—the Fédération Internationale de Football Association— which staged the first World Cup in 1930. Sport creates a multilayered identity in modern life. It establishes communities of participants and supporters who generally never meet one another. Because competition varies from the neighborhood team to national involvement in World Cup play, spectators can ventilate all types of feelings. In Brazil and Mexico, teams have recruited without much regard for skin color. Thus, sports seem to represent social mobility, but in reality, they don’t, because there are simply too few opportunities for most players to advance to any substantial income. In 1966, Mexico built the Estadio Azteca, which, with over 100,000 seats, has hosted two World Cups. Today, to walk down the streets of Mexico City during any national participation in World Cup play is to stroll through a ghost town—everyone is inside watching the game.

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The renewed Mexico had, of course, grown out of the old one. The country had always had a market economy; now it was increasingly based on national corporations, which enjoyed state protection and state-provided infrastructure and credit. The relative success of the economy also drew more investment from the United States— many of the industrial products of the United States were imported and assembled in Mexico. Others were produced under license from U.S. manufacturers. All this provided for the appearance and elaboration of an industrialized, urban culture with its radios, new televisions, newspapers, films, and endless array of cheap toys and much cheaper clothing. Yet, if one walked into the homes of the upper and middle classes, there was the other Mexico—the native or darkerskinned men and women working as gardeners, cooks, and nannies. This Mexico still dominated the makeup of the country. Lower-class Mexicans had more schools and often more food but the basic class makeup of the nation had not been changed in their direction, but in favor of the classes above them. Thirty to forty years before, their fathers and mothers had fought for a different nation, one that put the peasant and laborer first. Their parents had paid dearly in the effort, and it is striking how the government still used the rhetoric of that earlier era but fulfilled fewer and fewer of its promises. Had it been that the Mexican Revolution had never really been about the poor? Or, was it that it had been usurped and betrayed?

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION Mexico had a revolution from 1910 to 1920, the agreed-upon dates. The revolution had legal as well as social dimensions, and thirty years later it produced the Mexico City just described. The revolution was a watershed in the history of Mexico and of the world. It brought an end to the reign of don Porfirio Díaz and so stopped the possibility of oligarchic consolidation in Mexico, sending a message to other Latin American elites. It challenged the axioms of liberalism, political and economic, and so it was part of a series of rebellions and revolutions in the world before 1925. The rhetoric of the Mexican revolution’s leaders frightened the corporate chieftains and presidents of the United States. Revolutionaries and intellectuals tried to reimagine Mexico, its past as well as its future, and so they deserve a place in the history of struggles to improve the lives of ordinary people and to create a culture of radical hope for


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humanity. Over a million died in the conflict—in its battles and famines—and another million were never born. It was the bloodiest war ever fought in the Americas, north or south, and that alone makes it significant. In the New World, it was the greatest demographic catastrophe since the Conquest.37 It can be seen as the last of liberal revolutions of the nineteenth century or as one of the first struggles to attack liberalism in the twentieth century. Or one can argue it began as the first and ended as the second.38 It began in 1910, and when it was over, a great deal had changed in Mexico. Historians still argue over whether it changed the likely trajectory of the nation in the century that followed. It did not end capitalism. It did not end massive inequality. Despite its radical movements and radical moments, Mexico rejoined Latin America as an underdeveloped nation: its peasantry still desperately poor and exploited, and its rich still White and largely indifferent to those below them. The revolution began in the liberalism of the Porfirian era. Although don Porfirio Díaz presided over an economically successful regime, based on the Constitution of 1854 and to defend it, the liberals had fought the conservatives in the War of Reform (1857–1861); a weakened state left the nation open to invasion by the French, who then declared Mexico a subservient empire. Another war followed (1862–1867). When it was over, the leader of the liberals, Benito Juárez, was president and promised to establish free and open elections, considerable autonomy for the states to run their own affairs, and a separation of church and state—clergy were banned from appearing publicly in their robes—and he installed the civic rights of all citizens, who were defined as the general population. Unfortunately, the end of the war did not mean political peace. The liberals fought with each other in the 1870s, and in 1876, don Porfirio Díaz, one of Juárez’s major generals, rebelled successfully against President Lerdo de Tejada, denouncing his rule for failing to obey the constitution and, specifically, for intruding on civil rights and on home rule–or the autonomy of municipalities.39 The municipality in this context was not a city but more of a county seat and its hinterland. Don Porfirio defeated his opponents and was elected president in 1877; and then, obeying the constitution, he stepped down and allowed a good friend, Manuel González, to be president. In 1884, don Porfirio was elected president again, and this time he did not leave but amended the constitution; he was reelected every

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four years. As his successive presidencies unfolded, he became more autocratic. Opponents, many of them liberals, were physically intimidated and, if they persisted, thrown in prison or killed. Social movements of any type faced close scrutiny and then repression.40 To control rural banditry and political insubordination, Díaz drafted bandits and other young men into a violent police force, the rurales, a group that was relatively free to act without judicial procedures.41 The ley fuga—meaning shot while trying to escape—became commonplace. Díaz’s attitude toward civic life was summarized in the phrase pan o palo—bread or the stick.42 President Díaz owed much of his early support to the natives in his home state of Oaxaca, but natives fared badly under his regime. They lost their lands to surveyors and speculators and, if they rebelled, as the Yaquis in the north did, they faced genocide.43 Yaquis and other rebels from northern Mexico were sent into slave-like conditions on the sisal plantations in the Yucatán, a thousand miles from their homes.44 The Porfiriato divided the nation into prefectures, and Díaz, working with governors who were his allies, imposed jefes políticos (prefects) who made a mockery of municipal autonomy. They removed local councils at will, forced young men into militias, raised taxes, and enriched themselves by falsifying documents and seizing public and private lands.45 Díaz was widowed and in 1881 married doña Carmen, a Spanish girl in her teens. Doña Carmen was extremely religious and so helped restore the fortunes of the Church. The separation of church and state was retained, but clergymen came out in their robes, revived Catholic festivals, and tried to modernize their parishes by taking up liberal themes of progress. By the turn of the century, many liberals were furious with the regime but did not dare attack the president. Rural Mexicans despised what had happened to them. In 1850, the majority of them had some right to land; by 1910, only a minority did. Porfirio Díaz altered Mexico irrevocably. He built a railroad network—with British and then U.S. capital—that united northern and central Mexico.46 British and U.S. investment also modernized and revived Mexican mining: silver was once again Mexico’s major export. Oil speculators from both England and the United States found a major field to exploit in the zone near Tampico, and Díaz handed major concessions to foreign wildcatters. The idea became general that he was selling out the country; to counter it, Díaz backed off in the last decade of his regime, buying the railroads. One


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of his most famous quips was, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Nonetheless, he did nothing to harm foreign capital. In 1906, a strike at the U.S. Cananea copper mine in Sonora, Mexico, was ferociously quelled when the governor of Arizona sent a force across the border to shoot the strikers. The country had more money, but it became vulnerable to any downturn in the Atlantic economy, especially to any depression in the United States. In 1907, a panic on Wall Street triggered a general collapse of stock and bond values, and threw hundreds of thousands out of work. U.S. consumption of Mexican goods fell precipitously, and as the panic ripped southward, Mexican workingmen lost their jobs; and those who still had them had their wages reduced. The shock of unemployment and a reversal of fortune intensified anger toward the government. Mexican anarchists denounced the regime. They were imprisoned and sent into exile. There is no way of knowing what might have happened had Díaz been a little more flexible or even a little younger. He had strong financial support, and that might have kept the regime intact for a few more years. In 1908, however, he announced to an American journalist that Mexico was about ready for democracy. The announcement and his age began rumors and a search for an alternative. Liberals focused on Bernardo Reyes, a loyal general who was sent packing when supporters suggested he seek the presidency. An alternative appeared. Francisco I. Madero, at thirty-seven a relatively young man in Mexican politics, was the son of a major Porfirista landowner in the northern state of Coahuila. A little naive, Madero was a democrat who wanted an administration that was honest and obedient to the law. He ran for president in 1910. Don Porfirio warned him to withdraw, and when he refused, he was arrested until the election was over. The regime had a massive centennial celebration on September 16, 1910, with American journalists brought in to record the event. Don Porfirio received praise from all foreign quarters. He was reelected. While still in prison, on October 5, Madero issued his Plan de San Luis Potosí and called the election a complete fraud. He demanded “effective suffrage and no reelection,” the same slogan Díaz had used in 1876. He called for a revolution to begin on November 20. Madero escaped imprisonment, went to Texas and New Orleans, and raised money for the coming conflict. During his campaign, Madero had traveled by train through small towns in Mexico and was astonished at the turnout. His speeches

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often attracted thousands. He was not a social revolutionary and was reluctant to plunge his nation into a civil war. The men to whom he appealed were educated and gathered in Liberal Clubs; many, like himself, were Freemasons. Some had supported the effort to recruit Reyes; others saw an opportunity to step into the offices held by an aging cabal.47 Madero’s supporters were especially strong in a tier of northern states—Chihuahua, Sonora, and Coahuila—that bordered the United States. The states obtained their railway systems from U.S. investment, and Americans dominated their mines and some of their largest estates. Two historians of Sonora have called it an American colony.48 The rapid changes in these states left them vulnerable to the downturn of 1907 in the U.S. economy. Those changes had ruined many of the small farmers of the region, and a new agrocapitalist class now dominated those states. On the one hand, these states were the most Americanized in Mexico; on the other, many laborers, farmers, and miners resented how they were treated in this new economy. The Porfirian authorities had little trouble suppressing most of Madero’s gentlemen rebels but then found itself facing home-grown rebellions from small ranchers and farmers. In Chihuahua, a middleclass revolt joined with miners and ranch hands under a muleteer named Pascual Orozco and a former bandit, Francisco (“Pancho”) Villa.49 Madero’s pronouncement unleashed uprisings by young, rural men who resorted to looting and guerrilla warfare. Porfirio Díaz had neither the army nor the rural police force to contain the numerous ad hoc forces that called themselves revolutionaries, and that soon seized estates and municipalities. In March 1911, to the south of Mexico City, in the state of Morelos, a very distinct movement broke out. Its leader, Emiliano Zapata, would embody the demand of campesinos to return lands taken by sugar barons and other hacendados. Land hunger became an important and radical element in revolutionary politics.50 Madero’s plan did not include a promise of land redistribution, albeit he favored adjudicating land disputes. The spread of guerrilla warfare from the northern states already mentioned to the more southern ones of Morelos and Guerrero as well as strikes in Mexico City brought down don Porfirio. On May 9, Orozco and Villa took Ciudad Juárez, and soon thereafter, the Porfirian armed forces and Madero’s men signed a truce. At this moment, the dual nature of the revolution became clear to all: Madero wanted a legal, nineteenth-century turnover of power


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with the establishment of free elections; Orozco, Villa, Zapata, and many others wanted a social revolution, which, in many ways, defied the liberal canon. The latter represented the victims of corrupt rule that usurped lands, paid miserable wages, and left laborers of every kind with few prospects, even as the economy expanded. These two visions were irreconcilable. Madero had led the revolution and had the chance to impose his vision first. After an interregnum during which Díaz left for Paris (where he would die in 1915), Madero was elected president in June 1911. He attempted to disarm his followers, placing him in the hand of the very Porfirian army he had fought. Many of the social revolutionaries refused. Zapata resumed his battle and issued the Plan de Ayala in late 1911, when he saw no land would be distributed. Orozco, disappointed in his winnings and financed by land barons in Chihuahua, rebelled in mid-1912. Many of the revolutionaries in other zones went right on looting. Laborers in Mexico City and its surrounding industrial zones feared Madero a good deal less than they had don Porfirio; they staged numerous strikes to raise wages and change working conditions.51 Capitalists used the new freedom of the press to denounce Madero’s every move. American interests, led by Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, conspired with Porfirian military leaders to bring down the government. In mid-February 1912, elements of the Porfiriato—including Bernardo Reyes and don Porfirio’s nephew, Felix Díaz—attempted a coup. It led to a massive shelling of Mexico City for ten days. Victoriano Huerta, a general that Madero had trusted to fight Orozco (whom he defeated) and Zapata (whose forces kept him at bay) was entrusted with the defense of the government. Huerta, with Wilson’s approval, staged a struggle against the coup, then seized Madero and his vice president and had them shot. The second phase of the revolution began. Madero had increased the army to fight rebellions against his government. Huerta’s career blossomed as a result. The old general was now president. Although he has had his defenders, noting that he increased spending on education and gave labor some new rights, most authors describe him as a drunk surrounded by men of little character.52 Pascual Orozco saw an opportunity and supported the new government. In the north, Huerta’s opponents, led by Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila under Madero, called themselves Constitutionalists, invoking the legal concerns of the martyred president. One of Carranza’s

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lieutenants was Pancho Villa, who wanted sweeping economic and social changes. To the south were the Zapatistas, who demanded land and the empowerment of the poor laborers and peasants. They were not alone—dozens of revolutionary chieftains soon appeared. Huerta had a large army with little motivation; the Constitutionalists and Zapatistas wore his forces down fairly quickly. The United States aided the Constitutionalists. President Woodrow Wilson sacked Ambassador Wilson for his misconduct in having helped to murder Madero, whom the American president saw as a democrat. When U.S. sailors got into a fight in Tampico, Wilson seized the opportunity and retaliated by taking Veracruz in April 1914. Wilson allowed the Constitutionalists to bring arms through the port. 53 The eastern port was the principal source of tariff income for the national government; and to make up for the lost revenue, Huerta suspended foreign debt payments and printed money. Confronted by substantial armies, Huerta resigned in July 1914. (He fled to Europe and a year later tried to enter Mexico through the United States; he and his friend Orozco were arrested, and when they tried to escape, they were killed.) What happened next was in part a conflict of personalities, in part a conflict of ideals. The armies that had brought down Huerta turned on each other. The Constitutionalists divided, and Villa and his Army of the North split away. Zapata never trusted Carranza and maintained his Liberation Army of the South against both Huerta and Carranza. For one brief moment, Villa and Zapata became allies and occupied Mexico City in 1915. Had they been able to act together, the course of the revolution would have been very different. Zapata, however, did not see himself as a national leader and had no interest in remaining in the capital; Villa could not hold the city and maintain his base in Chihuahua at the same time. They both withdrew from the capital, thus leaving the single major objective that any revolutionary force had to control in the hands of their enemy, Carranza. Led by Álvaro Obregón, the most capable strategist of the civil war, the Constitutionalists took the capital. In two key battles, Obregón used tactics developed in World War I—barbed wire, artillery, and machine guns—to cut Villa’s cavalry to pieces. The Constitutionalists then trapped Zapata in Morelos and waged a campaign of scorched earth, destroying one village after another, until the Zapatistas became short of bullets and food. In 1919, they lured Zapata into an ambush. The hopes of many agrarians died with him. By then, Villa’s


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army was reduced to a guerrilla force, and Villa eventually surrendered. The hopes of northern farmers, ranch hands, and miners were now in danger as well. What remained was a mix of legalism and social aspirations. At a time of still extensive fighting, elements of the revolutionary movements gathered in Querétaro in January 1917 and drafted a new constitution. It remains the basic law of Mexico, albeit much revised. In order to undercut the appeal of Villa, Zapata, and numerous anarchists, the Constitutionalists promised workingmen the right to organize and to strike; peasants gained the promise of land distribution and of a restoration of parcels taken illegally under the Porfirian regime. Civil rights, including freedom of the press, were given to all. Localities were given control of their own affairs under the rights of municipalities. The document abolished Díaz’s hated jefes políticos and rurales. It limited the cultural power of the Church and provided for strict separation of church and state. Madero’s doctrine of “effective suffrage, no reelection” became the slogan of the new order and was stamped on every official document.54 Every adult male had the vote. Each president of the nation was to serve four years and could not be reelected; state governors were also limited to one term. Some of the constitution’s provisions were contradictory, but it was easily the most radical, general law in the Americas, providing for social as well as legal rights.55 How did such a progressive document produce a one-party state with the concentration of wealth and power so visible by 1950? The Constitutionalists put office above all other concerns. Carranza struck the radical American journalist John Reed as a cold, taciturn sort of man—obviously not someone of the people.56 As president of the Constitutionalists from 1916 to 1920, Carranza did little to help labor and, of course, killed Zapata as a means of suffocating agrarianism. When he tried to impose a successor, his once faithful commander, Álvaro Obregón, led a rebellion in which Carranza was killed. It seemed for the next decade that Mexico might again be plunged into an internecine conflict. There were military rebellions in 1923, 1926, and 1929. The Cristero War broke out between the government and the Catholic Church between 1926 and 1929; 80,000 were killed.57 None of these conflicts toppled the new order that Obregón and his handpicked successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, imposed. But they left the government insolvent, struggling to gain and sustain recognition from the

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United States, and unable to carry through many promises, however well intentioned. Insolvent governments have three choices: they can print money to cover their bills; they can borrow and hope to pay the funds back; or they can raise taxes. The Mexican government did a little of all three. The revolutionary forces had already printed too much money, and it took the government more than five years before it could scrape enough real funds together to start a central bank and so gain some control over the number of pesos in circulation. Until then, the peso fell regularly against the dollar, increasing the cost of imports and, obviously, making Mexico’s exports cheaper. Huerta’s debt default led to the creation a U.S.-led International Bankers Committee to press for repayment. Although there were some European interests on the committee, its chief leader came from the House of J.P. Morgan, and it was U.S. private interests that were paramount in these negotiations. As a condition for recognition from the United States in 1922—that is, for what came to be called the Bucareli Agreements—Mexico promised to pay its foreign debt, and it did, intermittently. In the meantime, Obregón and Calles were forced to resort to short-term loans, many of them totally inadequate to the government’s needs. One final possibility was difficult to carry out. Hacendados, threatened by agrarian reform and confiscation, were in little mood to pay more taxes. Foreign corporations could be extorted, but then they would turn to the U.S. and British governments and make Mexico’s relations with those countries even more difficult. There was one cash cow, oil. Oil had boomed during the revolution, and the 1920s were its greatest era (before another boom began in the 1980s); whenever the government needed more money, it threatened higher oil taxes and obtained oil “loans,” which were never repaid. The postrevolutionary consolidation involved an emotional exhaustion in which Mexicans wanted an end to the violence, on the one hand. On the other, those who might have opposed the new order, especially workers and peasants, quarreled within their own ranks. A million had died in the revolution, who knows how many had their lives disrupted beyond all recognition? The revolutionary caudillos found it harder to bring their young men out in any call to arms; the last uprising against the government in 1929 was a farce. People wanted some stability, but they also wanted what the government had promised. Obregón and Calles distributed very little


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land, but it was enough to keep people believing more efforts were coming. The government made a hero of Zapata, endearing his name to the campesinos. Once dead, he was no longer the predatory barbarian from the south, as the Constitutionalists had once painted him, but the embodiment of rural justice, a status he holds to this day. At the local level, campesinos fought one another as new claims were made for land. The government stood apart from some of these struggles and entered others as allies of the emerging, revolutionary bosses. As it did so, it won local and regional allies who had little choice but to support the national government that had helped them. The deal with labor was far more complex. To win laborers over during the revolution, including mobilizing them against the Zapatistas, the Constitutionalists allowed workers to form their own associations. They then suppressed the most radical, anarchist elements and permitted a shrewd, corrupt leader, Luis Morones, to emerge as head of the labor movement. Morones ran the CROM— Confederación Regional Obrera de Mexicana (Regional Labor Confederation of Mexican Workers). With government support, it became the most powerful labor association in the country, grouping all types of skilled and unskilled workers into its ranks. Dues from the CROM made Morones rich, and he spent lavishly on new cars, girls, and his cronies. CROM thugs enforced his rule. Railroad workers and, in many ports, dock workers defied him, but at their peril. Interunion struggles were nasty and lethal, and the agrarians also often turned to violence to settle their differences. Decent, ordinary people kept their distance from this type of politics. The postrevolutionary winner consolidated power even as the Great Depression unsettled other Latin American areas. Calles, the dominant figure of the era, was no more intelligent than other leaders in the region, but most of his opponents were already dead or in exile. In 1928, Obregón, having rigged the constitution to seek the presidency, won another term. This was exactly how don Porfirio had played it. Then a Cristero shot Obegón dead during a celebratory banquet, putting the government in crisis. Obregón’s supporters, hungry for another turn looting the national treasury, blamed Calles and, to protect himself, Calles did two things: Obregón and Morones had not gotten along, and Calles allowed Morones’s enemies to bring Morones down and almost decimate the CROM to avoid any hint of gain from Obregón’s death, Calles called a series of meetings and then an assembly to declare he would not run for

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president remained again. He proclaimed that the time had come to create an official party to institutionalize political order. The party, created in 1929, was first named Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR)—that is, National Revolutionary Party. It grouped dozens of smaller, regional parties into its ranks and became the supreme arbiter of elections. The 1929 uprising of Obregón’s supporters occurred anyway and was suppressed. A more serious challenge appeared in the person of José Vasconcelos, who had served as Obregón’s minister of education and who ran an electoral struggle against the official party. Vasconcelos charged that the new officials were simply replaying the undemocratic tunes that Madero had once opposed: they controlled the press, they stifled dissent, and their goon squads had made a mockery of elections. He wanted a return to no reelection in spirit as well as in deed. The regime hunted him and his middle-class supporters (many of them university students) mercilessly; he went into exile and any prospect of democracy ended in Mexico. Calles was no longer president but the man with effective power. The press made him a cult figure—the Jefe Máximo, or Supreme Chief—of the Revolution. The era between 1928 and 1934 is called Maximato. In that period, Mexico had three presidents during the new six-year term, each of them approved by Calles. Each had to cultivate his continued support, and failure led to dismissal. The Depression was in full force, and Mexicans suffered massive unemployment. The record of the government in this era reflected an inability to do much of anything: no more agrarian reform, little help for labor, and the incorporation of corrupt cynics into the party establishment. The government called itself revolutionary and always denounced the rule of don Porfirio. In 1932, it used the promotion of a “socialist” education to declare its still radical goals. The education involved using teachers to remind campesinos and laborers of their newly won rights and to promote hygiene, including sex education. The Church, landowners, and parents were outraged and did what they could to silence the school campaign— which included killing teachers in many areas. Overall, however, the government seemed to be biding its time. In 1934, a loyal figure of the Calles machine, General Lázaro Cárdenas, set out to become president. He had a socially progressive record as governor of Michoacán, his home state, but he seemed no social threat to the regime. He had helped suppress agrarian radicalism in Veracruz, and Calles viewed him as an old friend. He


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was well liked among the military men who dominated the government. Labor leaders and agrarian reformers looked to him for some changes. He would become Mexico’s most radical chief executive. His supporters controlled the nominating convention and succeeded. He did not need to do anything else. Instead, he went on a long journey, reminiscent of Madero’s travels, in which he met Mexicans in small cities and even pueblitos and reiterated the promises of the revolution. Once elected, he turned the emotions of a people loose: workers struck for higher wages and more powerful unions; campesinos demanded and received the most massive land redistribution in Latin American history; and middle-class reformers pushed for substantial changes in everything from the operation of schools to the treatment of natives. Appalled, the wealthy and even middling businessmen hit back to protect what they had acquired in the last fifteen years (or perhaps had never lost). The Jefe Máximo, in 1935–1936, stirred himself despite his advancing illness and demanded that all this stop. Cárdenas sent him packing to San Diego, California. The Maximato was over; Cardenismo and a Mexican populism had won. No one then knew what this meant, but the exhilaration of the Cardenista moment would last the nation another three decades. If he could not redeem all the revolution’s promises, he made a sincere effort. The Callista cynicism was gone, replaced by open national pride. Workers demanded a decent life and were not clubbed to death. Agrarian cooperatives organized so that campesinos had land and held it collectively in ejidos, which could not be sold. This was a sincere effort to prevent the breakup of native communities that had occurred in the nineteenth century. Their rural cooperatives also pooled production in the hopes of getting the best market price for everyone. Labor courts, established under Calles, now functioned with a more open bias toward laborers. The Confederación General de Trabajadores (CGT)—General Confederation of Workers—was a far more radical umbrella organization than the CROM had been. (The CROM still existed; Cárdenas allowed it to reconstitute itself in return for its support.) Of course, Cardenismo ran into enemies. The Church hated Cárdenas and all his works, and an incipient conflict between them always threatened to reignite the Cristero War (there were violent outbreaks in some areas). The wealthy called him a communist and attacked his social allies. Still, Cárdenas forged ahead, building new political coalitions and so centralizing the

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power of the official party; establishing roads, schools, and cooperatives on every side; and promoting everything from industrialization to anthropological research and the national output of films and entertainment records. Problems came with the mobilization. Leaders in U.S. business and Congress were frightened by Cárdenas, even though he compared his efforts to that of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. (Roosevelt, of course, often frightened the same people.) Internal contradictions abounded. The older conflicts between state and municipal authorities were not resolved; thus smaller, more radical municipalities often were snuffed out by more powerful state authorities. Cárdenas could not fight a battle for every locality, and localities began again to lose their autonomy as the regime consolidated authority nationwide. Workers could strike, but strikes raised the price of urban goods; and inflation then triggered more strikes. By 1937, the inflationary cycle and the conflicts attending it seemed to threaten all price stability. Campesinos received little more than land: credit was short and controlled by party bosses, who also ran many of the cooperatives; government was unable to reach very deeply into the more isolated zones of Chiapas and Guerrero. The natives were left, again, to fend for themselves. The defining moment of the Cárdenas era reflected these contradictions and helped bring an end to populist radicalism. British and American oil interests had dominated Mexican oil production since its inception. The major British figure was Weetman Pearson, whose enormous wealth led the British crown to eventually name him Lord Cowdray. He was a building contractor and oil wildcatter on a monumental scale. Pearson headed a major construction firm in England when Porfirio Díaz asked him to come to Mexico and build railroads and public projects. Pearson’s crew discovered one of the richest oil fields anywhere in the world, which he incorporated as the Mexican Eagle Oil Company (Cía. Mexicana de Petróleo El Aguila, S.A.) in 1900. From that moment forward, British, not American, interests prevailed in Mexican production. Edward L. Doheny was the most important American figure. He had made a fortune in California oil before coming to make another in the fields of Tampico.58 The oil deposits were on the southeastern edge of the country, in isolated zones; developing them involved killing off the native inhabitants and polluting the ground for miles around. Laboring


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conditions were abysmal. Workers and their families often had to drink the oil-infested muck around them. Segregation was rampant, with Mexicans isolated from the amenities provided White managers from abroad. Workers organized and struck for better wages and working conditions, but they repeatedly were met by goons and even gunfire. To ban labor militants, the oil companies enclosed labor compounds in barbed wire and mounted machine gun turrets to oversee the area.59 The strikes continued, especially inspired by Cardenismo. Another factor in the outcome of this battle for economic nationalism was that Pearson had died in 1927 and Doheny in 1935—the titans of production were gone. The oil companies themselves, worried about labor radicalism and falling rates of return, were moving more and more of their new investment into Venezuela. Finally, one such strike movement got a favorable ruling from a labor court; when the companies appealed the decision, the Supreme Court upheld the laborers. The companies knew that the president, not judges, decided matters in Mexico. They demanded that Cárdenas reverse the decision. Instead, he nationalized the fields, creating the single largest national oil company of its day—Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. This sealed the reputation of Cardenismo; it was revolutionary nationalism at its most ecstatic. When Cárdenas explained that the country would be forced to pay something for the oil wells, women lined up to donate their wedding rings. The Catholic Church said it was the duty of Mexicans to support their government in this moment. The right wing, organizing for the 1940 elections, kept its mouth shut. As one of his last organizational gestures, Cárdenas regrouped the official party. The party was no more democratic than it had been under Calles, but Cardenismo represented two important changes. Although the party had its own president, it was the nation’s president who made its major decisions. The party itself was a hierarchy in which party officers told underlings what to do. The PRN had included the military, the agrarians, and the labor movement; now, Cárdenas renamed it the PRM (Partido de la Revolución Mexicana) and removed the military as a party segment. Mexican politics was demilitarized for the first time since 1910. This was no small achievement, because one of the great tragedies of the rest of Latin America after World War II is that the military continued to intervene in national politics with ever more murderous consequences. For the rest, Cárdenas declared his party “socialist” and

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incorporated two major umbrella organizations within its ranks: the CNC—National Confederation of Campesinos (Confederación Nacional de Campesinos)—and a variety of labor associations. The left felt triumphant, even communists supported Cárdenas. Mexico’s reputation was such that the aging Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky came to live there in safety. (It was a mistake on Trotsky’s part; Stalin, the head of the Soviet Union, had his agents in Mexico City as well, and one of them put a pickax through Trotsky’s head.) The populist revolution had gone as far as it could. The government had its perennial financial problems, to which was added the costs of nationalizing the oil fields. Inflation was eating up the gains of the labor movement and driving peasants, who had no means of raising their corn prices, into destitution. Although the nation had backed the oil nationalization, the odds of doing much more seemed daunting. Cárdenas began to pull back. He stopped goading businessmen and made peace with the industrialists of Monterrey. He left many of the old, regional caudillos in place rather than push for younger, more left-leaning reformers. The agrarian redistribution slowed to a crawl. The United States had threatened retaliation for the seizure of the oil fields; Cárdenas then tried selling oil to Nazi Germany. Both sides backed off, and Mexico was allowed to incorporate its oil obligations into a more general debt; peace reigned along the border as the United States prepared for World War II. For many on the left, what came next seemed yet another betrayal. Rather than turn to his trusted and militant ally—General Francisco J. Mújica, a colleague from Michoacán—Cárdenas allowed the conservative segments of the party to pick Manuel Ávila Camacho, a man who saw some action in the revolution but was mostly a lawyer and party hack. Ávila Camacho moved well to the right. He declared himself a Catholic and so ended much of the conflict with the Church. He toned down any reference to socialism. He stopped land distribution. In 1936, he consolidated the competing labor groups into the CTM (Confederación de Trabajadores de México), or the Confederation of Mexican Workers.) He used the unions to slow down or prevent labor strikes rather than foment them, claiming Mexico needed a period of labor peace as the world war approached. His most important accomplishment was to become close to the United States. The war changed everything. Mexico could not afford any hint of cooperation with Nazi Germany. During World War I, in the era of


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gunboat diplomacy, Germans had operated in Mexico, helping this and that revolutionary faction in the hope of undercutting American influence in the country. The United States under Roosevelt took a more open and welcoming stance toward Mexico. The oil conflict was buried. The national debt was renegotiated and largely written off. When the war broke out in Europe and the United States became a silent ally of Great Britain, goods from Mexico helped sustain the flow of food and minerals to the United States. After December 1941, when the United States became a belligerent party in the conflict, Mexico broke off relations with Japan and Germany. In many respects, Mexico was more fully incorporated into the U.S. economy than it had been under Porfirio Díaz. Mexican minerals became part of the supplies controlled by the U.S. trade boards, set up to control prices and prevent hoarding. Unable to travel almost anywhere else, Americans came to Mexico, making tourism a major item on the Mexican national accounts. The melding of Mexico and the United States continued after the war, and the six-year term of President Miguel Alemán Váldez sealed the direction of the country for the next twenty years. In this era, workers and campesinos attempted to reclaim the national populism that had fueled their hopes in the 1930s. An entire generation had passed since the revolution itself, and a younger group of Mexicans had never taken part in the fighting. Still, the legacy of Cardenismo was fresh, and working people had put aside their goals in the name of supporting the struggle against fascism. What is more, the ideals of the Allied struggle had invoked, in Roosevelt’s expression, the four freedoms: of speech, of religion, from fear, and from want or hunger. Mexico had none of these things. When workers demanded higher wages to gain the purchasing power they had lost in the war, their efforts were suppressed and the Mexican government turned their unions into supporters of the party line. One of the union leaders wore an elaborate cowboy outfit to government events; from that came the expression charro for labor bosses, and charrismo for their subservience. The principal figure of the labor movement and leader of the CTM (Confederación de Trabajadores de México or the Confederation of Mexican Workers, which he had helped found, was Fidel Velázquez, who never met a president he did not like and who served as head of the labor association for fifty years, dying in 1997. By then, the CTM had become irrelevant to Mexican workers.

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Labor gained more than campesinos from the increasingly entrenched regime. Wages suffered the scourge of inflation until in the early 1950s, as the government fixed the value of the peso to the dollar, at twelve to one. But wages in urban zones were considerably higher than those in rural areas. Workers who had the good luck to labor in the era from the late 1940s through the early 1970s were well paid in comparison to small farmers or ejidatarios, had medical and other benefits, and acquired significant pensions. Many of them had solid lives, and they were able to support families whose children acquired a good education and were better fed, better clothed, and better housed than any other generation before. Nor were workers complacent, despite the servility of their leaders. They went on wildcat strikes and so pressured the government to meet some of their needs. Their relative success attracted rural laborers into Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, and other metropolises. In the late 1940s, the government had as ally the new hegemon, the United States. In 1945, representatives of Latin American countries and the United States gathered together in Mexico City to promulgate a set of common goals for the postwar era. The United States wanted all twenty nations involved (Canada, interestingly, was not invited) to agree to a common military pact; the Latin Americans wanted assurances from the United States that it would keep its markets open to them and help the region avoid any return to the trade problems of the Depression. The United States gained support for its goals but promised little in return. In 1947, once the Cold War began, the Americas met again and signed a mutual defense pact in Rio de Janeiro. In 1948, they met in Bogotá and created the Organization of American States (OAS), an organization that adhered to U.S. Cold War needs. We have come full circle from Mexico in the 1950s to the moments of revolution and back to a nation anxious to replace the anger of 1910 with the goals of economic development in alliance with U.S. capital. The victors of the Mexican Revolution forged a different market economy rather than a just one. This is not surprising. Had no state been organized in 1920, Mexico might have become one of those nations embedded in uprisings and coups. Instead, a group of military politicians and political militarists established a system that did not congeal into a personal dictatorship or an unchanging social order. Carranza, Obregón, and Calles had always supported goals of development, a stronger middle class,


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and a nation firmly rooted in a Hispanic culture free of religious dogma. The political outliers were not the victors of the revolution but Cárdenas, who dared to fulfill the social goals announced between 1910 and 1920. His moment passed, but it helped the regime portray itself for decades thereafter as revolutionary.

POPULISM AND THE OLIGARCHIES In a famous work on why some nations become democratic and others move toward authoritarian rule, Barrington Moore, whose left-wing leanings were clear, abandoned the Marxist thesis that proletarian labor was the key variable in political struggles. Moore, taking a clearheaded look at the brutality in the Soviet Union and communist China, focused on the relation between landed power and rural laborers. He compared landed power in eight nations, a simplification of his findings being that the route to modernization and modern politics turned on how landed power was broken and regimes came to include the participation of other classes.60 Those nations that generated a bourgeoisie to contest landed authority— such as the United States and Great Britain—moved toward industrial democracies. Those who did not, became either communist or fascist, depending on whether or not modernization arose from popular revolution or by administrative fiat. Moore never mentioned Latin America, a region that would have complicated his generalizations. Others have, however, applied his generalizations to the region because Moore recognized something about the twentieth century that many other scholars failed to see: fascism, communism, and democratic republicanism were all routes to modernity.61 It is too easy to dismiss totalitarian regimes as something retrograde when, in fact, various forms of autocracy and dictatorship are still dominant in much of the world, and tyrants cite modernization as their chief objective. The problem with applying Moore directly to Latin America is that the region’s nations are very different from one another in the pace of their modernization and the racial makeup of their populations. Moore’s ideas fit areas of Native American concentration quite well—zones such as Chiapas, Guerrero, Morelos, and Oaxaca in Mexico; the highlands of Peru; the Mayan highlands in Guatemala; and the nations of Bolivia and Ecuador. His ideas work less well in

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nations such as Argentina and Uruguay, which no longer had much of a peasantry in their periods of intense modernization. Another problem is that Moore’s thesis pays too little attention to contingency and to how the politics of specific events shape larger outcomes.62 Nor does he break down rural laborers into the many types of work that they perform and their own concern to maintain honor linked to local allegiance or other specifics of laboring identity. In Latin America, this rural segmentation is closely tied to race and ethnicity. Moore does warn that if rural society is highly segmented, there is little chance of a peasant uprising.63 Except for his discussion of the role of Britain in shaping India as its colony, he pays little attention to geopolitical elements—that is, how a nation is situated among other nations. Is it a great power or a small country? Is it economically dependent on another nation? Still, his analysis is insightful because of the central emphasis on the relation between landed power and modernization. The spectrum of ideologies is larger in Latin American nations than in the United States, and thoughts and attitudes developed within fascism or communism play much larger roles in Latin America’s politics than they do in the United States. Democratic and progressive elements within Latin America were urban, and landowners fought them throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter did their best to retard or contain the empowerment of labor, urban and rural. Indeed, they correctly feared that progressive changes for urban labor would sooner or later affect the control of the rural workforce. As we shall see, at midpoint of the twentieth century, first Bolivia then Guatemala experienced something like the conflicts that Moore found in Russia, China, and other “backward” zones. The Mexican social revolution evokes Moore’s comments about French capitalism and rural life; the incendiary response of Emiliano Zapata and his village supporters fits nicely into his observations on how modernization is a violent process and how radical peasants want land and control of their villages.64 Moore eventually distills his thesis into five requirements for competitive democratic capitalism: the central government (monarchy) cannot be too strong in the preindustrial stage of development, nor the aristocracy too weak; a political economy must create a commercial agricultural class; in doing so, it must weaken the precapitalist landed power; there must be no alliance of a “landed aristocracy” and a “bourgeoisie” against “peasants and workers;” and finally, a revolution must break with the past.65 Few nations fol-


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low a trajectory like this. As Moore notes, undemocratic societies have little difficulty creating industrial capitalism; it is the democratic aspect of modernization that is hard to achieve. The thesis here is that Latin America was never in danger of becoming overtly fascist or communist. The example of Cuba in 1959 is an illustration of political contingencies and a geopolitical setting, not of a peasant uprising from below. The region’s societies fought about mass politics rather than democratic politics. To understand the role of the landed oligarchy requires remembering that it was more than just landlords; landholding was an essential base to its power, but finance and influence over exports were also important. In other words, its members gradually merged into the bourgeoisie, fulfilling one of Moore’s dictums that prevent democratic capitalism. Nonetheless, there is a steady erosion of landed power as such; the rich had to diversify economically and ally themselves with other social segments to survive politically. However weakened, landlord power never disappeared and has not done so to this day, but it has been attenuated and altered. Every modernizing society must invest in human capital, education, and public health, and facilitate physical mobility. As soon as it does so, it begins to interfere with the capacity of landlords to control labor on their estates. The central vehicle eroding oligarchic authority was not the end of repression or the rise of the bourgeoisie, but the emergence of populist leaders (political entrepreneurs, if you like) in the cities and the velocity with which urbanization and demography changed Latin America forever. The case of Mexico served as a warning to the region’s trade-based elite—it could be overthrown from below. The elite that emerged from this revolution was not focused on the peasantry, but rather much more concerned with modernization and progress. Part of this outcome had to do with the increasing role of the United States in the region and to U.S. hostility to fascism and communism. Part would also be tied to the difficulties of forging any type of modern state in the mid-twentieth century. Modernization could no longer be based on a rural economy with several large cities, as was possible in the nineteenth century. Every state system had to increase the size of its bureaucracies and its militaries to an extent inconceivable in any earlier era. It would also have to centralize its forces. Latin American nations could generally not afford to build more than one major administrative and commercial center. The dynamics of creating

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trade-based capitals in the era of oligarchic consolidation (1880–1930) were reinforced in the period that followed, the time of industrialization. Why? Modern cities require massive infrastructure. Creating an electric grid and providing electricity to industry taxed even the strongest economies of the region. There was hardly a major city in Latin America that did not experience, from the 1930s to the 1950s, blackouts and brownouts when the grid failed altogether or limited availability of energy. Paved roads, sewers, and potable water would have helped rural areas develop, but they were rarely available to peasants, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers even in 1950. Governments poured infrastructural funding into Rio, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and so on. The costs of police, firemen, teachers, and other personnel regularly exceeded what cities could afford, and so the central government provided funds for them—in the major cities. Other areas received much less. Without such a concentration of effort, however, it is hard to imagine how Latin America would have capitalized any sustained industrialization. Industrialization and urbanization are not the same thing. Most decisively, Latin American nations could not capitalize from within. They could not extract the taxes or induce the savings required to generate solid government, the protection of property rights, and the extension of civil liberties. They relied on inflation, trade, foreign borrowing, or foreign investments even as they built their industrial zones.66 Latin American cities outpaced the growth of industry. Still, industry drew agrarian labor to one or a few major centers, weakening landlord power over labor as a whole. Between 1930 and 1955, a number of nations experienced a rising standard of living for an increasing percentage of the population. Venezuela, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1950 had the highest per capita incomes in the region and the smallest percentages of their populations in agriculture (33, 20, and 14, respectively), whereas the countries with the highest agrarian percentages—Brazil, with 58 percent; El Salvador, with 60 percent; Guatemala, with 68 percent; and Paraguay, with 54 percent—also had the lowest per capita incomes.67 Import-substitution industrialization now has a poor reputation among economists and economic historians. I have no idea why. ISI meant literally that national manufactures were to replace imported ones, thus saving the nation money, transferring the savings back into the industry, and developing new jobs for a growing population.


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As its foremost spokesman, Raúl Prebisch argued that the goal was to redress the poor terms of trade between primary products (ores, grains, and products such as coffee) with the higher value of manufactures. In a more telling observation, Prebisch noted that this was the only way that Latin American nations would develop the technical abilities to invent their own future and not always have to copy or use what more advanced nations offered.68 Prebisch’s home country, Argentina, turned this strategy to great success and became the only Latin American nation to make industry the driving force of the economy.69 The experience of Brazil was decidedly more mixed, with industry developing in Rio and São Paulo but leaving much of the rest of the country in rustic misery. Industry existed in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico on a fairly extensive scale by the 1920s.70 These countries were producing much of their own processed foods, cigarettes, shoes, textiles, finished clothing, and cement. They were behind Europe and the United States in the creation of capital goods—the machines that manufacture other machines. Much of their technology—whether in railroads, cars, or clothing—came from abroad, a point worth remembering to explain events after the 1950s. The jump-start to national industrialization came in 1929–1933, when the Great Depression reduced exports and the capacity to import anything. Domestic markets shrank, and the remaining consumers could buy only locally. Argentina abandoned many free-trade doctrines and pulled itself out of the Depression faster than the United States.71 The recovery of the American, German, and Japanese economies threatened to quash this Latin American advance in the late 1930s; then World War II (1939–1945) cut off trade with Germany and Japan and dramatically reduced the availability of U.S. and British goods. The Axis powers were blocked by the British navy, and after 1941, by the American one as well, while Britain and the United States mobilized their home industry to supply goods for their large armies. Again Latin American industry expanded. By 1950, Argentina had over 17 percent of its population working in manufactures; Mexico had 8.4 percent; and Venezuela, 7.1 percent.72 After the war, nations could not abandon a key sector. They resorted to higher tariffs and protected industry. They were rewarded with uneven growth, but growth nonetheless. Industrialization created unions and moved the center of political gravity away from older divisions between conservatives and liberals; the upper

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class in each of those nineteenth-century ideologies became more concerned with social pressures from below. Industrial concentration diminished the cause of federalism as well. The problems of provincial power were far from settled, but those controlling the primary cities now felt they could postpone them indefinitely. More than any other factor, outside of Mexico, where landed power had been driven from national office by the revolution, the oligarchies in the rest of Latin America succumbed to the rising power of cities and industrial labor. Cities paid higher wages and so drew the rural poor from the near feudal conditions that still existed on many large estates. Cities offered forms of amusement and personal freedom not found in the countryside. Estate owners in 1930s Chile still forbade newspapers for fear their workers would turn to communism. Tenants in Colombia still knelt by the roadside as the latifundistas drove by. Rural laborers who moved to the cities rarely went back. They recalled the indignities of a former life and this fueled disgust toward rural power. The term oligarchy became one of opprobrium throughout the region. Large landowners still had considerable leverage. They controlled food reaching the city—a landlord boycott could destabilize a government. Politicians struck a bargain: in return for cheap food to the cities, they would frustrate efforts to unionize agriculture. The divide between urban and rural deepened, and the countryside found itself economically, politically, and culturally on the wrong side.73

PERONISMO Workers in Argentina had been anarchists and socialists before World War I, and an anarchist streak ran through them well into the 1950s. The last freely elected government in the country was that of President Hipólito Yrigoyen, who won office in 1916 and opened an era of administration based on universal suffrage, one that promised a better social future for labor. Substantial unions formed in Buenos Aires. Elected again in 1928, Yrigoyen was too old and preoccupied with details. His Radical Party administration bogged down in bureaucracy and an approaching economic disaster. In any downturn in the world market, the prices of agrarian products tend to fall before those of manufactures. Much of Latin America began to feel the pinch as early as 1927–1928. As Carlos Díaz Alejandro noted, however, Argentina had ample gold reserves to ride out a crisis.


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Looking back over the previous twenty years, it appeared as if Argentina had witnessed a peaceful and irreversible surrender of political power from the traditional (landholding) ruling groups that dominated the government during 1860–1916 to the rising urban middle classes, represented by the Radical Civil Union.74 That assumption was an illusion. The oligarchy of the landed rich, the cattle barons, and financiers realized that, if democracy remained, they would never return to public office. They allied themselves with the upper stratum of the army. On September 6, 1930, General José Félix Uriburu, inspired by fascism in Italy and leading a pack of cadets, took President Yrigoyen prisoner and imposed himself as chief executive. President Yrigoyen was left to rot on a prison island and died in 1933 under house arrest. Ill, Uriburu died in 1932. To replace him, the oligarchy closed ranks around General Juan B. Justo, deciding they needed to legitimize rule with elections. Uriburu had already done a good deal of the dirty work, torturing and killing union leaders, but his crude rhetoric was hurting the nation’s image in key British and European markets. The Depression was intensifying. The electoral rules banned Yrigoyen’s followers in the Radical Party, and so began what the labor movement labeled the “infamous decade.”75 Rigged elections followed one another. Argentine cattlemen made deals with the British Board of Trade to maintain access to the British beef market; in return, the oligarchy allowed the British to control such key assets as railroads and to suppress competition from buses and trucks. Labor lost its right to strike and much of its unions’ treasuries. The return of economic growth in the mid-1930s revived industry but brought little to those who worked in that sector. World War II created a political conundrum, one shared by Chile. In the late nineteenth century, German officers had been hired by the Argentine and Chilean militaries to professionalize their forces. The influence of German military values remained strong through most of the twentieth century.76 Many Argentines were of Italian descent and admired Mussolini; the descendents of Spanish immigrants from the nineteenth century admired Spain’s fascist rebel and eventual victor in its civil war, Generalísimo Francisco Franco. But the army felt real enthusiasm for Hitler and was certain he was going to win. Neither Chile nor Argentina broke relations with the Axis powers when war broke out between Germany and the United States. In

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1943, when threatened with a loss of U.S. trade, Chile finally gave in. That same year the Argentine army deposed the president again and assumed direct power.77 The United States was convinced that fascists had taken over the government, and it was not far wrong. But it was wrong in believing that the Argentine military posed much of a security risk in the war. But the most dangerous social radical had emerged from the 1943 coup. The success of populists in Latin America turned on attacking the oligarchies and supporting national capitalism. They argued that they could provide a modern life without bowing to foreign powers. Populists knew they could not attack landed power directly and preferred to use taxes and regulations to diminish oligarchic authority. They concluded that the landed elite had merged with the bourgeoisie and that it would not be easy to drive them apart. They could, however, emphasize the importance of high tariffs to protect industry and so recruit some industrialists.78 And they succeeded in some countries in grabbing the nationalist flag away from elite interests. Within the framework of cities, they waged a street politics that resorted to mass demonstrations and the threat of mob rule. Finally, they promised a redistribution of income and wealth through higher wages, social benefits, and increased spending on public goods. The term populist had yet to be invented. It appears in the rhetoric of the rich only after the 1960s. In the late 1940s, the well-to-do called them communists, demagogues, and fomenters of “social dissolution,” a catchall phrase but one that right-wing media used to recruit middle-class supporters. There were populists who were genuine democrats, men such as Yrigoyen in Argentina and Arturo Alessandri in Chile, both of them appearing just after World War I. But military thugs could also sound populist themes: in the last throes of his Chilean dictatorship in 1931, Colonel Carlos Ibánez resorted to promising labor benefits; the infamous Rafael Trujillo handed out land titles in the Dominican Republic to increase his popularity in the 1930s and 1940s.79 Most populists supported mass politics rather than democracy per se; they wanted a mobilization of their supporters rather than an establishment of new civic norms. In fact, very few made civil rights an issue in their public campaigns. What must be remembered about populist electoral strategies is that a majority of the votes could often be constructed from urban laborers and the lower-middle class because the oligarchy could not muster more than a dependent minority of


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rural laborers; the upper class and the populists contested support from the middle class as a segment that might give electoral supremacy. Another factor to remember is that populists, like the liberals before them, were often wary of women, whom they feared would vote conservative if given the franchise. Nonetheless, populism represented an enormous step forward in political life: women did get the vote in many countries during the late 1940s and the early 1950s; laborers were allowed to form unions and claim benefits that were unthinkable a decade before; and industries were protected that probably would have succumbed quickly to the United States industrial juggernaut coming out of the world war. The combination of rapid urbanization and a surging industrial proletariat scared many in Argentina’s upper-middle class and its wealthy. A genteel way of life was giving way to one more brutish; the well educated were losing ground to the plebe. They could not believe that Juan Perón was president and extending his power. Nor could they understand how a common actress—his wife, Evita—had become a cultural icon. In a famous short story, “Casa Tomada,” Julio Cortázar described an aging couple in a large house with threatening noises. The frightened pair never go see who or what is making the sounds but steadily back away from the threat, boarding up one room after another as it grows closer. Finally, they corner themselves and back out of the house and into a street that is completely unfamiliar. Such was the fear and disbelief that anti-Peronists felt about events in the late 1940s. The story’s author went into exile in 1951.80 The greatest Argentine writer of his age, and perhaps the finest in the Spanish language from the 1930s to the 1950s, was Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). Borges wrote elegant poetry, wellcrafted essays, and short stories that mixed real events with invented ones, even combining history with a fictional future. He made little money until he went on reading tours in the United States (he was fluent in English as well as French and Spanish). He detested Perón for having taken his little library job from him, the one he used to support his mother and sister and to sustain him writing. Juan Domingo Perón was born in 1895, in the Province of Buenos Aires. His father was a farmer and he was probably illegitimate, a scandalous origin never revealed during his life.81 When he was still small, his family moved to Patagonia, and Juan came to know Argentina’s last frontier, where gauchos and natives still survived. Like many young men of modest circumstances, he joined the army.

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He seems to have had a quiet career aside from being caught as a spy in Chile and deported. He married and lost his wife to cervical cancer. He spent his single years chasing young girls. He said very little about politics during his army career. This was the only practical course to remaining in the army. The only inkling of his political thoughts came in the 1930s, when he bragged he had met Mussolini, a story that was untrue. One of the major issues about Perón is whether or not he was a fascist. We can say definitively that he was no democrat, but a man who wanted to head up a politics of the masses. Fascism is no easier to pin down than populism, but Mussolini certainly embodied an effort to give laborers a modern, national identity as well as to regiment social life around a one-party state. One element of fascism that Perón could never entertain was solidifying his support by waging war. Timing is of the essence here. Perón, like most of the Argentine military, expected the Axis to win and even to turn to them as an ally in South America.82 Perón tried to create a one-party state; his ideas of a proper social order evolved into a form of corporatism—that is, a doctrine that is opposed to individualism and argues that government creates an effective society rather than the other way around. He and Evita extolled the leadership principle and made themselves the center of personality cults. He also eventually resorted to censorship and thuggery.83 Indeed, a radical rhetoric derived from the social radicalism of the European right was easily translated into Argentine populism: economic nationalism, the laborers (the folk) as the real patriots of the country, and a projected masculinity as the key to Argentina’s dignity and future greatness. Perón and his followers attacked landlord power and the oligarchy, and peronismo made the working class a major element of modern Argentine politics. It would have been suicide to refer to his cause in terms that had just been defeated in a world war. He did appeal for military unity and multiclass support. But the major factors limiting his autocratic tendencies were that he had support from only a portion of the military, and most of the rich and the middle class were aligned against him. The closest group to a fascist wing of Argentine politics, the nationalists, detested him for having cheered labor.84 In 1943, he and other junior officers in the GOU (Grupo Oficiales Unidos)—a military lodge or fraternity—overthrew the regime of rigged elections, in disgust at what it had become. They turned to senior officers to run the government and picked General Pedro


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Ramírez, someone Perón could barely stand. As a result of conflicts within the military and particularly the U.S. pressure on Ramírez to break with the Axis, General Edlemiro Farrell, a friend of Perón’s, became president in 1944. Perón quickly became vice president—the position previously held by Farrell—minister of war and secretary of labor. Perón could probably have had a very high position even under Ramírez; instead, he became head of the labor department. He launched his career by enforcing labor laws that had been ignored by every administration in the 1930s. A strike movement—led by the CGT (Confederación General de Trabajo, or General Confederation of Labor)—had been building since the late 1930s, fueled by the brutal government antics of the early 1930s. The number of union members rose from 369,000 in 1936 to 522,000 in 1945.85 The number of strikes spiked in 1942 to 113, involving close to 40,000 laborers. As a result, wages during the war climbed back to their level in 1929 and then rose 25 percent.86 A decrepit political order had lost track of the social radicalism within Argentina, dating from the wave of anarchist immigrants and now affecting their descendents. It had paid little attention as rural tenants, offspring of immigrants and criollos, gave up being exploited and became urban laborers. It was once believed that it was Perón who gave them a political identity.87 The current state of the literature would put it the other way around: that he and the labor movement came to meet each other’s needs at that moment in history, as labor reached out for the political recognition it needed to consolidate what its strikes had achieved.88 Perón catered to a social revolution that was already underway. He reassured the right that he was anticommunist and pushed to purge the unions of leftists, his ideological competitors. He spoke with feeling about what the ordinary Argentine had been through. Pressure built within and outside the military to close him down. The task was not easily done, for the army was divided and Perón had the support of Farrell. He quickly moved up the ladder and jumped from secretary of labor and welfare to being minister of war and vice president as well. The war was ending, and the public demanded a return to civilian rule. While Farrell was looking for a way to restore elections, it became obvious Perón wanted to be president. He was despised by the oligarchy, most of the middle class (including university students and intellectuals), and major segments of the military, including the Navy. Finally, on October 9, Farrell forced

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him to resign, but that night, Perón gave an incendiary farewell from the labor building to tens of thousands of laborers. He accepted his fate, and he endorsed democracy and social change.89 It was his opponents’ turn to be frightened. There was talk of a general strike. On October 12, the government arrested him and put him on a boat. A series of tense days followed, and on October 17, a quarter of a million laborers came into the city center and faced the Casa Rosada, the presidential building. The Farrell administration brought Perón out to calm the mass, and in a rambling, emotional address, he did. He praised the labor force as Argentina’s true patriots. He and the industrial workers were now joined in common cause.90 A crucial element in the history of peronismo is, of course, his wife, Evita. Eva Duarte was born in humble circumstances, the natural daughter of a well-to-do farmer in the Province of Buenos Aires. When she was fifteen, she ran away with a hustler who promised her success in Buenos Aires. She became an actress, working in various vaudeville and radio programs. The life of an actress was assumed in Argentina to be promiscuous, and her many enemies always claimed she slept her way to success. When she met Juan Perón at a charity ball, she had achieved recognition in a radio serial in which she played a different famous woman each week—good training for the hysterics she would unleash on her “beloved Argentina.” They went home together after that first ball; he kicked his teenage mistress out and they set up house.91 This awakened little comment; army officers were not prudes. Juan and Evita caused trouble only when he began to impose her on formal society—that is, the one that included the officer’s wives. She became drawn to his politics as well as to him: to her, the future of her lover and her nation were one. She helped to organize the labor demonstration that freed him from arrest. Perón’s opponents never understood what was driving them out of their house, the political sphere to which they felt entitled. There were two simple factors: he had them outnumbered and he held the moral high ground. He ran in a free election in 1946 and won a solid majority. His party was not called peronista, although that is the name his followers gave themselves; it was named Partido Justicialista de la República Argentina (Justicialista Party of the Argentine Republic), and Perón’s extensive, often contradictory thoughts made up a political philosophy of justicialismo, a term he invented. It appealed to the oppressed—and much of the Argentine


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workforce was oppressed—and to economic nationalists. It bashed the agrarian and finance oligarchy that had ruled the nation illegitimately after 1930. The deals that the elite cut with the British came back to haunt them. A nation that was once proud of being the British ranch now despised its forced subservience. The elite’s policies had led to a recovery from the Great Depression faster than that of any other Latin American nation, and even more rapidly than that of the United States, but the ordinary laborer now saw them as exploiters and sell-outs. The recovery and Argentina’s intensifying industrialization sent production soaring during World War II, with the Allied demand for primary products. Thus, Argentina—a nation of Italian and Spanish immigrants with close ties to fascist Italy and Spain, and with an army trained by Germans at the turn of the century and so openly supportive of the Nazis—became rich selling food to the British Isles and their colonies. The British had nothing to send back except IOUs. Perón in 1946 took over a nation that had no foreign debt and, unusual for a Latin American nation, was flush with cash. The elite never thought of poor laborers as anything but cabecitas negras, or little black heads. The laborers, including many women in the meatpacking plants and textile mills, faced horrific working conditions.92 That abused labor force, which Evita Perón loved to call her descamisados (shirtless ones), became the backbone of Peronism. For them, economic recovery had brought little or nothing—they still had to suffer the daily humiliations on the job, the freezing tenements near the factories; and in a nation brimming with grain and meat, a miserable diet. It was Perón who assured them that government would now let them keep the unions and wages they had fought so hard to gain. He and Evita set up the Eva Perón Foundation within the labor office, and she ran the nation’s largest patronage machine. Perón’s enemies grouped into disparate entities, a fact that gave him the upper hand for about a decade. The elite had an ally in the United States, who saw him in fascist terms and could do little to help Perón’s opponents. The elite was divided because industrialists initially did quite well under peronismo, as the president raised tariffs and increased wages, which generated a larger national market for their goods. The middle class felt politically robbed. It had supported the socialists and the radicals, only to see progressive parties corrupted or suppressed in the 1930s. And now that an

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honest election had at last occurred, an obviously undemocratic militarist and his underclass had won it. Some members of the middle class, a minority, saw him as the nation’s savior from oligarchic rule and the political dead end of the 1930s. The Church was openly suspicious of Perón, but he struck a bargain with it, leaving it in control of schools and public morals. It demanded that he marry Evita before they moved into the Casa Rosada, and so he did. His opponents stumbled at almost every turn. The 1946 election against the Democratic Union coalition had moments in which the anti-Peronists gained ground, but at its height the oligarchy staged an elaborate banquet for the departing U.S. ambassador, Spruille Braden. Braden came from the American plutocracy created at the turn of the century, which very much like the Argentine oligarchy shared its interests in things British and the finer elements of European culture. He returned to the United States, became undersecretary for Latin American affairs, and wrote a pamphlet denouncing Perón. Thereafter, Perón created a campaign slogan: ¡Braden ó Perón! (Braden or Perón!). His enemies concentrated on denouncing him rather than on undercutting his appeal by making some gestures to the working class. As a result, the working poor had few alternatives. The anarchists, socialists, and communists lost what support they had to peronismo. Workers did not want to seize the means of production—they wanted a redistribution of capitalist gains. Once in office, Perón spent the savings gathered from the war. He bought the railroads, not a very intelligent thing to do because the lines were falling apart, but one that established his credentials as an economic nationalist: he had finished off British power in Argentina and unfortunately squandered a good part of British sterling earned during the war.93 The working class gained the right to organize, higher wages, paid vacations, public housing, and improved schools. They had something they had never had before: a leader who openly identified with their hardships and delivered on social promises. Their beloved Evita acquired a status almost like that of a saint. The musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the bad movie made from it, both called Evita, could have been written by a member of the anti-Peronist Radical Party. Evita, in fact, was hardworking and a shrewd supporter of Perón; she obviously loved the man much more than he did her. They came up with such ideas as the Children’s City, a place where working-class children could go to vacation


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camp.94 Having been born in poverty, her identification with the laborers, their wives, and their families was more than a matter of symbolism or manipulation. She dressed herself in black and spent hours handing out school cloths, apartments, and other goods to the labor force. Workers stood in line for blocks to get help from the Eva Perón Foundation (conveniently paid for by a special tax on wage increases).95 Whereas her husband modeled himself on Mussolini’s pomp and circumstance, she favored the histrionics of stage acting, with her arms and hands pointed straight out. But all of this was very effective. Once in office, Perón intended to stay. He and Evita put their pictures everywhere. He put his supporters in charge of the unions, and those who objected were silenced and imprisoned. He shut down the hostility in the University of Buenos Aires and censored newspapers, the radio, and films, deepening the hatred of the middle class toward his rule. The upper stratum of the military hated him, but he had rank and file support within the army, which made a coup difficult to imagine. He considered having Evita run as his vicepresidential candidate; at this thought, even his supporters deserted him and so he backed down. To assure a safe margin of victory against his Radical Party opponent, he declared a “state of internal war,” which helped him win 65 percent of the vote.96 His weaknesses, however, eventually ate at his support. He attacked the oligarchy by turning the exchange of trade goods into a state rather than a private activity. The oligarchy had always sold its beef and grain for British pounds. They then paid their workers in depreciating pesos. Perón took over this game and paid the agrarian producers in pesos and then resold Argentina’s exports for pounds and U.S. dollars—the state kept the difference in real value. The elite struck back by refusing to produce, an act of defiance that simultaneously undercut Argentina’s foreign earnings and increased the cost of food in Buenos Aires and other major cities. As early as 1949, beef production had dropped by 8 percent, and grain output by 31 percent.97 Nor was Perón much of a diplomat. Once he had constructed his coalition of labor and economic nationalists, he did little to broaden it. His conduct polarized the nation into a division that would outlive his government: in Argentina, one is a Peronist or not a Peronist—no other identity exists. He needed his wife more than he imagined. She contracted cervical cancer and died in 1952. Her funeral turned into the most massive

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public act since the protest to free Perón in 1945; she had become such a key personality that major Church leaders led the cortege. She had been the most powerful woman in Latin America, and although the region now has women presidents, none compare to Evita in terms of their emotional hold on the population, their social radicalism, or their institutional prerogatives. Never a feminist, she always claimed she was a loyal wife and argued that all of her service had been in that role and none other. Finally, Perón began to lose his labor base and reacted in a manner that allowed his opponents to topple his government. What labor had gained became threatened. He burned through the money won during the war and turned to the printing press to cover mounting deficits. Higher labor wages also meant that prices increased to cover them, eroding some of the workers’ gains. Had Argentine exports remained at a high value, Perón might have soldiered on, but a recession hit the meat and grain markets in the early 1950s, reducing their price just as agrarian producers cut their output. Somehow, the government kept going and balanced its budget in 1954, stabilizing conditions for an economic renewal. But the combination of previous policies had sent Argentine prices soaring, brought strikes, and heartened his opponents. Laborers began to back away from him. In 1946 at the height of his popularity, labor unions held 3,800 meetings, drawing 759,000 in attendance. By 1954, union meetings were down to 1,100 with 321,000 in attendance.98 Perón tried a new tack and waged a cultural war on the Church. He wanted to institute divorce and legalize prostitution, issues that were certain to push the Church into the opposition. The struggles became so intense that Peronists burned down a cathedral, and their demonstrations (and those of the anti-Peronists) turned into riots, with many deaths. The Peronist opposition united and recruited the military as its key ally. By now, many workers had become disillusioned by the raging inflation and civil turmoil. The air force and the navy tried to overthrow him in June 1955 and failed. Another attempt that included the army and took several provincial areas succeeded on September 16, 1955. He said, and there is little reason to doubt him, that he did want a civil war. Workers rioted in the aftermath, but to little avail. The Partido Justicialista and the Peronist labor unions were disbanded and lost their financial resources. The military tortured and murdered a number of activists.


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Perón went traveling into an extended exile. He found a new wife, María Estela Martínez Cartas who had the stage name Isabel as an Argentine working as a cabaret dancer in Panama. He settled in Spain, with the warm welcome of the fascist ruler Generalísimo Francisco Franco. Within Argentina, military repression sealed the political divide. Peronists could not vote for their own party, and they refused to certify the election of anyone else. The military ruled for some years, turned the government over to administrations elected by excluding Peronists, then returned to power. The Peronists could not return to office, but they were determined to make any other regime illegitimate. As governments came and went, the Peronist movement became fixated on the thought that el viejo, or the old man, would return. Unfortunately for Argentina, one day he did.

POPULIST FRUSTRATIONS Populism failed Latin America, or Latin America failed to generate a transformative ideology out of populism. For one thing, although populists copied one another—Perón had a major influence on the Carlos Ibáñez and Getulio Vargas presidencies of the 1950s—each nation had a distinct trajectory. Populism was, after all, nationalistic, and each leader drew on his own nation’s symbols, myths, racial mixture, and social structure to mount an offensive. For another, elites learned to fight populism by allying themselves with the military so that political coalitions now included military leaders. This, from the perspective of those descended from the turn-of-the-century oligarchy was a tricky business. Military men rarely came from the oligarchy; they were a class down. And so, any oligarchic-military alliance contained nonelite elements, many of whom pushed for social goods— better schools, highways, electric development—that generated changes a landed oligarchy could not possibly control. Population growth was not yet an issue in Latin America’s political consciousness but it should have been. Rapid population growth, in itself, tends to generate political instability. Too many new people (whether migrants or children) generate stresses on an established government, which cannot easily raise the additional funds to educate, acculturate, and induce loyalty to an existing order if their demands are to be met. Most nations in Latin America had populist political figures that did not gain executive power. Racial and class divisions emerged that

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could not be politically resolved. The point of political parties was not to win elections and so progress toward a democratic system, but to win the presidency and impose policies that ended the viability of other parties; in other words, the political objective was winner take all. The failure to redistribute key gains from new technologies and from increases in national product and productivity carried dangerous possibilities as well: one was a rise in crime; the other was revolution. The examples of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru are given below as populist failures, disasters that established civic frustrations that festered for decades thereafter. In each nation, just as in Argentina, a single figure embodied the push to mass politics. In each, the populist leader became strong enough to topple the oligarchy, thus forcing elite groups into alliances with the military and the undemocratic elements in the middle class. The results in each led to political stagnation and governments without popular support, or to open violence. The evolution of Brazil is also tied to populism, but in a different way than that of Argentina. A modified form of fascism helped Brazil to consolidate the central government’s control of the nation—and only then did a populist regime attempt to gain national power. Brazil remained a federated nation, with little but a common name holding its parts together. The Northeast, the old zone of sugar and slavery, struggled in backwardness and racism, whereas the regions of Minas Gerais, Rio, and São Paulo, became significant centers of modernization. The country had developed its interior to some extent, but much of the population still hugged the coastline and lived no more than fifty miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The Amazon ran through a region inhabited by people of mixed blood who had a few cash crops, such as the harvesting of rubber, and by natives who tried to avoid contact with any Brazilian authority. The nation was largely rural with high levels of illiteracy and poverty. In parts of the Northeast in the 1920s, bandit gangs of up to several hundred men (the famous cangaceiros) roamed. The most famous bandit of the Northeast—Lampião, who attacked people in a number of states—was cut down by police machine-gun fire in 1938. By then, São Paulo was booming and had textile mills, coffee-processing plants, and appliance industries—a modernizing city by any measure.99 These disparities meant that the verities of nineteenth-century Latin America persisted well into twentieth-century Brazil. In rural zones, landlord power remained unassailable—except by bandits,


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whom the landlords often hired as hit men. The First Republic, formed in 1889, lasted until the Great Depression made its economic base untenable. The regime of café com leite had been based on the circulation of office among the cattlemen of Minas Gerais, the politicos of Rio, and the coffee barons of São Paulo. When coffee prices collapsed to a tenth of their previous value in the Depression, the door opened for a rebellion against this very narrow alliance. In 1930, Getúlio Vargas ran for president, and as the coffee oligarchy and the politicos tried to fix the outcome, he rebelled. Vargas was from Rio Grande do Sul, a southern state that resembled Texas in its cowboy attitudes. He had support from a number of other states, especially Minas Gerais, whose unhappy leaders felt their deal with the Paulistas had been violated. There were also military reformers in his coalition. The rebellion was a bloody affair but limited in scope to a handful of coastal cities. Once Vargas came into office, he had to hold on to his coalition, a nearly impossible task. Unlike Perón, a tall and imposing military man, Vargas was stout and stumpy. He was open and personable, but many of his supporters thought he could be bent to their ends. It was he, however, who was the sharp one, aiding now one group, then breaking with it to support another. He kept the presidency as different factions won and lost official favor. He attacked the power of regional oligarchies and the old coronéis (the rural bosses) but imposed interventores (interveners) in place of elected governors. Finally, he banned municipal and state governments from acquiring loans from abroad. In return, he consolidated all local and state foreign debts into the national one. It was a masterstroke. Brazil could not pay its foreign obligations in any event. Should an economic recovery begin, it would keep local and provincial authorities from finding sources of revenue outside the national government. Step by step, federalism was being stripped of the power to sustain itself. The government finally abolished internal tariffs that state governments had maintained. The crucial moment in the age-old confrontation of centralists versus federalists came in 1932. The rebellion Vargas led had been against an attempt by Paulistas to dominate the national government; it was successful but left the nation’s most powerful zone angry and fearful. Then, Vargas became clumsy and had an interventor take over the state’s Coffee Institute, a move certain to infuriate not only the coffee barons but the politically active

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population.100 The state of São Paulo had a militia as large as the national army and an air force superior to the one run out of Rio de Janeiro. The Paulistas also believed they had allies in other zones as angry at Vargas for the appointment of interventores as they were. When the other states decided not to fight, the Paulistas went it alone. Some 30,000 died in the short-lived rebellion, and although Vargas did his best to make peace, São Paulo became a permanent base of anti-Vargas and anticentralist opinion. Vargas allowed state governments to tax their exports as a source of revenue, whereas the central government taxed imports. The only states that gained from this measure were already rich: Minas Gerais and São Paulo. No other state had enough exports to avoid fiscal dependence on the national government.101 In 1934, under pressure to institutionalize political power, he and his supporters established a new constitutional government and he won election as president. The document seemed liberal enough: it gave women the vote, enfranchised everyone over eighteen, and required that citizens exercise their suffrage. There was one small blemish: just as in 1891, no illiterate could vote, and so the electorate was limited to two million people. Only 5.7 percent of the population voted in 1934.102 Even so, important changes were under way. In Rio de Janeiro, an openly populist candidate, with Vargas’s support, ran for and was elected mayor. Pedro Ernesto, who called himself “the generous doctor,” visited the favelas (shantytowns) and helped residents gain public goods in exchange for their votes.103 The impediment to any populist program in Brazil was race, and this to a much greater degree than in Argentina. Mobilizing the poor meant inciting Blacks to claim some share of the national product and provoking fears far below those of the elites. The middle class also feared racial change. Blacks had already formed a Black Front, and they became enthusiastic about the president; but once he had their support, he delivered no specific laws to help them, and their front crumbled in 1938.104 Although the political class was small, it had a broad ideological spectrum. In 1922, in frustration at the corruption and backwardness of the First Republic, a group of lieutenants (tenentes) rebelled in Rio, São Paulo, and other cities. Their act was suppressed, and they gathered together in a march into the nation’s interior all the way to Bolivia. Their leader was Luis Carlos Prestes. The tenentes were seen as heroes against the old order, and Vargas


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drew upon some of them to become his interventores. Prestes’s anger never cooled, and he eventually became the leader of the Brazilian communists. On the other side of the spectrum, Brazil also had those who wanted a regime along the lines of the Fascists and Nazis. The head of this faction, called Integralist, was Plínio Salgado. These two groups often had street battles in the country’s major cities in 1934. Vargas was drawn to each of them because their members were middle-class youths who represented, in the paramilitary style of the day, the demand for modernization. He even gave Prestes money at one point. Finally, he had to choose between further confrontations with the agrarian oligarchies or the suppression of the left. In 1935, he passed a national-security act that banned left-wing parties; and in an ill-advised reaction, prompted by a Moscow agent, the communists rebelled. They were brutally put down, tortured, and imprisoned for years. Prestes lost his wife, a German Jew, who was deported and died in a Nazi camp. He was not released from prison until 1945. Some of his colleagues were beaten into madness.105 Vargas now had a secret-police apparatus, with torture chambers, and a willingness to be vicious with his opponents.106 The rise of the Integralists seemed a perfect fit for the New State. Salgado drew strong support from the descendents of Italian and German immigrants. Their hand seemed further strengthened when Vargas, worried that he would not be elected, proclaimed that a communist plot threatened Brazil and instituted a ninety-day state of siege. His strategy—in later Latin American jargon, an autogolpe, or self-coup—resembled that of Hitler in establishing the Nazi dictatorship a few years before. Like Hitler’s, Vargas’s tactic worked and gained the full approval of the Integralists. Thus, in 1937, began the Estado Novo, or New State. In 1938, Vargas decreed an end to all political parties. Salgado, faced with political limbo, rebelled, and the Integralists were put down. At this point, Vargas’s domestic hopes of modernizing the nation acquired foreign help. German Brazilians were a powerful ethnic group in the country—so much so that they ran their own public schools. As the United States looked at the political rise of the Integralists, the cultural strength of the Germans, and the obviously fascist model of the New State, it pressured Vargas to turn away from such adventures or face economic retaliation. In a move that would shape Brazil’s economy for the rest of the century, Vargas tied his nation’s future to the world’s greatest consumer of coffee as it

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prepared for the coming war. To do it, he had to end the formal influence of Germans in Brazil. He distanced himself from the Nazis, shut down the small Nazi party within the country, and even banned the teaching of German as a primary language in any Brazilian school.107 It was this alliance that drove Brazil’s economic development. Brazil, as a nation, had no populist movement. Vargas emphasized economic nationalism and a future greatness. The government and Brazilian entrepreneurs used U.S. technology and capital to create a more dynamic, industrialized economy—an interesting twist on the dependency thesis that foreign capital always debilitates the weaker partner. He built massive steel works and cement plants; industrialists in São Paulo and Rio made patent deals with American corporations to produce appliances and other durable goods. Vargas became so cooperative during the war that he sent a token army force to fight in Italy. Brazil always had the largest population in Latin America, but its economy had lagged in underdevelopment. However, by the 1950s, its gross domestic product reached the level of a much more sophisticated Argentina; thereafter, there was no comparison, as Brazil’s manufacturing moved into high gear. It was only as that industrial plant reached a certain size that populist politics became possible— that is, during and after the 1950s—but Vargas launched the nation in that direction. Although Vargas made ample use of the radio and had broad respect within the general population, many factions in Brazil saw him as a dictator rather than a modernizer. His policies increased the size of an industrial labor force, but union activity was carefully circumscribed. The middle class increased its income and size but resented the cultural backwardness and censorship of the New State. The army, as nationalist as the president, was happy and it became his strongest supporter. He did nothing to offend the Church. The old land barons in the Northeast and other underdeveloped, rural zones retained control of their populations, although even provincial cities began to consider development a priority. Salvador, in Bahia, for example, began spending funds to attract tourists.108 Once the war was over, Brazil was caught up in the same democratic fervor as much of the rest of the region: the New State ended, Vargas left office, and elections began. And yet, Brazil was changing profoundly. Links to the United States brought consumer fantasies that questioned whatever seemed


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quaint or backward. The most famous Brazilian in the United States was not Vargas, whom hardly anyone would have recognized, but Carmen Miranda, a leading figure in musicals. She was born in Portugal and began her career as a singer in Brazil, then became famous in Hollywood. She was, after coffee, Brazil’s most renowned export. Miranda was short, perky, and dark haired, she had an infectious wink and a skin tone just a shade darker than that of U.S. movie actresses. Her outfits were always garish—dresses or skirts that no respectable Brazilian woman would have worn. She wore high platform shoes, a skirt that was slit up near the waistline, and a blouse that buttoned across the breasts to reveal a pretty neck and a narrow waist. She often wore large bandannas on her head, and in one famous dance number she had a massive headdress made up of bananas. She was never the lead actress but always added “color” to any film. She was sexy and did a wild samba or mambo, depending on the script. 109 Contrary to what one might think, Brazilians loved this stereotype of themselves. Indeed, how was Brazil to project itself into a non-Catholic world? It had to sell fun, and so it toned down its Catholicism and packaged exotic sexuality for its tourist possibilities. This meant that, à la Ms. Miranda, it presented itself as something far more sensual, “natural and primitive” than the reserved Americans to the north. Within Brazil, a fascinating change took place. All the evidence to the contrary, the nation began to see itself as a “racial democracy,” following Gilberto Freyre’s thesis that Whites in Brazil were less racist than those in North America, and Brazilians began to believe they had created a more open society. Blacks had begun “samba schools” in the early twentieth century to compete in dancing and elaborate costumes with one another during the holiday season just before Lent. The celebrations were loaded with an inversion of power in which the rich and prominent were taunted; they also contained invocations of spirits derived from African practices. As the prospects for tourism improved, White investors took over the schools, emptied them of their religious connotations, and promoted Carnival as a “national” festival. The Church had always denounced samba as degenerate, hedonistic, and provocative. By the 1950s, it was the national dance. All of this did not mean that Blacks gained cultural power in Brazil, but rather that the blackness of Brazil’s origins could no longer be denied and that it could, in White hands, turn a profit. Peddling the sexually

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exotic turned into a gold mine, and Carnival created a Brazilian image around the world.110 Profound social changes were under way. The development of electricity and cement plants, the production of washing machines, and the assembling of automobiles had left most of Brazil—dark skinned and illiterate—untouched. The rural poor began in the 1930s—just as they did in Argentina, Mexico, and the United States—to move to developing zones in record numbers. In Argentina, they moved to Buenos Aires. In Mexico, they went to the capital or the United States. In the United States, they moved to the North, Midwest, West and Southwest. In Brazil, they left the miseries of the Northeast and traveled to Rio or São Paulo—the trek was often by foot, and many never made it. As Josué de Castro put it, in parts of the interior, the infant mortality rate was 50 percent. “Man’s dying rather than his living stands out in the Northeast. Death is such a pervasive presence that in some towns in the interior the cemetery is the most attractive spot in the community.”111 When they did reach the booming cities, they built favelas on the edges of the modern sector or on the unwanted hills of Rio. By the 1950s, the modern fear of two cultures—one civilized, one primitive and threatening—was complete. At the end of World War II, the civilized Brazil, including the military, believed that Vargas had outlived his era. There were too many overtones of fascism; his close cooperation with the United States notwithstanding, the U.S. government was not sorry to see him go. Another constitution was written in 1945; an anti-Vargas figure was elected in 1946. The story was not over. In 1950, Vargas ran for the presidency and was elected. He had paid attention to developments in Argentina and campaigned for office raising issues of social (not racial) justice. The outcome shocked the Brazilian upper class—both the nouveau riche and the old landowners. It infuriated the modernizing middle class and raised class fears along a broad political spectrum. Vargas, who had always liked his people and wanted them to like him, was now a populist—the friend of labor. He created a noble agenda to help labor, fight illiteracy, and create a social infrastructure to parallel his economic nationalist achievements. He could no longer do, however, as he liked. As president of an elected government, he faced formidable opposition in Congress and open hostility from a capitalist press that had its economic center in São Paulo. The campaign against him was


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effective. He found out that helping labor was expensive; and just like in Perón’s Argentina, raising wages helped fuel an inflationary spiral. The cost of living doubled while he was president.112 The conflicts between labor unions and industrialists came to resemble class warfare. Brazilian governments were corrupt—Vargas’s was no exception. A scandal in 1954 involving his police guard brought him to the end, but instead of resigning, he shot himself. By becoming a martyr, he unleashed a wave of popular hatred against his opponents, who became suddenly quiet. He also, irony of ironies, kept the elites from reclaiming control of the national government for the next ten years. He remains a political giant to Brazilian eyes. It is time to take stock of Barrington Moore’s thesis and its relation to Latin America. In three developing nations, there were distinct routes to reducing the oligarchy’s control. In Mexico, the closest case to Moore’s generalizations, an uprising from below prevented the consolidation of regional oligarchies into a national one and brought the issues of peasants and laborers to the political forefront. In Argentina, a revolution from below, within the working class—including recently transplanted rural laborers in league with radical leadership from above—broke the oligarchy’s hold on national power. In Brazil, Vargas snapped the oligarchic deals of the First Republic, launched his nation toward rapid industrialization, and so built the base for another stage in political development. The engine to all three efforts was populism. There are three major addenda, however, to Moore’s observations. It was not the bourgeoisie that confronted rural authority and so created rights that could then be developed by other elements. Although industrialists wanted larger markets, in politics they tended to side with landed authority against social progressives, let alone revolutionaries. There has never been a bourgeois revolution in Latin America. Absent that event, most Latin American states should have ended as fascist entities, and there are plenty of fascist moments in the region’s modernization. But fascism à la Mussolini is never fully realized, whatever paramilitary styles and rallies stressing the leader’s machismo. Aside from laborers and peasants—the crucial battering rams in these struggles—one factor to which Moore pays little attention is the petite bourgeoisie, which, translated into Latin America, formed a middle class that demanded modernization. This class wanted public goods but did not want a “revolution from below”; hence it acted to weaken landlord authority over the

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national government while demanding more urban, public goods. Ultimately, it was a class to be reckoned with because it could either support or oppose populist agendas. Segments of it supported Cárdenas until he went too far; most of it hated Perón, but he proceeded to impose his vision nonetheless; much of it supported Vargas until he seemed to have outlived his usefulness. The middle class wanted something fascists could never concede: a public sphere of consumerist ideals and relatively free expression for itself. Finally, the United States acted with political threats (Argentina) and economic opportunities (Mexico and Brazil) to put the brakes on any movement that became too radical. As noted earlier, Moore says little about the geopolitical setting in which states become modern. We should turn to our last two cases. The examples of Peru and Colombia will be treated much more briefly, although each also involved the clash of modernity with racial and class fears. Unlike Argentina and Brazil, however, no radical modernizer ever gained office. But just as in those two other countries, populism created public cleavages that could not be healed. Just like those countries as well, the conflicts over populism raised the issue of integrating the working poor and elements of the population considered uncivilized into the national polities. In Peru, the Aymara- and Quechua-speaking populations were a majority but firmly excluded from national office. Government was in the hands of the small minority of Whites, grouped around a nineteenthcentury liberal party, the Civilists (Civilistas). The rest of the population was mestizo or a mixture of mestizo and Black, called cholos. Blacks, once a distinct and substantial segment of Lima, had almost disappeared. The cholos in rural zones were poor, but as Spanishspeaking, they saw themselves as among the “civilized” rather than among the “barbaric.” In Colombia, the racial mixture varied enormously from region to region, with areas of the interior and west dominated by mixtures of natives and Whites, and the zones nearer the Caribbean having many more Blacks and mulattos. In each country, the effort to build a populist movement would run into racial divides that were often more important to working people than any political identity. In each, as well, the rural bosses and the conservatives worked with the military and the Church to contain popular movements of any type. Both nations, like Brazil, were still in the throes of nineteenth-century federalism. Conservatives, in the sense of those who still preserved the practices of the


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colonial era, dominated most rural zones, whereas more progressive attitudes emerged in Lima and Bogotá. Bogotá was not yet a primary city, because Medellín, Cartagena, and Cali were all important commercial and industrial centers. Lima was a primary city and held on to attitudes derived from its colonial past. In Mexico, Cortés became, in the mythology of the revolution, an evil harbinger of Spanish destructiveness; in Peru, Pizarro, a far less cultured man, was seen as the forefather of the nation. In both nations, competing parties had agreed not to mobilize the masses. Different as they were from one another, both nations had gained economically from the export era that preceded World War I, and each in the 1920s was trying to come to terms with the decline of the British and the ascendancy of Americans in Latin American affairs. Peru’s rising economy in the 1920s was more closely tied to trade with the United States than with Britain, as the dominant trading partner of the nineteenth century collapsed. By 1923, the United States supplied 50 percent of Peru’s imports and bought 46 percent of its exports, whereas Britain supplied 16 percent of its imports and bought 31 percent of its exports. Peru had a diversified economy that included copper, wool, sugar, and what remained of its guano deposits. The 1920s produced two distinct political movements that challenged the status quo. One developed on the left among the communists, and the other was created among middle-class populists. The most intellectually famous figure of this era is José Carlos Mariátegui, who was born in 1894. He was an impoverished White boy, sickly and often bedridden, who never knew his father. He was also crippled in his left leg, the result of a sports accident. His mother and family members saw to his education, although, weak as he was, he entered Lima’s harsh job market at the age of thirteen. He began working at a newspaper, La Prensa, as a copyboy when he was fifteen. By World War I, he was recognized as a successful journalist, full of opinions, and part of Lima’s left-wing intellectual circle. Later in the war, he became strongly sympathetic to the laborers in the cities, plantations, and mines who were staging strikes against the soaring cost of living. Threatened by the government, he went to postwar Europe and witnessed Mussolini’s success. When he returned, he helped form a multiclass effort to ward off fascism in Peru. He worked closely with Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who in 1924 founded a populist party, the APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, or American Popular Revolutionary Alliance).

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Mariátegui’s intellectual vehicle was Amauta, his own radical newspaper, in which he repeatedly posed the question, What was wrong with Peru? The answer was that Peru would never develop as a nation until it incorporated its native population.113 He wrote a series of essays in Amauta, which have influenced the region since they appeared between 1925 and 1927. Mariátegui was a journalist, and like many writers of his time, he saw himself as a Marxist. He joined the small Peruvian communist party and looked in Marx’s writings for inspiration; he fought for labor rights. In a leap for Latin American writers, he decided to apply Marx’s materialism to Peru’s evolution and centered its possibilities not on the appearance of a revolutionary proletariat, but on the need to incorporate the natives into the nation. He compared the situation in Peru’s countryside with its latifundistas and argued natives to that of feudal Europe, and concluded that landlord power had to be broken. He also argued that the education and emancipation of the native would lead to a very different Peru. His Siete Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality) remains a classic effort at explaining how leaders could turn native zones into a modern nation.114 The term ‘gamonalismo’ does not signify solely a social and economic category—that of the latifundistas or large agrarian property-owners. It designates a whole phenomenon. Gamonalismo is not exclusively represented by the gamonales in and of themselves. It encompasses a far-reaching hierarchy of officials, intermediaries, agents, parasites, etc.115 Gamonalismo was a Peruvian term for icaciquismo—the combining of landed power with local office, creating rural bosses. More recent research has demonstrated that, contrary to Mariátegui’s portrait of serfs, the natives wanted to be part of the monetized market economy, and some rebelled at their treatment in 1924. Landowners, priests, and political bosses used local authority to seize unearned shares of the growing economy.116 Mariátegui was right about a sense of entitlement among the landed rich who viewed the native as subhuman. Unfortunately, his analysis led to conflicts with the APRA, and when he left that organization to form a Peruvian communist party, he also had quarrels within that small leftist organization—they did not want to focus on the natives, but on a growing middle class and


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industrial proletariat. Always frail—he had his leg amputated in 1924, two years after writing Siete Ensayos—he came down with a feverish infection that killed him. The working class of Lima stopped for five minutes in his honor and turned out en masse for his funeral. His death “was mourned nationwide.”117 The movement that endured lacked Mariátegui’s genius, but its leader was a tenacious and arrogant young man—just the sort of figure a populist movement needs. Haya de la Torre fit a common profile in twentieth-century Latin America—that of the radical university student. Born just a year after Mariátegui, Haya de la Torre came from far better circumstances. He was a radical reformer within his university, that of Trujillo, even before he became a radical in Peruvian politics. Part of the idealism of the era involved educating adults, and Haya taught in night schools for the working poor. He always maintained close ties to his native, northern area, and the laborers on the Trujillo sugar plantations became apristas (members of APRA). In 1919, the economic collapse following World War I shook Peru, and to stem movements of anarchists and social reformers, Augusto B. Leguía established a military dictatorship. Leguía was a curious blend of the modernizer and the autocrat. He had been elected president in 1908 and led an administration that instituted some social and economic reforms in Lima. In 1919, however, he seized power through a coup, instituted a new liberal constitution in 1920, and then ruled in alliance with urban interests and conservative Catholics. As an example of Leguía’s agenda, one can mention his decision in 1923 to dedicate Peru to the Sacred Heart of Jesus—a favorite political item of the Catholic right in the 1920s. Haya protested this public demonstration as retrograde and was expelled from the country. He went to Mexico, and profoundly influenced by the Mexican Revolution, declared himself a revolutionary and an anti-imperialist, and founded APRA. Haya called APRA an international alliance of Indo-American nations—exactly what that meant was left to Haya’s fertile imagination. The closest construction seems to be that he wanted Peru, Bolivia, and other Latin American nations with a strong preColombian heritage to draw together an agenda that combined social reforms with a recapturing of past greatness. He believed, for example, that the ancient Incan empire had been a sort of early

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socialism—in this regard, he was adopting the Mexican perspective that the collectivist farm, the ejido, could solve that nation’s agrarian injustices. In practice, the APRA became a model party for populists in the Andes, influencing the rhetoric of similar movements in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Chile. It never, however, became an international organization, like that of the communists. It was radical enough to scare the Peruvian upper class, as Haya regularly spoke in favor of a Marxist revolution and against imperialism. When the Great Depression struck Peru, it looked as though Haya might win an honest election in 1931; when he lost, he yelled fraud and turned to violent opportunism. The election was won by a narrow margin by a military man, a cholo, who led the coup against Leguía. Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro tried to develop a right-wing populism based on style rather than on substantial social changes. He used his darker skin color against the aristocratic bearing of Haya and drew strong urban support. Haya appealed not only to labor but also to the struggling middle class concentrated among clerks (empleados) in commercial establishments, who suffered massive unemployment in the Depression. According to one study, he convinced the middle class that its struggle for white-collar decency had been thwarted by “imperialists,” which helped turn many educated young people to the left.118 In 1932, apristas attacked a military outpost in Trujillo, where they had organized support among the sugar workers and killed several dozen soldiers. The military hit back by killing over 1,000 apristas. The following year, an aprista shot Sánchez Cerro. A street war then broke out between the army and the banned party. To the military, the Church, and the political elite of Lima, Haya de la Torre became a hated figure, and Peruvian political leaders devoted a good deal of energy to keep him out of office. The apristas were sent into exile, and any time a national election came up, there was always the chance they would return and win office. To prevent this, the Peruvian polity moved from one electoral farce to another, periodically interrupted by a military coup. Successive governments tried to institute civil improvements, mostly in Lima and the secondary city of Cuzco, but these did not change their lack of legitimacy. In a nation of natives, only Whites and soldiers could rule. Haya’s fate—he lived until 1979, becoming more reactionary as he grew older—reminds us that without a divided military or open military support, no populist had a chance to become chief executive.


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The saddest consequence is that the efforts of Mariátegui to incorporate the Quechua- and Aymara-speaking peoples into the national polity failed. Haya never appealed to the natives, and he did not broaden the party’s base from what it was in the 1930s—about 20 percent of the electorate. As Peru’s dependence on U.S. trade deepened, he abandoned his denunciation of imperialism.119 Legislators passed laws preventing the worst abuses of natives in rural zones such as Puno; then new reforms had to be passed—reminding one that the old ones had not worked.120 Exploited by landlords, priests, and local officials, natives gained nothing from any government in power. They kept their distance, expecting little from any regime. As late as 1950, natives labored on estates and their own small farms, using digging sticks and surviving on a variety of potatoes, yams, and an occasional piece of chicken or lamb. The situation in Colombia turned on coffee and a few smaller agrarian outposts devoted to the cultivation of bananas by United Fruit. The most famous novel about Colombia is Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), written by Gabriel García Marquez and initially published in 1967 in Argentina. The author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. In the novel, a small town called Macondo stands in for the rural life of an entire nation. The author deploys a variety of literary devices to show that the core of the town’s evolution is that it starts out almost as the Garden of Eden and descends into endless cycles of violence and tyranny as it “modernizes.” Each cycle of increased knowledge and greater involvement with the world is accompanied by more sophisticated forms of extermination, until the original characters of the novel are reduced to dust. If any novel could be said to be emblematic of a nation’s evolution—with its endless civil wars in the nineteenth century, the War of the Thousand Days at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the 1928 massacre of banana workers at the Santa Marta plantation owned by United Fruit—then this is it. The liberals and conservatives, with their brutishness and obstinacy, are depicted to perfection.121 García Marquez was a young man when Colombia’s modernization and violence reached its populist apogee, with an outcome that, in terms of the loss of life, was surpassed only by the Mexican Revolution. The story of the modern nation begins in the 1920s with Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who grew up in poverty and became a lawyer through hard work and devotion to his studies. He suffered the

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insults of an older, darker-skinned child in the schools of Bogotá. He was a radical university student who became a social reformer in the Liberal Party while still in his twenties. When, in 1928, the army shot down strikers near the town of Magdalena at the United Fruit plantation of Santa Marta, Gaitán became a national figure by denouncing the massacre in Congress. Like many in the era, Gaitán had studied Mussolini, and like Perón, he had visited Rome in his youth. His politics always tended to the left, and he founded organizations aimed at labor reform and social improvements while denouncing what he called the “oligarchy.” In the early 1930s, he took on the landowners and organized rural laborers in hierarchies resembling those of the Fascists in Italy; liberal and conservative landowners struck back and destroyed his grassroots organization.122 After that, he stuck to Bogotá and became the most left-wing figure of the Liberal Party and national politics. He served briefly as mayor of Bogotá in 1936 and emphasized issues of social hygiene in the population by supporting trash collection and opposing alcohol consumption among the poor. His efforts to provide some dignity to workers won him labor acclaim and dismissal from office. He later served in a Liberal Party cabinet but his behavior and appearance scared the leaders of both parties. Gaitán did not conform to the gentlemanly conduct of party politics; on the contrary, he loved the stump speech and drawing large crowds. His dark complexion and prominent front teeth drew open racial derision in the newspapers of the era; the cartoonists were merciless, and his critics called him el negro Gaitán. Rather than back off, Gaitán took to opening his mouth widely, biting his teeth together, and emitting howls denouncing the ruling class. He carried out two political strategies: developing a mass movement and taking over the Liberal Party. In 1947, his wing gained control of the Liberal Party, just as the liberals won a majority in Congress. The conservatives began to transform themselves from simply a landed elite into a modern organization that included industrialists during the 1930s; by the late 1930s, they had modeled themselves on Franco’s Spain.123 With Gaitán’s ascendancy, the conservatives mobilized paramilitary organizations to control any rural uprising, and as a result, violence began between the two parties.124 It became obvious that he would be the party’s candidate for president in 1950, and that he was far more popular than anyone the conservatives could put on the ballot.


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In many respects, despite numerous differences, his timing and issues closely resembled those of Perón. In March and April 1948, the United States sponsored a set of meetings in Bogotá in order to turn a series of previous treaties with the Latin American nations into the Organization of American States. The Cold War had begun, and it was clear that the United States intended the OAS to be a military alliance against the Soviet Union; the United States was pressuring Latin American nations to suppress communists within the region. The meetings drew counterprotests. Fidel Castro arrived as part of a small army of university students who held a series of meetings raising the issues they thought central to the region’s development. Latin American reformers, like Gaitán, focused on social and internal issues—fighting Communism was not important. On the contrary, communists were often key leaders of labor and civic associations. Castro and Gaitán met and planned to meet again; Gaitán was on his way to their lunch on April 9 when a man shot him. Gaitán’s supporters then killed the assassin, leaving the murder a mystery to this day. Was this a lone and deranged assassin? Someone sent by the CIA (the newly formed U.S. intelligence agency)? A crowd gathered at the presidential palace in mourning and demanded some answers. A frightened conservative president fled, and the palace guard opened fire. Gaitán’s followers went into a rage, raiding police stations and taking firearms and setting fire to churches and conservative businesses. The insurrection, called the Bogotazo, lasted several days, and when it was over, liberals and conservatives resorted to civil war. The conservatives had the support of the army and used it to control the capital. Conservative and liberal paramilitary units roamed throughout the country, killing one another and slaughtering whole villages of the opposing political identity. Between 200,000 and 250,000 died in La Violencia (The Violence) over the next fifteen years. Some Colombian regions remained in turmoil until in the early 1960s: the U.S.-supported army and paramilitary units (death squads) on the right used their predominance to seize local offices and land, whereas left-wing guerrilla units emerged from La Violencia, demanded revolution and created zones of resistance.125 Eventually, the liberal factions broke down into bandas (groups) of bandoleros—engaging in peasant-based banditry—who were systematically hunted down by government forces.126 The right also used pájaros (birds), who drove out to the countryside, shot their

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liberal targets, and then drove back to their regular jobs. One of the objectives was control of the coffee-growing zones; those working with the right-wing governments of the era made a fortune paying the growers little and reaping profits when the beans reached the export market.127 The United States watched the uprising in Bogotá and blamed unknown communists. The Organization of American States was formally created by the member-states on April 30 and immediately declared its support of human rights. The damage to Colombia’s civic life was permanent. A careful study by Mary Roldán of a single department, Antioquia—where some 26,000 died—notes that the killings were not randomly timed but concentrated in 1952, as the conservatives consolidated their control of the national government. The violence involved rural identities as well as partisan ones, ethic labels as well as religiosity, and, of course, a good deal of alcohol.128 Nothing like Gaitán’s movement was ever permitted again. All efforts at land reform were crushed and the union movement was considerably weakened. In 1958, the right-wing military left office. The liberal and conservative leaders agreed to alternate national office, while poverty, political cynicism, and the widespread use of firearms led to guerrilla warfare and eventually created an alternative economy based on drugs and drug-related violence. It is important in the midst of all this not to succumb to the view that everything in Latin America turns into a disaster. The era of nationalist revolutions and import-substitution industrialization transformed the region in positive ways. Life expectancy rose almost everywhere and illiteracy fell. The population grew at an unprecedented rate. Within their cities, the larger Latin American nations now supported a varied life of literature and cultural institutions devoted to the fine arts. Cities had many of the accoutrements of North America and Western Europe, such as radio, movies, even some television. Nor was the effort a political failure in all respects. Higher rates of education are a requirement for a stronger civic life. Everywhere, the most retrograde elements of the oligarchy were on the defensive or had lost the battle for national power. It seemed briefly, in the late 1940s, that World War II would generate new electoral opportunities in the region by bringing a new generation and new mass movements into politics. Even in the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, laborers in key sectors gained new rights and the right to


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organize.129 These workers were always a minority of the labor force, but they were an opening wedge to the view that laborers generally were entitled to a decent life—a far cry from the easy contempt with which the ruling class had seen them a generation before. The middle class became a central element in politics, in which parties now had to have some middle-class support in order to hold on to even a substantial plurality of the electorate. Open middle-class opposition usually spelled eventual defeat, as it did for Perón in 1955. The elite was losing control—certainly, the oligarchy that had run Argentina, Chile, and Peru was still there, but it was losing its electoral hold. It was also clear that it could not compete for the popular vote against populist appeals. The core elite institution remained the Church, but religious figures now appeared speaking a social gospel that workers were to be decently treated and that governments had a moral responsibility to maintain order and establish conditions in which Catholic families could mature. This social gospel had been percolating since the late nineteenth century, but the war, the spread of socialism in Western Europe, and the fear of communism all made Rome and the bishops of Latin America more afraid of not reaching out to the population. In return, the Church de-emphasized any preaching based on ideas of innate social classes and the acceptance of poverty and suffering as a condition in this life. No educated person wanted to hear this nonsense any longer. Unfortunately, given this greater awareness of the need to link faith to positive social changes, there was one major problem: the Church was horribly short of priests and nuns. These occupations lacked the prestige of white-collar positions, prestige which it had had even in the early twentieth century. The elite no longer sent its third son or daughter into the Church, and a good part of the clergy was coming from the middle class; in some nations, a few came from laboring families. Elite families no longer endowed the Church as they had in the nineteenth century. The Church was still an ally of the rich, spending a major part of its efforts on private schools and universities for the upper classes, but there were too many other cultural projects and diversions for it to command anything that resembled the authority and centrality to the oligarchy it had had up to the 1920s. The elite itself had changed. A generation earlier, young girls would not have been found baring their bodies in skimpy suits on the beaches of Acapulco or Rio de Janeiro. By the early 1950s, such

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sights were commonplace. To have darker skin had always been a mark of lower status; now it was a sign that one had time to suntan. To be sure, the skin had better have been white before it was tanned: old racial attitudes died hard or not at all. The well-to-do Mexicans, Argentines, and Chileans all had their tennis courts, their private clubs (often devoted to golf, and so including women), their civic associations, and their private charities. They mixed at a distance with the general population when they went to public events; the social center of the new city was the soccer stadium. Many of the wealthy now invested in large estates and industry; they had diversified portfolios and bought property and stocks in the United States. And they knew they could no longer rule alone. There were strong civic possibilities in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, among other nations. These were now seen as the most progressive set of nations: they had better public infrastructure, expanding school systems, new highways, and flawed political systems that were having to respond to new pressures. Those in favor of political and social reform should have had a strong foreign ally, and instead, found an enemy. The U.S. government’s agenda for Latin America had nothing to do with civic improvements and social empowerment.

THE UNITED STATES AS A HEGEMONIC POWER The United States in the nineteenth century had viewed Latin America as a region it would dominate in the future. Its business leaders, presidents, and editorial writers saw Latin Americans as all of one kind. A people of mixed race and, therefore, degenerate, but certainly capable of joining the civilized world to an extent that would allow Latin Americans to buy goods from the United States and supply raw commodities at cheap prices. Great Britain had been the chief obstacle to the development of U.S.–Latin American ties. Outside of Argentina and Uruguay, that obstacle disappeared after World War I. Other powers appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. It seemed as though Japan and Germany might launch bilateral trade agreements with Latin American countries—that is, agreements with special terms applying between only the one country and another. The United States did everything it could to undermine such agreements but suffered a diplomatic reversal in the midst of the Great


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Depression. By 1932, world trade had spiraled down to such a low point that Latin Americans lacked the means to buy much of anything from abroad. Several governments, the example of Chile will be used, passed laws governing how foreign currency could be used. Chile required all exporters to sell any dollars they earned to the Central Bank for a rate fixed by the government. Those who needed dollars to buy from abroad then paid for them at a much higher rate; this manipulation became an important source of government revenue. The government went further and allowed those buying abroad to pay different rates for different goods: dollars used to buy manufacturing equipment (capital goods) cost the fewest pesos; dollars used on cosmetics and other luxury items cost the most. As a complement to all this, the Germans and Japanese opened special accounts in Chilean banks, in which francs and a Japanese “trade dollar” were cheap and could be used only to buy from one of those countries. In turn, the Germans and Japanese got to buy copper and nitrates and pay for them in these special trade currencies. Trade expanded for all involved. Japanese textiles were making important inroads in several Latin American nations; German radios and other manufactures sold well. World War II ended all this. During the conflict, the Allies centralized the purchase of Latin American raw materials; the U.S. trade boards rationed the purchases, set the prices, and even controlled the amount of shipping each Latin American nation could receive. American hostility to Argentina’s neutrality was expressed by cutting off the provision of movie film, which destroyed Argentine national movie production. At the end of the war, the trade boards were abolished. Latin American governments drawing on the experience of World War I, when stockpiled goods were dumped on the Atlantic market depressing their economies, asked the United States not to do the same after World War II. Despite assurances given during the conflict, the U.S. authorities lost interest once the war was over, and stockpiles of raw materials again flooded the Atlantic world.

THE ANTICOMMUNIST CRUSADE Latin America was now firmly dependent on the United States. Alternative markets in Western Europe and Japan were gone; in fact, a good part of the world depended on the United States for postwar economic leadership. Near the end of the war, the Allies created the

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United Nations in San Francisco in 1945; it was an effort to revive the idea of nations arguing with one another in a format of civility rather than turning to war. The Allies, in July 1944, met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and agreed to far-reaching changes in world trade. The agreements led in 1945 to the creation of the World Bank, which would extend long-term loans to governments in order to rebuild Europe’s devastated infrastructure. It was also intended to help Latin American nations to build their economies. The International Monetary Fund was established to extend shorter-term credits and keep governments solvent. Both institutions were to stave off another Great Depression. All of these institutions were located in the United States: the United Nations’ permanent residence became New York City; the World Bank and IMF are in Washington, DC. The link to U.S. power could hardly be clearer. To all this, the Truman administration added the enlightened policy of immediate aid to European nations, in what became known as the Marshall Plan, named after General George Marshall, who was Truman’s secretary of state. Three factors countered the hopes of world peace and development: the European empires and that of Japan had been smashed beyond any semblance of imperial repair; the United States and the Soviet Union, allies during the war, squared off against one another in 1947; and the United States linked the postwar recovery in any nation to its cooperation against the Soviet Union, in what became the Cold War. President Harry Truman and his key advisors followed the advice of a foreign policy specialist, George F. Kennan, and decided to “contain” communism to its existing territory. The task was more easily announced than accomplished. The Soviet Union’s army had overrun Eastern Europe and proceeded over a few years to establish puppet states in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other nations. Civil war broke out in Greece in 1947, an important moment in solidifying Truman’s decision to fight communists in Europe. In 1948, the United States and the Soviet Union almost came to blows over the control of Berlin. In 1949, Mao Zedong, head of the Communist Party in China, gained control of that country. In July 1950, a Soviet-sponsored regime controlling North Korea invaded a U.S.-allied regime in South Korea. The United States sent forces into the conflict, which lasted three years and ended with a truce dividing the peninsula at the border that existed before the war began.


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These events pulled American attention away from Latin America. Truman had no specific plans from the region aside for creating the OAS and fostering a mutual defense pact against communism. The meetings in Bogotá occurred precisely as the Cold War heated up. These defense pacts—NATO in Western Europe and SEATO in the Far East—were the institutional expressions of the American containment of communism. The U.S. strategy also demanded that allied nations do everything they could to dismantle communist-led organizations, whether by an outright ban of the Communist Party or a refusal to permit labor unions and other labor organizations to have communists in their leadership. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was constituted from a U.S. spy service in World War II; it arrived in the region and began bribing labor leaders and acquiring political informants. But the most serious consequence was that an anticommunist crusade ideologically rearmed the Latin American right. The rich and the right-wing military men found a new rationale for rigging the political system and weakening labor rights, and by 1950, the tide had turned against any sustained attempt at linking elections and positive social changes. A sense of quiet satisfaction settled over the U.S. attitude toward Latin America, interrupted only when a revolution broke out in Cuba.130 The other element in U.S. relations was, of course, commerce. Although the United States had adopted high tariffs in the Great Depression, it became an ardent supporter of low tariffs for everyone else. For understandable reasons, governments whose laboring populations had increased under a policy of import-substitution industrialization were not willing to risk lowering their tariffs; in several cases, they increased them even more in the 1950s. This did not stop trade between the United States and Latin America, but that trade was characterized by the presence of giant corporate entities in the region: Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Anaconda and Kennecott Copper Companies, Sears Department Stores, Coca-Cola, DuPont Chemicals, General Electric, the Ford and General Motor Automobile corporations, the Sheraton and Hilton hotels, United Fruit, American Smelting and Refining, and others. These giants had assets throughout the region and lobbying organizations in Washington. The world of the British merchant firm was gone. U.S. ambassadors regularly lobbied governments in Latin America on behalf of these corporations. Any failure of a Latin American government to give a U.S. corporation what it wanted ran the risk of provoking foreign

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economic and political retaliation. And what the corporations wanted was clear: cheap labor and low taxes, anything else was communist or, at best, socialist—and what was the difference? The outcome aligned the U.S. government and U.S. corporations with retrograde elements in Latin American politics. The United States under presidents Truman and Eisenhower did not object to dictators in the region; on the contrary, Eisenhower seemed fond of them. U.S. corporate managers mingled with the remnants of the oligarchy and the postwar rich. Latin American economic nationalism, however, appeared in another manner, and labor leaders attacked U.S. capital as a matter of course. Sometimes, as happened in the Chilean copper sector, the deals struck improved wages and working conditions, although Chilean miners still earned a fraction of their counterparts in the United States. Labor conditions in United Fruit plantations anywhere were pitiful. There is one interesting footnote to the United States and its ignorance of Latin America, and that is its general disinterest in the nonWhite world as a whole. The nations formed in the Middle East, the Far East, and sub-Saharan Africa from the collapse of the British and French empires moved toward “socialism” of a kind that resembled the use of the term in Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s, and in France and Germany by the 1890s. This involved the idea that governments had to intervene in markets in order to preserve social peace and build the schools and other public goods that a “modern” nation needed. Thus, the idea of import-substitution industrialization (or ISI) as practiced in Latin America gained a political footing in this world of new nations. What would this world be called? In the 1950s, Juan Perón, Jawaharlal Nehru (president of India), and Abdul Nasser (of Egypt) called for a “third way” between capitalism and communism, and demanded that nations not be forced to choose between the First World of the United States and the Second World of the Soviet Union. The globe should not be polarized in this manner, and the needs of emerging nations subsumed to a Cold War those nations neither began nor could influence. This “Third World” would be nonaligned. But the United States would have none of this. I remember a Mercator world map distributed to U.S. public schools that was colored blue for the Free World (us), red for the communist world (them), and had other nations in red stripes. Such nations were not considered neutral, but leaning toward communism. The decision to interpret events in Latin America through the eyes of


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anticommunism and the needs of major corporations meant that the United States was less interested in Latin American democracy or the complexities of Latin American social politics than it was in Latin American compliance with its wishes.

TWO REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS: BOLIVIA AND GUATEMALA The attitudes toward struggling nations hardened under President Eisenhower (1952–1960), with catastrophic results for two of the poorest nations in the Americas. The early 1950s were an early stage of hysteria in the Cold War—the result of a Korean conflict that took 33,000 American lives, of the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb, and of the Republican Party’s success in using anticommunism to regain the White House. A series of surprising developments led to revolutionary movements in Bolivia and Guatemala, but the outcomes in each seemed a repetition of populist frustration. These movements, however, differed considerably from those of Cárdenas, Vargas, and Perón, in that they faced an overt hostility from the United States. The consequences in each nation were tragic, although it would take decades to realize the extent of the disaster. Neither Bolivia nor Guatemala ever became modern nations; they are countries in which the hope of a better life seems quite distant. In frustrating their republican revolutions, the United States taught Latin America a bitter lesson: Washington was the seat of an imperial power, after all; and when unsettled, it would use that power without regard to the costs of small nations. The story of each revolutionary movement is also tied to the endless miseries of natives, and so each revives issues that go back to the colonial era. It is also a story of primary products: tin, coffee, and bananas. In one of these stories, the United States seemed to have no direct ideological stake; in the other, it acted on behalf of the United Fruit Company. In each, the Eisenhower administration argued it was not using its power to unravel a popular movement; as ample documents demonstrate, it was lying in both cases. In each as well, the national leadership was overwhelmed by the tasks it had undertaken. These tasks—which involved bringing the rural poor into the political process and confronting the many deficiencies and injustices inherited from a premodern era—were monumental. In addition to these tasks, each nation had to face the

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new imperial power of the United States, a fact that explains the sad outcome in each case. Bolivia was in 1951 a nation with 3 million people; it had 1.7 million in 1900. Most of the population was native or living as subsistence farmers; the condition of the natives closely resembled a form of coerced labor. Less than 5 percent of the landowners held 54 percent of the land. The country had extensive rural poverty, unstable government, and tin mining. There was some light manufacturing, but in general, production fell behind popular needs and the government printed money to cover its needs. The cost of living rose almost 1,000 percent between 1930 and 1950, whereas the currency depreciated to a quarter of its earlier value.131 In the nineteenth century, Bolivia had consisted of La Paz and Sucre as Hispanic centers surrounded by seas of native villages. A bargain was struck between the natives (consisting of Aymara and other cultures) and Whites in which the natives would make a “republican contribution” to the state, and in return, be left alone. The Hispanic population certainly exploited the native population, abusing the control of markets and demanding tributary labor, just as it had in the colonial era; but native resistance was real and sustained, for natives grew the nation’s food. With the arrival of rail and the exploitation of nitrate, silver, and tin mines, a more commercial life took hold in the late nineteenth century. State politics remained a series of regional conflicts led by different “white” factions. In fact, these Whites included substantial inputs of native blood. We must not forget that Hispanicized natives and mixed-bloods are among the worst abusers of native populations. Thus, the economy had four elements: a series of impoverished, native villages; a landed class of Whites and mixed-bloods that exploited native labor; a mining economy based on tin and dominated by a single family, the Patiños; and small, underdeveloped cities. In 1951, Sucre had a population of 282,000, and La Paz one of 267,000. In the 1920s, a series of border conflicts developed in the Bolivian southeast between Bolivia and Paraguay over a zone called the Gran Chaco. This immense track of land was largely uninhabited, but geologists became convinced it contained oil. Controlling it would also have given Bolivia access to the Atlantic Ocean via the River Paraguay. Standard Oil backed Bolivia’s claim to the region, whereas the British company, Shell Oil, funded a Paraguayan claim. The two nations went to war in 1932, and Paraguay won after


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100,000 people had died, despite the fact that Bolivia had an army ten times larger and better equipped than Paraguay’s.132 Tens of thousands of Bolivian natives had been conscripted into the conflict, and its outcome weighed on the state’s legitimacy for the next twenty years, with civilian and military leaders vying for power in what still seemed regional oligarchies.133 The oligarchic order of a two-party system fragmented into several parties, a number of them mixing populism with either a form of fascism or of Marxism. In the aftermath of the World War II, a populist coalition of social reformers and tin miners ran for the presidency; it lost in 1947 but won in 1951, despite the fact that most natives were without the suffrage. The military annulled the election. The coalition—the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, or National Revolutionary Movement)—rebelled against the military and completely routed the Bolivian armed forces. The uprising, over Easter week in 1952, was led by urban progressives and tin miners, and its leadership was a White lawyer, Victor Paz Estenssoro. Only 550 people died in the key victory taking La Paz.134 Paz Estenssoro, the MNR’s candidate in the earlier elections, was an urban populist promoting the basic goals of the middling strata of skilled laborers, small farmers, and white-collar employees. He wanted the right of labor to organize, to promote civic improvements, and most radically, to end the oligarchic control of native labor, and to nationalize the tin mines. The new government began well. It launched a major drive for education and created universal suffrage, increasing the electorate from about 125,000 to over a million. The tin miners, many of them Trotskyists led by Juan Lechín Oqueando, gained new labor rights, and the mines were taken away from the Patiños. Their organization—the COB (Confederación Obrera Boliviana, or Bolivian Labor Confederation)—also promoted land reform, helping native populations seize land and form their own syndicates and militias. There were serious economic consequences. The natives took a larger share of their own production for their families, which raised the cost of food in the cities. The tin miners demanded higher wages and better working conditions, which raised the costs of production just as the tin mines had run through many of the richest veins. Reviving the industry would have required making major capital improvements—money the state did not have.135 By 1954, the government was destitute and the cities were short of food. Tin-miner strikes increased as economic conditions worsened.

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The government tried to cover its costs—including a 50 percent increase in employees—by printing money; the resulting inflation cost the government its middle-class support. At this point, the divisions within the MNR, which had been there from its beginning, split it into hostile factions. As James Malloy noted, the middle-class base of the MNR had always feared the native masses as much as the oligarchy.136 Natives often paid 100 days’ labor to the estate owner, in addition to which they were expected to look after his livestock and have their wives and daughters provide unpaid domestic service. Land decrees during the revolution, and as a result of native pressures after it, meant that some 270,000 families obtained land by 1970.137 Many of the small farms were undercapitalized, but an army of tenants now had become landholders. As was the case in Mexico, many natives were without land, but this was a major transformation. Free to trade as they chose, the native standard of living increased. Unfortunately, the class that had been freed distrusted government, and for good reason. Government had never been anything but exploitive. The United States did not react to the Bolivian Revolution with any public alarm, even though this nation was Bolivia’s principal tin market. President Eisenhower sent his brother Milton down to Bolivia, and Milton reported that the United States should not oppose human progress in Latin America. One of the reasons for this broadmindedness was that the United States had a very small stake in the country: Bolivia had taken the mines from its own rich, and unlike the situation in Mexico in 1910, there were no American land barons in the country. The other was that it had not reached that point in its foreign-policy ambitions of sending troops into South America. Incursions had always been limited to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. Finally, the United States was just beginning to experiment with destabilizing regimes it disliked with means other than military attack. The major asset the United States could use against the radical elements of the MNR, especially against the miners, was to set conditions for financial aid, and the vehicle of involvement was the IMF. American economists predominated in the International Monetary Fund, and they opposed any social or labor activism; the economist assigned to Bolivia would later brag that he had dismantled the revolution. Each time the Paz Estenssoro administration or that of his successor, Hernán Siles, asked for a loan to keep their


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government going, the IMF set conditions that reduced what the government could do. At the same time, a succession of American presidents—Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson— insisted on the reconstruction of the regular military. As the MNR leadership gave in, they weakened their political control. In a second administration, Paz Estenssoro tried to revive a more radical agenda; he had Lechín as his vice president. The United States, under Kennedy, simultaneously stepped up aid to the government’s social plans, giving the economy a lift, and spent more on the military. Despite the monetary turmoil, real wages rose 20 percent between 1959 and 1963.138 When it was Lechín’s turn to run for president in 1964, conservatives within the MNR and the restored Bolivian military pushed the MNR out of government.139 The army imposed a state of siege to control the tin miners’ reaction. The U.S. attack on Guatemala was much less subtle. During the 1930s and early 1940s, a military leader named Jorge Ubico ran a “liberal” dictatorship in which he promised social change and better living standards. The chief recipient of his liberality was the United Fruit Company, which gained rights to extensive areas for its bananas, because it was the biggest landowner in the country. It ran a state within a state in its banana zone: it had its own rail line, its own ships, complete police control of anyone living on its terrain, and the right to bring in workers from Jamaica and other English Black islands. All this complicated the ability of banana workers to cooperate with one another. Ubico was a product of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, a practice that led the United States to stop invading the Caribbean and Central America and instead built up national militaries capable of policing their own nations. These “constabulary” regimes produced men who called themselves liberal and progressive, and who degenerated into megalomaniacs running kleptocracies.140 Aside from Ubico, one can mention Somoza of Nicaragua, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Batista of Cuba, and François “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti.141 Ubico fell early. He made the mistake of complimenting Mussolini and Hitler during World War II. In 1944, the tide of antifascist sentiment reached the middleclass students and professionals, who demonstrated against him in Guatemala City. He anointed a successor and left. A few months later, junior military officers overthrew what remained of his regime. Then what? Ubico’s long rule (1931–1944) meant that his cronies controlled the administration. He also had been accepted by the

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nation’s powerful coffee barons and had kept the native population (the majority) out of politics. Most educated people had been compromised by his extensive spy services or by cooperating with his rule. To find someone outside this circle of cronies, the young military officers had to go to provincial Argentina and there they found an obscure professor named Juan José Arevalo. Sponsored by the reformist elements in Guatemala City, Arevalo won a free election—a victory that was an immediate blow to the coffee barons and United Fruit. He then tried to create a civic life where none existed. He extended the suffrage to new groups, especially urban labor, weakening rural power over national politics. He extended also labor rights and even tried to foster a social security plan. In all this, he defended himself as someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, trying to create the Guatemalan version of the New Deal. The United States, now recovering from the Korean War, was in no mood for social reforms at home or abroad.142 At home, presidents Truman and Eisenhower had curtailed the labor rights won during the Depression and carried out campaigns against “communists” and radical reformers of any stripe in unions, education, and the film industry. The age of McCarthyism—named after the alcoholic senator Joe McCarthy, from Wisconsin, who kept finding communists in every part of public life—removed the left as an active force in the nation. Abroad, Truman and Eisenhower supported a corporate view of development in which major U.S. entities, such as United Fruit, had to be protected. Arevalo barely survived the propaganda campaign of United Fruit that branded his government communist. From that point on, relations between the United States and Guatemala deteriorated further. The junior officers that had supported a change of regime split over the liberal direction of the Arevalo administration. The more right-wing group planned a coup during the election of 1950; their plan was discovered and their leader killed.143 The victor of the election, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, represented the liberal and leftist backers of Arevalo. Against Arevalo’s advice, Árbenz launched radical labor and agrarian laws, the latter intended to create a nation of individual landowners. Like other reformers, Árbenz called his program a revolution, when it was really intended to restructure a market economy, raising the living standards of laborers and peasants. Árbenz’s program did carry out Barrington Moore’s dictum. Its 1952 land reform confiscated the unused lands of the United Fruit Company and opened the


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roads to colonos, natives subject to debt peonage decrees on the coffee estates who had previously been restricted in their movements. Landed power was frontally attacked.144 Like many others as well, he had to keep developing his support as he fought for his program. Arevalo had warned him that his goals were too ambitious. His leftwing wife and the small left-wing party based in Guatemala City pushed for immediate change. Árbenz faced four enemies: the United Fruit Company; the U.S. government; Guatemala’s coffee barons and native elites benefiting from exploitive labor arrangements; and the right-wing of the army allied with the coffee interests. The United Fruit Company had already launched an extensive media campaign against Arevalo; it stepped up the pace against Árbenz and had the support of the New York Times, Time magazine, and other major venues in stating its case that he was a communist. The U.S. government assigned the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to construct a plan to overthrow the regime. In 1953, the CIA (in collusion with the British government and British oil interests) demonstrated that it had created the techniques to end a reformist and nationalist administration when it promoted a coup against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and reinstalled the shah of Iran. The means involved bribing key figures in the administration and the military; sponsoring demonstrations against the regime; and creating “chaos” and so a justification for the ending a liberal and increasingly democratic government. Its campaign against Árbenz was labeled Operation PBSuccess. The secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, an anticommunist zealot, was deeply involved in creating it; his brother, Allen Dulles, ran the CIA. Both, as Boston attorneys, had represented United Fruit and still had financial interests in the company. The CIA generated financial and political “chaos” in the country: it gave money to Árbenz’s opponents; it sponsored a paramilitary invasion led by an antidemocratic military figure, Carlos Castillo Armas; it dropped leaflets and exploded a few bombs to terrify the population. The Guatemalan military, afraid of the U.S. power behind Castillo Armas refused to fight and refused to allow a militia to be formed from Árbenz’s supporters.145 The role of the major landowners and the Catholic Church was one of open hostility; they propagandized the middle class and natives into believing that the government’s reforms meant an end to accepted cultural norms. Árbenz was forced to resign. Castillo Armas was installed as president and killed or imprisoned

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many of the previous government’s supporters. All thought of labor rights, native rights, or land reform was shelved. The Castillo Armas government killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Árbenz’s supporters. In the face of protests throughout Latin America, President Eisenhower denied any U.S. involvement in the Guatemalan coup. The United States had begun the period under study by withdrawing its marines from Central America and the Caribbean, and by promising the Good Neighbor Policy of cooperation and friendship. It had strong economic reasons for doing so, but there was underlying Roosevelt’s behavior a paternalistic regard for Latin America, an idea that the United States could be a cultural force for good in the region. During World War II, the United States looked at the region instrumentally as a source of raw materials and as an area that must be politically aligned with the Allied cause. The Allies posed as democratic warriors against fascist brutality, yet it was not until near the end of the war that the United States began to promote democracy and human rights as good in themselves. This promise to empower ordinary people did not last long in Latin America. The region was ignored in favor of more pressing issues, especially the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan in the face of communist rule in the Soviet Union and China. Latin American nations were told to choose between becoming U.S. allies or being labeled communist and outside the sphere of the “free world”—that is, outside the zone of American trade and finance. Within Latin America, the “free world” became something of a joke. Mexico was a one-party state. Somoza and Trujillo still flourished; and in 1952, Fulgencio Batista led a coup and assumed power in Cuba. The United States said nothing. It created the OAS as a means of military and political solidarity, but it did little besides dumping old weaponry on the region. Little was done, even verbally, to assist any civic development. It was at this crucial moment, in the 1940s and early 1950s, when populists promised to restructure their national economies and provide larger shares for the general population. They supported the incorporation of industrial labor into unions, particularly in the large cities, and tried to end the worse labor abuses in the countryside. They increased investment in public infrastructure and human capital from roads to schools. They tried, usually through the concentration of executive power, to will their nations into the twentieth century and end oligarchic power as well as contain foreign domination of their economies.


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The United States government became openly hostile to all such proposals. Its ties to the region now ran through the nation’s corporations, and they were the political allies of the Latin American rich. The United States wanted a dismantling of economic nationalism and demanded that the region open its doors to even greater corporate investment. All this would come back to haunt U.S.–Latin American relations. Latin Americans of different political views came to see the United States not as some guardian of liberty, but as a major power, like any other, out to exploit whomever it could control. The collapse of the reform revolutions in Bolivia and Guatemala meant for many of the young in the region that only a radical break with capitalism and its chief proponent, the United States, would bring the region any hope of social progress.


CHAPTER 4

Modern Life and Modern Conflicts, 1956–1985 A decade after the end of World War II, Latin America seemed listless. Dictators ran much of the Caribbean and Central America; civilian governments predominated in Mexico and South America. Although governments were improving conditions for a substantial part of the population, the majority of the population still lived in destitution. The idea that industrialization would solve many of the region’s problems was now accepted almost everywhere and even dictators protected national production. The days of laissez faire liberalism seemed over, as did the days of federalism. Those who ran the capital cities had little to fear from the provinces. Many nations reflected the growth of their primary cities and neglect of the countryside. The poorest people in Latin America were provincial, dark-skinned women. The darker the skin and the more isolated the location, the more likely the residents were to be illiterate with little hope of taking part in the modernization of their nation. If landlord power had been broken at the national level, it still existed in rural provinces. In fact, in many nations, an unspoken social pact existed between the national government and local power brokers so that the latter could still abuse rural laborers with impunity as long as cheap food reached the capital. The result was a degraded rural population. In almost any major city in any large country, one could find schools, libraries, roads, buildings, and consumer goods that resembled life in more prosperous nations in the West. But the farther away one went from that urban center, the more backward life became. The cosmopolitan life of Rio de Janeiro, with its beaches and famous bikinis, trailed off into the nineteenth

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century only 100 miles away. Another 100 miles and one was back in the eighteenth century, and so on, until one reached an interior in the Amazon where the conquest of a native population was still taking place. How was a nation to sustain modern cities and modernize the rest of the country? No one knew. Modern cities were expensive, leaving little in government revenues available for other zones. An incremental expansion of modern life radiated from the principal cities into smaller centers and then into villages. The poor did not wait. They moved to the city to survive and at least share in the collective services that had already been constructed (schools in particular). The dream was to move from being a rural tenant or farmer on a postage stamp plot to having a job in one of the protected factories. The dream ran into harsh reality. Industrial work and related employment never provided more than a fraction of all the jobs in the cities. The major cities remained centers of peddlers, government bureaucracies, and small shops, with only a fraction of the population living in modern housing and driving a car. The arrival of the rural poor with their darker skins led to the expansion of shantytowns. The crush of new demands for urban services scared politicians and the upper and middle classes. What seemed a dream for many appeared to be a nightmare for the prosperous. The urban elites focused on social control. As the government failed to contain popular demands, the upper and middle ranks of society formed coalitions that included the military to contain any threat of social upheaval. The military now became an essential instrument of “development,” partner in a compact that made capitalist expansion possible. Once invited in, however, military rulers were slow to leave. The United States, preoccupied with preventing communism, chose to support militarism against civil mobilization. This resulted in violence against the poor and the idealists who wanted to change the political economy and improve the life chances of the majority.

SANTIAGO AND THE PINOCHET DICTATORSHIP How many times have I heard this phrase which sends shivers down my back: “Father, I thought the best thing if I and the children were to die . . .” Chilean Priest, 1975

If the visitor from colonial Latin America had gone to Santiago, Chile, in 1985, he or she would have recognized the central plaza

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with its ancient cathedral and little else. It had a beautiful setting obscured by smog. The nation is long and thin. The city itself sits on a high plateau with the Andes just to the east. The result is a temperate climate in the summer (December) and a very chilly zone in the winter (July), but one that rarely sees any snow. The sister seaport, Valparaiso, is only 50 miles away. The city had expanded steadily in the nineteenth century and the impact of the export booms of wheat and copper, followed by the nitrate era, had changed the basic size and shape of the city. Its colonial center gave way to buildings from the turn of the twentieth century. That abovementioned visitor would have noticed that the colonial Alameda that ran a few blocks from the plaza was still there, but the elegant trees that once lined it were gone. The street had been named after Chile’s liberal leader of independence, and Avenida O’Higgins was replete with automobiles. Most of the cars were from Western Europe (Volkswagens, Peugeots, Citroëns) or South Korea. Underneath the Alameda, as many still called it, was a relatively new subway that used French technology. In contrast to many of the Latin American city centers in the early 1980s, Santiago’s downtown was spotless. There was little sign that a depression was gripping the region and on any street corner, men and women in blue work clothes swept away any grit. A large pedestrian walkway cut through the downtown that held shops foreign and domestic. Fast food outlets—Burger King, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken—dotted the downtown, outlets that had more middle class status than in their country of origin. The center had a few street peddlers selling trinkets, Kleenex (for use in public restrooms), and so on, but their numbers were miniscule in comparison to the armies of ambulantes one might find in Mexico City or any other Andean nation. Instead, it was clear the city had a strong commercial sector that had displaced almost all signs of a premodern culture. The music on the radio, the movies at the theaters, the programs on television, the magazines on newsstands all resembled or were copied directly from the United States and Western Europe—there was a good deal of pornography, a major change from fifteen years before. There was something odd about Santiago. It seemed like a place with people only consuming other cultures. From the nineteenth century on, city people had looked upon the provinces with disdain—an attitude probably borrowed from that urban center the Chileans so admired, Paris.1 Santiago es Chile. Outside of the capital were the boondocks and secondary centers.

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Iquique in the north or even Concepción to the south looked provincial, small, and underdeveloped in comparison. From its very beginnings as a nation, those who ran the capital taxed trade that was fueled by provincial exports, and spent most of the revenues on Santiago. Provincial interests had not bothered Santiago since the 1890s, and the nation never had any form of federalism. The government in the capital ran everything and the regime in charge in the 1980s had decided to develop a more diversified economy by building provincial infrastructure and making it easier to transport grapes, wines, timber, paper products, and fish to foreign locations. The investment paid off, reducing the nation’s dependence on its principal export, copper, and building up its provincial cities, most notably Concepción. Foreigners frequented Santiago, which had become a major financial center for South America. They came to invest in its new agribusiness sectors, to speculate on its increasingly expensive real estate, and to begin new commercial ventures. While there were the perennial Americans and some Western Europeans and Japanese, the number of investors from the rest of South America was notable. Brazilians, Argentines, and Peruvians looked upon the city as a haven from the upheavals at home. After the financial collapse in 1982–1983, the economy was recovering rapidly. Foreign media and academics extolled the “Chilean model” as an example to underdeveloped nations within and outside of Latin America.2 The media included such stalwarts of business reporting as The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, but the Chilean model also received grudging admiration from liberal newspapers. It was based on ideas from the University of Chicago, including its economic luminary, Milton Friedman. But other American universities had taken part in training the Chilean economists, the “Chicago Boys,” who had turned the nation from a heavily regulated and nationalistic market economy into one that was based on notions that would have seemed obvious to a nineteenth-century liberal. Despite Friedman’s fame and the involvement of another right-wing economist, Friedrich von Hayek, the “Boys” principal teacher was Arnold Harberger who professed that he looked on the “Boys” as his “children” and added, “I have a lot of them all over Latin America.”3 Chile was not the first country to turn away from import substitution to attract foreign investment but, in the 1970s, it had gone farther than any other Latin American nation. It dropped its uniform tariff to 10 percent


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and allowed interest rates to fluctuate on savings and loans. A flood of foreign goods promptly destroyed many of its aging factories. It was the first to fit a term that would become commonplace in the 1980s; it was “neoliberal.” A dictator, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, ran Chile and had done so since 1973, when he overthrew the elected president Salvador Allende Gossens. Allende killed himself in the national palace rather than surrender. That a dictatorship could win praise from economists and the U.S. press says a good deal about the social science professions and journalism in the United States. A technocratic attitude toward human possibilities had taken hold of major American institutions. The same attitude, brought by those trained in the United States as technocrats and managers in U.S.styled schools in Chile, was imposed on the population.4 With it came a worship of consumerism at all costs. The dictatorship justified itself in terms of economic choice for those with an income: it promoted imported color televisions, new cars, a variety of clothes and whiskeys, and visions of a First World lifestyle for the upper 40 percent. The rest could see the new shops and remember dreams of a very different political course. For Pinochet had, in return for consumer choices, abolished freedom of the press, of labor association, of political assembly, and civil rights. All political parties and the national labor federation were disbanded. He and his subordinate military ran the principal state institutions and allowed little or no cultural or ideological variation from the idea that the general had saved Chile from dissolution, chaos, and socialism. Because the general and his supporters blamed the nation’s democratic past for the confrontations that preceded his rule, democracy was seen as something dangerous until the society restructured. The regime used the phrase “authoritarian democracy” to describe how it would sustain social “tranquility.” Despite the foreign praise, the dictatorship had its problems. Like the rest of Latin America, the days of easy credit from international banks had led the nation into debt. In most of Latin America, governments had contracted the debts, but in Chile’s case, a few financial conglomerates, conglomerados, had borrowed from abroad to buy corporations that the state was selling off and to pay for that flood of imports. Chile’s total obligations abroad amounted to $15.6 billion.5 These financiers had close ties to the Chilean Chicago Boys; they were implementing a model they understood well and gaining

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control of the entire economy. When they could not pay in late 1981, the foreign banks demanded that Pinochet’s government cover the obligations and, if he refused, they would cut off credit to the country. He agreed and Chile paid on its debts even when the total reached the annual value of the national output.6 The “debt crisis” for most of Latin America began in the fall of 1982 as Mexico and Brazil suspended payments on their public loans. In Chile, it had begun a year earlier and it shook the regime from 1982 to 1984. It turned out that the Chicago Boys had led Chile into a massive Ponzi scheme and much of the paper held by the conglomerates was worthless.7 The copper miners—a traditionally radical group—responded to the crisis with a strike that galvanized anger against the dictatorship. In 1983 and 1984, major demonstrations, including riots in the poblaciones (laborers’ housing), rattled Pinochet and his supporters in and out of the country. The regime responded with massive violence. Demonstrators were greeted with police dogs, rubber bullets, and water cannons. Troops invaded the poblaciones, randomly shooting into people’s homes and hauling off men for torture.8 Thousands were brutalized and some public examples set. Pinochet’s subordinates beheaded leftists and burned teenage dissidents alive. Those who had become rich under Pinochet’s policies defended him in the press and openly warned that ending his regime would mean a return to the chaos of Allende. President Ronald Reagan, his cabinet, and advisers admired Pinochet, and the State Department demanded that the constitution his supporters had written in 1980, and that had then been passed by a rigged plebiscite, be respected; they said that the fulfillment of its terms would eventually lead to “democracy.”9 The fuel from the protests came from unemployment so sharp it cut into a middle class that had made some gains since 1973. By late 1983, about 21 percent of the active population was unemployed and another 13% were on the minimum employment program that paid a pittance for sweeping the streets (and so keeping Santiago’s central plaza spotless).10 The demonstrations failed. The young men in the poblaciones had taken to throwing firebombs, cutting off streets by burning tires, and reviving an openly communist rhetoric. They had the support of people who remembered Allende as their president, as someone who had fought for them. A middle-aged woman in a women’s movement of the poblaciones justified resorting to violence: “It is right—we all have the right to


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be heard. If the authorities do not listen through good means, they will hear through bad means. It is the only way to express our disagreements and ideals.” She added that the absence of democracy left her people no other choice.11 They had as their objective a national strike, which never took place. The demonstrators frightened off the middle class support they needed to bring down the dictator. They also had to contend with informers and police agents in their midst.12 In the end, the Church, which had strongly condemned the human rights abuses of the regime, and the United States brokered a deal in which the constitution’s call for a plebiscite on the dictator would be held in 1989. The confrontations, however, had pushed professional associations that had helped bring down Allende into opponents of the dictator.13 No additional pressure was put on him. The economy began to recover in 1985, the demonstrations subsided, and the cheering for the dictator resumed. He remained in power until the plebiscite was held and he was voted out of the presidency; even then, his constitution left him a senator for life and a permanent threat to reinstall military rule. How had things come to such a pass? Chile had not been a democracy, as many of its defenders argued. It had been a constitutional republic with broad suffrage. In the 1960s and early 1970s, it was becoming a democracy as restrictions on voting were dropped and the poor, rural segments of the population were enfranchised. The oligarchy that had consolidated its authority in the nitrate era (1880–1930) had lost a good deal of power as that export ran into competition from new commercial fertilizers. In the 1920s, they had rallied around a military regime led by a former colonel, Carlos Ibáñez. He had won support with some labor reforms and had silenced the left by smashing the communists and anarchists. When he fell in 1931, the nation passed through a number of presidents until a former chief executive, Arturo Alessandri, was constitutionally elected. From that moment until 1973, Chile’s presidents had won office by election.14 Money had often flowed freely to decide the victor, but then what electoral system is not influenced by wealth? The 1930s are notable for bringing women into greater political participation and as champions of labor and reform. Their involvement grew out of a more general change, evident as early as the 1920s, as the middle class demanded entrance into the nation’s political life and became a key segment in

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promoting education, new forms of entertainment, and a more open civic culture.15 The major interruption of a progressive political evolution came in 1948, when, under pressure from the United States and frightened by a postwar, radical labor movement, the noncommunist parties had banned the communists and repressed labor mobilization, especially in the coal mines near Concepción. The result was to unseat the middle class Radical Party and return Ibáñez to the presidency as a prolabor reformer; he warmed to the populist style of Juan Perón in Argentina and, in one crucial deal, allowed the communists to legally re-enter the political arena. Late in his life, Ibáñez had seen a new political model in Juan Perón in Argentina, and he allowed labor to mobilize and the communists to re-enter the political realm. His administration was an economic mess, but the decision on the communists restructured the nation’s electoral future. Chilean politics had always turned on two elements: the state of its export economy and the formation of political coalitions. In the 1930s, copper displaced nitrate as Chile’s principal product, and the mineral made up to 50 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. Whenever copper prices rose, the national income rose with it and the incumbent coalition’s chances of holding together improved.16 When the prices fell, the situation became fluid. By the 1960s, Chile’s dependence on copper was total; it provided 80 percent of its export earnings and was controlled by two major U.S. corporations, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and the Kennecott Copper Corporation. Anaconda owned Chuquicamata, in the province of Antofagasta, the world’s largest copper mine. Most of Chile’s copper went to the United States until the 1950s, when exports to the United States shrank and were replaced by increased sales to Western Europe.17 The party system grew out of the trade-based economy and traditional alignments among landowners and urban businessmen. Numerous parties vied for the vote because Chile did not have a federal system that would impose the discipline of local politics. Each generation produced new parties because it was cheap to do so and easier to motivate the young behind a new name than an old one; it was often easier to gain office through a political pact between the new and the old than it was by serving time in an established party. As an example, the Radical Party, so dominant in the late 1930s and 1940s, had almost disappeared by the 1960s and the


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Christian Democrats that formed in 1957 won the presidency in 1964. All the parties began in Santiago and then recruited provincial support.18 Beginning in the 1930s, Chilean politics had taken on distinct regional and class distinctions. The far north with its nitrate and copper mines emerged as a region of anarchist and communist sentiments by the 1920s. The far south, dominated by landowners remained the most conservative zone (with the exception of the coal mining region). Santiago, between those two poles, tracked to a liberal and reform-minded line and was the center of middle-class support for the enhancement of public goods such as schools and an end to oligarchic influence in politics. The class lines are easy to trace. On the right stood the remnants of the landed oligarchy, a financial plutocracy based in banking and finance, and those who had gained fortunes in industry. These families often intermarried and it was common for the wealthiest families to be involved in fundos (large estates), industry, and finance. Santiago held the majority of the middle class that also existed in the major ports. It thus was the heart of reformist parties such as the Radicals and the Christian Democrats. The left had a strong base in the industries of Santiago, the port cities, and mining zones. No single party controlled the national government and so parties had to form coalitions to gain office. Looked at over time, these coalitions made up a right, center, and left with each winning 25 to 35 percent of the voters. In other words, the question in Chilean politics was what pact would be struck in Santiago? Would it be center-right or center-left? In 1958, the winning coalition was a center-right effort that brought Jorge Alessandri to the presidency. He was the son of the once populist leader, Arturo Alessandri, and now the leader of the rightwing Nationalist Party. Alessandri thought that a more openly capitalist effort, one that did not expand government spending, would produce growth. In 1964, the Christian Democrats elected Eduardo Frei Montalva president; he, too, won with rightwing support but his party carried the election by itself. Frei, like Alessandri, began well and ended badly. His social reforms alleviated some of the nation’s poverty and improved education and medical care but finally, the economy sputtered and his last two years produced a deepening of partisan divisions, a police massacre of protesters in the south, and land invasions by the poor in Santiago and on fundos to the south.

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Thus was the stage set for Salvador Allende Gossens, the leader of a coalition called Unidad Popular or U.P. (Popular Unity), which included the Communist and Socialist Parties and smaller leftwing parties. He won a 36 percent plurality in 1970. The center and right had each run its own candidate (the right ran Jorge Alessandri again), and this division gave Allende his chance. His opponents promptly began plotting against him, some openly and some clandestinely. Congress had to certify the victor and an attempt was made to keep Allende from winning a majority in Congress. The period between the popular vote and the congressional decision led to massive demonstrations on the left. On the right, paramilitary and corporate groups, foreign and domestic, planned a coup only to find that the army’s leadership wanted none of it. In an effort to generate military anger, a paramilitary unit attempted to kidnap the head of the army, General René Schneider. He resisted and was killed. His death shocked the civilian politicians who then made a deal with Allende and he was certified as president.19 Allende was an interesting character. He was born in 1908, that is, during the nitrate era—a period with one foot in the nineteenth century. He had become a physician, although he never practiced medicine, and entered politics at the height of the nitrate crisis and the onset of the Great Depression. He came from a strong liberal tradition, which in Chile meant he was anticlerical. He was a founder of the Socialist Party in the early 1930s and became prominent enough to serve briefly as minister of health in the latter part of the decade. He was a political warhorse who had been seeking the presidency since 1952. One joke told during the 1970 election was that when he died, his tombstone would read, “Here lies Salvador Allende, the future president of Chile.” The younger members of his own party did not want him to be the coalition candidate but his famous “wrist,” an ability to manipulate the system, held true and it became obvious he was the only one who could hold a left coalition together. Articulate, polished, immaculately dressed, he did not seem the type to rally workers. He was also a notorious skirt chaser, something that hardly helped to win the women’s vote. He did win but under conditions that made a successful term of office almost impossible. What happened to him and the Popular Unity reads like a Greek tragedy. Aside from the popular confrontations over the election, he faced the open hostility of the wealthy and


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the upper-middle class that promptly took their money elsewhere, melting the stock market and leaving a stagnating economy even more weakened. The U.P. campaign had been so arduous it left key supporters exhausted, even if exhilarated.20 He also faced the hostility of major foreign corporations, almost all of them based in the United States. Anaconda, Kennecott, and International Telephone and Telegraph led the charge against him; Anaconda was threatened with extinction if it lost “Chuqui.” International Telephone and Telegraph ran the phone system and owned key hotels. Its chief executive, Harold Geneen, helped engineer the kidnap/murder of Schneider. Allende promised to nationalize the copper mines and other foreign holdings. On this issue, he was as radical an economic nationalist as any populist. A narrative of South America can separate political events within the nation from the influence of the United States, but after 1948 that task becomes more difficult. The United States government demanded that Latin American nations align themselves against communism, and this effort intensified after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. It devoted greater amounts of money to aiding anticommunist groups in labor organizations and political parties and supported educational and cultural developments that were seen as reformist but not communist. As an example of its influence, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) financed part of Frei’s victory in 1964 and secretly assisted the candidate by running a black propaganda campaign claiming, among other things, that Allende and the left planned to impose communist daycare centers.21 Once Allende won the election, President Richard Nixon and his chief foreign adviser, Henry Kissinger (later secretary of state) worked with U.S. and Chilean interests to bring him down. The strategy was as simple as it was effective. They would squeeze the new administration economically by cutting off all foreign credits and do their best to sponsor resistance by elements opposed to it. They succeeded in getting the copper miners and truck drivers to strike and to mobilize massive demonstrations on the right, most notably a march of women from the upper class (and their maids) banging empty pots to demonstrate how little they had to eat.22 Of course, the event was part of an effort to cause panic amongst the middle class; the rich had ample freezers full of food. It was also a chance to call out the “manhood” of the Chilean soldiers. Nixon and Kissinger also sponsored the nation’s major newspaper in denouncing

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the administration. Chile posed no strategic threat to the United States except for the ideology of the Popular Unity. Nixon feared that Allende’s victory—which the entire socialist world now watched— would serve as an example to other Latin American nations. Allende’s policies did not help his cause. He had promised too much and could hardly carry out a program of economic nationalism, agrarian reform, bureaucratic reorganization, and labor emancipation in one six-year term. Two years into his administration, his ministers were still trying to pull together basic policies on everything from education to inflation.23 When expenditures exceeded income, something that happened almost immediately, Allende threw economic risks aside and printed money to cover the difference. Inflation soon ran wild—into three-digit figures a year—and the government tried to contain it by fixing the prices of food and other necessities. The result was a burgeoning black market in which the official price of the dollar was 28 escudos and the illegal trade sold dollars for 70 escudos. This tactic increased the economic impact of those who held dollars, none of whom were campesinos or laborers.24 He also allowed ultra-left elements in his Socialist Party and in an organization called the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR, or Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) to sponsor land seizures in major cities and in the countryside. The outcome brought campesinos to support the government but also triggered even greater resistance by landowners who cut off food supplies to Santiago. Within the city, the left organized workers to seize domestic factories, which Allende had not intended but that, once begun, he had to support or lose the radical elements in his own coalition.25 By late 1972, the high inflation, the difficulty of obtaining some foods and parts to maintain machinery and the many demonstrations that sometimes led to violence in the streets made it clear that the Popular Unity government could not hold on. The opposition parties believed that they could win a sufficient number of seats in the congressional elections of March 1973 to impeach the president. They failed; in fact, Popular Unity’s electoral margin rose to 44 percent. A second option was now deployed with U.S. government involvement. It was to destabilize the economy as much as possible and so justify overthrowing the president. An army faction tried a coup in June. The congressional opposition parties in August 1973 openly called Allende’s administration unconstitutional, inviting a military


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coup.26 Their plan was to eliminate Popular Unity and then, in time, return Eduardo Frei or some other noncommunist to the presidency. Instead, Pinochet and the heads of the Navy, Air Force, and Carabineros staged the coup on September 11, 1973, and took power. Pinochet, as head of the Army, eventually held the presidency longer than any other leader in Chilean history. The new regime killed more than 3,000 people (an official but extremely conservative total), tortured and illegally imprisoned thousands, and sent tens of thousands into exile. A wave of terror descended in rural areas as well as on many of those who had gained land under Allende, and who wound up losing it.27 Many of the rural organizers, such as the leaders in the factories, lost their lives.28 Nixon and Kissinger, fond as they were of Pinochet, always denied that they had anything to do with the coup. In 1975 in order to balance the nation’s fiscal books and with the advice of the Boys, Pinochet submitted the Chilean population to what they approvingly called “the shock treatment.” The government ended price supports for food, fired government employees en masse, sold off state firms, and many of them closed. Inflation declined to 340 percent, while the economy plummeted 12.5 percent.29 The Chilean people fell into a circle of hell, without jobs and food, and watched their children starve.30 The regime became an important experiment for American economists and other development specialists. A student of the “shock treatments” that American and American-trained economists imposed on other countries—places as different as Bolivia, Indonesia, Russia, and Iraq—called Chile “the epicenter of the Chicago experiment” and of the idea that entire populations could be hammered into capitalist submission.31

THE POPULATION EXPLOSION Most explanations of what happened during the Cold War never look very closely at what was happening to ordinary people. Instead, the era is seen entirely as a clash of ideologies. A different view is that the ideologies were attempting to grasp a momentous shift in the region and in the world—one that could not be reversed. Up until the nineteenth century, almost no one thought in terms of progress. Up until the twentieth, few imagined the transformation that the globe would see in the next 100 years. At the midpoint in the century, the

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direction of events became clear. The age of formal empire had ended and the world now consisted of nation-states; the last major imperial power, Great Britain, lost what remained of its major colonies between 1945 and 1965. The population of the world was growing at a rate that exceeded any previous era. The rural populations of the globe were moving into cities. This was true of Latin America and was occurring in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. The Cold War reduced these changes into a simplistic set of confrontations. The threat of nuclear war turned the United States and the Soviet Union toward two strategies: the first was called MAD, or a mutual assured destruction that involved building enough missiles to annihilate the other power even if that meant that both powers would be hit; the second involved a series of proxy wars and standoffs that served as tests of will in Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, among others. The Cold War ended but changes in the world’s populations and their concentrations continued. The very technologies that made larger cities possible and that produced more food and new medicines to prolong life also accelerated the population explosion and its attendant urbanization. Those pressures, on government and resources, would generate politicians who promised public goods and decent jobs. Those same pressures became configured in Latin America in terms of the Cold War, as a series of nations to be contested in the conflict rather than as a region undergoing the most profound change since the Iberian conquest five centuries earlier.

CAUSES

AND

CONSEQUENCES

OF THE

POPULATION BOOM

The origins of the population boom are many. For some reason, the major epidemics and pandemics that had plagued mankind in ages past became less frequent and lethal. A flu epidemic spread around the world and killed at least 20 million in 1918–1919, and this may have been the most virulent pandemic since the Black Death in the Middle Ages, but nothing like it reappeared. World wars in which tens of millions died made no dent in the increase. The Great Depression was notably free of any outbreaks of disease. The population of Latin America rose rapidly in the first half of the century. The region was not directly involved in either of the great wars. Campaigns against smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria played a major role in reducing the death rate.


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A number of governments also maintained public health clinics, albeit these always had stingy budgets. Small investments by the state and private charities in vaccination and in better sewage treatment and drinking water paid major dividends. Leaders throughout the Atlantic world, including those of Latin America, viewed these outcomes as part of modern life. From the early twentieth century on, they had campaigned against “degeneracy” and alcoholism and in favor of “hygiene.” The world’s population in 1800 was one billion; in 1900, 1.6 billion; and in 2000, 6 billion or more. Latin America’s population was 167 million in 1950 and 518–523 billion in 2000; the population more than tripled.32 In preindustrial cultures, in which life expectancy is 35 years or less, it is important that women become sexually active at an early age as infant mortality is high. A high fertility assured social reproduction and was valued by every agrarian culture. A reduction in the birth rate is noticeable in some European countries in the nineteenth century. Latin American cultures, aside from those of Argentina and Uruguay, which early on reflected a European sensibility about the need for birth control, entered the twentieth century with preindustrial attitudes. Syphilis and illegitimacy were common. The idea that men proved their manhood by impregnating women, and women their feminine purpose by raising as many children as possible, was unchallenged. Every culture when it attains a basic level of modernity passes through a transitional stage in which death rates fall and birth rates remain high. That period for Latin America began in the late nineteenth century and lasted through to the present. A declining death rate, combined with greater longevity—by the 1970s a substantial number of people lived into their 60s—meant the number of people rose rapidly each decade. The other side of the transition, birth rates fell slowly in response to greater longevity. Thus, life expectancy for the entire region in 1950 was sixty-three years for men and seventy-one for women; in the year 2000, it was seventyone for men and seventy-nine for women. Birth rates remained high with the greatest bulge in natural fertility rate occurring in the 1960s and 1970s and not falling sharply until the 1980s with the rapid spread of contraception among urban women.33 In 1950, Brazil had 52 million inhabitants; in 1990, it had 144 million. Mexico, with a startling birth rate, went from 25 to 83 million. Chile went from 6 million to 13 million. The largest number of young people in Latin

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American history appeared in a major wave in the 1960s and early 1970s, paralleling a similar wave in the United States.34 Increases of this magnitude put pressure on all resources. A major issue in Chile as well as Mexico and Brazil in this period was agrarian reform. This meant the breakup of large estates into small farms or the formation of peasant-run collectives. Allende had promised that natives in the south and inquilinos or tenant farmers on the fundos would gain land. The promise left out women heads of households and many seasonal laborers.35 Mexico, despite its radical redistribution of land in the 1930s, faced even more landlessness in rural areas by the 1970s. Demands for land in Northeast Brazil played a major role in destabilizing the civilian government in that country in 1964. Related pressures appeared in the area of public goods. Electricity was often scarce and blackouts were common in Brazil’s major cities. Everywhere, the new residents of shantytowns demanded roads, schools, sewers, and everywhere governments fell well behind the demand. In Latin America by the 1970s, the age pyramids, representing the distribution of the population from young at the bottom to old at the top, were almost all broad at the bottom. Those under the age of twenty made up half of Venezuela’s population. There was no direct correlation between population density and political radicalism; life is never that simple. However, the radical ideologies of the region in the 1960s and 1970s, especially those derived from the Cuban Revolution, were aimed at the young and found ready ears. Joblessness and underemployment had always been common but now more young people were concentrated in the cities, where they could make some noise. Educational levels had risen. Although Allende was over sixty when he became president, young people, many of them university graduates, predominated in the U.P.’s factions farthest to the left. The demand for a revolution rather than reform came from supporters in their early twenties, who, in turn, re-energized an older generation of the left. High school and university students played central roles in the radical uprising in Mexico in 1968, just as the nation was hosting the Olympics. People in their twenties staffed guerrilla movements that shook the region in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the conflicts that racked Latin America in this period cannot be explained solely in terms of class or the failures of industrial policy. Perhaps no policy could have contained such a population surge, could have supplied enough young people with housing, jobs, and some dignity.


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A significant cultural factor was religion. This meant the Church and what were called traditional values. In 1962, Pope John XXIII called the bishops to the Second Vatican Council. In contrast to the First Council in 1870 and its reactionary attitude, this council proposed a reconsideration of the Church’s teachings and practices to incorporate changes in the world. In Catholic Europe, the Church looked out on a population that had left the pews—disgusted by the Church’s cooperation with the fascist powers before and during World War II and no longer believing the Church’s emphasis on the sinful nature of man was of much importance in an era of sustained economic recovery. The institutional and doctrinal need for renewal seemed obvious. The Church would stop its opposition to democratic republics, a view that had become laughable, and endorse human rights, a dramatic shift in attitude. It would introduce the vernacular mass (mass said in each nation’s language as opposed to Latin) and emphasize a concern about the distribution of income in the capitalist world. Its condemnation of atheistic communism never changed. Within Latin America, this search for renewal introduced two novelties. Priestly intellectuals in Brazil and elsewhere produced what they called “liberation theology,” which focused on the need to combine the gospel with a demand for social justice in this world; at a famous 1968 Latin American Episcopal Conference in Medellín, the Catholic bishops pronounced an “option for the poor” in which the Church would prioritize its efforts to reach the large underclass in Latin America and re-evangelize it. One favored means was to construct “base communities” in which Catholics would live out Christian principles and collectively regenerate their lives.36 Some clergy pushed for an end to celibacy as a condition to be a priest or nun. The papacy became alarmed by the new politics and sexuality, and Pope John XXIII’s successor, Pope Paul VI (1963–1978), in Populorum Progressio (1967), expressed concern about poverty; he denounced thoughtless capitalists and the exploitation of laborers. He created an environment in which Father Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian of the Dominican religious order, could posit similarities between Marxism and the Church’s social teachings.37 However, in another encyclical, the Pope reiterated the Church’s opposition to birth control and abortion as well as any effort to permit priests or nuns to marry. After the one-month tenure of Pope John Paul I, John Paul II (1978–2005), a determined anticommunist, turned on “liberation

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theory” entirely and condemned clerics who participated in the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979–1990) or supported antigovernment movements in Argentina and El Salvador. The mandatory retirement of bishops at the age of seventy and his long tenure gave him his chance to replace left-leaning or socially conscious bishops with those holding his views. In Chile in 1983, he replaced Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez, a staunch defender of those persecuted by the Pinochet government, with Archbishop Juan Francisco Fresno, a weak, conservative prelate who backed off confronting the regime at precisely the moment it was most vulnerable.38 The Church by the 1980s was driving out priests and nuns who wanted radical changes in either politics or sexuality.39 The brief moment of Church radicalism, from the mid-1960s until 1980 or so, opened the door to moving efforts by priests and nuns to protect the poor from the violence of the era. The Church’s courageous stand in Chile has been mentioned. Priests were killed and nuns were raped and murdered in the conflicts of Central America. Some, such as Camilo Torres in Colombia in 1966, died fighting at the side of Marxist guerrillas.40 The Nicaraguan Revolution, unlike that of Cuba, was not anticlerical. The Church hierarchy, however, used all its authority to condemn the Sandinistas, saying the faithful should not be supporting them. When Pope John Paul II visited Nicaragua in 1983, he wagged his finger at priest-poet Ernesto Cardenal, who had fought against Somoza in the 1960s and was then minister of culture under the Sandinistas. The Pope went further and told mothers who had lost their children in the U.S.sponsored war against the Nicaraguan Revolution to shut up. After the Pope gave his sermon, Ortega ended it with a playing of the national anthem: half the priests walked out; half remained.41 The Pope condemned those who “depict Jesus as a political activist, . . . and even as someone involved in the class struggle.”42 The nation’s Archbishop Miguel Obando y Bravo traveled abroad and held mass for members of the contras carrying out atrocities to subvert the revolution. Thus the Church abandoned its moment of social conscience for an anticommunist crusade. The population of Nicaragua, as well as elsewhere, abandoned the Church. Some of them held on to the theology of liberation that the Church rejected. As observers of the Church have noted, there are two Catholic religions in Latin America: the institutional Church with its official doctrines and privileged hierarchy, and the popular faith with its


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messianic belief in redemption and justice in this life as well as the next.43 As even supporters of a “progressive Church” noted, grassroots efforts at social change require “the acquiescence of institutional authority.” Bishops can reverse “any change in his diocese that does not meet his approval, just as the pope has the authority to impose sanctions against individuals, movements, or theologies that he opposes.”44 The Church upheld its hierarchical prerogatives and began to lose the poor to other messianic doctrines. Beginning in the 1960s, U.S. televangelists raised substantial sums to promote their Protestant views. Pentecostal and Evangelical ministers spread throughout the region until by the early 1980s, religious experts began to wonder if, one day, Latin America would become Protestant.45 It takes far less time to train one of their ministers than to train a priest, and protestant sects spent much less money on Church overhead. The smaller Protestant groups have little bureaucracy. What is more, they are strongly anticommunist and often opportunistic in their politics, having come to support Pinochet, against the Marxists in Catholicism, and so gaining greater tolerance of their evangelization.46 Finally, although they and the Catholic Church oppose abortion, they have nothing against birth control, which the Church still condemns. As birth control became cheaper, the Church emerged from the conflicts of faith with a sexual theology totally out of keeping with the practices of its members. The outcome of this period, outside of Cuba and Nicaragua, reinforced the use of coercion and wealth in shaping social outcomes. Landlords, financiers, and industrialists in the region had two crucial allies: the militaries within their own countries and the U.S. government. The landed rich resisted progressive social change at every turn. The disparity between rural and urban wages was so sharp that the rural poor improved their circumstances by becoming the urban poor. Goods and services, however, were poorly distributed in the cities as well so that most nations had a severe shortage of primary schools, with high dropout rates, while public universities remained tuition free. Electricity, phone service, paved roads, potable water, and working sewers were readily available in Coyoacán in Mexico City, Providencia in Santiago, Chile, and Copacabana in Rio. These emerged as areas with a mix of shopping, residential housing, and tourism. The shantytowns in these cities resorted to desperate measures such as throwing a wire over a power line then channeling the electricity into various homes. Diets based on potatoes, beans,

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and rice remained common in the favelas, callampas, and rancherías, while the upper-class diet came to include more steak, eggs, and fresh fish. Still, the survival rate among the poor increased and their fertility remained high. In every single nation, the poorest were producing more children than other classes. Indian mothers begging for their children’s food had always been common in Mexico City; now their numbers had increased.

THE MISINTERPRETATION

OF

URBAN POVERTY

As the poor increased in the cities, they became a “problem.” In 1961, the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote a story based on his research in the slums in Mexico City entitled The Children of Sanchez, in which the head of the household, a widower, abuses his children, drinks, and chases women.47 A shocked Mexican government banned the book for some time; twenty years later, it was made into an English-language film. But turning the poor into a social science problem dismisses their humanity and renders them as primitives, unable to comprehend the modern world. The popular word to describe the poor became “marginal.” This referred to their living at the margins of an industrial economy and in miserable circumstances; a geographic marginality—living outside the developed city—is translated into a cultural one. In fact, Jesus Sánchez works hard and feeds his family a better diet than was available on most ejidos, the collective farms that the government created in the 1920s and 1930s. There is a direct parallel here to the social science literature about urban, Black poverty in the United States in which the failure to become middle class is seen as a failure in life. This kind of approach overlooks the differences in geography, race, and age that affect the poor—the young can take greater risks. It also sees the enormous stress of such risks as “cultural” rather than as coping strategies in a depressive situation and to the threat of even greater misery. Many of the poor were moving up, not in the sense of becoming middle class but in gaining a foothold in a growing urban economy rather than remaining in a stagnating rural one. The most intense period of urbanization occurred between 1925 and 1975; in 1950, the population in Latin American cities was 41 percent of the total; by 1975 it was 75 percent.48 The flight from rural conditions became so pronounced that in the 1970s, when a military government


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completed a major roadway to improve connections between Lima and the interior, the result was not an increased capacity to ship goods to the provinces but of the provincial poor, jumping on the trucks, to move to Lima. The poor, colored people from the dust bowl of the Northeast increased their flow to Rio and São Paulo. They cut down their risks by moving to slums where family or residents of their small towns already lived. Far from being marginal, these new residents increased the size of the urban market and created new demands for consumer goods. Their lives involved struggle. People are psychologically wounded by poverty and its brutalities, but the so-called marginal people worked in the many sweat shops of the large cities and in the houses of the better off, picked up the cities’ garbage, and prepared and sold much of its food; they were a part of the modernization of urban life. Many gradually acquired sweat equity, building their houses one brick wall at a time and gaining title to the plot of land they had once invaded. They got running water; paved roads; and schools—all acquired by trading in their votes to a party or city councilman. Their poverty came from the income and wealth hierarchies accompanying that modernization, from attitudes toward the people of color formed in the colonial era and reinforced with scientific racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and from the grotesque distribution of income from the greater productivity of modern technologies. In all, the 1960s and early 1970s were a successful period in the region’s development despite the rising population. Had governments acted earlier, the problems of poverty might have been abated by a steady increase in population rather than the vertical acceleration that took place. Even so, for many this era was transformative. Millions entered a middle class lifestyle their parents could never have imagined; workers gained access to consumer goods. The failure was political. Leaders thought great countries had large populations. The Brazilian military government in the 1960s wanted more people to carry out its national destiny to become a great power. Robert McCaa has demonstrated that poor women wanted birth control and would use it, as they did in the small area he studied in Chile, if it became available through public medicine.49 By the time governments did act to stem the population tide, it was somewhat late. The era of prosperity had ended and the region was in stagnation.

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ARTS

Latin America and the Origins of Its Twenty-First Century AND

COMMUNICATION

As educational levels increased and the population grew, Latin America underwent a cultural renaissance. There were enough readers to support novelists and popular essayists. Literary experts labeled the late 1950s to the early 1980s “the boom.” The Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and the Argentine essayist and short story-writer Jorge Luis Borges became well known among literati in Western Europe and the United States. In each case, much of their best work had been written before 1955 but their new prominence signaled a transatlantic interest in Latin American literature. New novelists and essayists now appeared, notably the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, the Argentines Ernesto Sabato and Manuel Puig, and, of course, the Colombian giant of the boom, the novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The region’s universities began to pay serious salaries. Until the 1960s, most professors worked part-time in a university faculty and made the rest of their money practicing a profession; now faculty could make a decent middleclass income at such institutions as the UNAM (the Autonomous National University of Mexico), the Colegio de México, and the University of Buenos Aires. Mexico already had a well-established reputation in the fine arts. Other Latin American nations joined it, especially in exploring modern art, music, and architecture. In art, Fernando Botero developed a distinct, satirical style by painting his fellow Colombians— especially those in the establishment—as comic, pretentious, and fat.50 In Chile, a strong interest in Andean folk music led Violetta Parra, Victor Jara, and a dozen others to explore the revival of such music or the application of its styles to new, often political, lyrics. The movement in Chile paralleled other efforts in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico that came to be called la Nueva Canción (the New Song). Parra committed suicide before Allende’s election but her song, “Gracias a la Vida” (“Thanks for Life”), became the theme song of the resistance to Pinochet’s dictatorship.51 Jara’s songs made him a lightening rod for the right. During the coup against Allende, he was arrested, and, with thousands of others, held in the national stadium. There, the guitarist and singer had his wrists broken, was repeatedly tortured, and was shot numerous times.52 The era also included a massive construction effort. Mexico City still kept most of its buildings no more than ten stories


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high because of earthquakes; the same was true of Santiago, Chile. But skyscrapers appeared in Caracas and São Paulo, and, even under a military dictator, Caracas tried to turn its university into a model of modern design.53 The major site of modernity in this era is, of course, Brasília. A Brazilian reformer elected in 1956, President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, planned the city as a statement—a new city to reconfigure the nation’s development and part of his promise to bring ten years of progress in only five. Built in the interior, about 1,000 km northwest of Rio, the city was formally dedicated in 1960. It became a federal district and the nation’s new capital, although many national officials resisted moving there throughout the 1960s. Kubitschek got Lúcio Costa to design the city and Oscar Niemeyer to design its principal buildings, including the congressional center that looked like an upside down flying saucer. Planned along an axis, the city was built entirely for cars and buses even though most Brazilians did not own automobiles. As its major historian notes, the laborers who built its modernist buildings lived in shantytowns— supposedly temporary. In fact, the popular shanty areas became the real heart of the city’s culture where residents went to dance, eat, and have fun. A modern, planned city with its open spaces and stunning design innovations was a sterile place in which to live. As James Holston notes, “In addition to isolation, the most consistent criticism that superquadra [modern housing complex] residents voice is their condemnation of the uniformity of the residential architecture.”54 Brasilia represented the predominance of the highway and superhighway as Latin America’s future. Latin America followed the transport model of the United States, gradually abandoned its railroads, and became addicted to gasoline- and diesel-consuming cars, trucks, and buses. The Volkswagen Beetle became commonplace in Mexican and Brazilian cities as private cars and taxis. São Paulo had the largest Volkswagen plant in the world. The problem was, of course, that automobiles consumed a resource that much of Latin America, aside from Mexico and Venezuela, did not possess in any significant quantity, oil. Economic growth led to more cars, trucks, buses, and a larger import bill for petroleum products. Urbanization and the technology adopted to sustain mobility made Latin America more dependent on a resource controlled until the 1970s by corporations in the United States, Britain, and European nations.

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The other sweeping change was the arrival of television. Until the 1970s, radio was still the dominant mass medium, with newspapers becoming secondary two decades before. The arrival of cheap, imported transistor radios meant that even the natives on the Andean altiplano could now listen to the news and their favorite music. But television’s inroad was steady. In the early 1960s, a working family that owned a set let their neighbors watch it; other strategies, still in use in poor neighborhoods, involved a town buying a public set and watching it outdoors or in a theater. In the wonderful film Bye Bye, Brasil (1980), a traveling magic troupe arrives in an isolated northeastern town, only to find its audience in the civic center watching TV. The Azcarragas dominated television in Mexico through its network, Televisa. Rede Globo, a conglomerate, ran TV in Brazil. Televisa and Globo became extremely successful by producing telenovelas—soap operas with a story line that ran twelve to twenty episodes—and exporting their products to the rest of Latin America, and even the Spanish-speaking audience in the United States.55 The plots varied only slightly but most involved the naive but virginal girl coming to the big city, being deserted by her boyfriend (either before or after she arrived), and then, through hard work or some luck in love, establishing herself as a success. In the mid-1990s, however, as the Mexican state tottered, Televisa broadcast telenovelas dealing with political corruption and even homosexuality. Its generally bland formulas, however, became a global dream: telenovelas are a major Mexican export, sending 22,000 hours of programming abroad in the year 2000. Programs were even translated into Vietnamese.56 Latin American television showed little originality. Its news shows looked like American news shows (often with the same network footage taken from the United States), and its dramas either copied U.S. shows or were simply rebroadcasts in dubbed Spanish or Portuguese of the original American programs. The use of U.S. programs had a political effect: it removed any political content from programming. One of my colleagues, referring to television during the Argentine military’s era of the late 1970s, called it the “idiotization” of the audience.57 One way or another, Latin America was being knit together. The provinces now followed the World Cup, and everyone in any given nation knew the most popular telenovela. Watching them was


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often a cultural event. Latin Americans also knew what was happening in the United States; they saw the Vietnam War and the civil rights movements unfold on their televisions at the same moment as those events were shown in the United States. It was not quite, as a Canadian theorist of media put it, a “global village.”58 But it was a breakdown of provincial isolation and a chance for even the barely literate to become familiar with cultures outside of their own. As for the educated in the region, this was a golden era, filled with new, affordable consumer goods, and access by air to Miami, New York, London, and Paris as well as to other Latin American nations. During the Allende presidency, young, revolutionary tourists flooded Chile, coming from the United States, Great Britain, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay to be part of a novel event. These years were also important for women. Although there had always been an educational disparity in the region between men and women, women now asserted themselves into professions other than teaching and nursing. They increased their participation in the work force, although their percentages in this respect ran behind those of Western Europe. Young women were part of the Cuban Revolution, included in the nation’s militias. They took part in the area’s guerrilla movements and the 1968 student movement in Mexico. Not everything was political. The more educated segments of the population acquired birth control pills and began to experiment with the “sexual revolution,” already under way in the United States and Europe. There were even Latin American hippies.

THE COLD WAR AND GUERRILLA DREAMS Given the age pyramid in the region, it is not surprising that so many youths turned to political radicalism. This was the heyday of dependency theory, of Marxism, of dreams that guerrilla war might bring an end to links with a dominant United States—ally of the Latin American rich—and put an end as well to the inequalities fostered by American and domestic capitalists. The theory argued that the center dominated the periphery in a world in which New York and Washington ran Latin America through financial and industrial predominance, through control of the region’s principal exports and through an alliance with the domestic elite in each of the region’s

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nations—that is, through the use of a comprador class that sold out its own people to retain its income and social position. Allende used this theory in his inaugural address and as he was about to die in La Moneda, the presidential palace. He blamed “foreign capital, imperialism, [which] together with the reaction” created the climate for the coup.59 He was right. It was also the moment when Republicans were reasserting their control of the U.S. presidency and using that control to impose a violent anticommunism on Latin America and, indeed, on the world. The Cold War had begun in 1947 and by 1970 had consumed the energies of a number of presidents: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. Until Nixon’s victory in 1968, the Democrats had the momentum of labor support and the experience of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s leadership during the Great Depression and World War II to build a progressive, liberal electoral base. That base disintegrated as Truman turned on the left in his own party and unions during the early stages of the Cold War and, later, as Democrats aligned themselves with Blacks seeking inclusion in politics and equality of treatment before the law and in the workplace. Southerners and many racist laborers in the north began to break with the New Deal coalition. In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater running against Lyndon Johnson lost almost everywhere but in the South, which voted for him in reaction to the Civil Rights Act of that year and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that struck down segregation and discrimination in employment. Once elected, Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reviving the right of southern Blacks to vote and further infuriating Whites of the region.. The Democrats then divided over the Vietnam War that Kennedy began as an exercise using some 10,000 troops to help South Vietnam fight communism. His efforts failed and Lyndon Johnson escalated the conflict until over 500,000 American troops were committed to the war effort. Youthful Democrats and many sincere liberals dissented against the war, splitting the party and making Nixon’s victory possible. Nixon carried the South, racists everywhere, and most of the West. As the Cold War intensified, successive administrations became more concerned about Latin America and that there be no repetition of the Cuban Revolution. Yet it was this same revolution, which had given heart to so many poor and to youthful intellectuals: the clash of purposes was momentous and disastrous for Latin America.


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THE CUBAN REVOLUTION In January 1959, Fidel Castro and a group of guerrillas overthrew the Cuban dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. This success culminated Cuban efforts to be free of external rule. Cuba had become a dependency of the United States after the Spanish-American War. In 1933, it rebelled against the Machado dictatorship, only to be saddled by American economic and diplomatic policies with Fulgencio Batista. Like Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Batista used the armed forces to maintain a “constabulary regime” and protect American corporations and the Cuban rich. In 1940, a new constitution was written and Batista won the presidency in an arranged election. In 1944, Cuba held its first free election since the 1920s and Batista’s nemesis, Ramón Grau San Martin, won; in 1948, the man Grau San Martín chose as his successor, Carlos Prío Socarrás, won. Grau San Martín had once been the hero of the uprising against Machado and someone the United States feared as a socialist, but he and Prío presided over an era of rampant corruption and a flagrant disregard for public needs.60 It was in this postwar period that the American Mafia, led by Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, began to develop Havana and Las Vegas as twin poles of a new empire in gambling and prostitution. Castro, the son of a wealthy Spanish landowner and a Cuban woman he never married, began his political career as a law student at the University of Havana. His younger brother, Raúl, became a communist. But Castro ran for Congress in 1952 as a reformer, intent on cleaning up Cuban politics. Batista ran again for the presidency and when he saw that he would not win, pulled his old military cronies together, staged a coup, and took power. Castro came to public attention when he staged an attempt by a few dozen supporters to seize the Moncada barracks in Santiago and trigger a public insurrection. The attempt failed, although the date of the attack, 26th of July, became the name of his movement. He was arrested, imprisoned for a time on a penal island, released in 1955 in a general amnesty, and went to the United States to join anti-Batísta forces in exile. Frustrated with their inaction, he then went to Mexico where he and a small band of men practiced guerrilla war tactics. They took a small boat, the Granma, loaded with firearms, to the coast of Cuba. Cuban military forces almost annihilated them. Then Castro, Raúl, a close friend, Camilo Cienfuegos, and a young

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Argentine doctor, Ernesto “Che” Guevara took to the Sierra Maestra hills (often called mountains) and, after nearly two years of struggle, defeated Batista’s army and seized Havana.61 Or so the story goes. There is a good deal of truth in it, in so far as the names and dates are concerned. From it sprang the central myth of the Latin American left in the 1960s, the idea that guerrilla war could bring down the region’s governments and build a revolutionary momentum at the same time. All revolutionary regimes generate myths to legitimize and rationalize their seizures of power. The Cuban myth was presented as a “theory” in a famous series of essays by Che Guevara on revolutionary war, studies that had Castro’s blessing. Reading these works now, one is struck by their homilies and loose generalizations. “The guerrilla warrior must be an extraordinary companion. At the same time, he must be closemouthed.” And, “The majority of [the] national bourgeoisie have united with North American imperialism: thus their fate shall be the same as that of the latter.”62 Karl Marx had claimed that modern revolution was tied to industrialization and that the proletariat in the most advanced sectors of society would lead it against the exploitive owners of the means of production. Lenin, in explaining the Russian Revolution, had argued that workers were not enough; a party led by those who understood Marx was a necessary vehicle of success. Mao Zedong, in explaining the Chinese Revolution, defended the importance of the party but insisted that peasants were the key factor in overthrowing the capitalist class. Castro and Guevara argued one did not need an industrial proletariat or a Communist Party. Cuba’s industrial workforce was small and tied to the seasons of sugar production; its Communist Party had once supported Batista and had nothing to do with Castro’s 26th of July Movement. The key, Castro and Guevara said, was the foco, or guerrilla cell. The foco was a guerrilla force, a small, armed recruiting unit, and a means of raising political consciousness. As the rural poor were brought into a foco, they would be trained to fight and taught why they were fighting; military discipline and guerrilla honesty would win them over and they, in turn, would feed and protect the revolutionary force. As focos grew, they would divide (one cannot help thinking of Guevara’s training in biology) and finally, together, they would overwhelm the enemy. The problem with this theory is it was never true. (This is probably the problem with all revolutionary theories.) Focos, alone, did not


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defeat Batista. Nor did they win simply in concert with a dissident labor movement in Havana. A major part of Cuban society, rich and poor, detested the dictator and came to despise U.S. foreign policy for supporting him. The rich saw him as uncouth and corrupt, and he was, and the laboring poor viewed his regime as unjust and barbarous, which it was. Cubans were not prudes but they were appalled at the thousands of women selling themselves and at the role of the police as henchmen for a criminal underworld. Castro, in his radio broadcasts from the Sierra Maestra, emphasized the moral bankruptcy of the government rather than harping on economic evils. He promised a Cuba with an elected, civilian government, publicly accountable officials, and social justice. Castro appealed for U.S. support, arguing a democratic nation should export its ideals. As a result, he drew multiclass support and his movement was seen as aligned with those of others who wanted Batista deposed. Grau San Martin and Prío Socarrás worked against Batista, and the latter, a corrupt president in his own right, gave Castro money. Urban interests, including small industrialists, sent him funds and he used the money to buy food from the Sierra’s isolated population.63 Havana also supplied guns and ammunition. Aside from Castro, Batista faced a phalanx of opponents. Prío Socarras ran a civilian opposition while living in exile in the United States. University of Havana students regularly demonstrated against the dictator, and in 1957 staged a daring attempt to kill him—one that almost succeeded but ended in their deaths and the closing of the university. Frank País ran an underground movement in Havana and showed just as much ingenuity as Castro; the two allied to bring Batista down. Batista did as much as anyone to make Castro the victor. He killed off the student movement and his forces killed País. The pattern of elimination left Castro in the hills and then he had a major stroke of luck. Batista had claimed him dead, but The New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews, went into the Sierra Maestra and found him quite alive. Matthews’ articles and photographs were the first to show the guerrilla as he would be seen thereafter. The suit and tie of the reformer were gone.64 Castro now had a beard, wore green combat garb, and smoked a large cigar. Cuba had one of the highest per capita incomes in Latin America but it was grotesquely distributed, especially with regard to the rural Blacks, the descendents of slaves, who were stuck in illiteracy, with

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little hope for the future. They worked the sugar harvest for six months, at backbreaking tasks, only to be unemployed the rest of the year. To call them neglected would be an understatement. Cuban elites had never moved to incorporate Blacks into the nation’s civic life. Blacks created a cultural movement of negrismo in the 1920s that produced excellent poetry, and Black musicians were central to the evolution of Cuban music, including dance styles such as the conga, danzón, and others that were popular throughout Latin America and even incorporated into U.S. jazz. Nonetheless, Cuban elites and American corporations distrusted them politically; a truly democratic Cuba might have elected a Black leader and would certainly have demanded better wages and working conditions in the U.S.-dominated sugar sector. Once again, United Fruit appears as a major corporate actor, as did American Sugar Refining Corporation, the Hilton Hotel chain, and International Telephone and Telegraph. Oil refining was also under U.S. corporate control. One could not separate the evolution of Cuba’s political economy from American corporate interest and this had been the case since 1898. In 1958, the United States distanced itself from Batista and stopped supplying him with arms, a clear signal that he was no longer in favor. It also urged well-to-do Cubans to arrange some transition toward an election.65 Even as Batista lost his narrow backing, his armed forces held Castro’s guerrillas at bay. Castro’s movement did not rely on peasants or laborers, although it included both. It was amorphous in terms of class.66 As Julia Sweig indicates, what seemed an endless series of reversals, including the regime’s destruction of the País-led general strike, suddenly turned into victory in a matter of six months as Batista gave up since his varied opposition was not going to relent. Most of the early administrators of the revolution were not guerrillas but urban, underground supporters.67 Castro’s promise of social justice ran directly counter to U.S. interests and attitudes. The majority of Americans in 1959 had not yet embraced civil rights for Blacks at home; why would they do so for Cuba? The Cuban Revolution as it emerged that year and in 1960 involved the complex task of confronting American corporate power and demanding better wages and working conditions while not infuriating President Eisenhower and his advisers. The ultracommunist secretary of state John Foster Dulles died in the spring of 1959, but his brother Allen still ran the CIA.


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The United States took an instant disliking to Castro and thought the tactics it had used in Guatemala and Bolivia—economic sanctions, the cutting off of credits, support for anti-Castro sentiment within the island—would force him out. Castro was smarter than that. Che Guevara had been in Bolivia and Guatemala when, coerced by the IMF and the CIA, each nation had to give up its progressive goals. As Castro instituted a sweeping land reform and allowed laborers to form unions and strike, Eisenhower authorized the CIA to create a paramilitary force to invade the island as the agency had done against Arbenz in Guatemala. This plan involved what the administration called Cuba’s liberation. By the time Eisenhower left office, relations with Cuba had ended. Kennedy ran for office claiming the Eisenhower administration had been weak on communism and had “lost” Cuba. This was tit for tat as the Republicans had used this theme, that the Democrats had “lost” China, to win the presidency in 1952. Now, Kennedy inherited the plan of Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, whom he had retained as head of the CIA, and launched an invasion in April 1961, by antiCastro Cubans at the Bay of Pigs. The outcome was a fiasco. Unlike Arbenz, Castro had dismantled the old army and constructed a new revolutionary force loyal to himself and the revolution. It repelled the invasion and captured the counterrevolutionaries. 68 He now struck at his domestic opposition: those unhappy that no elections seemed in sight, the Catholic Church that denounced the regime’s ties to the Soviet Union, and the upper class and large segments of the urban middle class upset at the profound social changes the revolution had launched. Over 800,000 Cubans left the island in the next few years, including a major part of the nation’s engineers, physicians, and experienced administrators. Castro called them gusanos (worms) and bid them good riddance. Once in Miami and New York, the exiles became a permanent source of hostility toward any American détente with Castro. The next key episode came in October 1962, as the United States put pressure on Castro’s government early in that year by instituting an economic blockade and demanding that member states of the OAS—that is, Latin America—participate in it. Congress also authorized the use of military force against the island and the United States began holding military maneuvers near the country. Castro, however, had what Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile had lacked, a powerful ally in the Soviet Union that supplied

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him with arms, oil, and an alternative market for the nation’s sugar. The Soviets also began to ship nuclear missiles onto the island, a response to the U.S. placement of missiles in Turkey, on the Russian border. When President Kennedy learned of the missiles, he went public with the information and a confrontation ensued that looked as though it would lead to nuclear war. Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev managed to diffuse the situation. This crisis was a very close call. The United States almost invaded and did not know that Soviet forces on the island had already acquired tactical nuclear weapons and the authority to use them. This knowledge appeared only after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.69 Fidel Castro was not included in the outcome and was livid about it. His comments at this time, some hysterical and even suicidal, claimed the Cubans had been willing to die rather than surrender. “The aggressiveness of the imperialists is becoming extremely dangerous,” he announced at one point, and then said that because the United States might invade Cuba, “this would be the moment to eliminate this danger once and for all.”70 He demanded that the Soviet Union increase its aid to Cuba and not leave the island out of any future strategic decisions. A basic pact was created between Cuba and the Soviets, one that sustained the revolution until the end of the Cold War. Cuba would be allowed to sell its sugar for above the world price to the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in Eastern Europe; in addition, the Soviets would sell oil to Cuba for below the world price. Cuba often saved on its oil and resold it for a profit. The price of such a pact was high for both parties. The Soviet Union subsidized Cuba at a very high rate and decided it could not support two Cubas in the region.71 It did relatively little to help Allende’s Chile in the early 1970s. Cuba became tied to a communist technology and to communist markets inferior to those it had before the revolution. Factories built with communist technology, decidedly backward in comparison to the United States, meant Cuba would never reach substantial improvements in productivity. Worse, the revolutionary dream of diversifying the economy ended. This pact drove Cuba to become more dependent on its export of sugar. The result was an economy and society that soon fell into the communist mode: a well-educated police state, an industrial segment turning out second-rate goods, shortages of food and other basic goods.


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On the positive side, Cuba confronted many of its severe injustices. Blacks were incorporated into the revolution and obtained positions of importance at both the local and regional levels; few of them, however, appeared in the national administration. The poor went to school and illiteracy disappeared within a decade. Real efforts were made to fight machismo and include women as equals in all facets of life. The society developed a surplus of physicians and the general health of the population rose; the number of Cubans increased from 5 million in 1950 to over 10 million in 1990, and this also put economic pressure on the regime. Until his retirement in 2008, when he became infirm and his brother Raúl took over, Castro ran the island as a benevolent despot or an authoritarian father. As intelligent and articulate a leader as Latin America has produced, no society can grow intellectually and culturally when one man runs it for almost fifty years. Cuba became a reflection of Castro’s personality and he often tried to micromanage the economy with disastrous results. He became frightened of any market innovations although he knew that small farms kept the island fed and a complicated black market supplied individuals with key goods. The end of the Soviet Union concluded the pact that sustained the island and, in the 1990s, Cuba plunged into a severe depression. But it is best to discuss Cuba’s fate then as part of what happened to the Latin American left after 1982.

THE BRAZILIAN MODEL The United States response to the Cuban Revolution was multifaceted. Kennedy created the Peace Corps to fight hunger and underdevelopment in the world and so tapped into the idealism of American youth while insisting the Corps was not “a tool in the Cold War.”72 He also launched the Alliance for Progress, drawing upon the ideas of Juscelino Kubitschek, as a sort of Marshall Plan for the region, combining aid, loans, and conditions for foreign investment; he had the effort approved at an inter-American conference in October 1961—a conference Che Guevara attended. Among the many goals announced for the program was a steady increase in economic growth, land reform, support for democratic governments, and elimination of illiteracy. Had the United States ever supported such goals, of course, the Cuban Revolution would not have

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happened. Nor did the program discuss the role of Latin American elites and U.S. corporations in fighting socially progressive leaders. On the contrary, it argued Latin American governments should reduce their tariffs and provide good conditions for foreign investment; corporate America would help in this democratic effort.73 As a recent study has demonstrated, the plan repeatedly sacrificed any sustained idea of development in its need to placate corrupt governments in the 1960s.74 The basic strategy of the United States was a counterrevolutionary fist. Those who did not isolate Castro and cooperate with the United States on anticommunist issues could expect economic harassment and even military pressure. The OAS became little more than a puppet organization and almost all of its member states cut off ties to Cuba. The United States also controlled other “international agencies,” the IMF and the World Bank. Supposedly set up to fight poverty and avoid a resurgence of a Great Depression, they acted instead to undermine progressive but overspending governments. Their politics were inflexible. Those governments not deemed “creditworthy,” that is, complying with conditions that facilitated U.S. corporate advances in their economy and sustained programs intended to empower the poor, did not get loans. Chile under Eduardo Frei received substantial sums, as did Pinochet, while Allende had his loans cut off. In the 1960s, it was hard for any Latin American government to stand up to the combination of political and economic pressure. One government, Mexico, refused to comply with U.S. objectives and insisted it had the right to trade with Cuba.75 This burnished the Mexican government’s domestic reputation, at a time when the public had become quite jaded about any commitment to social justice, and it meant that Castro never trained guerrillas to attack the Mexican regime. President Kennedy launched a program of military aid through the Defense Department and police aid through the Agency for International Development. President Johnson, taking office after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, stepped up awards of military equipment, eased the terms of sales of U.S. military hardware, and increased the number of Latin American officers training at the School of the Americas located in the Panama Canal Zone.76 The goal was to build up the capacity of Latin American governments to wage counterinsurgency warfare against any guerrilla force. By 1978, the United States had spent $2.4 billion on “military


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assistance” to the region: $251 million on Argentina, $597 million on Brazil, $313 million on Chile, $297 million on Peru, and tens of millions on smaller countries.77 The United States reacted not only to the Cuban Revolution but to an escalating war in South Vietnam and the fear that anything like it might break out in Latin America. In Vietnam, a combination of South Vietnamese Communists, aided by the communist government of Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam, attempted to take control of what remained of a former French colony. It was a classic instance of a war of national liberation, waged by communists against the U.S. determination to “contain” communism to its existing parameters.78 In this context, U.S. administrations saw Latin America not only as a zone subject to other Cubas but to other Vietnams. To help this image, Che Guevara, in one of his loonier and more bombastic moments, declared that, “the Cuban Revolution has before it a task . . . to create a second or a third Vietnam, or the second or third Vietnam of the world” in order to tear down U.S. imperialism.79 Cuba had not endured anything like the bombardment suffered by Vietnam. One of the ironies of what was to happen to Latin America in the 1960s is that U.S. policymakers, who knew nothing about the region, just as they knew nothing about Vietnam, swallowed the foco theory whole. They set out to develop better tactics against a myth of guerrilla insurgency that Castro and Guevara had promoted and in the process created a series of brutal military regimes. The United States, for all its importance to Latin America, had paid little attention to the region until World War II ended. Ambassadors sent to Latin America were generally men of little or no importance in Washington; they often could not speak Spanish or, if sent to Brazil, Portuguese. The Cuban Revolution changed that to some extent. The U.S. government and private associations sponsored university fellowships to develop knowledge of the field. This author received one of them. Were it not for Fidel Castro, I could not have gone to graduate school. But many of the Cold War’s major crises in Latin America—the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Cuban training of guerrilla leaders and sending them into other Latin American nations, the Brazilian coup of 1964, and the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965— occurred before any substantial knowledge of the region had developed. By then, official support for militarism had displaced any other strategy.

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The United States had an opportunity to try its new approach to the region when a left-wing populist, João Goulart, became president in 1961. “Jango” had served as the minister of labor under Getulio Vargas during the early 1950s and had been elected vice president in 1956 and again in 1960. Despite being a large landowner in his native state, Rio Grande do Sul, Goulart had great sympathy for the ordinary Brazilian and was a strong supporter of unions and land reform. Like Vargas, he was also an economic nationalist. The president elected in 1960 was Janio Quadros, who as a result of a quarrel with Congress, quit the office. When news came to Goulart that he would be president, he was touring China. Upon returning to Brazil, he ran into the hostility of the military, the press, and a major section of Congress. In order to be confirmed as head of state, he had to surrender many of the usual powers of the president. Even so, he launched a series of maneuvers to help the working poor of the country. He backed an aggressive union movement and permitted, in the Northeast, the poorest peasants to gradually create radical Peasant Leagues intent on claiming unused public lands and having large private estates broken into small farms. The U.S. reaction was to label the Leagues as communist and to see them as a repetition of what had happened in Cuba. While the early 1960s were a period of left-wing populism in Brazil, there is no evidence that Goulart or the most prominent figure of the Peasant Leagues, Francisco Julião, had much to do with the Brazilian Communist Party or that either received help from Castro.80 Instead, Brazil reflected the problems of the region’s general development: one of the highest population growth rates in the world, hyperurbanization centered on Rio and São Paulo, and, now, the gradual breakdown of the import-substitution model. This last problem had several dimensions and, as a result, ISI or importsubstitution industrialization has generally been tagged a failure. This is not true and industrial development played a major role in generating economic growth. The problems had to do with the size of markets and the disincentives to recapitalize industrial plants. Even in a nation as large as Brazil, the poor distribution of income meant that only a minority could buy industrial goods with any regularity. As a result, protected industries came to concentrate in a few cities, especially in São Paulo. A few competitors, oligopolies, dominated each sector and arranged prices among themselves. In


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such a world, there was little reason to modernize plants. Instead, industry had struck bargains with urban unions that existed in only a few sectors; most of Brazil’s industrial labor force was not unionized. Women, who worked in many of textile and clothing factories, were paid a pittance. Goulart’s attempt to help laborers develop unions and so, a la Perón, cement their loyalty threatened this industrial sector with higher wages and a need to restructure. Goulart attempted a great deal in a short time, without allies in the judiciary and only minority backing in Congress. His situation was analogous to that of Allende ten years later. Indeed, it is a shame Allende did not pay closer attention to what happened in Rio in 1964. Goulart regained a good deal of his authority in a plebiscite of January 1963—unleashing a more radical moment for his government. Among other parallels to Chile, the decision of the government to cover rising deficits by turning the printing press led to a wage-price spiral and ever higher rates of inflation. The military became openly hostile, the Church turned its back on civilian rule, the media, led by an emerging monopoly in O Globo campaigned against Goulart, and the U.S. government, using its embassy in Brazil and the CIA, helped undermine the government. President Johnson instructed the embassy in Rio “to do everything we can” to overthrow the president.81 The United States drew up the “Mann Doctrine,” that it would no longer oppose military coups.82 Thomas Mann was deputy assistant secretary of Inter-American Affairs and “a protégé” of the antipopulist Spruille Braden. Goulart briefly split the armed forces and thought about arming labor supporters but, in the end, went into exile. In the words of a scholar of the coup, “It is enough to say that Brazil’s economic, social, and political crises continued to worsen in the first three months of 1964 to the point of chaos and paralysis.” Goulart lived for a time in Uruguay and then moved to Argentina, where he died in 1976.83 The official cause of death was a heart attack at fifty-seven; it now seems clear that Uruguayan agents poisoned him at the behest of the Brazilian military regime. That same year, Juscelino Kubitschek, an outspoken opponent of that regime died in a car accident; this, too, is now thought to have been a political murder.84 The Brazilian model, a professional military running an entire country but altering its president periodically, emerged as the U.S. answer to the threat of Cuban-style guerrillas. At first the junta operated with a Congress but when its members investigated

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government tortures and complete disregard for the law, the military abolished Congress for a number of years. Even when Congress was in session, the military’s flag rank officers served as a sort of parliament that drew up institutional decrees setting aside civil rights and instituting sweeping economic changes. Unions were crushed, the Peasant Leagues disbanded, and Goulart’s supporters and people involved in everything from literacy campaigns for the poor to university reform were intimidated or sent into exile. Those who remained and criticized the regime were tortured and occasionally murdered. Even so, students and labor unions carried out ad hoc actions, protests, and strikes.85 Military rule provoked widespread resistance but no single group galvanized everyone.86 The left split between devotees of Maoism, however that would be applied to Brazil, and Stalinist confidence in a popular front (that is, a uniting of all opposition groups into subverting the regime). Neither tactic worked. A guerrilla resistance concentrated among university students in 1968 and 1969 appeared in Rio and São Paulo. Their most daring act was to kidnap the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil, Charles Elbrick. The guerrilla groups had only a few hundred in their ranks.87 By 1973, most of the guerrillas and much of the party opposition had been silenced, undercutting the reason for the regime’s frequent resort to torture and murder. The “model” as it evolved had three components: direct rule by the military, an opening of the economy to foreign investment, and repression of any peasant or labor mobilization. It succeeded to an extraordinary degree. By 1967–1968, the economy was growing quickly and the regime began to gain intellectual support among right-wing pundits and, of course, economists. The expansion excluded large parts of the population, leading one general to make the famous remark that the economy was doing well but the people were not. The rich supported the regime but the most notable social segment that accepted its practices was the middle class. That class grew with the commercial expansion and enhanced consumerism of late 1960s and early 1970s. Anyone looking at Brazil could only conclude that, far from being a support of democracy, the middle class in Latin America was now behaving, in Marxist terms, as a class for itself—whatever the consequences might be for the working and rural poor, for whom the military regime was traumatic. Their few institutional associations were dismantled and no new ones were


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allowed; Black efforts to imitate the civil rights struggles of United States and assert some pride in their heritage were silenced. U.S. support for militarism in Brazil redirected American policy in the region. This became even more pronounced under President Nixon. Nixon sent Nelson Rockefeller, a scion of Standard Oil and a supposedly liberal Republican, down to write a report on Latin America. Rockefeller, in 1969, produced an open endorsement of regional militarism, arguing that Americans must get over their prejudices against juntas and see some of them as progressives at heart.88 The general indifference to democracy and civil rights made it easier for militaries to seize power. Through their own attitudes and with the help of U.S. military ideologues, their mission was defined away from protecting borders and territorial integrity to fighting “subversives.” The Brazilian regime also called its opponents “terrorists.” Elaborated into a “Doctrine of National Security,” with ideas repeated in one country after another, the militarists argued that only armed force could create conditions for capitalist development in the region. The chief threats to success—subversives and their unwitting allies—had to be put down. Modernization would proceed from known economic theories implemented by military men, with their engineering outlook, and civilian technocrats. Markets would be opened, tariffs reduced, inefficient state firms would be sold off, and economic growth, driven by market incentives, would do the rest. The media, owned by the elite and censored by military regimes, drowned Brazilians, Uruguayans, Argentines, and Chileans with this litany. The Brazilians even borrowed the image of the burning phoenix rising from its ashes from the Greek junta that ran that country from 1967 to 1974. Every single regime tortured, murdered, and “disappeared” opponents or people thought to be opponents. In Argentina, agents of each military branch cruised around in Ford Falcons, grabbing people in their homes or on the streets—never to be seen again. As the 1970s ticked on, the levels of violence against populations rose with each new regime. To cement relations with one another, the military rulers in the southern cone established Operation Condor that tracked dissidents from one country to another in a massive computer file and killed dozens of prominent figures. Kubitschek and Goulart have been mentioned, but other victims included Carlos Prats, the head of the army under Allende, who was murdered by a car bomb in Argentina; his wife also died in the explosion. All this paled beside the horrors that descended on Central America.

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American policy makers had often invoked the “domino theory” to explain the dangers of not stopping communism in any given country. The theory, applied, for example, to the war in Vietnam, argued that if communism succeeded in one nation, it would then topple nearby governments. Taken broadly, it meant that the United States had the right to intervene anywhere. In fact, there was one region where the theory actually worked: the military regimes in South America. The military took power in Bolivia and Brazil in 1964, Peru in 1968, Uruguay and Chile in 1973, and Argentina in 1976. Not every regime followed the same model. Brazil changed its presidents once the regime stabilized itself in 1969, based on decisions within the military. There was a new president every five years. Peru had only two presidents; the first, Juan Velasco Alvarado, tried to outdo the populists and carried out a substantial land reform. Chile formed a military dictatorship with Pinochet heading the government throughout the regime’s existence. The Argentines had several presidents as the military changed heads of state based on one crisis after another. Aside from being undemocratic and violating civil rights, the military regimes shared the view that civilian politicians had made an unholy mess of each nation, and they repressed populists as well as leftists. They also carried out violence on a scale not seen since the nineteenth century and, in some nations, never seen before.

GUERRILLA WARFARE In the meantime, what became of the guerrillas’ and Che Guevara’s dream that the Cuban experience could be repeated in other nations? Guerrillas, trained in Cuba, succeeded in overthrowing only one other regime, that of the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979, and that success underlines not how easy but how difficult it was to ever turn guerrilla warfare into a revolutionary vehicle. The peculiar conditions of the Cuban Revolution were never repeated because they were contingent upon nothing like it having occurred before. Once one occurred, the United States, the middle and upper classes in Latin America, and, most importantly, the Latin American militaries would go to any lengths to prevent another one. Che Guevara became an icon of revolutionary hope (and, in the hands of capitalist entrepreneurs, an icon of everything rebellious), but he succumbed to an American-trained group of Bolivian rangers. Bolivia had one of worst militaries in the region.89 For the next two


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decades, as a result of the revolution in Cuba, the United States assisted undemocratic regimes and took no chance that a popular socialist might capture a second government. The middle and upper classes, aside from some of the idealistic and educated youth, feared the massive redistribution of wealth and income that occurred in Cuba. It was not just the rich who lost their estates. The middle class lost almost everything. In the best film made during the revolution, Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), the protagonist is a skirt-chasing, would-be intellectual who faces the changes of the early 1960s with uncertainty. The film is fascinating in that it allows the audience to grapple with its own questions about what it would do during a revolution. A major segment of Cuba’s middle class knew exactly what to do: they left. The middle class in the rest of Latin America faced the fact that such a route would not be open to it. The United States was not going to welcome two floods of Latin Americans. Thus, one of the key components of the Cuban upheaval, the broad social contempt for Batista, could not be repeated in any other country. No Latin American military ever again surrendered to a guerrilla force. Latin American militaries are as complex as other social institutions. They have fostered arch reactionaries but they have also produced reformers, modernizers, and populists. They have one thing in common: military training has taught them to be undemocratic. The tenentes in 1920s Brazil had wanted to reform the nation and end its pervasive political corruption. Perón came from a socially constricted Argentine army and generated massive changes in the 1940s and 1950s, recruiting the labor force into politics. After the Cuban Revolution, Latin American armies became as suspicious of populists and social reformers as they were of communists and socialists. After all, Castro had presented himself, in his rebel days, as a democrat. The Brazilian model included a distrust of popular sentiments and those who appealed to them. And, as an Argentine sociologist José Nun noted decades ago, most of the Latin American officer class was middle class and deeply affected by the populist refusal to raise military salaries in the face of massive inflation.90 Instead, one guerrilla force after another was defeated, whether it began trying to recruit peasants or operating in the cities and drawing on students and shantytown dwellers. Democrats and social reformers were also defeated. For all of Kennedy’s promises about the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, neither changed

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anything in Latin America. The Peace Corps sent idealists from the United States, most of them White, into countries when they did not speak the language very well and could say nothing about politics or religion. The entire assumption about Latin America behind this idea was that the region was technologically backward and with the help of well-meaning youths would acquire the American know-how to make their underdeveloped countries work. No one thought this proposition laughable. No one asked what political authority had kept entire peoples illiterate and without adequate housing, drinking water, schools, or roads. No one spoke of the role of race in shaping the region’s misery. The Peace Corps volunteers returned to the United States after a year or two, having acquired excellent Spanish or Portuguese and having built a well or a public dwelling here and there.91 Many of them returned as political radicals. The policies of the Alliance for Progress promoted greater dependence on U.S. corporate power. The Alliance spent 10 billion dollars in a decade. While this was a substantial sum in the 1960s when the United States had yet to begin its turning of the printing press to keep its economy going, it represented a very small sum, given the region’s needs. The dilemma that developed in the 1920s had never been resolved. The United States had not opened its economy to trade from Latin America. American farmers did not want to compete with Argentine or Uruguayan wheat and beef; they did not want any more Caribbean sugar. American mining companies such as Anaconda and Kennecott in Chile had mined copper to sell to Europe. The U.S. copper miners knew their jobs would be in jeopardy if they had to compete with the world’s cheapest ore. There is little sign that the Alliance generated any economic growth beyond that which would have occurred without it. In the meantime, rising U.S. corporate investment in the region lent credence to the guerrilla view that Latin American elites had become little more than tools of a foreign empire. It was ironically not the 1960s but the 1970s that would be the pinnacle of guerrilla successes and bring the house down on democratic hopes for another decade. The key here was economic change. Decade by decade, Latin American nations were becoming more integrated into transatlantic and then transpacific patterns of trade. By the 1970s, a good part of Europe, especially Germany, had been rebuilt and was buying Latin American primary products. In the east, the recovery of Japan played a smaller but parallel role. For


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the first time since the 1930s, advanced nations were competing to trade with the region. Had the region had more time to adjust to this global set of changes, internal developments might have gone in a different direction. Instead, opportunities to expand trade appeared only when the military was already in power or when it was about to seize power. Why? The economic basis for Latin American expansion since World War II had been, in the larger countries, a mixture of primary exports and of import-substitution industrialization. Industrialization never paid for itself and rarely opened new opportunities for exports. Instead, ISI required a steady increase in expenditures for patent rights, capital goods, and oil. Most of these costs were rising in the late 1960s. New machinery might have increased efficiency and reduced the need for imported oil but, if an entrepreneur had little competition, why invest in new machinery and not maintain the old? The outcome in the region was a solid but unspectacular rate of industrial development: Latin America’s manufactures rose steadily from 4 percent per year in the 1950s to almost 6 percent in the 1970s, a far better performance than already industrialized nations but one well short of the 11 percent in East Asia.92 The existing way of doing things was not generating enough jobs to absorb an increasing population. Students from Mexico to Buenos Aires understood the job squeeze on white-collar employment. Industrial employment grew very little, leaving the young to work in worsening conditions whether in or out of factories. The two most successful guerrilla movements of the 1970s were those of young Peronists against the Argentine government and the uprising of the Sandinistas against the Somoza dictatorship. Each movement succeeded in establishing a government it wanted, although, in each case, the revolution turned out differently than expected. This narrative begins with the Peronists. The Argentine military sent Juan Perón into exile in 1955. The political establishment, including the military, could not resolve a fundamental dilemma—one it once faced with the Radical Party after the coup against Yrigoyen in 1929. If it restored full civil rights and open elections, it would lose power and probably suffer retaliation by the victors. In 1955 and 1956, the interim military regime brutally suppressed the Peronist labor unions, tortured and killed Perón’s followers, and seized union halls and treasuries. The survivors, driven underground, had little reason to bargain with such

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a government. Perón settled in Spain with his young wife, Isabel. He continued to influence the union movement, which came to refer to him endearingly as “the old man,” el viejo. An attempt by one union leader, Augusto Vandor, to negotiate with a military regime led to the incomprehensible idea that workers should strive for a “Peronism without Perón.” Vandorismo became synonymous for many Peronists with treason.93 Given the fundamental political dilemma of Peronism, Argentina vacillated from one undemocratic form of government to another. The coup in 1955 eventually led to a government run by General Pedro Aramburo, who carried out the most vicious repression against the Peronists. Then the military, having discovered that the Radical Party (whom they had despised in the 1920s) was not nearly as bad as the Peronists, allowed one of them to become president. Arturo Frondizi, however, lasted less than four years when the military intervened again. It allowed a member of a different Radical Party movement, Arturo Illia, to win office in 1982, and intervened in 1966. Another coup put General Juan Carlos Ongonía in power until 1970 when the military replaced one general with another until 1972. Aside from not allowing the Peronists to return, political elements now had to contend with military opportunists who thought they were entitled to govern. All this fragmented the Argentine army. Each administration tried a different set of economic policies; those of Ongonía were the most ruthless in promoting a reduction in tariffs and repression of the labor force. Nothing worked. Argentina had the most educated population in all Latin America; it had agrarian resources among the best in the world; it was one of the most industrialized nations in the region; and yet its politics increasingly resembled that of a banana republic.94 It was within this setting that two revolutionary movements appeared. One was Trotskyist—that is, Marxists who were not supporters of the Soviet Union—and called itself the ERP (Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo), or the People’s Revolutionary Army. The other called itself the Movimiento Peronista Montonero, or the Montonero Peronist Movement. Each of them was inspired by events in Córdoba, Argentina’s second major city, where students and young autoworkers had seized the city center in protest of Ongonía’s government. Ongonía, in an attempt to win international financial support, had followed the IMF line of freezing wages, devaluing the peso, and suspending the minimum wage. The result was a general strike in


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Córdoba and then an alliance among young students and workers in an effort to bring down the government. The effort had broad popular support in the city. Suddenly, revolution seemed possible. The Cordobazo, as this uprising was called, inspired young men to think that the military could be taken down with a combination of guerrilla warfare, public demonstrations, and mass organizing.95 The ERP operated in the interior, in Córdoba and Tucumán (the poorest province in the nation), while the Montoneros concentrated in Buenos Aires and became especially good at recruiting university students and developing student interest to aid and mobilize the people in shantytowns. Where the ERP wanted an overthrow of the government ruling groups as a whole, the Montoneros demanded the return of Perón. Both guerrilla groups raised the ante against the establishment, kidnapping foreign corporate leaders, collecting multimillion dollar ransoms, killing military figures, and in one notorious case, the daughter of a military officer. In 1970, the Montoneros kidnapped and “executed” Aramburu for his conduct in killing Peronists fourteen years before. The ERP failed in its objectives but the Monteneros succeeded. At the height of their guerrilla activity, the Montonero leadership was warmly greeted by Juan Perón at his home in Spain. With this seal of approval, they stepped up their attacks on the military governments that followed Ongonía. There was a generational dimension to all this; students in the Montoneros often had parents in the Radical Party that hated Perón. In any event, the military decided to allow the Peronists to return but banned anyone from running for the presidency that had not resided in the country the past year. The Peronists ran a stand-in, won the election, had the president resign, and then elected Perón in 1973. El viejo had returned. He brought with him his wife Isabel, who was dubbed Isabelita, and she, in an echo of events in the early 1950s, became his vice president. His young “soldiers” had all along ignored the importance of right-wing Peronists who they dismissed as sell-outs to the true revolutionary nature of the movement they had imagined. They never once asked why Perón was so comfortable living amidst fascists in Spain. The ERP, numbering fewer than a thousand, continued its bank robberies and kidnappings, only to face an Argentine military that now had Perón’s approval to kill them at all costs. They were finished in two years. The “soldiers of Perón” persisted in their naiveté until he turned on them as well.96

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Now events unraveled at a furious pace. Perón returned to his free-spending ways and unleashed an inflation that topped anything he had done in the 1950s. Then he died in July 1974; he had been in office barely a year. His wife took over a job that would have overwhelmed an experienced Argentine politician. Lacking any intellect or education, she turned to a close advisor, who happened to be a warlock and a vicious one. He gathered right-wing Peronists into the Argentine Anti-communist Alliance (AAA) and began torturing and killing guerrillas of every stripe. The AAA also sent notes to liberal Argentines in the arts and literature to leave the country or be killed. In the meantime, the results of Peronismo came home in the forms of hyperinflation, massive government debt, and unemployment. Complaining of exhaustion, Isabelita left the country in September 1975. A military junta took power in March 1976 and launched a vendetta that would last for over four years. They tortured and killed on a scale never before seen in Argentina; some 30,000 victims perished in el Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (the Process of National Reorganization). Outside of the military, it was called “the Dirty War.”97 The military intended to reconfigure all Argentine politics just as Pinochet had reshaped Chile. They banned all political parties, not just the Peronists, and shut down labor unions; they suspended civil liberties, including any right to due process. Each of the services set up torture centers where they pulled in guerrillas and anyone related to or possibly having knowledge of guerrillas. They imprisoned all prominent Peronists as a matter of course. People were held for months and beaten senseless or given electric shocks for simply having appeared in an address book of someone else who had been grabbed. The young officers soon acted with impunity: attractive girls were ripped off the street and raped. Any dissident, no matter how much of the establishment, could be dragooned. Jacobo Timmerman, a prominent editor, was arrested and tortured during which his tormentors taunted him with anti-Semitic remarks.98 Those who lived were marked forever by el Proceso. The guerrilla movements were smashed but so was all civic life. In the meantime, the military returned to Ongonía’s policies in a pattern that began to close down Argentina’s factories. They continued to run up national debts with the support of President Reagan who saw them as strong anticommunists. Like many Latin American governments, they hit the debt wall of late 1982 and unlike them, they launched an attack against


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British possession of the Falkland Islands (the Argentines call them the Malvinas) to redeem themselves. The British responded with massive force. The Argentine military lost the war and left in ignominy. By the time the military regime ended, the guerrilla impulse had been destroyed. The most important guerrilla success after Cuba was the Nicaraguan Revolution. Nicaragua had a history that parallels events in the Dominican Republic and other autocratic regimes in the Caribbean and Central America; it had been a constabulary regime since 1933. U.S. Marines trained a National Guard and U.S. diplomatic interests promoted a young adventurer, Anastasio Somoza García, to head the agency.99 Somoza García or “Tacho” turned the Guard into his own rather than Nicaragua’s force: he made money from skimming its budget, from using members of the Guard to work his lands, and from coercing rival interests to sell him their businesses on good terms.100 One of his victims was Augusto Sandino, who had led an uprising against U.S. occupation and who naively trusted the establishment to work out a truce once U.S. forces left. Somoza’s Guard grabbed him on one of his trips to Managua and shot him, then massacred his followers in March 1934. A few years later, Somoza García used the Guard to take over the presidency. He held regular elections thereafter, which he usually won—although, under pressure from Roosevelt and Truman, he turned to figureheads in the late 1940s. He had himself elected again in 1950 when the Cold War was at an early peak and then had little trouble remaining in office. Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon openly admired him. A disgusted poet shot Somoza in September 1956; U.S. medical efforts in the Panama Canal Zone failed to save him. He had two sons, Luis Somoza, who took over as president in 1957, and Anastasio Somoza Debayle (Tachito), who became president in 1967 when his brother died. Luis Somoza had to deal with the U.S. reaction to the Cuban Revolution, which demanded greater respect for human rights. Tachito Somoza was freed of such concerns by the foreign policies of presidents Johnson and Nixon, who saw him as key to keeping an underdeveloped nation pro– United States. The Somozas took the mask off and became an open kleptocracy. From the moment Tacho Somoza took over the National Guard until Tachito was driven from Managua, the father and his sons robbed the public purse and private businesses to enhance their wealth and that of their relations. The economy grew

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with exports ranging from cattle hides to cotton, which boomed during World War II, and which supplemented coffee earnings. Exports in the 1970s, in nominal U.S. dollars, were more than a hundred times what they had been in the 1930s.101 The Somozas cut themselves in on almost every piece of commerce and of all the thieves, Tachito was the most diligent. He was also the most ruthless—he used his buddies from West Point, which he had attended, as his advisors in repression. The senior Somoza had made deals with labor unions on a selective basis, even allowing communists some room to maneuver in the 1940s.102 Luis had enacted some social reforms that did not interfere with the basic business of expanding the pelf. Tachito stole from everyone and, finally, he took too much and killed the wrong person. Opposition to the regime went back to the 1930s but most Nicaraguans found it hard to move against a government that had President Roosevelt’s support. After the war, a move to democratize Nicaragua developed but was cut off by Somoza senior when the Cold War gave him a chance to repress opponents by calling them communists. Near the end of the war, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal began a long, courageous struggle to end the dictatorship. Chamorro came from a conservative, landed family that controlled the nation’s major newspaper, La Prensa. He was repeatedly jailed; on one occasion he was tortured and on another driven into exile, but he returned whenever the repression let up and left him some political space in which to act. From a conservative father who was a committed opportunist and whose rebellion against liberal rule had brought the U.S. Marines back into Nicaragua in the 1920s, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro evolved into a democrat who constantly argued in favor of civil and human rights for his nation. In January 1978, frightened by the calls for democracy, which had come to include a usually quiescent Church, Somoza had Chamorro killed. As his father had done when killing Sandino, Tachito denied any involvement. As Chamorro was buried, riots broke out in Managua and a general insurrection began. The leaders of the insurrection were already in the field. The Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), more commonly called the Sandinistas, formed in 1961 to wage guerrilla warfare a` la foco theory. The leaders included the magnetic Carlos Fonseca and Tomás Borge, the only one among them to see the Nicaraguan Revolution achieve power, and came from the national university. The National


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Guard quickly repressed and almost destroyed the entire group. The survivors soon fell to fighting with one another.103 Then nature changed their fortunes. An earthquake leveled Managua in December 1972, and left 10,000 dead and most of the population homeless. Aid came from Europe and the United States; Somoza and his National Guard appropriated and then sold the supplies to hapless victims. An outraged public began to support the Sandinistas as well as Chamorro; then the Sandinistas turned into Robin Hood figures by kidnapping justices of the Supreme Court and trading them for imprisoned colleagues. One of those released was Daniel Ortega. As in Cuba, the demand for democracy coincided with a competent guerrilla effort and multiclass and varied efforts to change the government. The movement against Somozo ranged from businessmen to high school youths. The democrats kept their distance from the FSLN until Chamorro was gunned down on a street; then the middle class began to support insurrection as the only possible solution. From a force of about of 150 guerrillas in 1978, the Sandinistas had 5,000 fighters a year later. Once they gained power, they quickly expanded a new national army to 18,000 troops.104 This was no Cuban Revolution in which relatively few guerrillas had died. In 1978, the opposition waged war against the National Guard and the Guard hit back with its U.S.-supplied weaponry, including aircraft. One provincial city after another rose against the regime, and the Sandinistas made a spectacular move when they captured Somoza’s legislature and traded for even more of their comrades. Fifty thousand perished, many as a result of heavy bombardment. The Sandinistas also made up a different force, one that was much larger than anything Castro had mustered against Batista. The rebel army included women and girls; a good part of the force came from Nicaragua’s high schools. Street peddlers, artisans, skilled laborers, and students made up the bulk of the armed forces that destroyed the dictatorship in the battle for Managua.105 The multiclass coalition might have prevailed but Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, widow of Pedro Joaquín, and a substantial faction of the business class began to back away from the left once it became clear Somoza might fall. The United States had a good deal to do with this. President Jimmy Carter decided to do as Eisenhower had done, to cut off military supplies to the dictator, thus signaling his fall from grace, while bolstering factions not tied to the left. The tactic helped bring down Somoza but created a power vacuum rather

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than an alternative government.106 After the brutality visited upon them, the Nicaraguan people were not going to accept the National Guard as the nation’s armed force. The only alternative force was that of Daniel Ortega’s faction in the Sandinistas. The multiclass coalition lasted long enough to replace the dictator, however, and Ortega and his allies soon ran the government. The Sandinistas now launched a socialist regime, although it was, at the outset, not as radical as it was painted abroad. Somoza left Nicaragua a mess. To the damage caused by the earthquake, one could now add the carnage of the civil war it took to remove him. On his way out, he looted the treasury and left the country in debt. The conditions required a strong government capable of implementing remedial measures. In addition to the immediate crisis, the Sandinistas inherited the problems of illiteracy, mass poverty, and political fragmentation left by the Somozas’ reign. In order to appease attitudes in Washington, the new government promised to repay the national debt and to respect private property within the context of creating a mixed economy. This promise was kept and the Sandinistas allowed large- and medium-sized farms to continue, many of which did well during the mid-1980s and provided strong support to the opposition thereafter.107 Early on, revolutionary enthusiasm, the end of Somoza’s thievery, and a sound trade strategy gave Nicaragua, between 1979 and 1983, the second-highest economic growth rate in Latin America.108 If the decision to repay the Somoza debt was rash, at least it was partially offset by the decision to confiscate the dictator’s and his family’s holdings. The Somoza clan had controlled so much of the economy that its property and wealth alone provided a base of operations. By using the dictator’s properties and creating cooperatives and small farmers to work them, the Sandinistas helped 31,000 families or 37 percent of the rural labor force to claim some land and a decent rural job. The power of the major landowners over the countryside, already marginalized by Somoza, was broken.109 The two basic dilemmas for the Sandinistas, however, would be the same as that of any left government in Latin America. The circumstances under which it had gained power—the crisis of the entire political economy—presented problems that could not be remedied quickly, while the population expected rapid change. The Nicaraguan Revolution bore some resemblance to Castro’s Cuba. The Sandinistas, under the leadership of Daniel Ortega,


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launched a literacy campaign and far-ranging efforts in public medicine. They strengthened labor unions and set out to alter the severe poverty in the countryside. They also accepted communist support, such as a supply of Cuban physicians, to help their cause. The key resemblance was that, like Castro, the Sandinistas and their nonrevolutionary allies had defeated Somoza’s armed forces; they proceeded to form their own army. A key difference was that most of the opposition remained in Nicaragua. Although tens of thousands fled to it, the United States did not allow the numbers to reach anything like the Cuban exodus. Castro came to Nicaragua as he had with Allende in Chile and warned against imitating his radical socialization of the economy. The Sandinistas hardly needed any lessons on that score. Everyone knew the Soviet Union would not supply another nation with the subsidies it had given Cuba. The revolutionary regime proclaimed an economic goal of the state controlling key segments but permitting a large arena in agriculture and industry for private enterprise. Nor did the revolution have to nationalize U.S. enterprises; only a few existed because Tachito Somoza and his clan owned much of the country. The Sandinistas maintained diplomatic relations and repeatedly professed a desire for trade with the United States, but the United States could not be appeased. In the United States, the Sandinista victory helped the Republicans portray Jimmy Carter as inept, although the major bludgeon they used against the president was the fall of the shah of Iran and the embarrassment of having U.S. embassy personnel held hostage in Tehran by the religious revolutionaries. The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 meant the United States would, in the military jargon of the era, wage “low-intensity” war. The CIA director, contemplating numerous acts of violence—the placement of land mines, which ripped the limbs of children as well as adults, and the kidnappings and rapes carried out by Somocistas—said, “Let’s make them sweat. Let’s make the bastards sweat.”110 Reagan placed aircraft carriers on Nicaragua’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts and mined Nicaragua’s coasts—an act of war in anyone’s definition.111 He built a massive military complex in a compliant Honduras, and he used the threat of all-out conflict to force the Sandinistas to tread carefully in confronting their enemies. Reagan was no sooner elected than his aides rearmed the Somoza National Guard and antisocialist elements of the Nicaraguan population,

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calling its members Freedom Fighters and “contras” for counterrevolutionaries, and helped them launch raids of murder, kidnapping, and economic destruction.112 The contras also had the enthusiastic support of the Cuban exile community based in Miami. Forty-three thousand died in this conflict and the Sandinista government spent precious financial resources and manpower in a conflict that lasted over eight years.113 Other guerrilla forces in Central America never succeeded. In El Salvador, the largest militant faction called itself the Faribundo Marti National Liberation Front, an amalgam of several movements inspired by the Sandinistas’ success. They named themselves after a communist who died trying to instigate an uprising against oligarchic rule in the 1930s—the military killed 35,000 peasants to instill sufficient fear for another generation. Military leaders had seized power in 1979 and instituted some land reform and attempted other social changes. A small, landed oligarchy still ran the nation with military allies. It wanted nothing to do with reform; the right launched a series of blows at the reformers, and the left and the nation degenerated into a prolonged war. The military death squads called themselves the Union of White Warriors and the Maximiliano Martínez Gómez Brigade (president during the 1935 bloodletting).114 The Church spoke out against these barbarities. A military faction shot the nation’s Archbishop Óscar A. Romero as he was saying mass on March 24, 1980. His death triggered demonstrations but also signaled the determination of the right, which gained control of the government and killed other clergy and raped and killed nuns.115 The civil war eventually claimed at least 70,000 lives, more than half of them by the mid-1980s. Military units and death squads roamed rural zones exterminating entire villages. President Carter enunciated a policy of human rights, attempting to revive some dignity to the chief executive office after Nixon had resigned in disgrace. But Carter’s conduct toward El Salvador, driven by the fear of another Nicaragua, was craven silence followed by more U.S. aid to the army’s death squads. Reagan would openly support the rightwing repression. On December 11, 1981, one of the U.S. trained units, the Alacatl Brigade, swept into the village of El Mozote and surrounding hamlets, took the men out and beheaded them, raped the women and girls as young as ten, then murdered everyone. Piles of children’s clothes and skulls were found months after the massacre.


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The reporters Raymond Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post wrote up what they saw, and a Times photographer documented stories with photographs of the remains. As an example of the changed environment in the United States, the Reagan administration cut Bonner off from official U.S. sources; The Wall Street Journal attacked him as little more than a tool of the guerrillas; and The Times recalled him and isolated him from all real reporting until he resigned.116 Guillermoprieto became one of the most respected essayists on Latin America. Guatemala presented the sorriest spectacle of the entire region. After the U.S.-sponsored overthrow of President Arbenz in 1954, the nation never returned to honestly elected government. The immediate aftermath of Arbenz’s removal was the mass arrest and extensive murder of his labor supporters. By the 1960s, the nation had leftwing guerrillas, one of the most famous from the military itself, but U.S. military training and arms kept the landed oligarchy safe on their estates and the majority of the natives compliant. Greg Grandin has called what happened next a laboratory for the rest of Latin America as a U.S.-sponsored “Operation Cleanup” carried out mass killings of labor and rural reformers. Opponents of the government were “interrogated, tortured, executed, and their bodies placed in sacks and dropped into the Pacific.”117 (These were exactly the tactics used in Argentina’s “Dirty War”; in Chile, the dead were dumped in desert holes.) In retaliation in 1968, a Guatemalan guerrilla group killed the U.S. ambassador. In the 1970s, the worsening economic situation and the Nicaraguan uprising triggered military panic. The guerrilla groups were split into a number of factions and, by that era, resorted to sabotage and strikes in Guatemala City as well as attacks against military outposts in the Mayan highlands. The military through a series of internal shifts of power moved steadily rightward, intensifying its use of disappearances, summary executives, and torture. In 1982, the most violent faction of the military seized power and appointed the retired general Efraín Ríos Montt as president. Ríos Montt, an evangelical minister, then carried out a wave of killings that rendered everything before trivial. Tens of thousands died every two months as the military moved through the highlands and, with forcibly conscripted peasants, exterminated anyone in any zone thought to be “subversive.” People were shot for wearing glasses; Mayan schoolteachers were routinely dispatched. In all, some 150,000–200,000 lives were lost in the conflict and the

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killing was genocidal: the military targeted Mayans as its principal target.118 An era that began with the promise of revolutionary change ended in a region-wide bloodbath. Scholars have focused on the left and its guerrilla groups because they seem both more romantic and hopeful than the victors of this period. Seen all in all, however, the era of import-substitution industrialization did not lead toward democracy but away from it. By the early 1980s, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, and Costa Rica made up the core of civilian regimes. Mexico and Colombia were dealing with worsening economies and rising internal violence, including, in the 1970s, guerrilla uprisings. What had happened? The role of the United States in combating economic nationalists, populists, and leftists is clear; what is not clear is why Latin Americans could not muster the resources to create and sustain democracies.

THE DILEMMAS OF DEVELOPMENT Rapid urbanization and the increasing population placed Latin American nations in a series of novel binds, interpreted at the time as the result of age-old problems of exploitation by landowners and the consequences of corrupt government. In fact, the region was now “developed” in the sense that its path to modernity was fairly clear. As the era unfolded and especially after the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. government became an enemy of progressive democrats as well as leftists. It did not trust ordinary people to make decisions for their own nations. Experts dissecting Latin America’s problems decided that popular movements were the result of poor development, underdevelopment, or being undeveloped. These, of course, are three problems not one. People seemed to assume that a “developed” nation would look more like the United States or Western Europe and would have standards of living higher than those prevailing in the region. Ignoring for the moment that living standards varied enormously among nations in Latin America and within nations as well, no one could approach the real agents of social change and instead focused on issues such as obsolete industrial technology, inadequate transportation networks, or bottlenecks in the flow of productive goods. Discussing the growth of population and asking if any known model of development could meet the demands of record numbers of young people remained off the table.


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No one would address the agents of mounting tension in the region because doing so would require confronting the people with the need for sexual responsibility, confronting the Church to change its theology about reproduction, and, most of all, demanding effective and well-financed governments, governments with greater vision and coherence than any Latin America had seen (or, for that matter, than the world has generally seen). What could be done about rapid urbanization? People were flowing into the cities at a rate that completely outpaced the urban capacity to provide decent jobs, let alone housing and infrastructure on so many migrants. So the migrants became a “problem,” and were described as marginal people. An effective government might have instituted sweeping rural reforms to raise wages or subsistence earnings and thus ease the pressure to migrate from the countryside. Efforts to provide tax incentives for industry to move away from the primary cities generally did not work. It might also have assisted in the construction of self-help housing in either urban or rural zones with subsidized materials or by deploying architects and engineers to aid the residents. Greater investment in provincial public goods—schools, roads, and electricity— would have helped rural employment. Instead, governments reacted rather than acted; they concentrated their efforts to assisting already developed interests. Problems in Latin America were not only about numbers but also about the structures of power. Landed interests still exercised sufficient power to prevent rural reforms. Any sustained effort to raise rural wages was labeled communist, as was any effort at land reform. What could be done? Cuba, in one of its most radical measures, invested in rural development and ugly blockhouses and eventually found Havana coming apart from neglect. Outside of Cuba, members of the urban middle class and laborers with property demanded their stakes be protected whatever the consequences in provincial zones. They wanted public services and cheap food, reinforcing the need to keep down rural wages. Outside of Cuba, no nation tried to equalize urban and rural wages. The landless, growing in numbers, intensified their demands in the 1960s and 1970s in such different countries as Mexico, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. In Mexico, it led in the 1970s to another wave of land titles given to rural populations, but this time the land was hardly worth tilling. In Brazil and Chile, struggles over land distribution fueled the political polarization that led to military coups. In Peru,

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the military in a reform-minded phase between 1968 and 1974 issued land titles but found that, although the distribution barely touched rural misery, it did foment radical native anger.119 By 1980, land reform waned as a strategy for addressing social problems and for even retarding the flow of the desperate to the cities. Within the cities, the sprawl of shantytowns became unavoidable. The early squatters in the shantytowns during the 1950s and up until the mid-1960s had been able to build some equity and gain title to their land, and this, of course, encouraged more rural people to try their luck. The crowding, the smog, the bacteria created by congestion— not to mention the traffic jams—made urban life more and more difficult. Still, there was little point in staying in the countryside. By the early 1980s, almost every Latin American nation had reached the tipping point of having more people in its cities than its rural zones; this was a one way trip, and there was no going back. One answer to these problems was rapid economic growth and there were spurts of economic expansion. Mexico’s economic miracle lasted into the early 1970s. Brazil under the junta had substantial growth rates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Chile under Pinochet had a period of economic expansion in the late 1970s and again in the late 1980s, but these were offset by crises in 1975 and 1981–1983. The people gained ground if they were fortunately situated, if their barrio had political connections, and if the authorities had decided to put a paved street or a school in their area or to hand out land titles. The inequalities of income and wealth were worsening despite the threats from guerrilla movements. U.S. foreign corporations expanded their presence in the region and this increased the outflow of money in the repatriation of profits, patent and copyright payments, and so on. This was true even in the more prosperous years, and then things began to go badly wrong. To the internal pressures generated by more people, new difficulties appeared as a result of international changes—the oil crises and what followed, a searing debt crisis. The United States waged the Cold War with little thought to the needs of Latin America or any other underdeveloped region. So long as the threat of another Castro was contained, American political leaders could care less about the fate of those south of the nation. It was an indifference that would come back to haunt the United States but only after this period. There were three aspects of U.S. policies, however, that had a sustained effect on Latin America. The United


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States lost control of the value of its currency. It printed dollars to cover the costs of the Vietnam War and, more, to handle the oil crises of 1973 and 1978. It went off the gold standard in 1971 and by the late 1970s, its monetary policies were causing inflation at home and abroad. The Republican Party dominated the presidency. From 1968 until 2008, Democrats held the presidency for only twelve years. The Republicans were especially hostile to any populist or left-wing movement for change in Latin America. The U.S. government invested heavily in Latin American militaries as a means of securing its corporations’ assets in the region and preventing the embarrassment of another Cuba. Latin America felt the impact of all these events. The region maintained its currency reserves in dollars and so the collapse of that currency affected the state of its economies. Aside from Mexico and Venezuela, no Latin American nation produced much oil and so each had to pay the higher prices oil-producing nations demanded in 1973 and 1978. To cover the difference in terms of trade, the amount of oil that their primary products and minerals would buy, they borrowed. They borrowed more to cover the rising cost of running a government. Or they turned the printing press. One nation after another fell into hyperinflation—the rate of inflation rose to three digits or more a year. In Chile, hyperinflation helped undermine Allende’s administration. In Argentina, it fed people’s disgust at the government of President Isabel Perón and demoralized the nation to the point that many welcomed the coup of 1976. In Mexico in 1982, hyperinflation and the flight of capital led to an illconsidered nationalization of the banks that only accelerated the government’s economic desperation. Everywhere, governments, afraid of higher unemployment, tried to sustain unprofitable industries. It was lemon socialism, where the profits were privatized and the government absorbed the losses. The future price of anything became hard to predict. The assumptions under which Latin America had protected its industries became untenable. Major segments of the population lost their life savings to inflation or bouts of unemployment. Worse was in store. Much of the government borrowing was cheap in the late 1970s. U.S. policies had made dollars plentiful. American banks, with a stressed domestic economy, turned to lending abroad to push up profits. “Jumbo” loans of a billion dollars each became common in a surge of lending to Third World nations; at the same time, banks in Western

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Europe began lending massive sums to Eastern, that is, communist Europe. Bankers believed that no nation could go bankrupt, which was technically true, but meaningless: a nation could run out of dollars, the currency in which the debt was denominated. The U.S. Federal Reserve system, in order to wring inflation out of the American economy, began to raise the price of money, pushing interest rates to record levels. Latin American nations now found it difficult or impossible to roll over their debts, except at exorbitant rates. In September 1982, the Mexican minister of finance went to Washington and New York and informed them that his nation would not be able to meet its debt obligations that quarter. Latin American bonds as a whole collapsed in value and banks stopped lending to any of them. An era of economic nationalism and importsubstitution industrialization gradually came to an end and another era, based on very different economic attitudes, began.120 The region, in a single generation, had developed a great deal. Its industrial capacity, the size of its populations, the extent of its cities, and the lifespan of its peoples had all improved. Its governments finessed the short term because political life was roiling from all the unmet public needs. But Latin America had not outgrown its vulnerability to external shocks, which brought the region calamity. Indeed, the severity of the “debt crisis” caught the Reagan administration by surprise; it never considered the impact its domestic policies might have on other nations—nor had any of Reagan’s predecessors. From a region obsessed with the issues of social justice, land reform, guerrilla warfare, and burgeoning shantytowns, Latin America became one obsessed with paying its debts while sustaining what remained of its social fabric. Its people would soon know what happens when economic growth stops.

CHAPTER 5

Launched into the Present Latin America has been reeling from the consequences of the 1982 debt crisis for over a quarter of a century. The crisis gradually but permanently moved the region away from import-substitution industrialization and into the world it now inhabits. Tariffs fell and barriers to foreign investment fell as creditor nations, led by the United States, demanded Latin American nations carry out “reforms” if they wished to roll over debts. As a result, factories built between the 1930s and the early 1960s shut down, throwing tens of thousands out of work in each country—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. This “deindustrialization,” in turn, generated a laboring population with an unpredictable future and not tied in any serious way to the rules and regulations that existed prior to 1980. Many of the gains labor organizations had fought for decades to achieve disappeared. Experts began to speak of an “informal economy,” in which established work rules had little place and the workplace resembled hours and conditions in the early twentieth century. The distribution of income worsened, and the absolute levels of poverty increased. The 1980s, in Mexico and elsewhere, became known as the “lost decade.” Even worse, just about every nation but Chile has suffered periods of severe economic downturns since. Parallels with the Great Depression are inescapable. The earlier crisis was caused by an expansion of credit within the United States that involved the spread of consumer spending at home and lending to sovereign nations abroad. The overextension of credit, often to

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governments that could not possibly meet the terms of the loans, collapsed in a stock market crash that began on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929, and lasted for a month as values crumpled. That collapse removed the collateral for loans and stock market purchases, sending prices of everything from homes to government bonds toward an unknown floor. The Great Depression, however, did not originate in Latin America; rather, the region had to adjust to changes in the world financial system. Latin America was directly linked to the debt crisis of 1982. The expansion of the money supply by the United States to cover the Vietnam War and its trade imbalances caused by the oil crises of 1973 and 1978 led American and European banks to the illusion of “recycling.” In this game, money spent by the United States would be re-invested in U.S. banks by Middle Eastern states and then lent out to Third World nations (or at home) in the form of “jumbo” loans of a billion dollars each. By 1980, inflationary rates in the United States reached record levels and the head of the Federal Reserve, with President Ronald Reagan’s approval, decided to choke off the inflationary cycle by raising interest rates. Latin American nations became unable to pay their loans. In 1982, Mexico first, and then Brazil—the two largest borrowers in Latin America— suspended their debt payments and U.S. and European banks stopped lending to the region. Three periods thus make up the history of Latin America since the late nineteenth century to the present: the first, running from the 1870s and 1880s to the Great Depression, was an era of trade-based expansion, usually called the era of the export economies; the second, running from the Depression until the debt crisis, was named the era of import-substitution industrialization (ISI) or, in Latin America, the era of growth from within; the third era began with the debt crisis and extends to our own time and is usually termed that of “neoliberalism” or the “Washington consensus.” In each era, Latin America has had to adjust its economies and its politics to realities well beyond its control. This pattern may not fit the technical demands of “dependency theory,” but it seems to fit the rhythm of world events imposing consequences Latin Americans never considered or wanted. Latin America did not cause either of the World Wars or the Cold War, but its political possibilities were shaped and constrained by Great Power politics. Now, the age of neoliberalism seems doomed as well and, again in 2008–2009, an economic crisis

Launched into the Present

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generated within the United States is destabilizing the world economic system. Major political change will occur in Latin America as well as elsewhere. The more things change, the more they cannot remain the same. The region had 170 million people in 1950, at the height of ISI; it has over 500 million today; and it will have 800 million in another forty years. Mexico City had over 600,000 people at the time of the Revolution; today the city has spilled well out of the bounds of the Federal District, has run over the state of Mexico, and is penetrating the states of Puebla and Morelos—a megalopolis of over 20 million. It has an elaborate subway system carrying over 3.7 million passengers a day. The megalopolis is an astounding mixture of segments running from the wealthy in the south to a still-intact central plaza and north into slums and garbage dumps that stretch for miles. One of its garbage dumps, the Bordo Poniente has 700 trucks a day bringing trash to the northeast of the city and employs up to 25,000 people, including children, sifting through it for anything that can be recycled and sold in bulk. It is an example of the “informal economy” and, at the same time, a way the city has processed its waste for generations.1 Such changes, no matter how much they reflect the past, are permanent and indicate a very different future. The age of the hacendado has been replaced with agribusiness and miserably paid wage laborers; the merchant has disappeared and international banking finances the informal economy and its millions of trinket and food stalls; the mine owner and industrialist have given way to multinational corporations who exploit miners and industrial laborers. Warehouse retailing endangers the corner grocer. The major constants are the contempt of the affluent for the working poor and darker skinned, and the enormous differences in life chances between the middle class and a mass of laborers. Nor should we assume Latin American passivity in the face of these changes. Extensive rioting has hit the major cities of the region during this last quarter of a century. New groups, including Native Americans, found the means to break through linguistic differences and older rivalries and demand social services, resorting to guerrilla warfare, strikes, and massive demonstrations to influence the political systems. For the first time since the late nineteenth century when the natives resisted Europeanized states by violence in order to retain their lands, native movements are

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reshape the politics of Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and communicate with the general public and one another online. Hit by economic crisis, the people of Brazil through a campaign for direct presidential elections in early 1984 (called Diretas Já) created an elected, civil government. In 1988, the Chilean public used a plebiscite—one that President Pinochet had created to legitimize his continued rule—and voted him out of office. In 1994, a guerrilla movement in Chiapas named after Emiliano Zapata wrecked the neoliberal plans of the ruling party and moved Mexico away from one-party rule. In 1998, a neopopulist, former military officer, Hugo Chávez, who once led a failed coup against the Venezuelan government, became the nation’s president by promising a revolution in the distribution of oil income and social services. In Bolivia in 2005, a mobilized native population helped make a neopopulist, Evo Morales, the first native president of the country. While the world talked about globalization and the integration of many financial systems into one, people were less than happy. The neoliberal era revived many of the issues that the mid–twentieth century reforms had addressed: the right to organize labor unions, the need for decent housing, the state’s responsibility for adequate schools, and other public goods. These issues of social justice were either abandoned or postponed by military rule or in the name of recovering from the 1982 crisis. A development rhetoric, perfected in American universities and think tanks, put obtaining high rates of economic growth above all other objectives; presidents promoting neoliberalism, such as Carlos Salinas de Gortari, promised to move Mexico from a Third World nation to a First World one. At the end of the era, that is, today, Latin America is not part of the First World. Like the cities of the region in the nineteenth century that called themselves the “Paris” of South America, Latin America now has pieces of New York, Los Angeles, as well as Paris scattered amidst megalopolises of block apartments and shantytowns. The primary cities have grown into ungovernable zones and secondary cities from Córdoba in Argentina to Tijuana in Mexico are sprawling, with a million or two million each, smaller but just as unmanageable. It is best to begin with the city, the center of power now and in the other eras, to describe what has happened.


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SÃO PAULO, THE NEWEST CITY As students of urban development never tire of pointing out that Latin America contains two of the five largest cities in the world. Mexico City and São Paulo rival in size the megalopolises of New York, Tokyo, and Seoul. A megalopolis is not just a city. It is a collection of what were once separate political entities into a giant one, usually linked by freeways or superhighways that encompass the entire mass. São Paulo once had a sister port, Santos, which in the early twentieth century became Brazil’s most dynamic trade center. But the megalopolis has long since swallowed the port, just as Santiago has long since flowed into and surrounded Valparaiso, and Lima, Callao. Were the Latin American colonial visitor to come to São Paulo, looking for traces of the past, he would find nothing. The city has been torn down and rebuilt in each of the eras of this narrative. Even the colonial sites are either re-creations of what once existed, generated for tourist dollars, or original but long since overshadowed and hidden by skyscrapers. Nor would walking around be very advisable. The city is hilly and many areas are accessible only by car or bus. Paulistanos drive fast when they get the chance and have little patience with pedestrians. Moving within this city requires long commutes or being stuck in traffic jams that move more slowly than those of Los Angeles. The supremely rich often abandon their cars in favor of helicopters. In so many respects, Paulistanos (the term Paulista refers to anyone from the state of São Paulo) see themselves and their city as modern Brazil, the Brazil that really works. An old expression, used during the 1930s and 1940s, was that São Paulo was the engine of Brazil’s train and the rest of the country, the caboose. It was predominantly a White city in a nation that came from natives, Blacks, and mixed bloods. Its obsessions were, like those of Buenos Aires, with changes in Europe and for much the same reason: immigrants from Italy and Portugal altered the racial makeup of the city and its state. Some of that has remained. The city is the nation’s industrial center, the producer of most of its automobiles and a large percentage of its clothing, appliances, and electronic goods. The Volkswagen Gol has long since replaced the once ubiquitous Beetle, with over 5 million units sold in the nation and plans to expand sales throughout the world.2

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Since the 1920s, the city has been the principal producer and user of electricity. Its hydroelectric plants include the massive complex at Iguaçu Falls, hundreds of miles away. São Paulo is free of any threat of earthquakes and so has built up, as well as out. Although Rio has greater fame for its beaches and the sheer beauty of its coastal enclave and Brasília is noted for its ultramodern design, it is São Paulo that brought modernity to Brazil. It was the first Latin American city to hold a modern art festival in 1922, and its museum of art contains the region’s finest collection of paintings. Most of the city’s construction reflects a cult of modernity and this has led to numerous glass boxes, but the Edificio Italia, like the Chrysler Building in New York, is a blend of art and function, and the city’s parks and nature preserve reveal a far-sightedness within its bourgeois leadership that has usually been missing from that of other primary cities. As the city rebuilt itself, it brought in tens of thousands of immigrants each year. Contrary to the myths the Paulistas tell about themselves, slavery was an important factor in the state’s evolution. Slavery and coffee formed the basis of nineteenth-century growth, just as they did for the zone near Rio de Janeiro. But unlike Rio, São Paulo came late to the coffee economy and so brought a smaller number of slaves into its state. When slavery was obviously doomed, the Paulista planters began recruiting rural labor from Italy that brought in 90,000 laborers between 1886 and 1889—laborers they often treated like slaves.3 Whites, however, saw little reason to put up with such treatment. Instead of using the immigrants as replacements for slaves, the planter class began offering incentives in the forms of tenant farms and a share in the coffee profits—the colono system. Land in the coffee zone remained relatively cheap, opening an opportunity for an army of smallholders.4 Higher real wages and agricultural opportunities acted as a magnet, just as they had for Buenos Aires. Freed slaves, after abolition in 1888, tried to gain a foothold in the expanding wage economy and ran into hostility from the planter class and the new immigrants.5 Thus, Whites became the privileged laborers in the area, in the countryside and the city. From 31,000 inhabitants in 1870, the city had 239,000 in 1900, 1.3 million in 1930, 5.9 million in 1970, and over 10 million in the year 2000—the megalopolis was about twice the size of the city itself.6 Industrial development had, according to Warren Dean, two basic origins. Immigrant merchant importers developed complex


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relationships with foreign banks, not only those in Britain but firms in France and Belgium as well. Fortunes made in bringing in goods that immigrant laborers wanted and backed by substantial capital soon extended to investing in production for those same immigrants. Franciso Matarazzo began as an importer of lard in the late nineteenth century and emerged in the early twentieth century as Brazil’s largest industrialist, producing flour, salt cod, and textiles. The other group were coffee planters (owners of massive fazendas) who, initially resentful of immigrant upstarts and their demands for high tariffs, eventually appreciated the new industries as markets for their products other than coffee—cotton, sugar, hides, vegetable oils, and cereals. They, too, began betting on industrial growth. Soon, the sons of rich immigrants married the daughters of great landowners.7 The Paulistas and Paulitanos became major players in national politics. Their parties struck bargains with state oligarchies in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro and ran a triumvirate of “coffee and milk,” sharing the presidency in rough sequence and permitting each region to gain spoils from national revenues while protecting its own interests. It was a federalism that worked well for parts of the country. The other parts were less than happy. When a president from Rio broke the basic understanding of the pact and attempted to impose his own successor, the states, including that of São Paulo, rebelled. The 1930 uprising, fed in part by a coffee crisis that had developed even before the Great Depression, brought Getulio Vargas to power. When Vargas began to impose new conditions in national politics, the Paulista elite rebelled in 1932 and lost. The event was the greatest civil war Brazil had endured. Vargas reduced the power of the Paulistas in national politics but his economic policies, including protective tariffs, accelerated the region’s industrial development. São Paulo became the nation’s chief beneficiary of ISI. Although coffee prices plunged, the city and the state continued to expand, taking advantage of the high levels of literacy in its immigrant labor force, their already well-developed financial sector, and a growing industrial plant that supplied much of the rest of the nation.8 For complex reasons, including the need to undercut labor militancy and a revised view of laborers as being part of the industrialist’s success, the city’s bourgeoisie (it can be called nothing else) pursued a more enlightened set of social policies than was true of other major cities. Schools were built without hesitation and

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employers even supported adult education and technical training as well as improvements in state social welfare.9 Success brought its own dangers. To an astounding degree, São Paulo remained a White city into the 1950s. Blacks were still pushed to its margins and had little chance to take part in the industrial expansion. But the difficulties of rural Brazil could not be geographically contained. The impoverished countryside sent its members south to claim a share of this “growth pole.” The outcome was a surge of slums, favelas, and the urbanization of Black poverty. The White city reacted with a more intense form of racism than existed elsewhere in Brazil.10 The situation worsened as the city expanded. The first shout of humanity to this social crisis came in 1960 from a slum dweller who collected paper for a living. Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote a diary that, when edited by a journalist, became a national sensation. Carolina lived in one of a series of wooden shacks; photos of her encampment show it filled with shoeless children. Living without a man, she recounts how, when she gave birth to one of her children, she was alone and her other children had to fend for themselves until she gained the strength to get up and take care of everyone. She tells of the insults heaped upon her for being Black and poor and how her fellow favelados had internalized the view that they were all “ugly.” For food, she and her children often rummaged through garbage. As for public reformers: When a politician tells us in his speeches that he is on the side of the people, that he is only in politics in order to improve our living conditions, asking for our votes, promising to freeze prices, he is well aware that by touching on these grave problems he will win at the polls. Afterward he divorces himself from the people. He looks at them with half-closed eyes, and with a pride that hurts us.11 Her work became world famous, which did not prevent her from dying in poverty seventeen years after it was first published.12 Carolina lived and wrote in a relatively prosperous moment for Brazil and for São Paulo. A middle class developed; they owned apartments and automobiles, frequented cafes and theaters, making the city as cosmopolitan as many European capitals. In the 1970s, the military poured money into sustaining national industry but, after the debt crisis struck, the money and the military were gone. Brazil returned to


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civilian politics, and São Paulo remained the richest city in the nation and continued to draw the poor, Black residents of other zones to its “periphery,” the term the Palistanos used to describe the slums. As the formal economy of industrial development fell into shock, another one of unregulated hours and degraded working conditions expanded until by the year 2000, 57 percent of the city’s workforce was in the “informal” sector.13 This sector contains a massive drug trade, centered on cocaine trafficking, such services as prostitution, including the use of children, and the sale of sophisticated firearms. Faced with fiscal shortfalls and unable to borrow, the national government printed money. Inflation rates reached 400 percent in 1986, 990 percent in 1987, and 1800 percent in 1989; in 1993, the official rate of inflation reached 2,489 percent. Some were better protected against these shocks than others. The richest 20 percent of the population claimed 50 percent of the nation’s income in the 1960s; in the 1990s its share rose to two-thirds.14 Teresa Caldeira studied the outcome, which included the growth of slums and of high-rise apartments. The rich and the middle class walled themselves in from the poor. The well-off “engage in increasingly sophisticated techniques of social separation and the creation of distance. Thus, the fortified enclaves—apartment high-rises, closed condominiums, peripheral office complexes, and shopping centers— constitute the core of a new way of organizing segregation, social discrimination, and economic restructuring in São Paulo.”15 The spread of crime and despair in the favelas was captured in such Brazilian films as Peixoto, City of God, and Tropa de Eilte. Far from being unaware of what is going on, Brazilians look at their nation as one of extremes, with crime, exploitation, and a corrupt legal system at one end of the spectrum and a lifestyle fit for the rich in New York and Paris at the other. São Paulo reflects every element of this spectrum. The city’s social environment has been moving in a toxic direction for more than thirty years, the era of neoliberalism. Political radicalism remains. The nation has one of the strongest labor union movements in all the Americas. But that radicalism is as nothing compared to the increasing gangs of youths engaged in drugs, kidnappings, and territorial fights waged with automatic weapons. Violent crime rates more than trebled between 1981 and 1996. Bolstered by public fears, in the 1990s, police shot up to 1,300 young people a year—a rate of extra-judicial killing that exceeded that of South Africa under apartheid.16

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The age of neoliberalism brought Latin America to an inevitable outcome, when the majority of its people lived in the towns and cities. Tens of millions still work in the countryside as tenants, exploited day laborers, and small farmers whose life circumstances are modestly better than those of their ancestors. But the gulf between rural poor and urban rich is now the difference between Bangladesh and Manhattan’s Central Park West. Mexico and Brazil have billionaires annually mentioned in Forbes when it lists the richest people in the world. (Mexico’s media giant, Carlos Slim Helu, is now second on that list, behind Warren Buffet and just ahead of William Gates III. Slim Helu owes the bulk of his telecom fortune to the government-provided opportunity to buy the Mexican telephone system in 1990; he is now worth 60 billion dollars.17 According to James Petras, his career fits a pattern worldwide, especially in Russia and Latin America, where the privatization of government assets launched many new fortunes.) In the midst of economic difficulties, the world’s number of billionaires continues to climb—943 in 2007—and Brazil has twenty of them.18 The political economy of struggle, housing miseries, and the persistence of racism and violence hardly summarize Brazil. The Brazilians are a warm, engaging, and often beautiful people. And they are rarely boring; a recent article on traveling to São Paulo noted the complexities of its poverty and gentrification. An old zone of prostitution and sex clubs along the Rua Augusta, an artery dividing the social classes, is newly occupied by homosexuals and so develops a new name, Baixo Augusta and is a “gay-club district, a lounge district, a teenage-hangout district, even an old-ladieswalking-their dogs district. It’s a pretty interesting place to spend an evening: an anything-goes nuthouse.”19 Continuities remain from earlier eras. Most of the nation remains, in some sense, Catholic, although as students of Brazilians note, there are two forms of Catholicism in the country: that of the folk, which has often produced messianic lay leaders and popular miracles, and that of the Church hierarchy. Attempts have been made to merge the two. Brazil is an important center of liberation theology of what the hierarchy permits to remain. The Church as an institution, unlike that of Argentina that supported military rule, stood against soldiers in power and supported Christian ecclesiastical base communities (CBEs in the Portuguese acronym), popularly run efforts at material and spiritual survival. They numbered 80,000 by the late 1970s. A


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noticeable decline occurred after the military left power, but Diana Deere gives the communities high marks for raising the political consciousness of rural women, mobilizing them to protest their exclusion from land-reform programs, and producing legal, gender equality in the 1988 constitution.20 At the same time, the Church remained a sexual mess, demanding that, even when girls were raped or were victims of incest, they carry their babies to term.21 Religion within Brazil had undergone profound change since the 1970s. The Church encountered stiff competition from a traditional spiritual contestant, Umbanda, which became the fastest-growing faith in Brazil. Umbanda stemmed from earlier slave religions of the colonial period, especially macumba. It became a distinct faith in the early twentieth century, providing the Black urban poor in Rio and other cities a spiritual anchor. It blends rituals from Catholicism with a belief in psychic contact with the dead, and it has the songs and dances of other African-derived faiths. During its rituals, believers may enter a trance state and commune with the spirit world. Unlike candomblé that is more popular in rural Bahia, it rejects witchcraft. It professes the doctrine of only one deity and combines that with seven major spirits who are also divine. In sharp contrast to Catholicism, it has priests and priestesses—the faith thus provides Black women an opportunity for leadership.22 Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and Mormons are also gaining substantial ground in competition with the Catholic Church. The Church of the Latter-Day Saints abandoned its discrimination against Blacks in the 1980s, helping to make it more acceptable to Brazilians. Pentecostals and Evangelicals, beginning with support from U.S. televangelists, quickly expanded in the 1970s and 1980s as Brazilians dealt with the economic morass of military rule. Like the Mormons, they provided networks of community support, including jobs and charity. One of the Pentecostal churches, the Universal Church, has over nine million members. In June, 2006 over three million participated in São Paulo in a “March for Jesus.” The Universal Church is also heavily involved in politics.23 Aside from religion, Paulistanos, like the rest of Brazil, have carnival, television, and sports. The Catholic Church has always hated samba and the Black development of carnival. Whites feared that the Black procession that preceded Lent would lead to riots. Such fears disappeared as Whites discovered the commercial possibilities of Black dance and African-derived processions. Just like Rio, the

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major parade of carnival is heavily commercialized. Corporate sponsors demand everything be carefully structured. The key element is samba dancing by women dressed in hysterically colored outfits that are as flamboyant and cover as little of the body as possible.24 (Think Carmen Miranda in the near nude.) Commercial concerns also run television, to the exclusion of the medium’s educational and cultural possibilities. Rede Globo owns the major national TV network, as it owns São Paulo’s major newspaper, and it consolidated its power during the military regime. Under the military, it fed Brazilians a steady diet of American television programming and shows modeled after U.S. practices. Under the military and after, Rede Globo turned out a steady diet of soap operas, telenovelas, which became so popular that they were translated and successfully exported to Spanishspeaking countries. This format, like its use in Mexico, has developed common, national experiences and Brazilians from opposite zones of the country share the trials and tribulations of light-skinned heroines as they deal with sexual abuse and stupid lovers. Some 73 percent of the population watch these productions.25 São Paulo has every form of sport and, like the rest of Brazil, has turned soccer into a secular religion. The city contains six of the sport’s major teams, with Corinthians being the most popular. A major scholar of the subject referred to the national pastime as “soccer madness.”26 Aborigines carry out their war dances in front of televisions, hoping to bring Brazil success in the World Cup. They need not dance too long. By any measure, Brazil is internationally dominant in the sport, with the most famous player soccer the world has ever seen, Pelé. Its teams, in World Cup play, have won more games and more titles than any other. Its players have taken the world title five times, most recently in 2002.27 The military found the World Cup victory in 1970 particularly helpful in bolstering national acceptance of its regime. Soccer is so important to the country that congressional hearings were devoted to discovering why Brazil did not win in 2006.28 São Paulo is the new city, embodying the old Brazil in its problems, its racism, and its religion but having substantially broken with the life experiences of past generations. Its problems derive from the gulf between the rich and poor and the weak sense of citizenship among Brazilians. Neither the nation’s richest city nor the national government has been able to provide a civic direction for the


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population, especially the povo, as the poor are called. Robert Levine noted that, for the prosperous, the very term connotes “pejorative images of laziness, weaknesses of character, and ignorance.”29 That does not mean that Carolina Maria de Jesus’s cry has gone unheard. In a recent study, James Holston notes that although electoral democracy exists in Brazil, the fight of ordinary people for empowerment through civic action is now located in the very urban periphery from which she issued it.30

THE COLLAPSE OF MILITARY CAPITALISM There is a strong link between economic downturns and political change in Latin America. Between 1929 and 1932, there were twentyone rebellions or coups that overthrew governments in the region. The winners of those conflicts turned their nations away from liberalism and toward ISI or growth from within. The lineup of political and economic change was not as clear in the crisis of 1982. The changes that created neoliberalism were apparent in many countries before it occurred. Ignoring the gains of the ISI era, its critics concentrate on the problems of economic nationalism. Protecting national industry created oligopolies and low levels of technological innovation. Such industries could not sell their second-rate goods abroad and needed their countries to continue exporting primary products to buy the fuel and industrial goods they required. By the end of the 1960s, much of Latin America’s industry was decrepit. Inviting foreign capital into such a nation often led to a protected, foreign-owned decrepitude. A classic example was the Chilean automobile sector before the coup of 1973, which had nearly a dozen assembling plants producing foreign cars for a tiny domestic market. The Brazilian military model remedied this by ending restrictions on foreign investment and reducing tariffs to drive producers of any nationality into ruin or greater efficiency. The outcome worsened the distribution of income but many argued that was the price of “development.”31 But what is development? Did it consist only of some statistical measure of growth? Economists, certain that they had the correct theory for sustained growth, provided part of the intellectual impetus for military capitalism. The policies they proposed led to neoliberalism. A British colony and three small Asian nations— Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—were the chief

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examples of how poor nations became prosperous. Nations, by investing heavily in education, using their cheap labor to export goods to wealthier countries, and opening their economies to foreign investment, had posted rates of growth that ran into double digits. They were not stuck on any periphery; it was obvious their own governments decided their economic policies. Ipso facto, nations in the Third World should become like the Asian successes. Ignoring for the moment that the four “tigers” varied widely in size and resources, they had one thing in common, imperial or authoritarian regimes. Citizens had little say in developing or changing policies and were culturally and politically encouraged to save substantial portions of their modest earnings. Technocrats peddled this nonsense to Latin America, but the region did not produce a single tiger. In 2007, Taiwan’s per capita income was almost $18,000 a year; by comparison, that of Japan was $37,670 and the United States, $46,040. In that year, Brazil’s gross national income per capita was about $9,370 and that of the much-heralded Chile was $12,590—unheralded Mexico’s was $12,580.32 No nation reached anything like the per capita levels of Taiwan or South Korea. What happened? Although Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea had authoritarian states, which faced substantial difficulties, they did not have the complexities of Latin America. Taiwan and South Korea are racially homogenous; only Singapore resembled some of the racial and ethnic differences extant in most Latin American nations, but even then, despite a history of rural exploitation, there had been nothing like the native tributary and Black slave regimes that existed in Latin America well into the nineteenth century. In sharp contrast to the governments of Latin America, the Asian tigers poured money into education, trying to bring up every child to his or her educational potential. Singapore went from a nation in the 1970s with 11 percent of the population having gone beyond secondary school to 38 percent in the most recent decade. Although the income gap between rich and poor widened from the 1970s to the 1990s, from six times higher in the earlier decade to ten times higher in the later one, this was a relatively positive distribution compared to any Latin American nation.33 Each of the nations, aside from Hong Kong, poured state investment into rural development. Diane E. Davis emphasizes state efforts to sustain a rural middle class as a key to the Asian tiger phenomenon, noting that in South Korea, farm income


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rose sharply in the 1960s and 1970s and reached the same levels as those working in the cities34—something that did not happen anywhere in Latin America. In short, economics is not a science— markets always have social and political contexts in which they function, and histories that cannot be ignored. Just as importantly, each of the Latin American military governments contained a state culture of terror and disinformation—where lies were issued on a regular basis and could not be investigated. Hong Kong is not talked about in these terms. The goal of military regimes was not national development, although they said that it was; it was class warfare and laborers and the poor would be removed from political life. Torture became extensive; those who questioned state policies risked severe beatings, exile, or a hideous death—development required public “tranquility.” Every now and then there were moments of personal honesty; when asked about the DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional), which tortured and murdered for the Chilean regime and was disbanded in 1977 (only to be replaced by another murderous agency), President Pinochet stopped all questioning within his ranks by saying, “I am the DINA, gentlemen.”35 The military governor of Buenos Aires gave the most accurate assessment of the attitude behind the Argentine regime during the Proceso: First we will kill the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then we will kill their sympathizers, then we will kill who remained indifferent; finally, we will kill the timid.36 The legacy of such regimes was not just economic; they profoundly altered the political culture. A people terrorized and traumatized learn not to question. Chile went from a political life of a multiparty system and vivid debate about the future to one that has been tranquilized and in which socialists are elected presidents so long as they do not socialize anything. In a study of Chilean political culture after Pinochet’s era, Katherine Hite noted that the issues of the 1960s and 1970s had disappeared. Politics had become insular, a matter of details and accords among gentlemen. Underlying this elite insularity and consensus are complex and instructive realities. First, in addition to the institutional parameters of the 1980 constitution, a crucial source of the encapsulation and consensus of the past decade has been latent fear. This

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fear has been based on memories of political chaos and traumas of the past, memories that limited the political imagination and that may not prove a sound long-term basis for consensus.37 She was wrong. After another ten years, Pinochet is dead, and the 1980 constitution still rules the nation and constrains any attempt at social justice or labor mobilization. The major legacy of these regimes was in culture. During and after the military regimes, filmmakers produced work, both fictional and documentary, theaters sponsored dramas that discussed the realities of torture and denial that it was being practiced, and such figures as the Mothers of the Plaza even now bring some national dignity back to Argentines contemplating what took place. Each act of public resistance required physical courage. The finest body of work came from the region’s novelists. The dictator novel began with the work of Miguel Angel Asturias decades before it became an established and distinguished Latin American genre. It blossomed in the seventies and eighties: the Chilean Isabel Allende made her career with such works as The House of the Spirits and Of Love and Shadows.38 Giants turned out one masterpiece after another: Augusto Roa Bastos produced a complex rumination about Paraguay’s founder, Dr. Francia, in I, the Supreme; Gabriel García Marquez created a doorstop of a book, The Autumn of the Patriarch, which joins together the behaviors of a number of dictators to produce one Caribbean Frankenstein; and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa recently wrote The Feast of the Goat, a study of the carnal as well as political appetites of Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic.39 My favorites, however, are smaller tomes that compress the experiences of people caught up in a system that is predatory and evokes some nobility or moral collapse in its characters: Manuel Puig’s wonderful Kiss of the Spiderwoman, a study of a political radical and an apolitical homosexual, locked in the same cell by the Argentine junta, and Roberto Bolano’s Chile by Night, a hallucinogenic trip through the mind of an opportunistic priest, who, among his sins, teaches Pinochet Marxism.40 To all this must be added Jacobo Timmerman’s autobiographical account of having been “disappeared” and surviving the experience, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number.41 Unfortunately, the regimes changed their nations’ cultures in directions that they wanted. In the age of neoliberalism, the voices of


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the left were muted or silenced altogether. There are still mass movements and mass protests that draw upon traditions of popular protest, but these, in general, have weak institutional bases. The older union left, whether in Mexico, Chile, or Peru, has been hammered by deindustrialization and will have few descendents. The preoccupations of the young are focused on a consumer culture, not very different from that of the United States and purveyed in the same way, through television and other mass media.

THE SHOCK TREATMENT The age of neoliberalism began in Chile even before it was implemented in the United States and Great Britain and before the debt crisis of 1982. Chile, as now seems obvious, provided a new model of military capitalism. Brazil’s military officers had moved the region in this direction as early as 1964, when they overthrew the administration of President Goulart, suppressed left-leaning unions and peasant leagues, and opened the economy to foreign capital. The majority of the middle class joined in the attack. In the conflicts that came out of the 1970s, the middle class became far more worried about a decline in status and income than with either social justice or better forms of development. It turned against populism as well as socialism or any other distributive ideology. The social violence of the Chilean coup—its tortures and extrajudicial murders—sent a message to all the poor, whatever their political position. This was reinforced by the “shock treatment” of eliminating tariffs, freezing wages, and letting the labor force absorb skyrocketing unemployment and massive price increases as the government cut all subsidies for necessities. The result was mass starvation and the fear it brings. Twelve-year-old girls sold themselves to buy food for their families. The economy, run according to the ideology of the University of Chicago economists, developed new exports—wine, fruits, fish, and timber—and kept labor demobilized. Wealth became concentrated to an unprecedented degree. The day of the oligarchy had ended, although many of its descendents gained new riches. The day of the plutocrat had arrived. In 1970, before Allende’s radicalism reshaped the market, twelve groups controlled 51 percent of the nation’s 250 largest firms and banks. In 1978, after the Chicago Boys eliminated most controls on finance, three groups, called conglomerados, controlled 40 percent

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of the 250 largest firms and banks.42 They had reached this control by debt leveraging, that is, borrowing over and over again on their assets. Pinochet fell into the debt trap as well when international banks demanded that his regime make good on private-sector debts, or Chile would lose access to any future credit. The economy plummeted but Pinochet survived and modified his policies to avoid another financial balloon. His policies survived despite the impoverishment of the general population. Chile was not representative, however, of military capitalism in general. In Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay, military regimes tried to underwrite the blows of the 1970s oil crises by borrowing to pay for oil and sustain the credit structure of the private sector. In these nations, the militaries succumbed when that borrowing could not continue. In Argentina, the military tried to avoid the inevitable with a diversionary war and when it lost, gave itself a general amnesty. Before leaving power in Brazil and Uruguay, the militaries also amnestied themselves, leaving succeeding civilian governments with a legal, moral quandary. The Chilean military did the same when Pinochet lost his plebiscite. The new civilian governments, aside from that of Chile, inherited massive debts, and the question of what to do with men who raped, tortured, and murdered and who now demanded impunity. Sadly, those instrumental in most barbaric regimes usually escape any special punishment. To take Europe as an example, the Nazis and Fascists of the Second World War suffered the consequences of defeat but few endured any specific punishment for having murdered millions; the Nazis held in Soviet concentration camps for years after the war learned something about the receiving end of state violence, but this was unrelated to the holocaust.43 Most of those who commanded concentration camps or carried out mass murders returned home and resumed their lives.44 After all, the Nazis had a popular base that knew very well about the extermination of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others classified as “deviants.” How could any subsequent government carry out reprisals without inflaming the passions that had brought the Nazis to power in the first place?45 Hannah Arendt was right when she argued that evil, in modern times, has become banal; most people are not so much frightened as they are accommodating of fascist regimes, so long as their own lives are not disrupted. 46 Modern states find violence expedient and useful. It is much easier to motivate through hate than


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reason and to justify torture and murder as “solutions” in the midst of a national “crisis.” The United Nations patched together the idea of “human rights” after the Second World War and, in 1975, it passed a declaration against torture, but it and member-states have done very little to enforce its edicts. If this was true of the famous tyrannies of the twentieth century, why should we be astonished that it was also true of killers and sadists in uniform in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Uruguay? Mexico, with its official party under guerrilla siege, resorted to the same tactics in the 1960s and 1970s as the military governments of Central and South America: rape, torture, and creating the “disappeared.”47 The Mexican army, in its hunt for guerrillas in Guerrero in the 1970s, commonly killed peasants they suspected of anything by pouring gasoline down their throats and setting them on fire. As late as 2003, when a Mexican campaign for justice was under way, arrests for such conduct were few and those threatened by the legal system often killed the witnesses. 48 Two specific cases in Argentina illustrate the difficulties of bringing anyone to account for his crimes. Raúl Alfonsín, the Radical Party leader elected president after the Argentine junta left power, tried to prosecute soldiers for their crimes, only to face repeated attempts or threats of a coup. Eventually, the new government arrested some, including Jorge Videla, president from 1976 until 1981, that is, during the most intense period of the Dirty War or Proceso. He was tried and convicted for numerous crimes, given a life sentence, and pardoned after five years as a means of reducing tensions between the civilian government of President Carlos Menem and the military. The most illustrative case is that of the Naval Captain Alfredo Astiz, “The Blond Angel.” Astiz’s nickname comes from the military rather than his enemies. That it invokes Josef Mengele, the famous physician-butcher of Auschwitz-Birkenau, reveals some of the deeper elements in the junta’s attitudes. Astiz infiltrated the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who walked in Buenos Aires’ most prominent public space, demanding to know the whereabouts of their kidnapped children. He gained their confidence and used the information to kidnap and kill others, including some of the mothers. Astiz openly bragged, “I am the man best able in all of Argentina to kill politicians and journalists.” He, like the rest of the naval torturers,

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worked at the Naval School of Mechanics in the center of Buenos Aires. In 1982, the British captured him during the Falklands War. A photograph of his capture circulated and the French and Swedish governments immediately demanded his extradition for the murder of two French nuns and the shooting and disappearance of a Swedish teenager. A journalist who met him during his captivity described him as a “liberal-thinking man.”49 The British became bound up in the legalities of turning him over to nations that had not been involved in the conflict and ultimately sent him back to Argentina. The Argentines arrested him on occasion but then would let him go, afraid of the consequences of holding him. In the meantime, the French government tried him in absentia, convicted him in 2001, and thus, under international law, made it impossible for him to travel outside his own country. Once outside Argentina, the French could pursue extradition. But he remained a free man.50 Nor did the extra-judicial killing end with the Dirty War. As the French were demanding Astiz’s extradition, the Argentine police tortured teenagers and killed 266 of them to keep impoverished youth in line.51 The most famous attempt to bring a murderer to justice involved Chile’s dictator, Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. Under the constitution his underlings wrote in 1980, the former president remained head of the army until 1998 and then became senator for life. Old and ill, he began going to Great Britain for medical treatments. His government killed Spaniards as well as other foreigners it believed supportive of Allende or opposed to Pinochet’s regime. An ambitious Spanish prosecutor went after Pinochet on the grounds that international law prohibited what his government had done; Spain intended to bring him to its country for trial and possible punishment. It is important to note that Spain had done nothing to prosecute the accomplices of Francisco Franco, its own dictator from 1939 to 1975. In addition to those his forces had killed in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and the numerous reprisals his government carried out after the war, it had regularly tortured and murdered until Franco died. Indeed, seeing the industrial development that had taken place under Franco, not a few compared Pinochet’s achievements to those of the Generalissimo. But now, a Spaniard, in the name of human rights, took on Pinochet. At least two of those who disappeared under his rule were British, and a female British physician was brutally tortured—in the usual


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manner, with electrodes to her genitals—for weeks for having treated a wounded opponent of the regime.52 No British prosecution was ever undertaken. The British had to respond to the Spanish prosecution and arrested Pinochet on October 16, 1998. The extradition trial cost British taxpayers £11 million, involving over 100 attorneys. The police guarding him cost £50,000 pounds a week.53 In the first round, Pinochet won but then the House of Lords overturned the court decision and ordered his extradition. That ruling was overturned when one of the Lords involved was found to have ties to Amnesty International. Eventually, Pinochet’s lawyers pleaded that he was too old and senile to answer to the Spanish charges. He was sent back to Chile. As had happened in the “affair Astiz,” British legal procedures took precedence over any moral issue. Legalities aside, the case was a political mess for the British and Chilean establishments. Dame Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when Pinochet was in power, spoke up for the former dictator and demanded he be released. How could one persecute an anticommunist so devoted to free trade ideals? The Chilean government under the Christian Democrat president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (son of the president that preceded Allende) argued that its national sovereignty was being violated by the proceedings and Pinochet had to be returned immediately. The door was opened, nonetheless, for the Chilean and British public to weigh in and, finally, the enormity of what the Chilean dictatorship had done to its own citizens reached an international audience. As for the British, The Times obituary on Pinochet in 2006 admitted, “The Government was deeply embarrassed and uncertain and vacillating.”54 The Chilean government, in the hands of a supposedly liberal left coalition, defended the dictator and a Labor administration in Britain punted the ball out of its own part of the field. Near the end of his life, Chilean courts finally stripped Pinochet of his immunity and he was prosecuted for tax evasion; he died before any conviction. By the 1990s, a new factor entered into the equation of mass murder and its consequences. Although U.S. congressional committees investigated the sequence of tortures and mass murders in Central and South America, no U.S. administration under a Republican or Democratic president repudiated the U.S. role in promoting Latin American militarism during the Cold War. In 1989, the Berlin

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Wall, symbol of communist authority in East Germany and, to some extent, Eastern Europe, came down. In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved into a series of states, the largest of them Russia. These developments led to an examination of communist rule and its inhumanities, but they also resurrected the issue of human rights in general. Western Europe now paid more attention to what had happened in Latin America. European nations used judicial authority and human rights clauses in their laws and treaties to pursue extradition and punish Latin American military figures that had committed atrocities. In most instances, the countries pursued figures, such as Astiz, that killed their nationals. Pinochet’s case, presented as an issue of holding mass murderers accountable for committing crimes against humanity, hinged on the Europeans his regime had murdered. There are hints here that Europeans would reassert their international law into nations more backward and barbarous than their own. There was also the spectacle of seeing elected civilian governments cringe at the thought of bringing soldiers to some moral accountability. And so the praetorian state ended with no moral or economic resolution. Years after civilian rule had returned to Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza still walked. Eventually, the numbers killed were totaled and stories of the tortured were published or turned into plays and films. Authorities learned that the children of the disappeared had been seized by their parents’ torturers and distributed among military families, to be raised as fascists. Chileans returned to their land by the tens of thousands to find, what? Their careers had been smashed, their friends killed, and the new government coalition, the Concertación with socialists in its ranks, deferred to General Pinochet and protected him against prosecution. Reports issued by government commissions or Church investigations had little impact on the everyday life of their nations. The nation’s poor remained subsumed in shacks, third-rate schools, and wages on which they could barely survive. Chile’s agricultural exports are built on the backs of women, working part-time with no benefits, and little hope for a better future.55 Its copper workers, still the core sector of the nation’s economy and run by a state firm, look back fondly on the old days of U.S. domination.56 In those nations, the age of military capitalism led fairly seamlessly to that of neoliberalism, and people trying to survive had little time or energy to worry about past crimes.


THE END

OF THE

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GUERRILLA LEFT

The same external factors and a domestic exhaustion with violence brought an end to guerrilla war as a strategy to gain national power. It never stopped entirely and is still being waged in parts of Latin America. In 1982, Cuba and Nicaragua remained as tributes to the sixties radicalism. Nicaragua was under siege by the United States. Ronald Reagan had campaigned against the Sandinista victory and promised to “roll back communism” in Nicaragua. Americans, hit by high inflation, two oil crises, and a depressed economy did not really care about the country. Reagan’s staff had a free hand and, in true covert fashion, outlined a threepronged attack on the Sandinistas: an armed force that served as the U.S. proxy, in this case called the “contras” (for counterrevolutionaries) and made up of Somoza’s old National Guard as well as others; an economic blockade; and a heavy military presence that constantly threatened to escalate the contra attacks into all-out war. Honduras became little more than a U.S. military base from which the contras launched their attacks. The Sandinistas made serious mistakes, including a revolutionary and ethnic arrogance that offended the Miskito natives on the Atlantic coast and that turned them against the government. But in the first few years, Nicaragua’s economy grew quickly. Initially, the Sandinistas had some goodwill from the entrepreneurial class, which had played an important role in undermining the Somoza regime. Most of their problems—hyperinflation, shortages of goods, and an unpopular military draft—could not be avoided, given U.S. hostility and attacks by the contra forces. The population gradually wore down. The economy shrank in the late 1980s; per capita income dropped a disastrous 14 percent in 1988.57 By 1990, the national income per person was only 42 percent of what it had been under Somoza.58 As had happened in Castro’s Cuba and Allende’s Chile, the government had created two markets. It had the sense, however, to call one subsidized and the other unsubsidized (rather than illegal). Prices in the unsubsidized market were four to twenty times those in the subsidized market; people had to supplement their subsidized goods and had no money for clothing, and spent every córdoba on food.59 In 1989, the Sandinistas accepted the conclusions of the Contadora Agreement, designed by four Latin American governments, and

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promised to hold elections in 1990. Elections had been held before but the Sandinistas’ opponents refused to participate, claiming corruption of the electoral process. In the election, the United States backed the right-wing Violeta Chamorro, widow of the most famous victim of Somoza’s terror. It did not seem to bother her that she was championing a cause that included Somoza’s former henchmen. She promised peace and aid from the United States. A sad era followed. After so many had died fighting Somoza and the contras, Chamorro won and began rolling back the revolution’s achievements. The army remained in Sandinista hands but the efforts at full employment, literacy campaigns, and public medicine ended. People who had fought for the revolution were thrown back into misery. Katherine Isbester described one of them, Amparo Rubio, who worked as a street peddler as a child. “She sold bread in the morning before school, sweets during the lunch break, and after school fruits, eggs, sugar cane, or anything else she could find. Although so poor that she had no shoes, she was one of the best students in her school.” She grew up quickly and became involved as a teenager in a Christian-based community and, through Church contacts with the FSLN, joined the guerrilla effort against Somoza. Caught by Somoza’s forces, she endured imprisonment and then was released. She had a child, which she left with her mother while she went off to rejoin the guerrilla movement. She became second in command of a guerrilla unit in the fighting against Somoza and captain of the new national military when the Sandinistas won. After Chamorro was elected, she was so poor she had to return to living with her parents.60 Money now decided who governed Nicaragua. Chamorro’s promise of U.S. aid turned out to be hollow. Once the Sandinistas were out of power, the Republican administration of George H.W. Bush lost all interest. In an effort to win Washington’s approval and to deal with the economic morass left by the civil war, Nicaragua sold off government enterprises and severely reduced public spending. Experts on the conflict noted that the struggle within the country did not end. Women played a major role in overthrowing Somoza, and they reorganized into support groups that sustained ideals developed during the revolution, including, of course, their own civil rights. The victor of the 1996 election, Arnaldo Alemán, returned the nation to a Somocista state—corrupt and with no social safety net. The young poor in Managua formed gangs and acted out a


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pathology of poverty.61 The Sandinistas became the chief party of opposition, with Daniel Ortega running for president in 1996 and 2001, and losing. Poverty intensified and a triumphant capitalist class became so corrupt that, in 2006, the populace elected Ortega. He faced the task of reviving social hope at a time when “savage capitalism” had decimated any remnant of what the revolution had once constructed. Even so and in his early sixties, he seemed to be part of a changing tide. He no longer spoke of socialist revolution but of a substantial change in what had once again become a grotesquely inequitable society. And he was not alone. Neoliberalism began in the 1990s to produce, in reaction, a neopopulism. The next zone of guerrilla warfare was as unlike Nicaragua or Cuba as possible. It began in the Peruvian highlands and eventually reached Lima, turning the mountains and the primary city into sites of a civil war. Each side waged the conflict with terror tactics, including torture, summary execution, and mass murder. Caught between the forces, Peru’s poor and middle classes, at one point, had almost no place to hide. Peruvian peasants were recruited and even drafted by the guerrillas, who called themselves Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path), and by the Peruvian army. By the year 2000, between 62,000 and 69,000 died in the conflict; 12,000 perished in the region where the violence began, that is, in the departments of Ayachuco, Huancavelica, Junín, and Pasco.62 Sendero Luminoso began as a branch of the Peruvian Communist Party and considered itself an intellectual descendant of José Carlos Mariátegui, who had argued that the nation’s central problem was the political exclusion and economic exploitation of its Indian majority. To this, Sendero added the thoughts of Mao Zedong who believed that the truly revolutionary force in a backward country was not its proletariat but its peasantry. The man who merged these two lines of thought was an obscure philosophy professor, Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, who taught at the San Cristóbal of Huamanga University and who used the nom de guerre Presidente Gonzalo. Autocratic toward subordinates and peasants, he ran Sendero as his own movement and punished with exile or worse anyone who disputed his authority.63 Scholars note that joining Sendero gave students, especially those from the lower-middle class, an identity not only as revolutionaries but as intellectuals.64 The provincial university was distinctive in several ways: it was located in one of the nation’s poorest zones, a good many of its students came from native

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stock and nearby villages, and it had been generally overlooked in Peru’s effort in the late 1960s and early 1970s at agrarian reform. The political background favored Sendero; Peru had just elected a well-meaning, well-educated, and inept president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Belaúnde came from an elite, White family and had been raised in France, where he studied engineering. He later went to the United States and became an architect. Urbane and sincere in his democratic attitudes, he returned to Peru and became involved in politics while never belonging to the nation’s most populist party, the APRA, or to the country’s promilitary factions. He formed his own party, Popular Action (Acción Popular) and ran for the presidency without success in 1956 and then came in second in 1962. His chief opponent, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, came in first but without enough votes to take office. The leader of APRA had aged badly; once the opponent of militarism and U.S. imperialism, Haya de la Torre now bargained with both to keep Belaúnde out of office. He succeeded only briefly. New elections were called and Belaúnde won. He ran his government as an architect would, expanding state spending on infrastructure and improving amenities in Lima. The underlying dynamic of a policy based on urban improvements was already failing. Peru’s industry was old. Its principal urban site of Lima-Callao had three million people, many of them desperate refugees from the impoverished countryside. The countryside itself was in the hands of the few; some two percent of the owners held 85 percent of the land. The bottom 25 percent of the population received only three percent of the nation’s income.65 Belaúnde was fond of invoking native traditions, the Incan ability to plan and the native ayllu, the collective unit of rural production from pre-Colombian times. He visited the length and breadth of the country during his election campaign but there is no evidence that he consulted natives on how to help rural Peru. A modest land reform began. So did a series of guerrilla movements, inspired by the Cuban Revolution.66 Even so, his increased expenditures on health and education paid some sharp dividends, with the percentage of children in school rising from 54 to 74 percent and those in secondary education doubling to 500,000.67 He overspent, caused inflation and the rapid devaluation of the currency, and made a bargain with Standard Oil of New Jersey over Peruvian oil that made him look like a sellout. In fact, Belaúnde


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faced the basic problems that every successor would encounter: the nation’s tax base was too small to fit its needs for infrastructure and human capital; the inevitable outcome was deficit spending and borrowing abroad. Once stuck in that the bind, the IMF would regularly turn up and demand spending cuts and monetary “reforms” that would raise unemployment and delay the creation of roads and other public goods. The Peruvian military, accustomed since the 1930s to arbitrating politics, stepped in and removed him from office. Belaúnde went off to teach in the United States while the military went through a populist phase and then after 1974, a period of economic retrenchment and social repression. Under President Juan Velasco Alvarez, the soldiers launched a land reform, a significant expansion of unions, and other social changes. This was a blow to what remained of rural oligarchies that still ran regions of the country. The military reduced foreign corporate influence. The effort was expensive and coincided with the first oil crisis and a general downturn in the world economy. Nonetheless, the populist impulse seemed necessary. The nation had 10 million people in 1960, 13 million in 1970, 17 million in 1980, and 22 million in the year 2000. So, the population had more than doubled in a little more than a generation. It had a favorable balance of trade until the Belaúnde administration, but from 1965 on, the country imported more than it exported; at times the imbalance was dramatic, such as in 1975 the year military populism came to an end—when imports were double exports. A major part of this trade deficit was a need for food—a sign the land reform had reduced food production. Until the Belaúnde administration, government expenditures ran less than revenues; then government deficits rose sharply and were accelerated by military spending. In 1975, expenditures exploded to 138 percent of revenues. To cover the difference, governments turned the printing press and a consumer price index of 100 reached 1397 in 1980; the cost of things had gone up fourteen times.68 Discouraged by rampaging inflation and food shortages as well as its internal divisions, the soldiers left power before the 1982 debt crisis.69 Before they left, however, they caved into pressures from the IMF to reduce expenditures and open up the nation’s economy to foreign investment and imports. Heavy borrowing paid the trade imbalance. Elections were held and Belaúnde won again. He again set out building highways and he returned civil liberties to the

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population. The legacy of military rule hit him full force as the economy contracted 12 percent in the first year of the debt crisis. The IMF now imposed even more stringent rules to roll over past due bills and Belaúnde sold off nationalized industries, made sharp cuts in public spending, and triggered the rapid devaluation of the currency and more inflation. The shock treatment and neoliberalism had come to Peru. He was understandably uninterested in events in Ayacucho.70 The financial setting thus favored Sendero. Its recruiting issues included the still outrageous treatment of natives by highland landowners and authorities and the age-old promise of land reform, as yet unrealized in the area. The natives also faced the pressures of rapid population growth. Local and departmental police and military forces were small and badly armed. Belaúnde’s presidency was ending when Sendero’s various guerrilla strikes turned into open warfare. Until then, even the Peruvian left, based in Arequipa and devoted to armed revolution, took little notice of the Senderistas.71 That year, as Sendero broke out of Ayacucho and began assaults in other provinces and even Lima, the consumer price index reached 17,900. The government had lost control of economic reality. Finally, with the reformers in tatters and the military disgraced, the APRA had a chance at presidential power. Haya de la Torre died in 1979 and, given the confused scold he had become, this was a blessing. Alan García, candidate of the APRA, won the presidency in 1984; his timing could not have been worse. The debt burden of the government now prevented its doing much of anything. García acted courageously and suspended making full debt payments to the international creditor banks, arguing they had no right to bleed the nation for more than 10 percent of its export income. Unfortunately, he took the money saved by this measure and boosted public contracts, especially to fellow Apristas. Public spending went from 12.7 million soles to the equivalent of 13.455 million. Inflation turned into hyperinflation in 1985 with devastating consequences. As other Latin American nations have done, in 1985 Peru took three zeros off its currency and renamed it: 1,000 soles equaled 1 new sol. Sendero exploded as a military force, recruiting peasants throughout the highlands as the rural standard of living dropped 48 percent.72 Against them was the Civil Guard, whose rural policemen were paid the equivalent of 30 dollars a month.73 Another element of the conflict involved the U.S. “war on drugs,” which turned the


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military, with substantial U.S. aid, into enemies of small farmers who grew coca for local production and for the booming international market in cocaine. García hit back, killing Sendero prisoners and authorizing military brutality against entire villages.74 He also drew on the rondas campesinas, village self-defense groups, to attack Sendero soldiers. The war escalated, with peasants caught between the two sides. In the coca area, Sendero ran a protection racket, helping small farmers against military raids and the demands of coca traffickers.75 García’s presidency ended as Belaúnde’s had, with Sendero becoming more prominent and the economy in shambles. Under siege in Ayacucho but still flush with money, Sendero expanded its operations in Lima, recruiting university students and the poor in the city’s burgeoning shantytowns. Alberto Fujimori came from a tiny Japanese Peruvian community and had almost no public visibility before running for the presidency in 1990. He ran on a reformist platform against Peru’s most famous writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, and won, in part, because Vargas Llosa courted the rich during the campaign and promised a neoliberal agenda of public spending cuts and the selloff of government enterprises. Although Fujimori ran a populist campaign, once in office, he decided to administer a “shock treatment” to Peru. When Congress, controlled by his opponents, refused to carry out his “reforms,” he staged an auto-golpe, using the military to shut down the legislature and suspend civil rights. He regrouped, passed a new constitution, and with his enemies out of the country, created a new legislature with his supporters in the majority. And yet, even an authoritarian and rigged electoral system such as Fujimori’s made some social progress. From his own inclination and from the social fact that women had come to be over 36 percent of the active labor force, the president decreed that a percentage of all public positions had to go to women. In the year 2000, just before he fled Peru and resigned, the legislative quota for female candidates was 25 percent.76 In the midst of all this plus a nasty, public divorce from his wife, he waged total war on Sendero Luminoso. The military was given authority to do whatever it wanted. In the highlands, official forces and the SIN (Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional)—the secret police— stepped up torturing and killing often helpless villagers, but they also used community defense forces with increasing effectiveness. The guerrillas assumed that these forces had been coerced into cooperation, which was true in some cases. But in many areas, the natives

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had tired of Sendero’s arbitrary behavior, its demands for support and food, and its willingness to kill anyone who dissented from its doctrines.77 Sendero struck back by killing police and army officers almost at random, assassinating judges and peace advocates as well as rivals on the left, and setting off a series of bombs in Miraflores, Lima’s commercially prominent zone. One of its favorite terror tactics was to hang dogs from lampposts. An example of its loss of public morals was using dynamite to blow up María Elena Moyano right in front of her family. A leader from the shantytowns and of obviously African descent, Moyano had led a campaign for peace.78 In August 1992, Lima’s police caught Abimael Guzmán, and the government, after exhibiting him, tried him, and put him in a naval prison where he remains. This was hardly the end of Peru’s miseries but the capture of Guzmán led to a steady decline in guerrilla violence. Fujimori imposed his neoliberal policies with impunity, rigged his re-election, and then ran into a scandal involving his secret police, its numerous violations of human rights, and charges of massive corruption. He fled Peru in 2000 and went to Japan. In 2005, he visited Chile and was extradited to Peru, convicted of violating his ex-wife’s privacy and sentenced to prison. He awaits charges for his terror campaign against Peruvians during the war on Sendero. In the meantime, Peru elected another failure, its first Indian president, Alejandro Toledo. In 2006, the Peruvians stopped courting new evils and elected a familiar one, putting Alan García back in the presidency. Conditions in the 1990s became so bad that women with college degrees fled to Santiago, Chile, where they worked as undocumented laborers, usually as domestic maids and nannies. The Chileans referred to them as “Indians.”79 The sharp swings in the economy, the guerrilla war, and the overall deterioration of economic conditions created a political cycle of promises of reform followed by more difficulties. At times, the nation’s most valuable export was its coca leaves. The rate of inflation declined, however, and this in itself promised relief from the economic crisis. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, about a million Peruvians emigrated from the country.80 In a trenchant critique of Peru’s past policies, a businessman, Hernando de Soto, wrote The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. The work appeared in the late 1980s and became a best seller in Peru and much of the rest of Latin America.


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He became an immediate darling of right-wing elements in the region but, even so, he had something to say. He noted that Peru had undergone dramatic alterations in culture—the decline of clerical power, the rise of the automobile as the principal means of transport, the replacement of Andean music with hard-rocking chichi sounds—but that its government remained inefficient and ineffective. The people innovated but the state passed regulations, rarely enforced, that only complicated life and facilitated corruption. He noted that Lima had increased its housing by 375 percent in the past twenty years, little of it due to government construction or government-regulated construction. Migrants had built the new city through land invasions and self-help or informal housing despite constant official harassment.81 The same thing happened with trade and transportation, with innovation coming from a desperate need for urban services and the inadequacy of the formal sector to meet them. Remaining in legal compliance involved paperwork that would take months or years to process and cost up to 347 percent of after-tax profits; not surprisingly, no one obeyed these rules and, aware of their ridiculousness, the government looked the other way.82 The situation had become untenable.83 Although this seems to justify the wrecking ball that Fujimori took to Peru’s government, even selling off the department of education, it overlooks the fact that while no nation wants corrupt and ineffective government, every society needs a state with a capacity to carry out basic regulations and social functions. How is that state to be built? Toledo and García, in his second term, had to wrestle with the IMF over debts and the U.S. drug agencies over coca production, but neither returned to the status quo ante Fujimori. Instead, the policies of a more open economy and the growth of the “informal sector” occurred because the national government remained incompetent or unable to change direction. Peru produces a wide variety of foodstuffs and minerals. Spain invested heavily in the country, with the United States coming in second. Throughout the Fujimori years, the GDP grew and it continued to expand thereafter. In 1997, at 9 percent per year, it had the highest growth rate in Latin America. Alas, this growth did little for the majority. Peru still relied heavily on sales to the United States and high demand for its minerals and natural gas; like other nations, it is being hard hit by the global depression of 2008–2009.84

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The revolutionary experience that launched such hopes has suffered an endless series of reversals, but Cuban national pride and Castro’s indomitable spirit have kept the “revolution” going. It is obvious at this writing that it is a revolution in search of a new direction. But the question of Cuba’s eventual evolution has been before the country since 1986 when changes in the Soviet Union put Cuba in a bind. A critic of the revolution’s long course and the population’s suffering to sustain it noted, “At the end of 1991, the hardest question confronting the Cuban government was how long the Cuban people would continue to consent—out of conviction, fear, or passivity—to be governed in the same, or almost the same, ways as in the past.”85 Another critic, noting Castro’s depressed comments about retiring in 1993, thought he might be serious.86 We can answer that the revolution has lasted into at least 2009, even though Fidel Castro is so sick he has relinquished executive power to his brother, Raúl. No one knows what will happen. The United States has a new president, Barack Obama, who has promised to end the mindless confrontations of his predecessors in so many regions of the world and, in Cuba, to reconsider trade and travel embargoes that have strained relations to this ridiculous point.87 Much of U.S. hostility came from a historic demand that the Caribbean remain the American lake of the gunboat days; the other factor stemmed from the influence of Cuban exiles in Florida politics. The Cuban Revolution has persisted for fifty years despite numerous errors. The economy was never run well. Castro, his brother Raúl, Che Guevara, and other key figures from the early days of the revolution in the 1960s had very little idea of how to manage anything. They lost a great many of the nation’s technicians in the massive exodus from the island in the early 1960s. They still had enormous goodwill and revolutionary fervor into the late 1960s. They enacted land reform and a series of social welfare measures that required capital the nation did not have, despite the support of the Soviet Union. The outcome of rapid unionization and the attempt to alleviate rural poverty brought the same problems as those of populist regimes where wages outran the availability of goods, and they led to the same solutions: rationing and the appearance of a black market. Such problems and outcomes, combined with the hostility of the United States, had destabilized and destroyed governments as different as Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and Nicaragua in 1989. Why had Cuba survived?


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Castro deserves a great deal of the credit. Although he always said the people created and approved revolutionary policies, in many respects, he and Cuba knew that he was the revolution—its leader, its personification abroad, and its principal cheerleader. Witness the number of times the CIA tried to kill him or harm him, some of them hilarious, such as using an exploding cigar.88 Castro led a fairly united people because those who hated him left the island. It is true that losing the exiles cost the nation educated talent; it is also true that Castro used emigration as an escape valve whenever internal pressures built. This was case in 1980 when over 100,000 left in the Mariel boatlift, using any craft they could to reach Florida. It is also true of the balseros (using flotation devices such as empty tires and homemade rafts) since the 1990s. Fearing problems with more refugees, the Clinton administration decided to turn the refugees back. A central advantage of Cuba over other radical governments in the region was that the revolution controlled the army and faced no armed insurgency. The armies of Guatemala and Chile destroyed Arbenz and Allende; Nicaragua was undone by U.S.-supported attacks against the nation for six years. After the Cuban missile crisis, the United States promised not to directly attack Cuba. Castro’s government had to fend off economic sabotage—the CIA in the early 1970s waged biological warfare by unleashing a disease that killed 500,000 pigs.89 But the hostility of the United States remained Castro’s trump card, proof that Cuba mattered in the world and a constant reminder of the national humiliations the United States had inflicted before the revolution. Finally, one must mention the revolution’s achievements. Cuba created the greatest social welfare policies in all Latin America. Before the end of the Soviet Union and its subsidies to the island, Cuba achieved astounding successes in the fields of education, medicine, and longevity. It created a nation of literate people where most lived into their mid-70s. It brought women into the labor force and opened doors for them that would have been unthinkable before the revolution. Women became 35 percent of the workforce in the 1980s, although discrimination against them in terms of wages, political office, and professional careers never disappeared. Cuban machismo never succumbed to the regime’s sermons on sexual equality.90 The changes for people of color were spectacular and Afro-Cubans remained ardent revolutionaries long after other population segments became disillusioned. Blacks did not

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forget their treatment in prerevolutionary Cuba by White Cubans and Americans. Even as disaster struck in the 1990s, Cuban infant mortality rates were as low or lower than those among Blacks in the United States.91 Castro played up Cuba’s African heritage as no other leader had, using it to justify foreign military adventures in Algeria, the Congo, Guinea Bissau, and most notably in Angola, where Cuban troops helped defeat forces financed and led by South Africa. Their efforts were a blow to U.S. policy in the area, the hegemony of South Africa in the region, and even South Africa’s apartheid.92 Castro remained a symbol of hope to many in Latin America. For one thing, his was the loudest voice in denouncing U.S. neoliberal policies, which had brought such misery to most of the region. For another, he was the most famous representative of revolution left on the planet. Contrary to the belief in much of the United States, the poor in the rest of the world would welcome radical change in their lives. There are also considerable failures. The revolution’s economic mismanagement continued to the present, often because Castro’s ego and rigidity got in the way of Cuban’s desire to improvise privatesector solutions to scarcity and to be paid real wages. A rationed life is a bland one, a pathetic fate for a people who are so lively and talented. The Cubans gave the world danzón, the rumba, the mambo, and the musical genres to go with all those famous dances. In the 1970s, when the rest of Latin America turned to self-help housing, Castro insisted on public construction a la the Soviet Union, and much of that in the countryside. The results left Havana crumbling and a population living in blockhouses, when they found any to live in. The housing shortage became acute, so much so that Cubans postponed getting married, and even married couples, living with their parents, had to go to a hotel to have sex. Family pressures reflected the problems of setting up a household and providing the young with some pleasures in life. An erotic culture remained but women found it more difficult to hang onto their men—Cuba has one of the highest divorce rates in the world—and women raising children without husbands rose to 61 percent of all households.93 When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Cubans were forced from an already austere standard of living called the “rectification” into the “special period.” Medicines disappeared. Provisions dropped to near famine levels. The suicide rate increased. Malnutrition became so bad that it caused blindness in thousands. The balseros launched themselves onto the sea and many of them drowned. Sugar


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production fell to below the amount needed to buy imported fuel and keep industry and transportation running. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., the most balanced historian of the revolution, reports on what Havana felt like in this era: The years of the período especial evoked signs of an apocalyptic premonition, especially in the cities: major urban thoroughfares and streets with virtually no automobile traffic; vast swaths of neighborhoods enveloped nightly in total darkness, without street lights, without lights from shops, houses, and apartment buildings. An eerie silence descended upon urban neighborhoods in the evenings as the sights and sounds of the city so much associated with gasoline and electricity ceased.94 Out of necessity, the regime opened new social and economic spaces. The social spaces involved popular entertainment and allowed the young much greater latitude in imitating U.S. culture, such as rap music. It also involved religion. The regime stopped making atheism an ideological requirement and permitted Pope John Paul II to visit the island in January 1998. It also permitted Pentecostals to worship and even tolerated a revival of Afro-Cuban santería. But none of this was allowed to politically empower citizens. Those who demanded civil rights were imprisoned or even shot. Economically, the regime welcomed foreign investment while reopening possibilities for small farmers, traders, and artisans to supply the national market (albeit still illegally). Foreign investors were most interested in Cuban natural resources and in developing tourism. And so, the regime that began denouncing foreign capitalists and the immorality of the Havana tourist trade opened itself to the redevelopment of both. There were, of course, major differences. For once, foreign investment would answer to Cuban laws and concerns—a far cry from the U.S.-led development that the island had known between 1898 and 1959. Tourism is also under Cuban control. One scholar has noted that whenever the Cuban sugar economy faltered—in the 1920s, the 1950s, and the late 1980s—Cuban leaders began dreaming tourists would remedy the situation.95 Tourists, few of them from the United States, brought their own problems. No major tourist destination escapes prostitution and Cuba soon became famous for its preteen and teenage girls, jineteras, selling themselves in Varedero. And, of

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course, the girls are asked to act out male fantasies and cover the costs of renting rooms, earning a few dollars a night. Researchers described one such village girl—most of them poor and of color—as “physically very immature, standing about 4’10,” with hands and feet the size of those of a child much younger than her fourteen years. She dresses in a childlike fashion which emphasizes her diminutive stature and her mannerisms are those of a little girl rather than a teenager.”96 A regime with no other way to supply the rural poor ignores all this while the police demand payoffs and frequently rape the girls. As the tourist culture has evolved, it has created every kind of niche, from people seeking cheap medical care to those interested in transvestites. (The latter is particularly striking since the regime always persecuted homosexuals.) As for the future, two considerations arise. The “younger” brother of Fidel, Raúl, is 78 and much of the revolution’s leadership is almost as old. A new generation trained to take over the middle echelons of power, but that was during the special period. Most Cubans have never known any other political culture but that of the revolution, and as there are no polls, it is hard to say to what degree they still support the one-party state. Even so, there are promising beginnings with a restoration of Havana underway and greater freedom in musical expression and the arts in general.97 Cuba cannot attract tourists unless it offers a vibrant Havana. We can expect that Cubans will never stop playing their national sport, baseball. But opening the economy means dealing with a deepening rift between the state-run sector that has failed and the private sector with dollars. Professors teaching at the national university make a pittance in comparison with taxi drivers working the tourist sites. Cuba is not China, it cannot expect to deal with the United States and develop its own one-party state as it likes. There are many Republicans who accept a market-oriented despotism in China, but who will never permit the Cuban communist system to renew itself in a similar manner. Dealing with the United States will mean confronting a Cuban American culture still hostile to Castro, the revolution, and everything they represent. If the United States approaches Cuba with some sensitivity to the past, the Cubans might be able to maintain control of their national pride, bought at great price over these fifty years, but such a thing is no sooner said than it becomes hard to believe. As Louis Pérez notes, the United States will find it hard to forgive Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union or its


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defiance of American demands.98 The revolution’s continued existence is a reproof to American views of Caribbean states. And yet, as even an ardent admirer of Castro now admits, “the internal demands for change among Cubans are virtually unstoppable.”99 The era of militarism and guerrilla wars has ended. Issues regarding social justice and human development—the restoration of hope, education, and opportunity—to the bottom half of the population in most Latin American nations remains. The eras of caudillos, of oligarchs, and, in many countries, of union-based populists have ended as well. Restoring the unions destroyed during the military regimes would accomplish relatively little because many of the industries in which they were based have been pulverized. Restoring labor rights is another matter and the need to empower the poor to press for enough food, clothing, and housing is as essential as ever. The age of neoliberalism began when multinational corporations sensed victory in the Cold War. Neoliberalism permitted governments based on suffrage to ignore popular needs because the working poor no longer had the capacity to act collectively. Thus, elections became safe for capitalists, even as the electorate lost state benefits and labor regulations. No nation illustrates this mix of political and economic liberalization better than Mexico.

MEXICO REVISITED Mexico’s evolution represents the conundrum of Latin America at the end of the twentieth century: the final achievement of electoral rights and formal civil liberties has not empowered the general population. In the year 2000, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party) lost the presidency; until then, the PRI in Mexico had run the nation longer than any other single-party state. The winner represented the conservative Catholic party, the PAN (Partido Acción Nacional, or National Action Party), but Vicente Fox Quesada did not change basic economic or social policies. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) had established a neoliberal agenda during his sexenio. He also reestablished diplomatic relations with the Vatican, ending a church-state conflict that went back to the 1920s and the origins of the PRI. And he ended many of the achievements of Lázaro Cárdenas, weakening the labor unions and peasant

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associations and inviting foreign, especially U.S. capital, into the nation on the most favorable terms. The interruption of PRI rule brought no relief from the changes made by Salinas and his successor, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, although it seriously affected the party’s system of cronyism. It was so weakened that it lost in 2000, and two other parties contested the final round of the 2006 presidential election. The unraveling of the official party and a series of economic disasters are intertwined stories. In 1968, the party massacred university and high school students in the city center and from that point on, all pretence of civility disappeared from Mexican politics. In 1973, the oil crisis hit Mexico full force and the nation’s long financial stability that underlay a sustained era of economic growth ended. The Mexican “miracle” was over. Even so, it is best to remember that Mexico’s government continued to invest in infrastructure and education, that its capitalist system, however wounded by inflation and government debt, continued to grow albeit much more slowly, and its middle class, at times under siege, persisted in the purchase of apartments and automobiles. Mexico is no Peru or even Brazil. Until recently, the enormous variety of its economic activities and its oil exports gave it some chance of economic renewal, as many things seemed to go well as went badly. At the heart of the Mexican political system was the PRI, and at the heart of the PRI stood the president of the republic. No other Latin American state had centralized power to this degree and for this long. Under one name or another, the PRI had run Mexico since its invention in 1929 and its founders had run the country since 1920. The Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, gave Mexican government its most famous sobriquet, calling it “the most perfect dictatorship” in the world. Until the year 2000, every six years, the current president anointed his successor in a destape or dedazo (uncovering or pointed finger), and that successor campaigned for office and always won. The presidents after 1968 were Luis Echeverría (1970–1976); José López Portillo (1976–1982); Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994); Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000); and Vicente Fox until 2006. The current chief executive is Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa, like Fox, a member of the PAN. The Mexican political psyche wrapped itself around this PRI’s process of choosing successors, always hoping the next leader would be better than the current one. After


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the PRI lost the presidency, the populace hoped that genuinely contested elections would bring better leadership. Both hopes have been frustrated. The fact is, Mexican politics is a peculiar mess, a federal system with poorly funded states and municipalities, dependent on the largesse of the national capital. It has become a tripartite party system. The third player is the PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, or Party of the Democratic Revolution). These three parties contest elections for governors and legislative seats in all 32 states and in some 300 electoral districts. Unlike, say, the party coalitions in the history of Chile, the Mexican parties have tended to go it alone or to coalesce only around one or two issues despite the fact that both the PRD and the PRI propose populist platforms of government investment in infrastructure and greater social justice. An extraordinary number of unions, professional associations, commercial interests, and chambers of commerce are grouped below the parties and lobby in every possible way. Below them are an array of social movements among various native populations and the rural and urban poor. Mexico’s current system seems to divide and attenuate government rather than innervating it and giving it a clear direction. Mass media, especially how a candidate appears on television, now decide presidential elections, but such victories do not give the president the social and political base with which to be decisive. The nation is deeply divided between the populist tradition—of government ameliorating the impact of market outcomes and periodically distributing subsidies and even land to the poor—and the neoliberal belief that government should cut back on its regulations and let an open market allocate resources. Four neoliberal presidents, from Salinas de Gortari to Calderón, succeeded one another and widened the gulf between the rich and poor, in terms of household as well as regional incomes. It is worth noting that all four presidents have had the support of the U.S. government and her corporate interests. For the upper 10 percent of the population, neoliberalism has brought professional careers and a prosperity that support a U.S. pattern of consumption. For the next 30 percent, it has brought an improvement in living standards and longevity but also a basic precariousness as the economy has swung from periods of gain to those of panic. The rest of the population, more than half of Mexico, lives in poverty, and about one-quarter of the population lives in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty can mean

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trying to live on less than a dollar a day.100 Having gone from a revolution for popular welfare (1910–1920) to a government devoted to state-led development (1940–1976), Mexico turned to policies that the prerevolutionary ruler, Porfirio Díaz, would have approved (1988 to the present). Many of the policies that Salinas implemented had their origins in his role in economic planning for the de la Madrid administration. A free electorate never approved these changes. In his famous novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz), Carlos Fuentes presented the revolution that had begun in 1910 as rotting from within by the 1960s. The novel concludes with his protagonist, Cruz, and the revolution turning into excrement.101 The revolution, in any meaningful sense, was over before 1970—bureaucrats ran the government and vied for power, according to Jorge G. Casteñeda, in ways recalling intrigues in Renaissance palaces. Deception and betrayal permeated each cabinet. Maneuvers for succession began as soon as a new president was inaugurated.102 All that was missing were stabbings and the use of poison. Then the PRI’s 1994 presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, was shot in Tijuana. No one believed the police story of a lone assassin. Instead, explanations focused on Colosio’s campaign and his constant promise to create an honest electoral system. His death occurred in March.103 In September, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, who was about to become majority leader of the House of Deputies and was the former brother-in-law of President Salinas de Gortari, was shot as he exited a Mexico City restaurant. His brother, Mario, was a prosecutor in charge of drug cases. Mario investigated the murder and resigned the task, claiming that high officials of the PRI were blocking his efforts. He fled to the United States and was arrested for carrying some $28,000 in cash; Mexico tried to extradite him. Mexican authorities continued seeking the murderers and eventually settled on Raúl Salinas de Gortari, brother of Carlos, and linked the murder to drug trafficking and consorting with a specialist in the paranormal. In 1999, Mario, still fighting off extradition, swallowed a supply of pills rather than face charges that involved drugs and covering up for Raúl.104 Before the party lost power, it had become something worthy of a Renaissance palace after all; no novelist could have sold a plot like this.105 The bureaucrats also ruined the pact with the population to provide growth in place of the revolution they abandoned. Desperate to


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revive some popular credentials, Echeverria revived land reform, built new universities, and supported unions. The business class abandoned its close cooperation with the regime and increased government spending led to more debt and currency devaluation in 1976. The peso had last been devalued in 1953–1954, when it settled at 12.50 pesos to the dollar; by 1977 it was 22.6 to one. There was one card left to play, the nation’s oil. Massive reserves had been found off the coast of Campeche and after debating what to do with this wealth, the new President Lopez Portillo decided to bring it up and spend it as quickly as possible. This was an era, after all, of oil crises; the United States, seeing in Mexico a much safer source of fuel than the Middle East, encouraged rapid development. In 1981, however, when oil made up threequarters of all exports and a third of government revenues, the price fell precipitously. Lopez Portillo, hit by hyperinflation, capital flight, and increasing deficits, took over the banks.106 Then the debt crisis hit, and the next president, de la Madrid, presided over an economy that was exporting its net wealth to cover its foreign obligations. Today it would take 361,000 new pesos to buy what 100 old pesos bought in the early 1970s.107 Mexico struck three zeros off its old currency and issued a new one. To add to these miseries, in 1985 and early 1986, a series of earthquakes hit Mexico City. The worst occurred in September of 1985 and killed about 10,000 people. In her magisterial work on the disaster, Elena Poniatowska relates how the government completely failed to respond. She describes the hundreds of buildings that had been leveled and several thousand more that were damaged, the revelations how one contractor after another ignored building codes, and the disillusion that accompanied the misery.108 In 1988, a former leader in the PRI and son of Lázaro Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, ran against the PRI candidate, Salinas de Gortari. Mexico City voted overwhelming for the independent Cárdenas. The PRI had bragged about its modern, new computerized election system; the system mysteriously broke down and when it came online again, Salinas had won. In his memoirs, President de la Madrid said that when he saw the capital’s early returns, “I felt like a bucket of ice water had fallen on me,” and so the election was rigged.109 The sexenio of Carlos Salinas de Gortari is to neoliberalism, or better said, to savage capitalism what Lázaro Cárdenas was to the populist aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. It set out to reverse

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every populist impulse it could find: the agrarian reform of collective farms, ejidos, was parceled into individual rights that could be sold off; union demands were ignored and repressed; state-owned firms with the exception of the petroleum company PEMEX (Petróleos Mexicanos) were sold at often a pittance of their real value— establishing the fortunes of later billionaires; the banks, nationalized under Lopez Portillo, were privatized; schoolbooks were rewritten to give a different account of Porfirio Díaz, who now seemed the victim of unthinking peasants in 1910. In short, Salinas could not eliminate the name of his party but he removed all other vestiges of the revolution. In its place, he took attitudes to fruition that had been gestating within the upper and middle classes for years. He had obtained a graduate degree in political science from MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and had close ties with Harvard, just down the street in Cambridge, on Massachusetts Avenue. He installed others like him in the cabinet. An older generation of bureaucrats had come from law schools, especially that of the UNAM—the national university in Mexico City. The new needed proof they could function in an English language university and meet its higher standards; most of them came from the capital, the sons of professionals or businessmen.110 Labor unions and peasant cooperatives were no longer any route to office in Mexico. The technocrats professed the positivist doctrine of economics as a science, one that appeared in variant form as “rational choice theory” in political science. It was the Pinochet moment in Mexico, without the soldiers. The Mexicans did their best to fight these developments. After all, they had voted for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. The students of 1968 had demanded democracy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a schoolteacher, Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, appalled at the misery in Guerrero led an Army of the Poor in guerrilla warfare. The Mexican military responded with the usual tactics: the torture and murder of suspected supporters and the “disappearance” of political opponents. In 1974, they gunned down Cabañas. From 1977 to 1987, teachers, furious at their low pay, repeatedly went on strike and led massive public demonstrations against the regime. By the late 1980s, when Salinas came to office, demonstrations by laborers and peasants, marching around the city center, had become commonplace. Nothing stopped the neoliberal juggernaut. While Mexico contained substantial automobile factories—it was the last place in


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the world to build the old Volkswagen Beetle—and attracted General Motors and Ford to expand operations in the country and take advantage of its cheap labor, most of Mexico’s thousands of manufactures were small affairs, with fewer than fifty laborers; many had fewer than a dozen. As Salinas lowered tariffs and these small producers had to compete with output from the United States and Asia, they were ruined. The leather goods of León, a major segment of that region’s economy going back to colonial times, became a tourist curiosity. The historic beer and glass factories of northern Monterrey, whose owners had always been the enemies of the PRI, closed as well. Hit by the subsidized corn and wheat from the United States, tens of thousands of small farmers gave up. What could they do? People can vote with their feet and millions flooded into the capital and turned the border cities of Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana into massive urban complexes, duplicating many of the problems in Mexico City. Others, by the millions, crossed into the United States. Unable to mobilize for any social share of the Salinato, the young turned to drugs and crime. Mexico had entered the drug market slowly at first, selling its marijuana to American college students on spring break. That led to an expansion of marijuana and heroin production, but in the late 1970s and during the 1980s, Mexican cartels begin to work with Colombian cartels to bring cocaine into the United States. The drug money flowed into the border states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, and into impoverished Guerrero in such quantities that Mexicans began to speak of narcogobiernos (a phrase already common in Colombia). Drugs became a source of income for the nation’s balance of payments. The Mexican government responded with harsh prison sentences, even as the drug money permeated its municipal, state, and eventually, federal police forces. The ancient practice of the mordida (the bribe or bite paid to the police for an illicit activity, to run a business, or even to avoid a traffic ticket) adjusted to the drugbased cannon shots of U.S. cash fired into Mexico. Aside from drugs, how did the Salinas economy work? Salinas promised Mexico a First World future. Although that kind of hyperbole can be dismissed, Salinas did have a plan. Foreign capital was drawn in by the promise of a strong Mexican currency. Ordinary Americans trusted Mexican banks, which paid higher interest than across the border. Labor was kept cheap. Maquiladoras, assembling and manufacturing plants, already existed in the border cities. Most

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of them employed women at dismal wages. The government promoted them openly. Mexico had its oil income. The government also promoted tourism, building up such sites as Cancún in the Yucatán and Cabo San Lucas in Baja California. The first had college coeds on spring break and ancient Mayan pyramids! The second, college coeds and lobster tacos. Crucially, Salinas and Mexico had remittances, money sent back by Mexican laborers working in the United States. The national income rose steadily. Depending on which index one used, it climbed three to four or four to five percent each year, then hit a snag and rose very slowly or not at all in 1993, Salinas’s last year in office.111 Salinas used the strong currency and his ideological correctness to renegotiate the foreign debt. He became a favorite foreign head of state among New York bankers and in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. Salinas inherited a highly unbalanced budget but by 1992 that situation had been remedied. Offsetting this success was the behavior of upper and middle class Mexicans who went on a foreign spending spree. The nation also had to pay for the capital goods foreign corporations were bringing in and the profits they were taking out. Exports lagged well behind imports, and the economy began to sag from the weight.112 Salinas could have devalued his currency and raised the price of cheap imports but that would have triggered an exodus by foreigners investing in Mexico’s banks and stocks. He had dreams of leaving the Mexican presidency in order to head a new World Trade Organization to be formed in 1995. This organization was the neoliberal, corporate dream come true; it would oversee trade negotiations over the entire globe and create mechanisms that corporate power could use to enforce them. As a capstone to his presidency, Salinas would pass the TLC (Tratado de Libre Comercio)—in English it was called NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association)—that would link the United States, Mexico, and Canada into a common trade zone with low tariffs and the increasingly free flow of capital and goods; it would go into effect January 1, 1994. That historic moment came and brought with it the most significant native uprising since the Mexican Revolution. An armed coalition of Mayan villages, pulled together by a mestizo intellectual who wore a black ski mask and called himself Subcomandante Marcos, attacked several towns. They called themselves Zapatistas but the uprising took place in Chiapas, not Morelos. The EZLN


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(Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) raised issues that neoliberalism had put to one side. The current government was so out of touch with the Mexican people that the only answer was war. How were ordinary working people to survive the flood of imported goods planned in NAFTA? What would happen to the remaining natives? The villagers demanded protections for their lands, another land reform, and laws that would recognize native culture and identity as important in the politics of municipalities, states, and the federal government. The age-old annihilation of native cultures had to stop and the government had to become democratic in the old sense of being honestly elected but also in a new sense of granting dignity to native communities. The EZLN had its own Web site and so became the first guerrilla movement to use the Internet extensively. Its members quickly faced a government counteroffensive carried out with a brutality Pinochet and Videla would have admired. The guerrillas fought the army for years but this was a negotiating stance as they bargained with the government and, more importantly, with the Mexican public for native dignity and the establishment of democracy. The Church in Chiapas became an intermediary, doing its best to reduce government massacres. The major impact occurred outside of Chiapas. Foreign capital fled Mexico’s “developing” economy; as it left, the new Zedillo administration had no choice but to rapidly devalue the currency. The new peso went from around three to the dollar to nine and eventually settled at about ten to one. The sharp increase in dollar goods caused imports and economic activities tied to it to nearly cease— consumer spending imploded. Mexicans had been introduced to the credit card economy and now watched as variable rates shot into double digits a month. At such rates, debts of 5,000 pesos soon turned into 20,000. Interest on mortgages rose and crushed housing construction. The economy contracted about 7 percent in a year. After Colosio’s assassination, Salinas picked a loyal technocrat, Ernesto Zedillo, to be his successor. After the crash, it was Zedillo who put Raúl Salinas de Gortari in prison. Humiliated, the former president left for Ireland and turned his mistress into his new wife. However disgusted Zedillo and the PRI leaders were with Salinas, they maintained the neoliberal policies that the Salinato had instituted. These were accompanied, as they had been under Salinas, by minimum government programs to ameliorate the greatest levels of

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poverty, that is, to prevent famine and epidemics. Everyone else was left to fend for himself. The economy resumed its growth; it has continued growing ever since the depression of 1994–1995, but the general population has little to show for it. In addition to economic problems, others have matured. The general congestion in Mexico City and several secondary cities have made everyday existence difficult. Smog is so pervasive in the capital that most of the population suffers from bronchial diseases. Traffic problems have proliferated to the point that getting from one section of the city to another can take hours. Most of the population survives day-to-day or week-to-week. The secondary cities are also congested and have poor infrastructure; flooding in Tijuana kills dozens and wipes out hundreds of homes every year because there is no drainage system. At such times, the Tijuana River turns into a flow of sewage. The countryside has become such a bitter spectacle that villages often contain only old people and children; the parents are working elsewhere and sending money home to support their families. The most important development of the last fifteen years, however, has been crime. Until even a decade ago, I was never afraid or worried traveling in Mexico City. Now, I hardly know any resident who has not been mugged or had a family member assaulted. Carjacking is common and often leads to the deaths of those who resist. Kidnappings have proliferated. Even members of the middle class are taken in “secuestro express” and held until they empty out their ATMs. (A film with this name was done in Venezuela; the expression may be common throughout Latin America.)113 But the most brazen and violent crimes are over drugs. In the presidential race of 2006, the promise that, as a conservative, he would be tough on crime was Felipe Calderón’s major issue. Once in office he launched an antidrug effort involving thousands of federal police and the army. A conservative article on the subject notes that in 2007, there were 2,500 drug-related deaths; in 2008, the number rose to 4,000.114 I live in San Diego, not 30 miles from the busiest border in the world. In October 2008, the Mexican police captured Eduardo Arellano, the last brother of the Arellano cartel in Tijuana. A territorial fight ensued among other gangs. As I write, the drug traffickers have killed hundreds in Tijuana and seven thousand in Mexico over the last year, torturing and beheading competitors. The violence has panicked American traffic to the zone and threatens to close the


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city’s tourist shops. American authorities warn college students not to go into Baja during the spring break. The cause of all this is not hard to find: young men without regular employment. The economically active segment of the labor force has jumped from 22 million in 1980 to over 40 million in 2000. The majority of those jobs are badly paid or the hours do not add up to full employment. Some 28 percent of the labor force works in the “informal sector.” Drugs are produced in labor intensive, often small, operations and employ large numbers in production, transport, sales, and protection. Because production and evasion are labor-intensive activities, drugs are a made-to-order export for Mexico as well as the rest of the region. When American enforcement officials shut down a good deal of the methamphetamine production in the United States, it moved to Mexico. Recent stories demonstrate that the drug producers and their enforcement teams buy their firearms in the United States.115 Writing about the Fox administration, a moderate columnist concluded, “But above all is the absolute dependence on the United States, which cannot be remedied,” and this is accompanied by an indifference to “popular fury.”116 Far from becoming part of the First World, Mexico remains Mexico, fighting to continue as a nation just south of the world’s major power. When the Obama administration sent Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to Mexico to see what could be done about border violence, Mexican representatives became anxious to assure the new administration that they did not oversee a “failed state.”117 Most Mexicans manage to find employment and joy in life at some level of survival. They produce their own music; the border ranchera songs not only echo with lost love, they also talk about gangs, drugs, and the dangers of immigration. Despite all the dangers of being a journalist, Mexico has a far more vibrant set of newspapers than does the United States. They reflect a broader range of ideological concerns and much more incisive critiques of politics and culture than are to be found in this country. The role of the public intellectual remains a strong one and Mexico has aging giants such as Elena Poniatowska and Carlos Monsivais, who still rage against the twin machines of savage capitalism and the Mexican state. Despite the cuts to education, the country goes on producing professionals that are inventive and superb scholars. We tend not to think of Latin America as a region of innovation but it has only been in the last

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forty years that Mexico and Brazil have had the range of skills to create their own capital goods and computers. Tens of thousands of elderly Americans go to Tijuana for legal drugs and for medical and dental care they cannot afford on this side of the border. The differences between rich and poor, urban and rural, the capital and its provinces have turned its national elections into contests between classes. In the 2006 election, the PAN incumbent, Vicente Fox, used all the means of government to mobilize support for his party. The PAN, with its plutocracy, bought most of the advertising time on radio and television.118 The contest came down to a populist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the PRD, and Calderón, who won with a quarter of a million of the 41 million votes cast. The official Election Tribunal sought to calm all claims of fraud, but the PRD had not forgotten 1988; it did not help that the Tribunal, after a recount of millions of votes, destroyed all the ballots.119 López Obrador tied up Mexico City’s streets with protests by the poor against what he considered a rigged election. Calderón benefited from an economic improvement near the end of Fox’s sexenio but leads, Mexico with two of three major parties believing he does not deserve to be in office. When Calderón was sworn in at a simple midnight ceremony, he could barely get through the public protest and howls of derision and contempt. One reporter concluded, “Never before in modern Mexican history has a president been sworn in under such chaotic and divisive conditions.”120 The age of neoliberalism ended with a neoliberal as Mexico’s president.

THE LATIN-AMERICANIZATION OF THE UNITED STATES The title of this section is taken from that of a chapter in Global Reach, written in 1974. In it, two liberal-left authors, Richard Barnet and Ronald E. Müller, noted the impact that multinational corporations were having on the United States.121 In their account, these corporations were moving toward a stage of oligopoly, buying each other up, and making deals with one another that would remove any real competition from the market place. They were moving production plants from unionized states in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic, and Middle West states into the South and Southwest, in other words, into antiunion states—Mexico was emerging as an


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alternative to this strategy—in order to cut wages and benefits. Reading the book now, its conclusions seem commonplace, even though its neo-Marxist phrases are dated. The study was written before the Chicago Boys engineered the economy of Chile, before the World Trade Organization was formed, and when Wal-Mart was still a string of a few dozen stores in five states. The United States has had its long crisis and its plunge into savage capitalism, accentuated at each end by depressions. The crisis began with the financial aftermath of the Vietnam War and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1978 and led to the depression of 1982. Yes, economists call this downturn during the Reagan administration a “recession,” but there seems little reason to go along with their technocratic definitions. The economy went into a free fall as the Federal Reserve deliberately increased interest rates to reduce inflation. It was a shock treatment and the worst economic reversal since the Great Depression. Ten percent of the work force became unemployed. Millions fell into homelessness. The formation of a “rust belt,” already appearing in the 1960s, of abandoned factories in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and northern Middle West states—in other words, the Union during the Civil War—was completed. Manufacturing moved into the New South and abroad to Third World nations; the economy in the North became centered on finance and “services.” Large parts of the nation and particularly its Black and Latino minorities never recovered from this blow. By the end of the 1980s, the nation moved into a very clear new class structure: a much richer upper class, a struggling middle class, and a laboring class moving downward on the economic ladder with a shrinking percentage in unions and fewer receiving pensions or medical insurance. Some of the workforce turned into permanent welfare recipients and a favorite target of Republican ire. Male manufacturing wages faltered and women entered the workplace; then when that was not enough, households borrowed more money. The divorce rate rose, as did the number of women raising children on their own. The gap between rich and poor widened to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Those unfortunate to be born with the wrong skin color and attend inner city schools have little hope of a higher education. America now has a stigmatized and growing underclass. The middle and working classes have struggled in each decade of recovery and been hammered by each downturn. Laborers are

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expected to provide, out of flat or declining real wages, the pensions and medical benefits they once received from their employers. “The great risk shift” meant that most new retirees, the baby boomers, face living on Social Security, Medicare—programs devastated by years of government raids—and little else.122 The next generation will have it even harder. We are in the worse downturn since 1929–1933. The financial bubble of the turn of the century, “the dot.com” boom, destroyed hundreds of billions in equity assets; the 2008 collapse, combining a mortgage bubble and once-banned forms of speculation, has already destroyed banks, ruined such prosperous nations as Iceland, Ireland, Spain, and is threatening France and Italy. Savings invested with the largest mutual funds in our nation have dropped 40 percent or more; many diligent savers have been wiped out. A proposed program to suspend such speculation and force corporations to pay 3 percent a year in pensions to the federal government sounds excellent but comes a little too late and is unlikely to be approved by even a Democrat-controlled congress.123 As I write this, our major automobile plants are closing and with them, the dreams of hundreds of thousands of Americans for a decent job and a decent retirement. Detroit resembles Tijuana in many respects and Michigan could pass for any impoverished province in Argentina. Millions throughout the nation have lost their homes in foreclosure as housing values and jobs imploded. The idea that high U.S. wages were going to drive exports and economic development in the rest of the world had one flaw, what would happen as production moved to low-wage nations? To explain this comparison to Latin America requires a clarification of verbiage and of differences. In Latin America, the shock treatments, the deindustrialization, and the attacks on labor were part of a militarization of political life carried out with lies, torture, and mass murder. In every downturn, the “Washington consensus,” drawn up in 1989, emphasized the need for Latin American governments to reduce spending, sell off state firms, eliminate subsidies to production and popular consumption, reduce tariffs, and open their economies to foreign investment. It proposed a systematic attack on populism and economic nationalism in return for modest reductions in Latin America’s foreign debts. And it was carried out. In the United States, the war against laborers and the poor was waged within the confines of race, cultural norms, and crime. The


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U.S. government, under Republican administrations for most of this time, attacked the poor by calling them “welfare moms” and developed a racially coded language and drug laws to incarcerate as many minority males as possible, even though most of the drug consumers were White.124 Curtis Marez’s historical study of American films demonstrates how movie studios, American legislators, and federal officials cooperated to stereotype and repress Chinese and Mexican immigrants and Native Americans. He concludes that “cultural production” by the media has been an integral part of America’s police justification for its “drug wars.”125 The same media depicted the drug problem as a predominately Black issue developed in the ghettoes. By the end of the 1980s, the United States had one of the highest percentages of incarceration in the world. The state government of California eventually spent many times more on prisons than on universities. Building and managing prisons became big business, much of it privatized. Government, however, did not become smaller; it grew in size. New Deal measures to prevent speculative fraud were abolished. Those who supported these changes were concentrated in the Republican Party and became known for reasons internal to American politics as “neo-conservatives.” The neo-conservatives assembled a strategy for gaining and holding office that fulfilled an old ambition—the destruction of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition—with a new one, the belief in a more centralized, militaristic government. Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 demonstrated that an electoral majority could be assembled from racists in the South and West and White ethnics in the rest of the nation. To this formula the neoconservatives added the recruitment of Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Catholics by denouncing sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and abortion. As another factor in their favor, they used the fear of crime, especially by Blacks after the urban riots of the 1960s, to ally themselves with the gun lobby. The National Rifle Association (NRA) became one of the major players in American politics: the nation now has 303 million people and the NRA claims there are 250 million firearms, with that number rising 4.5 million a year126 The shooting of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, just two months into his first term, did not stop the party’s support of gun ownership. As the final plank in attacking social progressives and demonizing the term “liberal” in the American political vocabulary, the party recast itself as a movement defending the rights of White males. The party denounced “feminists” and

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contained the movement to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which would make women’s equality a constitutional matter. Neoconservatives promised to replace the “tax and spend” liberals and their social programs with tax cuts. In 1978, they demonstrated the appeal of this approach when they slashed property taxes in California, passing Proposition 13. Thereafter, major corporations set up their own think tanks in Washington—the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and so on—to grind out policy studies for a government preaching tax cuts, deregulation, and smaller government while spending more money. This was done by increasing the federal debt and raiding the largest federal pension, the Social Security system. Reagan knew the power of mass communications. An actor of sorts, he had made a career as a shill for one of the largest financial entities in the country, General Electric. His first administration put an end to the fairness doctrine governing television and radio, which had required that, in order to keep its federal license, when a station made an editorial, it provide equal time to an opposing view. Soon after this rule ended in the mid-1980s, talk radio, funded by corporate largesse, filled the airwaves with a hatred of all progressive attitudes. Churches, radio stations, and the Republican domination of the presidency sustained a culture war that has lasted until the present. Cowed by this course of events, many Democrats went into hiding. The Democrats also relied on corporate donations to finance their campaigns. They continued to receive financial support from unions but allowed the corporate attacks on unions to grow stronger, until unions represent only 9 percent of the workforce. They elected two presidents, Jimmy Carter (1976–1980) and Bill Clinton (1992–2000), both southern Democrats and neither devoted to reviving a more liberal agenda. On the contrary, Carter raised the issue of welfare “reform” even before Reagan, and he “deregulated” an excellent airline system that soon led to speculative annihilation of established firms and the erosion of labor rights in the industry; and Clinton passed a welfare reform that has worsened destitution and worked with Salinas de Gortari to pass NAFTA in 1993 on the grounds that it would increase jobs on both sides of the border and help prevent illegal immigration to the United States. To their credit, many Democrats in Congress denounced the nation’s social and economic direction and opposed the U.S. role in sponsoring military regimes and paramilitary terror in Latin America, but they seemed


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unable to forge a coalition and an agenda to counter what the neoconservatives eventually labeled the Reagan Revolution. The intellectual heroes of this revolution, for it was one of sorts, were the actual Chicago Boys, especially Professor Milton Friedman—one of the architects of neoliberalism in Latin America. The goal was economic growth. Dependency theory was out; the equivalent of Pinochet studies was in. The outcome within the United States was exactly what Barrnet and Müller predicted: But the business-government interlock has been so strong that controlling the misuses of corporate power has been something less than an obsession. The dominant role of Big Business in both political parties, the financial holdings of certain key members of Congress, the ownership of the mass media, the industry-government shuttle in the regulatory agencies, and, most important, the ideology prevailing throughout the society of salvation through profits and growth all help to explain why the government of the world’s mightiest nation musters so little power to protect the interests of its people.127 Now that the suppositions of the neoconservatives have crashed, it is worth looking at them a little more closely. The neoconservatives ran up debt to sustain public consumption—an idea that stemmed not from Friedman but from John Maynard Keynes, the economist Friedman detested the most. Although Keynes had defended the need of government intervention in markets to move them out of a depression and foster a “multiplier effect” of government-induced jobs, he never argued that such borrowing and spending should go on indefinitely.128 To this, the neoconservatives had another answer. They praised the borrow-and-spend tactic as a means of making certain that when liberals regained office they would have no choice but to use their time reducing the debt the neoconservatives had engendered. There would be no new social programs. The neoconservatives’ favorite form of spending was military contracting and so they encouraged a further militarization of the American economy; not surprisingly, most people in the armed forces are Republican and all of the major arms manufacturers and military contracting firms support that party as well. Weapons sales abroad became a major item in America’s balance of trade. Neoconservative adherents dominated the Federal Reserve Bank, raising or lowering interest

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rates, in a manner that promoted financial expansion as the means of sustaining growth. Perhaps the most arresting aspect of the Republican strategy was they applied it to every level of government. One might argue along “federalist” lines that the national budget had grown too large and those funds would be better spent at the state and local levels to revive and sustain essential public services: schools, police, and fire services. But the antitax forces proposed tax cuts across the board and opposed any level of public savings during good times to cover costs during cyclical downturns. The outcome is clear in California. Thirty years after Proposition 13, the state is closing 200 state parks, laying off 68,000 employees, slashing salaries of those who remain, eliminating dental and a good deal of medical care to all poor adults, and closing school programs for impoverished children. Local governments have laid off tens of thousands of teachers, police, and firemen. Refusing any thought of raising taxes, Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, another former actor, summarized, “Our wallet is empty, our bank is closed, and our credit is dried up.”129 The current depression has roots in the Reagan Revolution. No phrase explains its origins better that than of Reagan in his first inaugural address, “In this present crisis [1981], government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.”130 Deregulation of the financial sector opened the door to charlatans. Michael Milken, an early beneficiary of the cowboy stock market, spoke at Stanford and was considered one of the wizards of new finance. He was arrested for racketeering and insider trading in 1989 and sent to prison; his shenanigans helped sink the nation’s Savings and Loan sector. An editorial noted that as “king” of the junk bonds, he had to put up $600 million, to cover his felonies.”131 He was a rank beginner. Enron, one of the largest corporations in energy with “earnings” of a $100 billion, imploded in 2001 as its financial abuses came to light.132 The current holder in the history of Ponzi schemes, a fraud based on promising impossible earnings and paying old investors with funds from new ones, is Bernard (Bernie) Madoff, who in March 2009, confessed to the misappropriation of $65 billion.133 Others put the total losses at more than $69 billion. Unregulated hedge funds, created to limit losses in market speculation, flourished by gambling on ever more complex financial contracts. Banks, freed of New Deal controls, issued mortgages to


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those who could not possibly repay them. When the U.S. stock market collapsed in 2008–2009 and housing values fell by a third or more, wiping out $11 trillion in American household wealth; the entire mess read as a replay of Frederick Lewis Allen’s classic account of the 1920s and the Crash of 1929, Only Yesterday.134 Economists and banking CEOs proclaimed they could not have foreseen such an outcome. More disinformation. Hyman Minsky wrote the key work on Ponzis, Can It Happen Again?, in 1982.135 He predicted the current mess as what happens when earnings from speculation outrun productive activities. Or the neoconservatives could have read the history of any recent economic crisis in Latin America: the debt crisis of 1982, the Mexican crash of 1994–1995, or even the recent meltdown of Argentina in 2001–2002. Each of those disasters came from an economic expansion based on speculation and an indifference to the needs of a workforce. The Reagan legacy did its job. It set the United States on a course of even greater deficit spending. The export of good-paying jobs led to persistent, negative current account balances, although these were offset by the flow of foreign investment into this country. The official record says, “The traditional pattern of running large deficits only in times of war or economic downturns was broken during much of the 1980s.”136 Although the number of federal employees declined from 5.3 million to 4.1 million between 1962 and 2007 (including a sharp decline in military personnel from 2.8 to 1.4 million), the annual deficit became constant from the mid1960s, with one positive year in 1969; it reached $53 billion in 1975 (the first oil crisis), then $212 billion in 1983 (Reagan’s response to 1980–1982 crisis). Under George H.W. Bush, it climbed to $292 billion (the First Gulf War). Bill Clinton, supposedly a liberal Democrat, did just as neoconservatives wanted and cut the deficits, proudly eliminating over 200,000 federal jobs with pensions and benefits, and reached surpluses in 1998–2000. George W. Bush spent the surplus he inherited and set the deficit soaring to $400 billion a year when he left office. 137 The dependence on consumer spending also produced a negative pattern in the balance of payments, with a positive outcome on services (tourism, patent earnings, repatriated profits, etc.) more than offset by a poor balance of trade. In the 1970s, when Barnet and Müller wrote their book, the negative balance was $27 billion at the end of the decade (the second oil crisis); it became $114 billion

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under Reagan by 1988, dropped under Bush I, then began rising steadily under Clinton and Bush II, going from $98 billion a year in 1994 to a whopping $753 billion in 2006.138 Much of this trade deficit was the result of the rise of Chinese products flooding the United States. Ever thoughtful, to keep their currency low and the U.S. market growing, the Chinese, once the feared enemy of the Cold War and still maintaining a one-party state, began buying hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. debt. Economists debated the meaning of all this. In 2004, one tied to a major German bank thought the concern with rising trade deficits ridiculous. He noted that the United States was not like other countries, the dollar was the world’s reserve currency, and so investors the world over counted on its value. The United States had absorbed 80 percent “of international savings in recent years.” Among its many strengths, it had the only growing population within the industrialized world. As for any fear that foreigners might sometime in the future refuse to finance U.S. deficits, he quoted an expert who years ago said this country could run “deficits without tears.” “In short, if someone argues that at some point foreigners might refuse to continue financing U.S. external deficits, a question must answered—where would they go with their money[sic].”139 A more recent overview, in the usual jargon, notes that the flow of money was responding to financial globalization. The United States was not merely selling Treasury bills; a larger segment of its payments were to cover the interest due on those bills, the cost of which had gone from 9 percent of the gross payments in 1970 to 23 percent in 2007. This fact was leaving it more vulnerable to changes in return in other financial markets.140 Paying more and more out to cover the interest on previous debts constitutes the “tears” of foreign indebtedness and, as its volume rises, it becomes difficult to finance infrastructural investment—as any Latin American nation knows. Contrary to received opinion, it cannot go on forever. In the hands of President George W. Bush (2000–2008), Reagan’s most devoted presidential successor, the nation finished off effective financial regulation, cut taxes even further, took up a war against Iraq (a country filled with oil and run by a butcher but one that had not attacked the United States), ended any effort at protecting our national parks from forestry and energy interests, ignored the quickening consequences of global warming, and, when a flood wrecked


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New Orleans, allowed its people to flounder and drown for days on end. A once great city is now a complete ruin. Bush was elected to the presidency twice, albeit by close margins and probably rigged elections. All this cronyism, arrogance, incompetence, and lying is worthy of a Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico, Carlos Menem in Argentina, Fernando Collor of Brazil, Alberto Fujimori of Peru, and recent kleptocracies in the Caribbean and Central America. All of the above were good neoliberals. The presidency of Barack Obama is spending trillions to bail out the banks and stabilize housing markets. He is thus utilizing government funds to save failed institutions—lemon socialism. He has proposed projects to rebuild an infrastructure neglected for thirty years. He is also proposing a health care plan to save a near majority than can no longer afford private medical insurance. Unfortunately, he has inherited a budget that cannot pay for these innovations and must do what the IMF and the World Bank told many Latin American nations they must never do: expand government spending when the budget is unbalanced, print more money or take out more loans when the economy is in crisis, and expand government services in a populist manner. Obama, by the conventional language of economists, should be giving the United States a shock treatment— clearing markets of the foolish investors, charlatans, and laborers who have made irrational choices. The failure to do so will be inflation and perhaps capital flight from the dollar. No one, however, is counseling more shocks for the American people. A self-absorbed empire has had little time for Latin America. Nonetheless, the periphery intersects with the center. Increasingly, the United States cannot avoid the consequences of its behavior in Latin America. Before the 1980s only momentous events in the region affected the United States in any serious way, the Mexican Revolution and the Cuban Revolution being the most notable. Such events as the coups in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1973 had little echo. The debt crisis of 1982, however, was an important incident in U.S. financial history. It grew out of U.S. policies that triggered financial collapse in the region. This, in turn, caused losses that threatened to destroy the capital assets of the ten largest U.S. banks. Reagan and the Federal Reserve saw to it that the U.S. banking system was saved; Latin America was not. This interaction was an instance of “blowback,” a term that Chalmers Johnson appropriated from U.S. intelligence jargon.141 It refers to the unintended

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consequences of an action by a major power that comes back to threaten or harm its citizenry. Although the intelligence agencies limit its use to their operations, I, like Johnson, will speak of it in more general terms.

BLOWBACK The first duty of a man in power is to stay in power. Omar Torrijos142

On September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda operatives who had sneaked into the United States, seized four commercial airliners, attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center, and hit a section of the Pentagon. The attacks startled the United States and led President George W. Bush to launch a counterattack on Afghanistan and then wage war in Iraq. Everyone now knows that the Central Intelligence Agency helped form Al-Qaeda by aiding its leader, Osama-bin-Ladin, when his organization ran attacks in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of that country (1979–1989). Osama-bin-Ladin became antiAmerican after U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia during the first war against Iraq in 1990. News reports in 2001 emphasized the joy among people of the Middle East, especially Palestinians, in watching the twin towers of the Trade Center collapse. Few showed any film or photographs of the poor in Latin America, many of whom also seemed happy at what had happened. The rich of the region had cheered when Reagan was elected; the poor now smiled at a United States that had gotten its comeuppance. Some noticed that September 11 was the same date that Allende was overthrown in 1973. The reaction corresponds to popular feeling in Latin America about the role the U.S. government and corporations played in foisting military regimes on the region, about Washington’s use of the IMF to collect debt payments for decades, and to promote neoliberal and exploitive labor practices from the Cold War to the present.143 The United States cannot play innocent in Latin America. It handled the debt crisis to the American bankers’ satisfaction, whatever the consequences for Latin America’s people. It imposed trade conditions and demanded cooperation in its “war on drugs” and then meddled in the Andean region, Colombia, and Mexico, with disastrous results. There are three specific instances of blowback,


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however, that reveal how the attitude of the United States—the combination of power unchecked by cultural awareness or social concern—has come back to embarrass the country. The first two, the Iran-Contra affair and Panama, will be discussed in this section, as each was contained by the Republican domination of the media and the Democrat fear of the know-nothing culture in which the nation lived. The third, the flood of Latin American immigrants since the 1980s, merits a section of its own. Iran-Contra involved a strange marriage of U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East and in Latin America. The history of Iran in geopolitical terms resembles that of many Latin American nations: the awakening of nationalist sentiments in the early part of the twentieth century, the dependence on oil, the U.S. role in overthrowing an economic nationalist in 1952 and installing a despotic shah, and finally a popular revolution in 1979. The victors in that revolution were nationalists and Islamic clerics. When they seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held its occupants hostage for a year, they helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter and bring Reagan into office. Reagan, in his second term, decided to approach Iran over American hostages held by Islamic militants in Lebanon. Using Israel as a broker, he offered Iran missiles in return for the hostages. The entire undertaking was illegal, although Reagan’s defenders argue that no direct link has ever been found in which he ordered the “arms for hostages” deal. Because this is not a study of the Middle East, it is best to put aside the legalities involved except to say that a number of Reagan’s aides were convicted of crimes relating to this affair. They got off on legal technicalities or were pardoned by Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush. Reagan, pleading a poor memory, walked away from this mess into retirement, one of the most admired presidents in our history.144 The concern here is that money from the sale of the missiles was diverted to fund the Contras fighting in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas. A Democratic Congress in 1982 passed the Boland Amendment, financially limiting the use of the CIA and U.S. military power in Nicaragua. These limitations were turned into an outright ban in 1984, although Congress continued nonmilitary supplies to the Contras. Colonel Oliver North, working for the National Security Council (NSC), a special intelligence agency closer to the White House than the CIA, organized the use of the Iranian funds to

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buy airplanes and weapons for the Contras. The president told one official investigation that he had nothing to do with this “Operation Democracy,” but he admitted to separate a congressional investigation that he had, admitting that private the Contras was his idea.145 Seen from one perspective, those entrusted with authority abused it out of a desire to accomplish a favorite goal of Reagan, ending the revolution in Nicaragua. Viewed in this light, it sounds deranged because the administration was legally capable of using American armed forces to prevent any hostile action by Nicaragua. Viewed from another vantage point, it marked an ongoing erosion of legality in the White House. Tactics of subterfuge, public deception, and outright bullying of the media that had been deployed so often abroad with a complete lack of accountability had come back to the United States.146 Critics note that the operation not only involved the kind of covert operations of the 1950s and 1960s, it meant, with its recruitment of Israel, a contracting out of U.S foreign policy. Israel used the wars in Central America to become a major arms dealer for the Contras and the murderous governments of El Salvador and Guatemala. It faced no public criticism because the Democrats did not want to offend their Jewish supporters.147 The Contras raised additional funds by channeling cocaine sales to Los Angeles. The CIA knew what they were doing.148 The failure of officials to successfully prosecute anyone for being involved in IranContra enhanced later autocratic conduct among Republican officials—reaching a pinnacle of arrogance and ignorance in the presidency of George W. Bush. Marine Colonel Oliver North was one of Reagan’s officials released on legal technicalities; he became a multimillionaire radio commentator for rightwing causes. Nicaragua was the last Latin American battle in the Cold War; Panama was the first in a new age of dollar diplomacy. Panama evokes America’s imperial roots. The canal’s construction on the eve of World War I put the United States in control of one of the world’s major sea routes.149 Recent scholarship indicates that, thereafter, the United States saw Panama as a sort of wilderness in which it could carry out any kind of experiment, including those involving nuclear explosions.150 The Panamanians had no direct income from the canal and so could not capitalize their nation in any serious way. The United States located SOUTHCOM in Panama. It is the U.S. Southern Command of all armed forces with


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responsibility for Central and South America; in 1997 it was moved to Miami.151 The U.S. government ran the Canal Zone, and its employees were openly racist Southerners with contempt for the mixed-race population around them. The United States kept promising to honor Panamanian nationalism, including the display of both nations’ flags in the Zone. The “zoners,” as they called themselves would have none of it and neither would the commanders of U.S. forces stationed within the zone. In 1964, Panamanian high school students in a national act of defiance went into the zone, pulled down the U.S. flag at the American high school, and put up that of Panama. The uproar reached Washington but the incident also ignited Panamanian pride. The confrontation became ugly; the U.S. army was used to suppress a riot in which a couple of dozen Panamanians were killed. The Panamanian elite played down the incident, but the head of state, Arnulfo Arías, milked it for political gain. He had often annoyed the United States, especially during the Second World War when he favored the Axis powers. In 1968, the United States sponsored a coup against him and helped install a militarized regime dominated by Omar Torrijos. Torrijos took Panamanian politics in a surprising direction. No democrat, he fused populism with public spending and retained strict control of the National Guard and public life. He never bothered to make himself president. Opponents had no chance against him and his policies infuriated the elite—removing it from politics. He began spending on public works, including housing, and on expanding the bureaucracy. His policies won support from the laboring poor and at least acceptance by the middle class. Torrijos worked to gain Panamanian control of the canal; in a treaty signed with Jimmy Carter in 1977, the United States promised to turn over the canal at the end of the century. In order to obtain the treaty, Torrijos promised the United States to restore civil liberties and annul special powers he had given himself in 1972. In fact, he had another advantage that never appeared in the public discussion of ratifying the treaty: he had built a new banking system that concealed ownership of any account. He could now compete with the Bahamas and Switzerland as a tax haven for all the petrodollars awash in the world economy; Panama soon had a hundred banks. A system useful in avoiding taxes was also useful in laundering drug money and facilitating illegal, international arms sales. An equal opportunity regime, the Torrijos government helped Castro gain

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hard currency by repackaging Cuban exports for sale to the United States. The United States Congress and its executive branch knew all about this; intelligence agencies entertained the thought of killing Torrijos.152 Frederick Kempe says that Torrijos told Manuel Noriega, his chief of intelligence, that Panama was “like a thin-waisted woman, everyone wants to fuck her.”153 Torrijos died in an airplane accident in 1981, not quite having completed Panama’s transition to democracy. His eventual successor was Noriega. Noriega’s story has the ring of Somoza and Batista to it. Born into poverty, he saw the National Guard as a route to a decent life. The Guard did not have a military academy and forced its future officers to train outside Panama. Noriega went to Peru’s academy, supplementing his high school scholarship by informing on his fellow cadets for the CIA. He remained an “asset” through all his years of clawing his way up the tiny Panamanian force. Torrijos found him useful for intimidating, torturing, and even, as a last resort, eliminating opponents. Noriega enhanced his role when Colombian drug lords began bringing their cash to Panama. After all, Panama had once been a province of Colombia. It was only a short hop to Miami, a hop that could be made in small planes flying under American radar. Panama attracted the most powerful figure in the cocaine trade, Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín cartel. When Torrijos died (many believed it was not an accident), he left a thoroughly corrupt political and military structure behind him but one that had begun pulling Panama out of the economic blight it had endured since the nineteenth century. He broke the power of the small oligarchy without robbing anyone; he built new infrastructure and developed schools and a larger middle class. He is admired in Panama to this day, his face emblazoned on its coins. Noriega lacked Torrijos’s polish, his suave good looks. Noriega’s dark complexion was so pockmarked that when he became a public figure, Panamanians called him “pineapple face.” He was not interested in development and acted on primitive impulses. Shrewd and capable of major violence, he practiced santería—the Afro-Spanish faith that is comparable to voodoo in Haiti or candomblé in Brazil. When he was taken by U.S. troops, American newspapers featured his little altar with (probably) chicken blood smeared on it. Like Torrijos, his plan involved having someone he controlled serve as president. In 1983, he completed the next stage of his succession


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when he became head of the National Guard and soon renamed it the Panamanian Defense Forces. Panama held elections, decided by fraud and intimidation. Hugo Spadafora, a Panamanian physician who had fought for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and so was widely admired, announced in 1985 that he would return to his native country and oppose Noriega. He crossed the border without a bodyguard of any kind, was taken off by Noriega’s men, who tortured, beheaded him, and left his headless body in a postal bag. Usually this crime is seen as the beginning of the end for Noriega; it was nothing of the kind—not at all like the aftermath of Somoza’s killing of Chamorro. Noriega quashed an attempt to investigate the murder and went on trafficking in arms and drugs. Whenever he needed to reduce U.S. pressure, he would hand over a small drug dealer. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency gave him a good conduct certificate for such assistance. Noriega also came to know Colonel North, who traveled often to Panama as he channeled firearms to the Contras. Noriega was undone by bad luck. He successfully rigged another election in 1989, bloodying his opponents in full view of foreign reporters and former President Jimmy Carter who was hoping to talk men such as Noriega into holding honest elections. Then, a small airplane flying from Panama crashed in Florida. It was full of cocaine and its pilot talked. A Florida federal district attorney, already involved in tracing the Colombians’ relation with Noriega, called a federal grand jury and indicted him.154 The United States imposed economic sanctions on Panama, a tactic that works on elected, civilian governments but always fails against dictators. It ruined the economy Torrijos had built, finishing the capacity of businessmen—a group that detested Noriega—to move against the dictator. A U.S. general tried to talk him into the zone where he could be taken; Noriega did not fall for it. He also thwarted attempts at a coup, poorly backed by the United States. In the end, his police and military roughed up some U.S. serviceman and when they manhandled a Navy officer’s wife, George H.W. Bush had had enough and sent in the troops on December 20, 1989.155 The United States said that some 200 Panamanians died in the invasion; other estimates put the number at 2,000.156 Noriega was eventually cornered in the house of the Vatican Nuncio, and U.S. troops blared heavy metal music until the Nuncio forced him to leave.

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Whether it is even legal to forcibly remove a military leader from his country and try him in another is an interesting question, one that the United States never asked. Federal authorities waited until the next national election was over in 1992 and then tried Noriega for drug trafficking, money laundering, and other crimes. The invasion had been front-page news; his trial appeared on the back pages. Sitting in prison, Noriega dictated his memoirs, which few have read, and argued that the invasion and the U.S. manipulation of his trial had nothing to do with drugs, money laundering, or any of the other charges against him. He had defied the United States, fought back its attempts at a coup, and thwarted President Bush. He knew too many secrets. George H.W. Bush had been Director of the CIA under President Gerald R. Ford (1976–1980), when Torrijos was at his peak. It came down, in Noriega’s mind, to Panama’s position in the world and its takeover of the canal in 1990: They [the Americans] were looking at a chessboard. They controlled the pieces at the important stalemate: Panama was still the crossroads [sic] of the hemisphere. At the close of the century, the Americans saw Panama just as Teddy Roosevelt had seen it in 1904, this land was theirs and they wanted it all for their own.157 He was convicted and sentenced to forty years. His sentence was reduced and has now served his time but is still held in custody. France also convicted him in absentia and Panama’s leaders hope that he will be extradited to that nation and serve another ten years.158 The United States, in its national politics, its media, and its foreign policy, drew no lessons from Panama and Noriega. On the contrary, he was seen as a stupid, ugly thug who had been arrested, imprisoned, and no longer meant much of anything— Panama was “restored” to democracy. Two journalists, surveying the wreckage, concluded the United States would have done more for the nation by having bundled all the money it spent on the invasion and kicked it out of an aircraft flying over the country.159 Only scholars writing fairly obscure books told the real story of America’s abuse of Panama. The episode had all the earmarks of American behavior in Central America since the 1850s and especially after 1898.


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MIGRATION The United States is in a struggle over what it will look like in fifty years. The struggle originates in the nineteenth century and will certainly last well into the twenty-first. Perhaps it is an issue, given the relative openness of the country that will never be settled and never should be. The present form of this struggle turns on a flood of migrants from Latin America, especially Mexico. It is a period with the highest levels of migration into this country since the last liberal era came to a close in the 1920s. Although this section will concentrate its discussion on Mexican migrants, large numbers of other Latin Americans have come into the country in the last quarter century. I also use the term “migrants” rather than immigrants because that term has been used to split migrants into “legal” and “illegal,” “documented” and “undocumented,” terms that obscure rather than reveal what is happening. There are four major factors involved: the Latin American surge in population, the wage differential between the United States and Latin American nations, the impact of civil conflicts and mass murders during the Cold War and after, and the present drug violence in the region. Aside from the issue of population growth, the United States has promoted policies that exacerbated the ability of Latin Americans to live in their own countries while the difference between wages in this country and those in Latin America increased. The population issue has finally been faced in parts of Latin America. About fifteen years ago, in a fit of sanity, Mexican governments began running public advertisements on billboards and television urging young people to postpone having children. The young were ready to listen. Infant mortality had fallen and raising large numbers of children in already crowded conditions made no sense; within the urban elite and the middle class, birth control was already commonplace. The Catholic Church remains obstinate in opposing birth control and abortion, even when children have been raped. Everyone treats its doctrine as sensitively as possible while an ever larger segment of the population abandons it in practice. Astoundingly, an otherwise sound study of Mexican migration to the United States fails to mention religion as a factor in the “sending” country.160 Another element in the population increase is that attitudes linking masculinity and femininity to fecundity have been slow to alter. The U.S. government began investing small sums in

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promoting birth control abroad, but President George W. Bush, acting to retain his religious constituency, attached conditions to foreign aid by cutting off any foreign program offering abortion or promoting abortion in any way.161 Nonetheless, when things change, they can change quickly. In the 1970s, the Mexican fertility rate was seven children per woman; it is now a little over two. In Brazil, it is 2.7. The trend downward is true of a number of poor and developing countries.162 This may have a down side in thirty years but it will help contain job competition and resources in the next decade. The population expansion of twenty and thirty years ago is affecting the United States and Mexico. The most striking characteristics of Mexican migration to the United States in the last twenty years have been its intensity and spread to areas where Mexicans have not lived in great numbers before. This has included the South, the most racist zone in America. Mexicans in Atlanta, for example, jumped in number from 24,000 in 1980 to 268,000 by the year 2000.163 Opponents of migration argue Mexicans endanger values in this country. They cite the differences in culture between Mexicans and the rest of the nation and the fact that they do not assimilate as rapidly as other migrant groups have in the past. Samuel P. Huntington, the prominent Harvard political scientist, argued that this wave of migration by Mexicans was different from other flows because it could lead to a provincial zone such as Quebec, Canada, in which Spanish instead of French would prevail and Mexicans would refuse to assimilate.164 Nativism and racism have been thrown against every wave of migrants to the United States. The idea that Mexicans will alter the United States is perhaps a good one. They bring better food and often better music than Anglo-Saxon culture. And what is wrong with Quebec? Its nationalism decades ago came from the mistreatment of French Canadians, which seems largely past. It is a charming area. Huntington and others worried about the Mexicanization of the Southwest are wrong—Mexican migration is spreading throughout the nation. Mexicans want to assimilate and even the poor put a high priority on their children learning English. This is what my parents did; I see no reason other Mexican American children cannot go just as far and help this nation to grow culturally as well as economically. Contemporary Mexican parents worry that bilingual education may confine their children in a cultural ghetto.165 As scholars have pointed out, Mexicans in this country do not identify with any one


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label. For one thing, those from Oaxaca or the Yucatán are probably native and may not even speak Spanish. For another, those who have lived in the United States for years choose labels such as Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano, Hispanic, and Latino—each of them resonant with differences in values and even politics. The percent of migrants calling themselves Mexicans has actually fallen in the present migratory wave, and this was true before the current campaign against them.166 Nor are many permanent residents; the present crash has sent a good number home. Mexicans have made many of the industries in this country viable; no one knows how many factories might have closed without cheap Mexican labor. If their work was unavailable, would the factories just move south of the border and find the cheap labor they need in Mexico itself? This is exactly what many have done, filling up border cities with maquiladoras—paying even lower wages than are available here. Nor do Americans want to pay the price of food that higher wage native laborers would demand to work in agriculture. The dilemma for Mexicans is that they are “illegal” and cannot claim the rights of other workers. This status also generates an “informal economy” within the United States, as much of their labor stays off the books. The risk is that, like the Blacks, they are being pushed into the nation’s underclass. Cities have been decimated as factories closed, and in each downturn the number of jobs with decent wages and benefits is replaced by part-time employment with few or no benefits: Wal-Mart jobs. The “economic growth” of the last couple of decades has not raised real wages for the bottom half of the population—Mexican migrants are part of that half. A recent New York Times article noted, “With the economy beginning to slow, the current expansion has a chance to become the first sustained period of economic growth since World War II that fails to offer a prolonged increase in real wages for most workers.”167 The largest corporation in the country sells Chinese goods and pays so little to its clerks that a food stamp application often accompanies the one for a job. Then there is the issue of taxes. An argument against migration says that Mexicans place a burden on social services—schools, emergency rooms, welfare, and police—and do not pay taxes to cover those costs. Migrants do pay taxes but to the federal government, and those sums are not used to support local needs.168 This is a problem in the centralization of government; a federal support

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program to aid areas hit by an influx of new migrants would alleviate many local problems. In the meantime, because migrants can usually not regularize their status, they are in a legal (and tax) limbo. Those of their children born outside this country will be in the same limbo as they become adults. Such a status does not create good citizens. For years, local police departments did not enforce immigration laws for fear migrants would stop cooperating in the prosecution of crime. Now, the Minutemen and other nativist movements have led the Republican Party to make anti-immigrant sentiment a part of its election plank and, along with radio demagogues, has successfully demanded local authorities help in deportation efforts. The attitude is reminiscent of the mass deportations of Mexicans that took place in the early 1930s and in 1954.169 As the economy slides, Americans look for scapegoats. No one discusses the role of American business and conservative politicians in recruiting Mexicans into this country for over a hundred years.170 Pete Wilson supported an easing of immigration laws in the 1980s when he was the Republican senator for California and anxious to help state agribusiness; when he became governor, he promoted Proposition 187, which penalized Mexicans in the state by denying them medical benefits and education; it required local authorities, including welfare agencies, to report suspected “illegal aliens.” Wilson remained unapologetic for his behavior as governor, even as Mexican residents voted against his party.171 A federal court declared the measure, which passed, unconstitutional. There is a difference between previous campaigns against Mexicans and the current one. Americans who favor deportation without regard to consequences are not thinking clearly. Sending 12 million Mexicans back across the border would destabilize that country and its government. Nor is it historically accurate to blame Mexicans for all their domestic problems. No one mentions the debt crisis of 1982, the financial collapse of 1994—direct consequences of policies promoted by the United States—or the long-term impact of NAFTA, which destroyed millions of agricultural jobs in Mexico. Finally, there is the fear of crime and drugs. The United States’ war on drugs, pushed by the federal government, forced drug vendors to become more creative in trafficking their goods. The Mexican border cities fit their needs perfectly. The San Diego–Tijuana zone, which is the most heavily traveled border in the world, has now become militarized. Electronic devices, helicopters, federal immigration and


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customs police, and even a massive fence are in place to stop migrants and drugs. Both are still coming across. Mexicans can circumvent the border altogether by crossing at some desert location (a route that has killed migrants through dehydration) or coming on an airplane. The drug culture has generated gangs on each side of the border. An illustrative lesson is what happened not to Mexicans but to refugees from El Salvador. Some 450,000 people from that beleaguered nation, facing civil war and execution by El Salvador’s U.S.-sponsored military and paramilitary forces, fled to Los Angeles and other Hispanic cities. In Los Angeles, their sons grew up and tried to join Chicano gangs in East L.A., only to be rebuffed—the victims of Mexican American discrimination.172 They formed their own gang, the Mara Salvatrucha, also called the MS-13, which became the largest, most ruthless Latino criminal organization in the United States. U.S. authorities picked up the youths; many of them with gang insignia tattooed on their face, and deported them to El Salvador. Most of them had never visited the country before but they quickly recruited poor teenagers and spread their gang throughout Central America and Mexico. Various offshoots of the Mara now number 50,000 in the United States alone—an army of culturally displaced.173 The United States’ indifference to Latin American people is now coming home. As Noriega pointed out, the region’s nations were important as chess pieces in a geopolitical game, one played against the Great Powers at the turn of the century, then against the Axis just before and during the Second World War, and finally against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Cold War has been over for twenty years. Latin Americans, however, have not stopped evolving, adopting new technologies, and contending with the consequences of military regimes and economic policies they never endorsed. They are on the periphery of American concerns, and they feel ambivalent about the United States. On the one hand, the role the U.S. government and corporations played in fomenting militarism and economic dependence has not been forgotten. Nor does it help that Latin Americans know the people of the United States do not care very much about them. On the other, they admire American openness and the consumer culture maintained in this country. One sees this in the young people of the region who wear blue jeans, “gangsta” clothing, and follow the latest

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techno pop and hip-hop trends in our music. That they, in turn, are migrating and reproducing their culture in this nation is alarming only to those too paranoid to see possibilities as well as difficulties. Whatever the nativists may claim, our fates truly are entwined and what happens in Latin America will alter this nation as well. We must see this as something other than a matter of migration. A vibrant, economically successful, and politically stable Latin America is our best bet. As the United States has repeatedly demonstrated, it has no idea and too little interest in how to bring this about. For all the pretensions that American aid and foreign investment would stabilize the region, neoliberalism was separating governments from their peoples’ needs and thoughtlessly endorsing policies in the short term that had led to another watershed, another crisis. Although the preponderance of military and economic power is that of the United States, there is no longer only a one-way direction of cause and effect. Latin America will influence this nation even more in the future than it has in the past.

CONCLUSION

The Twenty-First Century Has Begun We live in a climatic moment, not the one we would want to live in, but one that, nonetheless, is going to change global assumptions about economic survival, political stability, and social goals. All but one of the chapters in this work have cut across economic catastrophes and favored a periodization that allowed changes within Latin America to be presented in their own terms and not always as a response to disaster. Latin America from the last century to the present has been shaped by three periods that ended in economic collapse: the period of trade-based growth began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and ended in the Great Depression; the era of rapid industrialization behind protective tariffs ended in the Debt Crisis of 1982; the era of reducing restrictions on foreign investment and eliminating organized labor as a major force in national politics is ending now in 2008–2009. The conventional labels for these eras are economic liberalism, import-substitution industrialization, and neoliberalism. The period ahead of us has not been named. Several aspects of each era come to mind, but the most striking is that Latin America has not caused any of the economic crises that have shaped its nations’ prospects. Another is that it must break with the recent past. Even the 1982 crisis, in which Latin American governments borrowed heavily to remain in office, owed its direct evolution to decisions in the United States relating to taxes, the oil crises, and domestic inflation. Now, another crisis is here. We could say that every depression is a “debt crisis.” The conservative World Bank, agency of corporate international development, is completely

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pessimistic: world trade in 2009 will fall for the first time since 1982, “and capital flows to developing countries [are] predicted to plunge 50 per cent.” Its chief economist, Justin Lin, says bluntly, “We know that the financial crisis now is likely to be the worst since the 1930s.”1 Neoliberalism is dead or soon will be. The assumption that the region could develop itself by becoming more closely tied to the world economy overlooked how crises have played out within it. This is not surprising. The same “experts,” ignorant of history and culturally obtuse, advised the United States to follow policies similar to those that collapsed in 1929–1931. The United States is confronting the consequences of a financial collapse and has decided not to swallow what its economists have demanded from all other nations. It is rapidly inflating its economy and increasing deficit spending. It is bailing out the banking sector. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, a firm devotee of ChicagoChile style economics, publicly toys with the thought of socializing the banks. Some nations no doubt will stick to neoliberal policies but, as the Great Depression demonstrated, financial crises lead to political instability, which is not corrected by clinging to economic orthodoxy. To paraphrase Keynes, peripheral countries cannot remain in thrall to some dead economist. Each Latin American era has had its political forms and social struggles coming from attitudes created in the colonial era but also from the specific conflicts generated by new technologies in commercial administration, military force, and transportation. Each era redefined property rights, and governments wrestled with the need to extend civil rights, including suffrage, to larger segments of the population. In the beginning of the nation states, political leaders backed by improvised or poorly paid militaries fought one another over the centralization or decentralization of power and over the cultural influence of the Church. They borrowed heavily from Great Britain in order to pay for their governments and attempted, sometimes, grandiose schemes that failed. Real power fell to those who could muster control of rural populations and then impose that authority on nearby towns and cities. The long nineteenth century was not, however, an era of economic stagnation. In bits and pieces, economies and nations were built. Native communities revived and, in some locations, thrived. Democratic efforts and demands to be included in local and national politics came from Native Americans in Mexico, Blacks in Colombia, and villagers in many nations.

The Twenty-First Century Has Begun

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Then, links to a larger world altered prospects within Latin America. By the end of the nineteenth century, property rights were rewritten to facilitate a greater volume of exports. Native Americans and mixed race villagers were pushed aside, and large estates expanded. Labor regulations stiffened, controlling the poor with vagrancy laws and new applications of military and police force. The most concrete gain for laborers as a result of rising exports was the end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil, an outcome that involved the British navy reducing the Atlantic slave trade. The leaders or caudillos before the 1870s gave way to a more coherent application of liberal economic ideology. The ideology was based on constitutional law but deliberately excluded natives, Blacks, and the illiterate from effective suffrage. Oligarchies, based in land and finance and flush with money from the export economy, flourished, able to sustain political machines or dictators for decades. They built larger cities, and invited foreign capitalists to build railroads, improve ports, and increase the range of consumer goods in each country. Buenos Aires was the jewel of their achievements. No other nation combined agrarian resources, immigration, and commercial opportunities as successfully as Argentina. Had the Argentine elite been more astute in its politics, less rigid in its class attitudes, what might it have achieved? But even the most enterprising of oligarchic orders, overseeing a Europeanized labor force and with a sophisticated party system, failed at the task of consolidating a complete, liberal political economy. In this period, growth accelerated dramatically and most nations created economic links from one part of each country to another. A more centralized administration evolved in almost all the larger nations. But, when labor and the middle class demanded inclusion in the nation’s decision making, the export-based political systems came apart. One event stands out as a warning to the view that liberal economic development would solve every problem, generate social peace, and even create a new nation. Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico from the 1870s until 1911 and gradually centralized power. He began his reign in the age of liberal reform and ended it amidst an economic consolidation of provincial bosses and landowners. He left Mexico with new railroads and a varied body of exports: sisal, copper, silver, cattle, and a vastly expanded internal trade of everything from pulque to cement, from sugar to sewing machines. Mexico was becoming a modern nation—albeit still filled with

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natives mestizos, and a scattering of mulattos, and with much of its urban population renting unsanitary housing—when it exploded in revolution. Peasants and then laborers rallied to the possibility of electoral reform and when that was frustrated turned to guerrilla warfare. In a few years, an effort at political reform broke down and battles between substantial armies decided who would rule. The nation acquired a new constitution with a radical social content, promising genuine democracy and home rule. The most violent event in the Americas, the Mexican Revolution, in the short run, provided little to the peasants who had fought it. Changes it eventually set in motion led to land reform and dignity in the workplace for a substantial segment of Mexican farmers and laborers. The distribution of income remained skewed to the rich but landed power and its burgeoning ally in industry did not control the government. The revolution did not lead to democracy or socialism; it carried out a requirement of modern politics. Mexico became the first nation in which revolution and a populist president, Lázaro Cardenas (1934–1940), broke the back of landed control of the national government. The Great Depression forced Latin America back on its own inadequate resources. Interests of great importance in the export era, such as the nitrate corporations in Chile and the sugar mills of Cuba, collapsed into disuse, even abandonment. Oligarchic political orders, outside of Central America and a few predominately Indian nations, went into a crisis in which they recruited professional militaries as their allies. From the turn of the century, Latin America had produced radical intellectuals and labor organizers but the 1930s provided them with proof that liberal capitalism did not work. The urban labor force expanded, as governments promoted domestic production over imports, and populists such as Cárdenas, Haya de la Torre, and Perón tried to reorganize politics around new social principles, including the idea that government should promote labor organizing and use it as one of the new bases of political power. It should also reach out to the middle class. The populists played the card of economic nationalism, accusing previous regimes of having sold each nation’s patrimony to foreign interests. Issues that had been raised in the late nineteenth century now came to the forefront and included an agrarian reform to create classes of small farmers and the need to replace peonage


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with truly free labor, the start of public health and sanitation measures to combat a range of diseases and high infant mortality, and the creation of labor codes that provided a minimum wage, an eight-hour work day, and penalized employers who maintained unsafe working conditions. This was a mass struggle led by nationalists as opposed to a democratic struggle fostering civil rights for all. Even so, it extended suffrage to new groups of people. By the early 1950s, women had gained the vote. The point of populist elections, however, was to gain predominance over the entire political system and keep it. In general, however, the populists overreached—their nations lacked the capital resources to carry out so many public projects at once, especially at a time of record population growth and urbanization. The push for industrialization provided laborers with a different consciousness but it left the countryside in the hands of landlords and ruthless local officials. Any attempt to break landed power and expand laboring rights, as happened in Bolivia and Guatemala, divided fragile populist alliances and brought national militaries into play. Not surprisingly, elites fought back. As this took place, the elites of the region diversified their interests. They were not opposed by national bourgeoisies intent on capitalist progress; they joined those bourgeoisies. They owned land as a hedge against inflation, they owned industries protected by nationalist policies, they controlled the national banks, they ran the media, and they strongly influenced the direction of public investment. They used this concentrated economic power to retard wage increases in the cities and keep the rural poor repressed. They used the new media to recruit an increasing middle class into a culture of consumerism, in open imitation of the United States and Western Europe. And when populists pushed too hard or the left threatened to come to power, they rallied middle class support and the military to bring down civilian rule. They had allies in United States corporations and the U.S. government. In this conflict between popular needs and the protection of privilege, the United States chose privilege every time. The United States arrived in Latin America through the Caribbean; it staked its claim to resources based on a preponderance of military power and the pretense of democratizing and enlightening beleaguered societies. Its use of power was never beneficent. It imposed its will on Cuba after winning the Spanish-American War in 1898. It took over Panama in order to build a lucrative canal. It overthrew the

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government of Nicaragua in 1909 to prevent a liberal nationalist from reframing the goals of his country. It invaded Mexico and interfered in the course of the revolution there. Then, as South American powers rebuffed its economic advances, it called itself a good neighbor and installed constabulary dictatorships in the Caribbean and Central America and used its economic power during the Second World War to gain ascendance throughout Latin America. After the war and facing a conflict with the Soviet Union, it resorted to covert operations and economic blackmail. The United States government overthrew the elected government of Guatemala in 1954; it undermined the Bolivian Revolution in the 1950s. It conflated populists and communists and overthrew elected governments with popular agendas. Fidel Castro’s Cuba inspired a generation of educated Latin American youths to take up guerrilla warfare against what they called oligarchs, and it inspired one U.S. administration after another to wage war not only on guerrillas but almost any popular cause. U.S. presidents turned the crusade against communism into a broader assault on Latin American civil liberties and economic nationalism. The Johnson administration helped overthrow the populist government of Brazil in 1964; it invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent the return of an elected populist to the presidency. The Nixon administration helped the military seize power in Uruguay and subverted the presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile. Carter and Reagan backed a series of murderous military regimes in Central America and undermined the Nicaraguan effort at social revolution. U.S. administrations bear major responsibility for the hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans who were raped, tortured, and murdered and the millions driven into exile, their lives dislocated forever. Officially, it has never acknowledged any part in these horrors. Just as in the case of economic crises, the Latin American people had little say in the course of their political lives. The foreign corporations intent on destroying economic nationalism in Latin America were busy destroying organized labor and business regulations dating from the 1930s and 1940s in the United States. At the very moment that corporate power asserted itself over Latin American elites and domestic interests in the United States, theories of imperialism and dependency went out of vogue in the academies of both zones. The replacement of oligarchies with corporate plutocrats included a change in capitalist culture. The mass


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media became emptied of intellectual content. Corporations in the United States and militaries in Latin America used their power to close down any discussion of class or exploitation. Dependency theory, which had fired up the hopes of Allende and other progressive leaders, disappeared and, with it, talk of land reform, labor rights, and social justice vanished as well. Dependency theory was not a technocratic theory, which could be tested in departments of economics. Those departments, convinced that dependency was a myth, cheered on the Chicago Boys in Chile as an excellent example of theoretical rigor, ignoring that Pinochet’s regime was applying its “model” by murdering and terrorizing the population. Dependency theory was more of a spatial study of the forms of power that dominant nations used on peripheral ones than an explanation of purely economic functions. For one thing, a hegemonic power, such as the United States, changes over time and these changes are reflected in what it demands from peripheral governments and societies. We will not explain dependency by limiting our search to the terms of trade. The terms of debt have played a much greater role in contemporary history. Every economic era ends in a “debt crisis,” as the gains from financial manipulations outrun productivity and as credit is manipulated to extract higher “earnings.” In each of the depressions that followed, Latin America required a decade or more to recover; in each, a major part of its population remained impoverished even when recovery took place. The rise of corporate power, decades in the making, undid oligarchs, socialists, and populists in Latin America. The rich in Latin America are now much better labeled as plutocrats, just like their counterparts in the United States. Like them as well, they could care less about what happens to those below. The point of their expansion, taught at so many business schools in the United States, was a “freedom” limited to markets and trade. Writing about the administration of George W. Bush, David Harvey notes that U.S. goals during the war in Iraq involved much more than eliminating a dictator: What the US evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital. I call this kind of state apparatus a neoliberal state. [His italics.] The freedoms it

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embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital.2 Harvey’s focus is not Latin America but his generalizations fit what has happened in that region. The U.S. government and corporations and Western European corporations supported military and civilian regimes that eviscerated popular power. No other stakeholder—peasant, Native American, Black, laborer, woman, or child—has any rights based on needs outside the market. This is a twisted ideal and it has generated twisted results. In its mature form, societies hold elections whose winner cannot change any of the basic rules. Chile has now elected two socialist presidents, neither of whom could restore any of the initiatives to labor unions that Pinochet took away. Luiz Ignácio Lula da Silva began his life as a child laborer, and rose to become a great union leader. He led Brazil’s steelworkers, courageously opposed his nation’s military regime, and built one of the strongest labor parties in Latin American history. When he ran for president in 2002, Brazil was in another crisis.3 Before the election took place, the IMF and foreign creditors demanded that he, along with other candidates, promise full payment on the national debt, whatever the domestic consequences. He did so. Once elected, his social promises gave way to the promise of economic growth—it took place and Brazil has worked its way out of debt but lost another six years in the campaign to ameliorate hunger and landlessness. Under neoliberal rules, leaders cannot raise but can always lower taxes. They cannot effectively regulate corporations to prevent pollution, ecological destruction, or even financial chicanery on a massive scale. They leave public goods to rot and collapse. Prior to the debt crisis of 1982, Latin American governments tried to rescue their industries from an untenable situation, but it did not follow that this mistake required dismantling all but the coercive powers of government. Allowing efforts to improve social welfare and education to go by the board has high social costs and these have been accumulating for a generation. As the poor gain the franchise, they are electing neopopulists. It is only American experts on Latin America that ever believed the age of populism was over. These neopopulists—Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, Alan García of Peru, Lula of Brazil—may or may not keep their promises. But the more effective


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the suffrage, the more people will vote for public goods and relief from savage capitalism. The greater the strength of popular movements, the more those movements will invoke the recent past to demand their governments defy U.S. dictates. Chávez had increased his popularity by bringing health care to the poorest barrios of Caracas and by thumbing his nose at the United States. Morales built his initial following organizing coca farmers against U.S.-sponsored efforts to poison their fields in its “war on drugs.” A trend toward a redistribution of wealth and resources is clear and growing, so is the revival of economic nationalism, witness the fight over Bolivia’s control and use of its natural gas reserves. Leaders such as Chávez and Morales polarize the electorate for they cannot possibly gain the revenues required for social change without also reaching into the pockets of the middle class. Another class struggle is in the making: it will be between those in the “informal sector,” who now make up the politically and economically excluded from state protection, and those in the middle class and above. Organized labor has so little power that it can no longer play the role it once did in promoting social progress. Scholars of Latin America, seeking out more histories of women and their understudied role in past struggles, have documented what it was like for them to labor in the textile plants of Colombia in the 1940s and 1950s and the meat packing plants of Argentina. Then having recounted some major labor victories, the historians come to a last chapter and note that those factories are closed.4 Where are the jobs? Neoliberal rules have not supplied them. Even in Chile, the model country, young men in their twenties sit around at home waiting for some decent employment opportunity. Those at the bottom of Latin American societies are not like their counterparts in the United States. They vote for their own interests and they are not as easily distracted by “culture wars” over abortion and stem cell research.5 If some means is not found to bring the excluded into the polity and change government taxes and spending priorities to reshape the job market and provide Latin Americans with some dignity, then things do look grim. Latin Americans were told over and over again that they must be patient in awaiting the gains of neoliberalism. They waited and waited. The wave of laborers in Latin America entering the job market is the largest in the region’s history; many of them are already part of the underpaid “informal sector” as children selling trinkets and even themselves. The colonial visitor to any

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contemporary city, in the conceit used throughout this work, would now see new mansions and new shanties everywhere. The mansions are on agribusiness estates or in luxurious apartment buildings; the shanties look as discouraging as they ever did. High walls surround the mansions. Residents of the shanties send their young out to work or commit crimes. Latin America will also have to confront internal changes, now coming at a rapid pace. It is no good blaming landlords any longer. Although they still exploit rural workers and do social and ecological damage in the hinterlands of Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and Chiapas and Guerrero in Mexico, they no longer decide the fate of nations. The rural population of Latin America has pressing needs but it is unlikely that the region’s difficulties will be decided in the countryside. And yet, Latin American nations must address those difficulties involving the need for better infrastructure and schools as well as a concerted effort at birth control. The recent decision in El Salvador to punish women and doctors for abortions is another step into past darkness. Without a program to help poor, rural women control their fertility, the push of the impoverished into the region’s cities will continue and is already unmanageable. The region will need to assist even larger numbers of urban poor and no one, in any nation, has a reasonable idea of how that is to be done. It will require imagination, resolve, and money on a scale that no Latin American government has ever reached. And where this leadership is missing, whatever laws the United States may pass, the hopeless situation in their own country will drive people north. Migrants, from Mexico and elsewhere, have fled one informal sector and relocated to another. As a result of a Republican-led nativist campaign, those who found decent jobs, with fake identifications, are now losing them, branded criminals, and sent home never to return. Children brought into the United States and raised, schooled, and acculturated here are also classified as “illegal” and sent “home” to nations they know little about. These migrants desperately want to regularize their situation. They have contributed to the country’s prosperity and brought social problems from the sender countries, but this is true of every migration. The United States has a choice of legalizing the status of millions and negotiating some process with Latin American nations on how to deal with migration, or finding itself with an impossible outcome— even more millions within its borders condemned to a legal


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limbo. Latin Americans within the United States are just beginning a campaign for dignity and an end to persecution. And so we come to the illustrative history of Colombia. That nation repeats many of the themes in this interpretation: the nineteenth century wars between the liberals and the conservatives culminating in the War of a Thousand Days in the early twentieth century; the reconstruction of political parties that went on fighting but were allied against social movements from below; the 1948 murder of the populist Jorge Gaitán, followed by the riots of the Bogotazo and the open-ended killing of La Violencia in the late 1940s and the 1950s; and the surge of guerrilla warfare in the 1960s and the nation’s descent into a permanent state of social conflict among paramilitary factions and between the military and leftwing forces thereafter. Colombia had high levels of partisan violence well before drugs altered its economy and society. Populism was brushed aside in La Violencia but the issues raised about social justice in Gaitán’s campaign did not disappear. Then cocaine arrived as the harbinger of the future. The selling of cocaine looked like every other agrarian boom in Latin American history. The coca leaves were easy to procure in Peru and Bolivia, Colombia had thousands of cheap laborers to turn it into paste, and the United States provided a lucrative and growing market for the product. The fact that this was, with the exception of growing the leaves, all illegal was beside the point. The point was and is that the Colombian poor were not going to “grow” out of their poverty. Like every other export boom, cocaine enriched some and led to the exploitation of many. Those who became rich in the drug trade stopped killing one another and formed cartels to improve efficiency. They bought political influence or got elected to Congress. They raised private armies, often better equipped than the Colombian military. In short, they behaved as other export plutocrats had done before. Pablo Escobar, born as La Violencia escalated, became the richest and most famous of the drug lords. He began life stealing on the streets and rose to become the head of the Medellín cartel. A member of Congress in the early 1980s, he worked closely with Torrijos and Noriega in Panama. He was a credit, really, to private enterprise and a reminder that those born poor are often highly intelligent. In the late 1980s, he and another drug lord were on Fortune’s list of the twenty richest men in the world; they twice offered to pay off Colombia’s national debt. The return on cocaine in 1990 was

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$5,000 million in profit to $1 million in paste, making drug trafficking “the most lucrative business in the world.”6 In the age of neoliberalism and the end to public social programs, he became a benefactor. In a nation in which government did little for its people, he bestowed schools, homes, and playgrounds—practicing a sort of local populism.7 His business required him to kill others or beat them into submission but this did not make him unusual in Colombia; a good part of the population was inured to violence. His commercial difficulties centered on the United States, which wanted him for drug trafficking. When Colombian authorities began to cooperate with the United States, they promised to extradite Escobar and other major figures in the trade. The cartels fought back, killing police, military men, prosecutors, and judges. One of Escobar’s tactics was to kidnap prominent figures—journalists, government officials, and businessmen— and so underline his refusal to go quietly.8 The Colombian authorities eventually reached a compromise with Escobar and U.S. officials and imprisoned him in a palace of his own design. He escaped and U.S. authorities assisted the Colombian police in hunting him down in 1993.9 This story is well known but worth repeating, as is the moral: the drug trade grew larger after Escobar’s death, as did the violence surrounding it. The nation allowed, under neoliberal rules, for U.S.-subsidized staples to flood the domestic market, ruin many small farmers, and send them and their families into the cities. The various factions competing to control the drug trade are not short of hands. They include a variety of paramilitary groups, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization called the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), and various gangs. As neoliberal reforms drove farmers and laborers into hunger, the United States decided to aid the Colombian government’s antidrug effort with Plan Colombia in 1998–1999. This involved military aid and support for rightwing paramilitary forces sent out to kill the FARC guerrillas, and it involved spraying herbicides on the heads of those farmers growing coca or thought to be growing it. Robin Kirk describes in moving detail the moral chaos that followed with honest judges, decent legislators, even pacifists among the victims of one faction or another.10 Businessmen bought armored cars, surrounded themselves with bodyguards, and sent their families to the United States. Kidnapping


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became an economic sector. Children caught committing crimes were sentenced more lightly than adults, and so drug entrepreneurs used children as drug carriers and hit men, sicarios, who knew their lives would be profitable but short.11 The worst of this violence seems to be subsiding but the cycles of poverty and violence are far from over. Is this Latin America’s future? In a statistical sense, Colombia is fine; its gross domestic product, even aside from drugs, continues to grow. But are we tipping into a moral blight even more than an economic problem? Hope is disappearing from many shantytowns. The border wars in Mexico, the gangs of São Paulo, the rise in crime in almost every major city signal that public safety is and will continue to be a major issue in the near future. The poor in these cities self-medicate with drugs, including cocaine derivatives, and so have become markets in their own right for further drug production. We can say with some confidence that the aftermath of neoliberalism will be played out primarily in the region’s cities, and aspects of it will be nasty—they already are so. Movements for social regeneration will be in competition with gangs as well as plutocrats. Once again, Latin American nations have become entangled in decisions other than their own. Facing the consequences of the Vietnam War in which American soldiers obtained cheap marijuana and heroin and those of a growing drug culture in American colleges and universities, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” in 1969. This war led to harsher penalties for producing, transporting, possessing, and using a wide variety of psychotropic substances, including marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and LSD. Early convictions in this war sent young men to prison for twenty years for marijuana possession and use. Once prohibition was established as a goal, federal and state authorities began spending substantial amounts to stop drug trafficking. In 1973, Nixon established the Drug Enforcement Administration to, as its Web site states, “establish a single unified command to wage [in Nixon’s words]‘an all-out global war on the drug menace.’” The DEA began with 1,470 Special Agents and less that $75 million. “Today, the DEA has 5,235 Special Agents, a budget of more than $2.3 billion and 87 foreign offices in 63 countries.”12 It makes this boast without irony. There are lucrative careers at stake in maintaining this idiocy. According to a drug legalization source, $4.7 billion dollars were spent at the federal level in the first three months of 2009. State governments

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spent an additional $7.2 billion, bringing the total to about $12 billion a quarter—$48 billion a year. Over 1.8 million people are arrested each year for drug violations, most of them for smoking marijuana.13 As one cultural student of drugs notes, drug prohibitions have been manipulated over the last 100 years to control non-Whites.14 The United States provides the principal market and most of the firearms used in drug trafficking throughout Latin America, a fact recently admitted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.15 When read side by side, two things become obvious: fighting the drug war is now big business, perhaps bigger than the drug market itself; and the antidrug forces expanded along with the drug cartels and now have more drug lords to oppose than ever. Turning a domestic issue into a “war” gave American officials reason to meddle abroad, especially in Latin America. It seemed clear by the year 2000 that the drug wars would be the next excuse for maintaining armed forces much larger than those needed to defend American shores. Then came 9/11 and another, more vague and much more insidious reason was found, fighting terror. In contemporary parlance, the two are often conflated and U.S. journalists and officials speak of “narco-terrorism.” American militarization of every social problem reveals a good deal about this nation. Joining the military is still one of the few jobs with benefits left for American youth and the long experience of war (World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars) has made Americans far more open to a militarized language in politics. But Latin Americans, having suffered the consequences of militarism, are sick of such formulations and of the idea that America’s problems with drugs are their responsibility. The United States can expect greater resistance to its dictates on this issue in the future. There are certain patterns to Latin America’s past that point to the future, and one is that although the region needs the United States as a market, it does not need or want the United States as an arbiter of its nations’ internal affairs. This has become and will remain a central issue for the region. A nation that has run its own economy aground and abandons orthodoxy to save itself will have some difficulty imposing orthodox rules on others. And as that nation enters another Depression, the real “tigers” of China and India are expanding their economies—having been financed in a major part by U.S. purchases of their consumer goods and cheaper technical labor. The


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Euro from an integrated Europe is also playing a major role in developing Latin America. Though I will not mourn the end of the neoliberal era, it has not been a total loss. On the contrary, the region acquired technology and expanded its capacities with new highways, airports, hydroelectric plants, and universities. It took steps to integrate its national economies into larger units, trying to imitate some of the success of the European Union. The brutal experience with military regimes has given civilian governments some security against a revival of militarism. It was the Contadora Group—of Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela, meeting on a Panamanian island— that in the mid-1980s initiated the discussions that would bring peace to Central America. They faced the constant hostility of the United States. Another significant development took place in 2002 when Hugo Chávez faced a coup attempt reminiscent of events surrounding Goulart and Allende. The military effort had CIA written all over it. Chávez’s supporters risked their lives to publicly support him. The military was divided, and Latin American governments from north to south denounced the possible creation of another military regime. The coup failed. If Latin American governments maintain this kind of solidarity, a real change may come in the region’s relations with the United States. Much depends on how serious the current economic crisis becomes. Crises of any depth in Latin America lead to open demonstrations and conflicts that sweep away the existing regime. Domestic crime and violence are now a pressing issue and, if nothing else, governments will have to improve their capacity to provide public safety. Crises in Latin America generate disorganized anger toward those in power and so opportunities for political entrepreneurs who seek to create new bases of power. The next cycle of that process is underway. It began in the struggles against neoliberal misery. But these processes, in many countries, will take a decade or more to mature. It will be interesting to see who shows up in each country to address the problems at hand and how authority will be restructured to improve the capacity of each state to act. The hope is that this new round of political consequences will lead to more effective citizenship and greater social welfare. These appear to be simple enough goals. In fact, in the future as in the past, the people will have to fight for them.


Notes CHAPTER 1 THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY, CAUDILLAJE, POWER, AND THE PEOPLE 1. Peter F. Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Fernando López-Alves, State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, Latin America Otherwise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 2. Leslie Bethell, Colonial Spanish America (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Mark A. Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Louisa Schell Hoberman and Susan Migden Socolow, eds., Cities and Society in Colonial Latin America, 1st ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986); Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 3. Leslie Bethell, Brazil: 1822–1930, Empire and Republic (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989); E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths & Histories, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

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4. João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 5. John Lynch, Argentine Dictator: Juan Manuel De Rosas, 1829–1852 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Ricardo Donato Salvatore, Wandering Paysanos: State Order and Subaltern Experience in Buenos Aires during the Rosas Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 6. Cecila G. Méndez, The Plebian Republic: The Huanta Rebellion and the Making of the Peruvian State, 1820–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 7. James E. Sanders, Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 8. Margaret Chowning, Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico: Michoacán from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 9. John H. Coatsworth, Alan M. Taylor, and David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Latin America and the World Economy since 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 1998), 33; Simon Collier, Chile: The Making of a Republic, 1830–1865: Politics and Ideas (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 10. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Sarmiento, Author of a Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967); Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrants, or Civilization and Barbarism (New York: Gordon Press, 1976). 11. Ariel de la Fuente, The Children of Facundo: Caudillo and Gaucho Insurgency during the Argentine State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1853–1873) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 12. Richard W. Slatta, Cowboys of the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Richard W. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 13. John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Alvaro Jara, Guerra y sociedad en Chile; la transformación de la guerra de Arauco y la esclavitud de los indios. Colección Imagen de Chile, 14, 1st ed. (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1971). 14. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande & senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, abridged from the 2nd English-language ed. (New York: Knopf, 1964).

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15. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (New York: Vintage Books, 1946). 16. George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 17. Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York: Norton, 1974). 18. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 19. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1838 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 20. Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Rebecca J. Scott, The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988); Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900, Studies in American Negro Life (New York: Atheneum, 1970). 21. Richard Alan White, Paraguay’s Autonomous Revolution, 1810–1840 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978). 22. Edward Holland Spicer, Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1333–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962). 23. Nelson A. Reed, The Caste War of Yucatán (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Terry Rugeley, Maya Wars; Ethnographic Accounts from Nineteenth-Century Yucatán (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2991). 24. Herbert S. Klein, Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society, Latin American Histories Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 124. 25. Nicoláa Sánchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 136–139. 26. Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). 27. Zephry L. Frank, Dutra’s World: Wealth and Family in NineteenthCentury Rio de Janeiro (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 168–169. 28. Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery, Blacks in the New World (Urbana: University of Illinois

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Press, 1992); Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835. 29. Emilio Kourí, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 267–280. 30. Ramon A. Gutierrez, “Honor Ideology, Marriage Negotiation, and Class-Gender Domination in New Mexico, 1690–1846,” Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (1985); Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 61ff. See also the introduction of Ramón A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 31. Ana Luz Rodriguez Gonzalez, Cofradías, capellanías, epidemias y funerales: una mirada al tejido social de la Independencia, 1st ed. (Bogota, Colombia: Banco de la República, El Ancora Editores, 1999); Edward Wright-Rios, “Piety and Progress: Vision, Shrine, and Society in Oaxaca, 1887–1934” (PhD diss., University of California–San Diego, 2004). 32. Paul J. Vanderwood, The Power of God against the Guns of Government: Religious Upheaval in Mexico at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 33. Carlos A. Forment, Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 104–143. 34. Guardino, The Time of Liberty, 1750–1850. 35. Sanders, Contentious Republicans. 36. Slatta, Gauchos and the Vanishing Frontier. 37. David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 38. Arnold J. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Mario Góngora, Origen de los inquilinos de Chile central, 2nd ed. (Santiago, Chile: Instituto de Capacitación e Investigación en Reforma Agraria, 1974); Julio C. Serrano C, “Los peones acasillados y nuestra legislación agraria” (Tesis de licenciado en derecho) (México, D.F.: UNAM, 1930); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933). 39. Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 40. Brian Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993). 41. Miguel Angel Cuarterolo, Soldados de la memoria: imágenes y hombres de la Guerra del Paraguay, 1st ed. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta Argentina, 2000); Barbara Anne Ganson, Las consecuencias demográficas y

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sociales de la guerra de la Triple Alianza (Asunción, Paraguay: B. Ganson de Rivas, 1985); Hendrik Kraay and Thomas Whigham, I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864–1870 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Thomas Whigham, The Paraguayan War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 42. Collier, Chile: The Making of a Republic, 1830–1865: Politics and Ideas. 43. Jack Autrey Dabbs, The French Army in Mexico, 1861–1867: A Study in Military Government (The Hague: Mouton, 1963). 44. Frederick J. Cwiekowski, The English Bishops and The First Vatican Council, Bibliothèque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, fasc. 52 (Louvain, Belgium: Bureaux de la R.H.E. Bibliothèque de l’Université. Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1971); August Hasler, Hans Kèung, and August Hasler, How the Pope Became Infallible: Pius IX and the Politics of Persuasion, 1st ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981); Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London and Washington, DC: Sheed and Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990). 45. Christine Hunefeldt, Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 46. Linda Lewin, Surprise Heirs (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 47. Ivan Jaksic, Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, Cambridge Latin American Studies, 87 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 48. Costa, The Brazilian Empire. 49. National census data collected in Latin American Centre at Oxford University (OxLAD), Oxford Latin American Economic History Database (Oxford University, 2008). 50. Economic Commission for Latin America at the United Nations and Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems, original 1949 Spanish ed. (Lake Success, NY: United Nations, 1950), 59. 51. Basic works include Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Charles K. Wilber, The Political Economy of Development and Underdevelopment, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1984).

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52. Paul Bairoch, The Economic Development of the Third World since 1900 (London: Methuen, 1975); John H. Coatsworth and Alan M. Taylor, Latin America and the World Economy since 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 1998); Stephen H. Haber, How Latin America Fell Behind: Essays on the Economic Histories of Brazil and Mexico, 1800–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); José Antonio Ocampo, María Angela Parra, and United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Returning to an Eternal Debate: The Terms of Trade for Commodities in the Twentieth Century, Serie Informes y estudios especiales, 5 (Santiago, Chile: Naciones Unidas, CEPAL, 2003). 53. David Joslin, A Century of Banking in Latin America: To Commemorate the Centenary in 1962 of the Bank of London & South America Limited (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 110. 54. D.C.M. Platt, Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Clarendon Press, 1977). 55. Karen Racine, Franciso de Miranda, A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003). 56. Albert O. Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, orig. 1945). 57. Kirsten Schultz, Tropical Versailles: Empire, Monarchy, and the Portuguese Royal Court in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2001). 58. Carlos Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 1820–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Carlos Marichal, “The Vicious Cycles of Mexican Debt,” NACLA Report on the Americas 31, no. 3 (1997); Christian Suter, Debt Cycles in the World-Economy: Foreign Loans, Financial Crises, and Debt Settlements, 1820–1990 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). 59. Heraclio Bonilla, Guano y burguesía en el Perú: el contraste de la experiencia peruana con las economías de exportación del Ecuador y de Bolivia, 3rd rev. ed. (Quito: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 1994); Jonathan V. Levin, The Export Economies: Their Pattern of Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); W.M. Mathew, The House of Gibbs and the Peruvian Guano Monopoly (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981). 60. Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru’s “Fictitious Prosperity” of Guano, 1840–1880 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 124. 61. Juan Bautista Alberdi, La vida y los trabajos industriales de William Wheelwright en la América del sud (Paris: Garnier Hermanos, 1876); Carmen McEvoy, “The Republican Utopia: Ideals and Realities in the

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Formation of Peruvian Political Culture, 1871–1919” (PhD diss., University of California, San Diego, 1995). 62. Jeffrey D. Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Robert Edgar Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Scott, The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil; Robert Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil, 1st ed. (New York: Atheneum, 1972). 63. Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

CHAPTER 2 OLIGARCHY AND THE IMPACT OF NEW WEALTH, 1880–1914 1. Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen, PostContemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 2. Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 3. Nicoláa Sánchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 4. Jean-Pierre Blancpain, Les Allemands au Chile (1816–1945), Lateinamerikanische Forschungen, Bd. 6 (Cologne, Germany; Vienna, Austria: Böhlau, 1974). 5. James R. Scobie and Samuel L. Baily, Secondary Cities of Argentina: The Social History of Corrientes, Salta, and Mendoza, 1850–1910 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 6. Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970); Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 7. David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 8. Marcello Carmagnani, Formación y crisis de un sistema feudal: América Latina del siglo XVI a nuestros días, 1st ed. (México, D. F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1976); Ernst Halperin, The Problem of Feudalism in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1967).

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9. Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 10. Kenneth P. Serbin, “Priests, Celibacy, and Social Conflict: A History of Brazil’s Clergy and Seminaries” (PhD diss., University of California–San Diego, 1993). 11. Austen Ivereigh, The Politics of Religion in an Age of Revival: Studies in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Latin America, Nineteenth-Century Latin America Series, no. 5 (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000). 12. Manuel Vicuña Urrutía, La belle époque chilena: alta sociedad y mujeres de elite en el cambio de siglo (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Sudamericana, 2001). 13. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Mexico at the World’s Fairs: Crafting a Modern Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 14. Clorinda Matto de Turner, Aves sin nido (México, D.F.: Editorial Oasis, 1981). 15. Dain Borges, “Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880–1940,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 2 (1993). 16. Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 17. Verena Stolcke, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba; a Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (London; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 18. W.T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1969); Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 19. José Luis Romero, A History of Argentine Political Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963); Leopoldo Zea, El positivismo en México: nacimiento, apogeo y decadencia, 1st ed. (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1968); Leopoldo Zea, The Latin-American Mind (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963). 20. Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 21. Tim Gray, The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer: Individualism and Organicism, Avebury Series in Philosophy (Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1996); Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State: With Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1981); Herbert Spencer and Stanislav Andreski, Principles of Sociology, abridged ed. (London: Macmillan, 1969); William Sweet, “Herbert Spencer (1820–1903),” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. James Fieser and Bradley Downden (Martin, TN, 2008).

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22. Peter DeShazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902–1927 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Stephen H. Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment: The Industrialization of Mexico, 1890–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson, “Working Women of Santiago: Gender and Social Transformation in Urban Chile, 1887–1927” (PhD diss., University of California–Berkeley, 1995); Susie S. Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879–1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003). 23. Rae Lesser Blumberg, ed., EnGENDERing Wealth and Well-Being: Empowerment for Global Change, Latin America in Global Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995). 24. Alvaro Góngora Escobar, La prostitución en Santiago, 1813–1931: Visión de las elites (Santiago, Chile: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 1994); Donna J. Guy, Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1991), Bliss, 2001 #1236. 25. Charles W. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Brian Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor in Chile, 1919–1973 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). 26. James R. Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 27. David Rock, Politics in Argentina, 1890–1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 154. 28. James R. Scobie, Argentina: A City and a Nation, 1st ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); James R. Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas; A Social History of Argentine Wheat, 1860–1910 (Austin: Latin American Studies, University of Texas Press, 1964). 29. Michael Johns, “Industrial Capital and Economic Development in Turn of the Century Argentina,” Economic Geography 68, no. 7 (1992), 190. 30. George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980). 31. David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 166. 32. Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Samuel L. Baily and F. Ramella, One Family, Two Worlds: An Italian Family’s Correspondence across the Atlantic, 1901–1922 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Guy, Sex & Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina; Jose C. Moya,

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Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Hilda Sabato, The Many and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 33. Eugene F. Sofer, From Pale to Pampa: A Social History of the Jews of Buenos Aires (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982). 34. Donald S. Castro, The Argentine Tango as Social History, 1880–1955: The Soul of the People (San Francisco: E. Mellen Press, 1990); Simon Collier, Tango: The Dance, the Song, the Story (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Ricardo García Blaya, “Todo Tango” (Todotango, Argentina, 1999), http://www.todotango.com/english/main.html; J.M. Taylor, Paper Tangos (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 35. James Joll, The Anarchists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964). Staff of the Anarchist International, “Anarchist International Information Service,” (Anarchist International, Switzerland, 1996). 36. Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 16. 37. Richard J. Walter, The Province of Buenos Aires and Argentine Politics, 1912–1943 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 38. David Rock, State Building and Political Movements in Argentina, 1860–1916 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 39. Carlos Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 1820–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Christian Suter, Debt Cycles in the World Economy: Foreign Loans, Financial Crises, and Debt Settlements, 1820–1990 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); L.S. Presnell, “Gold Reserves, Banking Reserves, and the Baring Crisis of 1890,” ed. C.R. Whittlesey and J.S.G. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 40. David Rock, Politics in Argentina, 1880–1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 41. Hebe Noemí Campanella, La generación del 80: su influencia en la vida cultural Argentina (Buenos Aires: Editorial Tekné, 1983); Alfredo Díaz de Molina, La oligarquía argentina: su filiación y régimen, 1840–1898 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Astrea, 1972); Karen L. Remmer, Party Competition in Argentina and Chile: Political Recruitment and Public Policy, 1890–1930 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1984); Ricardo E. Rodríguez Molas, Vida cotidiana de la oligarquía argentina (1880–1890) (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1988). 42. Carl E. Solberg, The Prairies and the Pampas: Agrarian Policy in Canada and Argentina, 1880–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). 43. Peter H. Smith, Politics and Beef in Argentina; Patterns of Conflict and Change (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).

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44. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). 45. E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798–1858 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Erick Detlef Langer, Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 46. Richard Collier, The River That God Forgot; the Story of the Amazon Rubber Boom (New York: Dutton, 1968); Emilio Kourí, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 47. Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934, Pitt Latin American Series (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986). 48. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Peter L. Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco; Modernization without Change, 1840–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 49. George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 50. Eduardo Posada-Carbó, The Colombian Caribbean: A Regional History, 1870–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 51. Charles W. Bergquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978). 52. René De La Pedraja Tomán, Wars of Latin America, 1899–1941 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2006). 53. Manuel Arturo Claps and Mario Daniel Lamas, El batllismo como ideología (Montevideo: Cal y Canto, 1999); Christine Ehrick, The Shield of the Weak: Feminism and the State in Uruguay, 1903–1933 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Milton I. Vanger, José Batlle y Ordoñez of Uruguay; the Creator of His Times, 1902–1907 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Milton I. Vanger, The Model Country: José Batlle y Ordoñez of Uruguay, 1907–1915 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press, 1980). 54. Carmagnani, Formación y crisis de un sistema feudal; Halperin, The Problem of Feudalism in Latin America. 55. Carlos A. Forment, Democracy in Latin America, 1760–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003); Fernando López-Alves, State

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Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 56. Borges, “Puffy, Ugly, Slothful, and Inert.” 57. Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999); Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 58. Oscar Bermúdez Miral, Historia del salitre: desde la Guerra del Pacífico hasta la revolución de 1891 (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Pampa Desnuda, 1984); Harold Blakemore, British Nitrates and Chilean Politics, 1886–1896: Balmaceda and North, Institute of Latin American Studies monographs, 4 (London: Athlone Press for the Institute of Latin American Studies, 1974); Fernando Bravo Valdivieso, Francisco Bulnes Serrano, and Gonzalo Vial Correa, Balmaceda y la guerra civil (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Fundación, 1991); Manuel A. Fernández, Technology and British Nitrate Enterprises in Chile, 1880–1914, report no. 34 (Glasgow: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Glasgow, 1981); Michael Monteón, Chile in the Nitrate Era: The Evolution of Economic Dependence, 1880–1930 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); Thomas F. O’Brien, The Nitrate Industry and Chile’s Crucial Transition, 1870–1891 (New York: New York University Press, 1982); Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Balmaceda y la contrarevolución de 1891, 2nd ed. (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1969); Marcelo Segall, Desarrollo del capitalismo en Chile; cinco ensayos dialécticos, 1st ed. (Santiago de Chile, 1953); Maurice Zeitlin, The Civil Wars in Chile, or the Bourgeois Revolutions That Never Were (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 59. Julio César Jobet, Luis Emilio Recabarren: Los orígenes del movimiento obrero y del socialismo chilenos (Santiago de Chile: Prensa Latinoamericana, 1955); Michael Monteón, “Luis Emilio Recabarren y los orígenes de la izquierda chilena,” in Movimientos sociales en la Argentina, Brasil y Chile, 1880–1930, ed. María del Carmen Arnaiz (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Fundación Simon Rodríguez, 1995); Luis Emilio Recabarren, El pensamiento de Luis Emilio Recabarren (Santiago, Chile: Austral, 1971); Miguel Silva, Recabarren y el socialismo (Santiago, Chile: M. Silva, 1992). 60. Góngora Escobar, La prostitución en Santiago, 1813–1931; Elizabeth Q. Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930, Latin America Otherwise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). 61. Holger H. Herwig, Germany’s Vision of Empire in Venezuela, 1871–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

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62. Charles Johnson Post, “The Lighter Side of Life in Castro’s Land,” New York Times, Oct. 25, 1908. 63. José Ramón López Gómez, Don Cipriano y la restauradora (Valencia, Venezuela: Dirección de Medios y Publicaciones, Universidad de Carabobo, 2001); Mariano Picón-Salas, Los días de Cipriano Castro: historia venezolana del 1900 (Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1986). 64. Isidro Fabela, Las doctrinas Monroe y Drago (México, D.F.: Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 1957); Gerardo Bra, La doctrina Drago (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de America Latina, 1990). 65. Serge Ricard, “The Roosevelt Corollary,” Presidential Studies 36, no. 1 (2006); Peter Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.–Latin American Relations, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 36. 66. Theodore Roosevelt, “Fifth Annual Message,” ed. President’s Office (Washington GPO, December 5, 1905). 67. B.S. McBeth, Juan Vicente Gómez and the Oil Companies in Venezuela, 1908–1935 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 68. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993), 24–25; Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 69. George Black, The Good Neighbor: How the U.S. Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean, A New Look History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 70. Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 71. The classic indictment of U.S. conduct remains; see Philip Sheldon Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895–1902 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). There is a vast bibliography on this subject; for example, see Jim Milio et al., Remember the Maine (New York: A&E Home Video, Distributed in the U.S. by New Video Group, 1997), video recording; John L. Offner, An Unwanted War: The Diplomacy of the United States and Spain over Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898, Envisioning Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For expressions of Cuban resentments, see Eliades Acosta Matos, Los colores secretos del imperio, 2nd ed., corr. y aum. (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2003); Raúl Izquierdo Canosa, El despojo de un triunfo, 1898 (Ciudad de La Habana: Ediciones Verde Olivo, 1998). 72. Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 61. 73. Bill Albert and Paul Henderson, South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile

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(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988); P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914–1990 (London: Longman, 1993). 74. David Joslin, A Century of Banking in Latin America: To Commemorate the Centenary in 1962 of the Bank of London & South America Limited (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); D.C.M. Platt, Business Imperialism, 1840–1930: An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Clarendon Press, 1977). 75. John M. Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 76. Thomas F. O’Brien, The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 77. Jonathan C. Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Jonathan C. Brown and Alan Knight, The Mexican Petroleum Industry in the Twentieth Century, Symposia on Latin America Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); McBeth, Juan Vicente Gómez and the Oil Companies in Venezuela, 1908–1935.

CHAPTER 3 REVOLUTIONS AND MODERNIZATION, 1910–1955 1. Jacques Lambert, Le Brésil; structure sociale et institutions politiques (Paris: A. Colin, 1953). Translated fifteen years later as: Jacques Lambert, Latin America: Social Structure and Political Institutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 2. Barry Carr, “Mill Occupations and Soviets: The Mobilisation of Sugar Workers in Cuba 1917–1933,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 1 (1996), 129–158. 3. Michael Monteón, Chile and the Great Depression: The Politics of Underdevelopment, 1927–1948 (Tempe: Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1998). 4. José Luis Torres, La década infame; 1930–1940 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Freeland, 1973). 5. Monteón, Chile and the Great Depression, 73–91. 6. Michael L. Conniff, Latin American Populism in Comparative Perspective, 1st ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); Michael L. Conniff, Populism in Latin America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999). 7. Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

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8. Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 9. Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 10. Latin American Centre at Oxford University (OxLAD), “Oxford Latin American Economic History Database” (Oxford University, 2008). 11. Jorge G. Castañeda, Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen, trans. Padraic Arthur Smithies (New York: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2000). 12. Diane E. Davis, Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 13. Wayne A. Cornelius and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Migration and Development Study Group, The Impact of Cityward Migration on Urban Land and Housing Markets: Problems and Policy Alternatives in Mexico City (Cambridge MA: Migration and Development Study Group, Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1975). 14. Gustavo Garza, “El proceso de industrialización en la ciudad de México (1821–1970): Condiciones generales de la producción y concentración espacial en el capitalismo,” 2 vols. (México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, PhD diss., 1983), II: 208. 15. Leopoldo Solís M., La realidad económica mexicana; retrovisión y perspectivas, 3 vols. 1st ed. (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1981), III.1. The data has been modified to 1950 values. 16. Garza, “El proceso de industrialización en la ciudad de México (1821–1970),” II: 206–209. 17. Jeffrey Lawrence Bortz, “Industrial Wages in Mexico City, 1939–1975,” (PhD diss., Berkeley, University of California, 1984), 359–363. 18. Jonathan Kandell, La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1988), 498. 19. Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priista, 1940–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 20. Raymond Vernon, The Dilemma of Mexico’s Development: The Roles of the Private and Public Sectors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 105. 21. John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958). Although the book opened a discussion of the middle class in Latin America, it was fundamentally wrong in its description and premises about that class.

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22. There is an excellent collection of photographs of the city’s evolution in Memoria de la Ciudad de México: cien años, 1850–1950, (México, D.F.: CONACULTA-INAH, 2004). One of them involves the Tonga dancer. 23. Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad, Ediciones Cuadernos Americanos, 16 (México, D.F.: Cuadernos Americanos, 1950). Translated as: Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico (New York: Grove Press, 1961). The work won Paz the Nobel Prize in 1990. 24. Carlos Fuentes, La región más transparente, 3rd ed. (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1960). Translated as: Carlos Fuentes, Where the Air Is Clear: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960). 25. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, 1st ed. (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955). Tranlated as: Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo: A Novel of Mexico, 1st Grove Weidenfeld Evergreen ed. (New York: Grove Weidenfeld Evergreen, 1990). 26. Daniel Cosío Villegas et al., Historia moderna de México (México, D.F.: Editorial Hermes, 1955). 27. Alan Gilbert, The Latin American City, 2nd ed. (London: Latin American Bureau, 1998), 80. 28. Oscar Lewis, Five Families; Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959). 29. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad. 30. Alan Gilbert, Latin American Development: A Geographical Perspective (London: Penguin, 1974). 31. Charles Ramírez Berg, “El automóvil gris and the Advent of Mexican Classicism,” in Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 84–85, 103. 32. Carl J. Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–1980 (Berkeley: University of California, 1982), 76. See also John King, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America, new ed. (London: Verso, 2000), 129–144; and Alberto Elena and Marina Díaz López, The Cinema of Latin America (London: Wallflower Press, 2004). 33. King, Magical Reels, 130–131. 34. Maximiliano Maza, “Más de Cien Años de Cine Mexicano,” México, D.F., Anexos, 2006. 35. G. Richard McKelvey, Mexican Raiders in the Major Leagues: The Pasquel Brothers vs. Organized Baseball, 1946 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006). 36. David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football (London: Viking, 2006), 28–44; Stephen Wagg, The Football World: A Contemporary Social History (London: The Harvester Press, 1984), 3–8.

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37. Robert McCaa, “Missing Millions: The Demographic Costs of the Mexican Revolution,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 19, no. 2 (2003), 367–400. 38. Basic surveys of the revolution include: Adolfo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution (New York: The New Press, 2005); Michael J. Gonzales, The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1940 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002); John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, The Great Rebellion: Mexico, 1905–1924 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982). 39. Paul Garner, Porfirio Díaz (London: Pearson Education Limited, 2001). 40. Aside from surveys of the revolution, see Juan Gómez Quiñones, Porfirio Díaz, los intelectuales y la Revolución, 1st ed. (México, D.F: Ediciones El Caballito, 1981); Jorge Fernando Iturribarría, Porfirio Díaz ante la historia (México, D.F: [s.n.], 1967); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933). 41. Paul J. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development, 2nd ed. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992). 42. Edward Wright-Rios, “Piety and Progress: Vision, Shrine, and Society in Oaxaca, 1887–1934” (PhD diss., University of California–San Diego, 2004). 43. Raymond B. Craib, Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 44. John Kenneth Turner, Sinclair Snow, and ACLS Humanities E-Book, Barbarous Mexico, 2nd ed. (University of Texas Press, 1969), available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.02804 through ACLS Humanities E-Book Project. 45. Romana Falcón, “Jefes políticos y rebeliones campesinas: Uso y abuso del poder en el Estado de México,” in Patterns of Contention in Mexican History, ed. Jaime E. Rodriguez O. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992). 46. Daniel Lewis, Iron Horse Imperialism: The Southern Pacific of Mexico, 1880–1951 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008). 47. François-Xavier Guerra, México: Del antiguo régimen a la revolución, trans. Sergio Fernández Bravo, 2 vols. (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988). 48. Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, The People of Sonora and Yankee Capitalists (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988); Miguel Tinker Salas, In the

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Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border during the Porfiriato (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 49. Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 50. Samuel Brunk, Emiliano Zapata: Revolution & Betrayal in Mexico, 1st ed. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); John Womack Jr., “The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920,” in Mexico since Independence, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 51. John Lear, “Mexico City: Popular Classes and Revolutionary Politics,” in Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930, ed. Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens: The Revolution in Mexico City (Lincoln, NE; London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Labor and the Ambivalent Revolutionaries: Mexico, 1911–1923 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 52. Hector Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican Revolution: Contemporary Mexican History, 1910–1989, trans. Luis Alberto Fierro (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 34–35. For his defenders, see Michael C. Meyer and Richard E. Greenleaf, Huerta; a Political Portrait (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972); William L. Sherman, Victoriano Huerta; a Reappraisal (México, D.F.: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos, 1958), microform. 53. John M. Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 54. My own experience reading documents in Gobernación, in Archivo General de la Nación, México, D.F. 55. Dr. Antonio Rafael de la Cova, “1917 Constitution of Mexico” (1997). 56. John Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1914). 57. David C. Bailey, ¡Viva Cristo Rey! The Cristero Rebellion and the Church-State Conflict in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974); Christopher R. Boyer, Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920–1935 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Jean A. Meyer, La cristiada, 2nd ed. (México, D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1974). 58. Doheny was quite the character. He had bribed the secretary of the interior to drill for oil in a national park in 1922, which became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. Upton Sinclair wrote a novel, Oil! (1927), based

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on him, and it became a movie in 2008, There Will Be Blood. See film review in The New York Times, October 17, 2008. 59. AGN196, “Aurelio Posada, Comisario Ejidal de la Cuchilla (Municipio de Muzquiz, Coahuila) al C. Presidente de la República, Gral D. Láza Cárdenas,” (2/127.1(3)27163, vol. 7, 27 Junio 1938). AGN is the Archivo General de la Nación. 60. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 61. The best such adaptation is Jeffery M. Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). See also Maurice Zeitlin and Richard Earl Ratcliff, Landlords & Capitalists: The Dominant Class of Chile (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 62. J. Samuel Valenzuela, “Class Relations and Democratization: A Reassessment of Barrington Moore’s Model,” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, ed. Miguel Angel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 245. 63. Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 459. 64. Ibid., 71. 65. Ibid., 430–431. 66. The best explanation of these complexities is still Albert O. Hirschman, Journeys toward Progress; Studies of Economic Policy-Making in Latin America (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1963). 67. Benjamin Higgins, “The City and Economic Development,” in The Urban Explosion in Latin America: A Continent in Process of Modernization, ed. Glenn H. Beyer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 121. 68. Economic Commission for Latin America United Nations and Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems, original in 1949 Spanish ed. (Lake Success, NY: United Nations, 1950); Prebisch (1901–1986) was closely associated with development studies in the United Nations, where he founded CEPAL (Comisión Económica para América Latina—that is, the Commission for Latin American Economic Development). 69. Thomas Childs Cochran and Ruben E. Reina, Capitalism in Argentine Culture: A Study of Torcuato Di Tella and S. I. A. M (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); Carlos Federico Díaz Alejandro, Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic (New Haven, CT: Economic Growth Center, Yale University Press, 1970); Jo-Anne Vogt, Argentina: Rapid Industrialization and Political Instability, 1930–1945 ([s.l.: s.n.], 1967). 70. Some of the best studies of early industry have involved women workers: Elizabeth Q. Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex:

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Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Asunción Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Susie S. Porter, Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879–1931 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003). 71. Díaz Alejandro, Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic. 72. Higgins, “The City and Economic Development,” 126. 73. The best illustration of this bargain is Brian Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor in Chile, 1919–1973 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975). 74. Díaz Alejandro, Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic, 58. 75. Torres, La década infame. 76. Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 63–96. 77. David Rock, “War and Postwar Intersections: Latin America and the United States,” in Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions, ed. David Rock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 29. 78. The importance of protective policies in reshaping Peronist Argentina is clear in Carlos H. Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina: Postwar Counterrevolutionary Policies and Their Structural Consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 79. Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in the Dominican Republic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 80. Translated as “House Taken Over,” see Julio Cortázar, “House Taken Over,” in The Argentine Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Gabriela Nouzeilles and Graciela Montaldo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 81. Robert J. Alexander, Juan Domingo Perón: A History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1979); Robert D. Crassweller, Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987); Frederick C. Turner and José Enrique Miguens, eds., Juan Perón and the Reshaping of Argentina (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983). 82. Alexander, Juan Domingo Perón, 30. 83. Paul H. Lewis, “Was Perón a Fascist? An Inquiry into the Nature of Fascism,” Journal of Politics 42, no. 1 (Feb. 1980), 242–256. 84. Richard J. Walter, “The Right and the Peronists, 1943–1955,” in The Argentine Right: Its History and Intellectual Origins, 1910 to the Present, ed. Sandra McGee Deutsch and Ronald H. Dolkhart (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1993), 115.

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85. David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 255. 86. Ronald Munck, Ricardo Falcón, and Bernardo Galitelli, Argentina from Anarchism to Peronism (London: Zed Books, 1987), 124. 87. Gino Germani, Política y sociedad en una época de transición (Buenos Aires: Editorial Paídos, 1962). 88. Jeremy Adelman, “Reflections on Argentine Labour and the Rise of Perón,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 11, no. 3 (Sept. 1992), 252–253. 89. Crassweller, Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina, 160–162. 90. Joel Horowitz, Argentine Unions, the State & the Rise of Perón, 1930–1945 (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California–Berkeley, 1990); Juan Carlos Torre, La Vieja Guardia Sindical Y Perón: Sobre Los Orígenes Del Peronismo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, 1990). 91. Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro, Eva Perón (London: André Deutsch, 1980). 92. Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 93. Winthrop R. Wright, British-Owned Railways in Argentina: Their Effect on the Growth of Economic Nationalism, 1854–1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 258–260. 94. Christina Alvarez Rodríguez, “Evita Perón Historial Research Foundation,” Buenos Aires, Argentina, FIHEP, 2008. 95. J.M. Taylor, Eva Peron: The Myths of a Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 96. Associated Press, “Peron Backers Celebrate Re-election in Argentina,” St. Petersburg Times, Nov. 13, 1951. 97. Gary W. Wynia, Argentina in the Postwar Era (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 66. 98. Munck, Falcón, and Galitelli, Argentina from Anarchism to Peronism, 138. 99. Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas Press, 1969). 100. Jordan M. Young, The Brazilian Revolution of 1930 and the Aftermath (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), 85. 101. Michael Monteón, “Fiscal Crisis and Regime Survival in Latin America: Chile and Mexico in the Great Crash, 1924–1934,” Berkeley, All University Group in Economic History, 1994. 102. Joseph L. Love, “Political Participation in Brazil, 1881–1969,” Luso-Brazilian Review 7, no. 2 (1970), 16.

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103. Michael L. Conniff, Urban Politics in Brazil: The Rise of Populism, 1925–1945 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 106–107. 104. George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 153–156. 105. John W.F. Dulles, Sobral Pinto, “The Conscience of Brazil”: Leading the Attack against Vargas (1930–1945), 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). 106. R.S. Rose, One of the Forgotten Things: Getulio Vargas and Brazilian Social Control, 1930–1954 (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 2000). 107. Frank D. McCann, The Brazilian-American Alliance, 1937–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). 108. Miriam Elizabeth Riggs, “There’s Room for Everyone: Tourism and Tradition in Salvador’s Historic District, 1930 to the Present” (PhD diss., University of California–San Diego, 2008). 109. Videos of her performances are on the Internet, including at http://www.youtube.com. 110. Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba, 1st Vintage Departures ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 111. Josué de Castro, Death in the Northeast: Poverty and Revolution in the Northeast of Brazil (New York: Vintage, 1966), 24. 112. Mário Henrique Simonsen, “Inflation and the Money and Capital Markets of Brazil,” in The Economy of Brazil, ed. Howard S. Ellis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 136. 113. Jesús Chavarría, José Carlos Mariátegui and the Rise of Modern Peru, 1890–1930 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979), 51–70. 114. José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, Texas Pan-American Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971); José Carlos Mariátegui, Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Colección Literatura Latinoamericana (La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1973). 115. Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality, 27. 116. Marcela Calisto, “Peasant Resistance in the Aymara Districts of the Highlands of Peru, 1900–1930: An Attempt at Self-Governance” (PhD diss., University of California–San Diego, 1993). 117. Chavarría, José Carlos Mariátegui and the Rise of Modern Peru, 118. 118. D.S. Parker, The Idea of the Middle Class: White-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900–1950 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 171–178. 119. Carol Graham, Peru’s APRA: Parties, Politics, and the Elusive Quest for Democracy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 24–36.

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120. Thomas M. Davies, Indian Integration in Peru; a Half Century of Experience, 1900–1948 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974). 121. Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1967); Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 122. Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitan: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 68; Richard E. Sharpless, Gaitan of Colombia: A Political Biography (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), 71–89. 123. Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 113. 124. Forrest Hylton, Evil Hour in Colombia (London: Verso, 2006), 30–46. 125. Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence, 136. 126. Gonzalo Sánchez and Donny Meertens, Bandits, Peasants, and Politics: The Case of “La Violencia” in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 173–191. 127. Jenny Pearce, Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth (London: Latin American Bureau Limited, 1990), 54–66. 128. Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 9, 236. 129. Mark Everington, Revolution and the Multiclass Coalition in Nicaragua (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 103. 130. There are numerous works on the postwar era and Latin America; some of the best are Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993), 87–99; Peter Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.–Latin American Relations, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 131. Herbert S. Klein, “Prelude to the Revolution,” in Beyond the Revolution: Bolivia since 1952, ed. James M. Malloy and Richard S. Thorn (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 40–43. 132. Waltaud Queiser Morales, Bolivia: Land of Struggle (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 56. 133. Klein, “Prelude to the Revolution,” 33–35. 134. Christopher Mitchell, The Legacy of Populism in Bolivia: From the MNR to Military Rule (New York: Praeger, 1977), 33. 135. James M. Malloy, “Revolutionary Politics,” in Beyond the Revolution: Bolivia since 1952, ed. James M. Malloy and Richard S. Thorn (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 118–138. 136. James M. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 191.

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137. Morales, Bolivia, 79. 138. Richard S. Thorn, “The Economic Transformation,” in Beyond the Revolution: Bolivia since 1952, ed. James M. Malloy and Richard S. Thorn (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), 196. 139. Morales, Bolivia, 86. 140. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 76–80. 141. Paul H. Lewis, Authoritarian Regimes in Latin America: Dictators, Despots and Tyrants (New York: Rowman & Littlefied Publishers, 2005), 155–172. 142. The best accounts of all this remain Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 85–116; Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, 1st ed., The Texas Pan American Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982); Stephen C. Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Anchor Books ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). 143. Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 64–71. 144. Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 200–219. 145. Gleijeses, Shattered Hope, 334–344; LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 125–127.

CHAPTER 4 MODERN LIFE AND MODERN CONFLICTS, 1956–1985 1. See the reflections of Jotabeche, Chile’s famous columnist of the midnineteenth century; José Joaquín Vallejo, Sketches of Life in Chile, 1841–1851, trans. Frederick H. Fornoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 2. As an example, see Javier Martínez and Alvaro Díaz, Chile: The Great Transformation (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1996). 3. Juan Gabriel Valdés, Pinochet’s Economists : The Chicago School in Chile, Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 156. 4. Nor have such attitudes ceased. In late 2008, the University of Chicago founded the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics despite outcries from those concerned with human rights. See the University’s Web site and Kurt Jacobsen, “Milton Friedman Gives Chicago a Headache,” The Guardian, August 26, 2008. 5. World Bank figures cited in Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, Chile under Pinochet: A Nation of Enemies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 194.

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6. Joseph Collins and John Lear, Chile’s Free Market Miracle: A Second Look (Oakland, CA: A Food First Book, 1995), 65. 7. Phil O’Brien and Jackie Roddick, Chile: The Pinochet Decade. The Rise and Fall of the Chicago Boys (London: Latin American Bureau, 1983), 72–73. 8. Corporación José Domingo Cañas, Tortura en poblaciones del Gran Santiago (1973–1990): Colecivo de memoria histórica, 1 ed. (Santiago, Chile: Corporación José Domingo Cañas, 2005). 9. David R. Mares and Francisco Rojas Aravena, The United States and Chile: Coming in from the Cold (New York: Routledge, 2001), 12–14. 10. Mary Helen Spooner, Soldiers in Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 184. 11. Philip D. Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 229. 12. Cathy Lisa Schneider, Shantytown Protest in Pinochet’s Chile (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), 158. 13. Genero Arriagada, Pinochet: The Politics of Power, trans. Nancy Morries, Vincent Ercolano, and Kristen A. Whitney (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 66. 14. Michael Monteón, Chile and the Great Depression: The Politics of Underdevelopment, 1927–1948 (Tempe: Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1998). 15. Patrick Barr-Melej, Reforming Chile: Cultural Policies, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Paul Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932–1952 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures & the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 16. Theodore H. Moran, Multinational Corporations and the Politics of Dependence: Copper in Chile (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 17. Jere R. Behrman, Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: Chile (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 176–177; Markos Mamalakis and Clark Winton Reynold, Essays on the Chilean Economy (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1965), 240–267. 18. Michael Fleet, The Rise and Fall of Chilean Christian Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 19. There are numerous accounts of the 1970 election; one of the best is still that written during it: Richard E. Feinberg, The Triumph Of Allende: Chile’s Legal Revolution (New York: New American Library, 1972). 20. Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile (London: Verso, 2005), 49–51.

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21. United States, Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963–1973: Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1975). 22. Margaret Powers, Right-wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964–1973 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 23. J. Ann Zammit, ed., The Chilean Road to Socialism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973). 24. Still the best analysis of economic policies and outcomes is Stefan deVylder, Allende’s Chile: The Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Unidad Popular (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 25. Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 26. Barbara Stallings, Class Conflict and Economic Development in Chile, 1958–1973 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 145–151. 27. Florencia E. Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolas Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001, Radical Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 28. Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood. 29. Haslam, The Nixon Administration, 20. 30. There are many memoirs of the dictatorship. Most notable are Sergio Bitar, Isla 10, 1a ed. (Santiago, Chile: Pehuén, 1987); Herlado Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow: A Political Memoir (New York: Basic Books, 2008). See also Steve Stern’s works on how the dictatorship is recalled by competing factions: Battling for Hearts and Minds : Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988, Latin America Otherwise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London, 1998, Latin America Otherwise: Language, Empires, Nations (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 31. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2007), 62. 32. Wolfgang Lutz and Ren Qiang, “Determinants of Human Population Growth,” The Royal Society 357, no. 1425 (Aug. 2002), 1197–1198. 33. The best single study of Latin American demography is José Miguel Guzmán, et al., “The Demography of Latin America and the Caribbean since 1950,” Institut National d’Études Démographiques 61, no. 5/6 (Sept.–Dec. 2006), 529, 546. 34. See age pyramids in ibid., 554–558.

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35. Tinsman, Partners in Conflict. 36. Michael R. Candelaria, Popular Religion and Liberation: The Dilemma of Liberation Theology, SUNY Series in Religion, Culture, and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People: The Struggle for Human Rights in Latin America—The Catholic Church in Conflict with U.S. Policy (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). 37. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1973). 38. Michael Fleet and Brian H. Smith, The Catholic Church and Democracy in Chile and Peru (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 116–118. 39. R. Scott Appleby, “Pope John Paul II,” Foreign Affairs, no. 119 (Summer 2000), 16–18. 40. Camilo Torres, Revolutionary Priest: The Complete Writings and Messages of Camilo Torres, ed. John Gerassi (New York: Vintage Press, 1971). 41. Roger N. Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 171–172. 42. Michael Dodson and Laura Nuzzy O’Shaughnessy, Nicaragua’s Other Revolution: Religious Faith and Political Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 110. 43. Roger N. Lancaster, Thanks to God and the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 65, 179–181. 44. Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde, “The Progressive Church in Latin America: An Interpretation,” eds. Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1989), 15. 45. David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America (London: Blackwell, 1990); David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 46. Anthony James Gill, Rendering unto Caesar: The Catholic Church and the State in Latin America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 143, 79–85. 47. Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Random House, 1961). 48. Marcela Cerruti and Rodolfo Bertoncello, “Urbanization and Internal Migration Patterns in Latin America” (paper presented at the African Migration in Comparative Perspective, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2003), 3–7. 49. Robert McCaa, Marriage and Fertility in Chile: Demographic Turning Points in the Petorca Valley, 1840–1976 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983).

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50. John Sillevis, The Baroque World of Fernando Botero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 51. Leonidad Morales T., Violeta Parra: la útima canción (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propria, 2003). 52. Omar Jurado and Juan Miguel Morales, El Chile de Victor Jara (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2003). 53. Valerie Frasier, Building for the New World: Studies in the Modern Architecture of Latin America, 1930–1960 (London: Verso, 2000). 54. Easily one of the best studies of any Latin American city, James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 110. Along the same lines but written much earlier, see David G Epstein, Brasília, Plan and Reality: A Study of Planned and Spontaneous Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 55. Vivian Schelling, “Popular Culture in Latin America,” in Modern Latin American Culture, ed. John King (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 186–190. 56. Sam Quinones, True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2001), 69. 57. Carlos Waisman, expert on Argentina, Sociology Department, U.C. San Diego. 58. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message (New York: Bantam Books, 1967); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 59. Salvador Allende, “Salvador Allende’s Last Speech,” (Wikisource: Speeches, 2009). 60. Luis E. Aguilar, Cuba 1933: Prologue to Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 230–247; Louis A. Pérez, Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy, 2nd ed., The United States and the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997); Ramón Eduardo Ruiz, Cuba: The Making of a Revolution (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968). 61. Sebastian Balfour, Castro, 3rd ed. (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2009); K.S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, 1st ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1970); Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Hugh Thomas, The Cuban Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 62. Collected as Ernesto Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, trans. J.P. Morray (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 83, 197. 63. The best description of the varied nature of those struggling against Batista comes from a series of oral histories, John Dorschner and Roberto

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Fabricio, The Winds of December (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980). 64. Herbert L. Matthews, A World in Revolution: A Newspaperman’s Memoirs (New York: Scribner, 1972). 65. Jules R. Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 146–153. 66. Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered: Envisioning Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 168. 67. Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173–182. 68. Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 69. Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Norman Polmar, Defcon-2: Standing on the Brink of Nuclear War during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006). 70. Yuri Pavlov, Soviet-Cuban Alliance, 1959–1991 (Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers for the North-South Center, University of Miami, 1994), 45. The work is uniformly hostile to Castro but uses Russian and Cuban sources; the quote is from Granma. 71. Mervyn J. Bain, Soviet-Cuban Relations, 1985 to 1991: Changing Perceptions in Moscow and Havana (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007). 72. The Kennedy address is on Universal-International News, “Peace Corps, Kennedy Outlines Program,” (YouTube, March 13, 1961). 73. L. Ronald Scheman, ed., The Alliance for Progress: A Retrospective (New York: Praeger, 1988). 74. Jeffrey F Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York: Routledge, 2007). 75. A still very useful study from an insider’s point of view, Teresa Hayter, Aid as Imperialism (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971). 76. Lesley Gill, The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 77. Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 214–215. 78. Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 79. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 14. 80. Jonathon P. Lane, “Isolation and Public Opinion in Rural Northeast Brazil,” Public Opinion Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1969).

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81. Peter Kornbluh, “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup,” The National Security Archive, no. 1-7 (2009), http://www.gwu.edu/ ~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/index.htm. 82. W. Michael Weis, Cold Warriors & Coups D’etat: BrazilianAmerican Relations, 1945–1964 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 166. 83. Jan Knippers Black, United States Penetration of Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). 84. Both men, hated by the Brazilian military, were killed as part of “Operation Condor,” an alliance of anticommunist dictatorships in South America. 85. Thomas E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 138–140. 86. Thomas E. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil, 1964–85 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). 87. Susan Eckstein, ed., Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 88. Nelson A. Rockefeller, Rockefeller Report on Latin America (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969). 89. Carlos Fuentes, A New Time for Mexico, trans. Marina Gutman Castañeda, first paperback ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 90. José Nun, “The Middle-class Military Coup,” in The Politics of Conformity in Latin America, ed. Claudio Veliz (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 91. Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 92. John Sheahan, Patterns of Development in Latin America: Poverty, Repression, and Economic Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 85. 93. James W. McGuire, Peronism without Perón: Unions, Parties, and Democracy in Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 94. David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 95. James P. Brennan, The Labor Wars in Córdoba, 1955–1976: Ideology, Work, and Labor Politics in an Argentine Industrial City, Harvard Historical Studies 116 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 96. Richard Gillespie, Soldiers of Perón: Argentina’s Montoneros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

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97. The literature on this topic grows each year; of this sample, the book by Lewis has the advantage of demonstrating the kind of guerrilla violence that provoked the military in the early stages of retaliation; Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Paul H. Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); Mark J. Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Ordinary Evil, and Hannah Arendt: Criminal Consciousness in Argentina’s Dirty War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 98. Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, trans. Toby Talbot (New York: Vintage Books, 1981). 99. George Black, The Good Neighbor: How the U.S. Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean: A New Look History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); Andrew Graham-Yooll, Imperial Skirmishes: War and Gunboat Diplomacy in Latin America (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2002); Kenneth J. Hagan, American Gunboat Diplomacy and the Old Navy, 1877–1889, Contributions in Military History, no. 4 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). The best study of American gunboat diplomacy and its numerous consequences is still Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993). 100. Andrew Crawley, Somoza and Roosevelt: Good Neighbour Diplomacy in Nicaragua, 1933–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Walter Knut, The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Ternot MacRenato, “Somoza: Seizure of Power, 1926–1939,” (PhD diss. University of California–San Diego, 1991). 101. (OxLAD) Latin American Centre at Oxford University, “Oxford Latin American Economic History Database” (Oxford University, 2008). 102. Jeffrey L. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 103. The best description of the early FSLN is Matilde Zimmermann, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Zimmermann argues that the movement later used the memory, not the more revolutionary ideals, of the martyr Fonseca to promote its objectives. 104. Gary Prevost, “The FSLN as Ruling Party,” in Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nicaragua, ed. Thomas W. Walker (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 107; Thomas W. Walker, “The Armed Forces,” in Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nicaragua, ed. Thomas W. Walker (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 103. 105. Mark Everington, Revolution and the Multiclass Coalition in Nicaragua (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 165.

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106. Anthony Lake, Somoza Falling: A Case Study of Washington at Work (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990). 107. Rose J. Spalding, Capitalists and Revolution in Nicaragua (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 146–147. 108. Paul Oquist, “Sociopolitical Dynamics of the 1990 Nicaragua Elections,” in The 1990 Elections in Nicaragua and Their Aftermath, eds. Vanessa Castro and Gary Prevost (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1992), 10. 109. Jon Jonakin, “Agrarian Policy,” in Nicaragua without Illusions: Regime Transition and Structural Adjustment in the 1990s, ed. Thomas W. Walker (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1997), 98. 110. Peter Kornbluh, “The U.S. Role in the Counterrevolution,” in Revolution and Counterrevolution in Nicaragua, ed. Thomas W. Walker (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991), 326. 111. William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977–1992 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 330–332. 112. E. Bradford Burns, At War in Nicaragua: The Reagan Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Harper & Row, 1987); Morris H. Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua: How Washington Constructs Its Case for Counterrevolution in Central America (New York: Institute for Media Analysis, 1987). 113. Holly Sklar, Washington’s War on Nicaragua (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 393. 114. Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 52. 115. While there are a number of books on violence in El Salvador, the best new source is a film by Sante Altizio, Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest (Italy: Filmakers Library, 2008). 116. Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote, 62–84, 136–139. 117. Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, 1st ed., The American Empire Project (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 98. 118. Timothy R. Gulden, “Spatial and Temporal Patterns in Civil Violence: Guatemala, 1977–1986,” Politics and the Life Sciences 21, no. 1 (Mar. 2002). 119. Linda J. Seligmann, Between Reform & Revolution: Political Struggles in the Peruvian Andes, 1969–1991 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 120. Robert Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America: The Supply Side of the Story (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Jacqueline Roddick, The Dance of the Millions: Latin America and the Debt Crisis (London: Latin American Bureau, 1988); Barbara Stallings, Banker to the

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Third World: U.S. Portfolio Investment in Latin America, 1900–1986 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Christian Suter, Debt Cycles in the World-economy: Foreign Loans, Financial Crises, and Debt Settlements, 1820–1990 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992); Rosemary Thorp and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Latin American Debt and the Adjustment Crisis (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987).

CHAPTER 5 LAUNCHED INTO THE PRESENT 1. Associated Press, “Green Garbage Dumps? Mexico City Vows to Try,” (msnbc.com, Jan. 25, 2009). 2. Xavier Navarro, “Volkswagen Brazil Announces the Refreshed Global Gol,” autobloggreen.com, June 26, 2008. 3. Warren Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies by the University of Texas Press, 1969), 36. 4. Steven Topik, “Where is the Coffee? Coffee and Brazilian Identity,” Luso-Brazilian Review 36, no. 2 (Winter 1999), 90. 5. George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 6. Planeta Barsa Ltda. 7. Dean, The Industrialization of São Paulo, 50–80. 8. Martin T. Katzman, “São Paulo and Its Hinterland: Evolving Relationships and the Rise of an Industrial Power,” in Manchester and São Paulo: Problems of Rapid Urban Growth, ed. John D. Wirth and Robert L. Jones (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 117–124. 9. Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 114–180. 10. Lourdes Carril, Quilombo, favela e periferia : a longa busca da cidadania, 1a ed., Geografias e adjacências (São Paulo: ANNABLUME, FAPESP, 2006). 11. Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, trans. David St. Clair (New York: New American Library, 1962). 12. Robert M. Levine, The Cautionary Tale Of Carolina Maria De Jesus (Notre Dame, IN: Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, 1992). 13. Mike David, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 176. 14. Teresa P.R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 46. 15. Ibid., 254.

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16. Ibid., 122, 61–62. 17. Luisa Kroll, The World’s Billionaires (Forbes, Mar. 5, 2008), available from http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/05/richest-people-billionairesbillionaires08-cx_lk_0305billie_land.html. 18. James Petras, “Global Ruling Class: Billionaires and How They ‘Made It,’” Global Research.ca, (Mar. 23, 2007), http://www. globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=PET20070323& articleId=5159. 19. Seth Kugel, “Crazy Nights in São Paulo,” The New York Times, April 5, 2009. 20. Carmen Diana Deere, “Gender, Land Rights, and Rural Social Movements: Regional Differences in the Brazilian Agrarian Reform” (paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association, Washington, DC, 2001), 4–7. 21. Alexie Barrionueve, “As Abuse of Brazil’s Girls Increases, Abortion Debate Flares,” The New York Times, Mar. 28, 2009. 22. Diana DeGroates Brown, Umbanda (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 23. Staff, “Historical Overview of Pentecostalism in Brazil,” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (Feb. 20, 2009). 24. Although based on Rio, the best study of carnival and commercialization is still Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba, 1st Vintage Departures ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 25. Los medios y mercados de Latinoamerica, survey done in 1998, reproduced in Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: An Interpretation of Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933). 26. Janet Lever, Soccer Madness: Brazil’s Passion for the World’s Most Popular Sport (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1995). 27. Statistical Data for FIFA, Previous FIFA World Cups (FIFA.com, 2009); available from http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/archive/. 28. Alex Bellos, Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life (London: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2005). 29. Robert M. Levine, “Elite Perspectives of the Povo,” in Modern Brazil; Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective, ed. Michael L. Conniff and Frank D. McCann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 217. 30. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 31. For example, see Sylvia Ann Hewlett, The Cruel Dilemmas of Development: Twentieth-century Brazil (New York: Basic Books, 1980). The prolific Dr. Hewlett stopped writing works on economic development in order to devote herself to denouncing feminism and the consequences of women working outside the home. 32. The World Bank, “Data and Statistics,” (The World Bank, 2008).

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33. Chia Siow Yue and Chen Yen Yu, “Income Distribution in Singapore,” (2003), http://www.eadn.org/reports/iwebfiles/i08.pdf. 34. Her specific comparison is to Argentina. Diane E. Davis, Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24, 133–138. 35. Heraldo Muñoz, The Dictator’s Shadow: Life under Augusto Pinochet (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 62. 36. Thomas C. Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina and International Human Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 107. 37. Katherine Hite, When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968–1998 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 187. 38. Originally, La casa de los espíritus and De amor y sombra. Isabel Allende, Of Love and Shadows, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1987); Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits, 1st American ed. (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985); Miguel Angel Asturias, El señor presidente, 4. ed., Novelistas de España y América (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1964). 39. Originally, Yo, el supremo; El otoño de patriarca and La fiesta del chivo. Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1st U.S. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Augusto Antonio Roa Bastos, I, the Supreme, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1986); Mario Vargas Llosa, trans. Edith Grossman, The Feast of the Goat, 1st ed. (New York: Picador USA, 2002). 40. Originally, El beso de la mujer araña and Nocturno de Chile. Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions Books, 2003); Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman, 1st American ed. (New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1979). 41. Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number, Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 42. Francisco E. González, Dual Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Institutionalized Regimes in Chile and Mexico, 1970–2000 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 37. 43. Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 44. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). 45. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 46. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006, original 1963).

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47. Staff, “Mexico: Impunity for Past Rights Abuses Continues,” Human Rights Watch (April 4, 2007). 48. Tim Weiner, “Despite New Violence, Prosecutor Presses His Investigation into Mexico’s ‘Dirty War,’” The New York Times, Feb. 23, 2009. 49. Michael A. Meyer, “Liability of Prisoners of War for Offenses Committed prior to Capture: The Aztiz Affair,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 32, no. 4 (Oct. 1983), 952. 50. Iain Guest, Behind the Disappearances: Argentina’s Dirty War Against Human Rights and the United Nations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Nigel A. Rodley, The Treatment of Prisoners under International Law, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28–38, 125. 51. Staff, “World Report 2002, ‘Argentina,’” Human Rights Watch, (2002). 52. Thom Hawkins, “Pinochet’s British Victims,” Remember-Chile, (Jan. 19, 2000). 53. Kim Sengupta and Ian Burrell, “Pinochet Extradition Failure Leave British Taxpayers with 11 Million Pounds Bill,” The Independent, (Jan. 14, 2000). 54. Major works on the trial are, Reed Brody, The Pinochet Papers: The Case of Augusto Pinochet in Spain and Britain (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2000); Marc Cooper, Pinochet and Me (London: Verso, 2002); Ariel Dorfman, Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet (Boston: Open Media, 2003); Naomi RohtArriaza, The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 55. Paulina Rytkonen, Fruits of Capitalism: Modernisation of Chilean Agriculture, 1950–2000 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International, 2004); Heidi Tinsdale, “Reviving Feminist Materialism: Gender and Neoliberalism in Pinochet’s Chile,” Chicago Journals 26 (2000). 56. Janet L. Finn, Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 57. Rose J. Spalding, Capitalists and Revolution in Nicaragua (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 234. 58. Ibid., 98. 59. Roger N. Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 60. Katherine Isbester, Still Fighting: The Nicaraguan Women’s Movement, 1977–2000, Pitt Latin American Series (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 1–9. 61. Florence E. Babb, After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 259.

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62. Nelso Manrique, “La guerra en la región central,” in Los senderos insólitos del Perú, ed. Steven J. Stern (Lima: IEP Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1999), 193; Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Carlos Iván Degregori, and Félix Reátegui Carrillo, Informe final: Perú, 1980–2000 (Lima, Perú: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2004), 17. 63. David Scott Palmer, “Introduction,” in The Shining Path of Peru, ed. David Scott Palmer (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 9. 64. Ton de Wit and Vera Gianotten, “The Center’s Multiple Failures,” in The Shining Path of Peru, ed. David Scott Palmer (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 51–52. 65. Abraham F. Lowenthal, “Peru’s Ambiguous Revolution,” in The Peruvian Experiment: Continuity and Change under Military Rule, ed. Abraham F. Lowenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 23. 66. Francois Bourricard, Power and Society in Contemporary Peru (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1967), 243. A more positive assessment of Belaúnde appears in Christine Hunefeldt, A Brief History of Peru (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2004), 222–228. 67. Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, Peruvian Democracy under Economic Stress: An Account of the Belaúnde Administration, 1963–1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 57. 68. Data on Peru from Latin American Centre at Oxford University (OxLAD), “Oxford Latin American Economic History Database,” (Oxford University, 2008). 69. The best study of the military in power is Alfred C. Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). 70. Oscar Ugarteche, “Peru: The Foreign Debt and Heterodox Adjustment Policy under Alan Garcia,” in Managing World Debt, ed. Stephany Griffith-Jones (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 174. 71. Iván Hinojosa, “Sobre parientes pobres y nuevos ricos: las relaciones entre Sendero Luminoso y la izquierda radical peruana,” in Los sendero insólitos del Perú: guerra y sociedad, 1980–1995, ed. Steve J. Stern (Lima: IEP Instituto de Estudios Peruanos UNSCH Universidad Nacional de San Crisóbal de Huamanga, 1999), 91. 72. Raúl Hopkins, “El impacto del ajuste estructural en el desempeño agrícola,” in El Perú de Fujimori, ed. John Crabtree and Jim Thomas (Lima: Universidad del Pacífico IEP Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1999), 167. 73. Lewis Taylor, Shining Path: Guerrilla War in Peru’s Northern Highlands, 1980–1997 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), 110. 74. Michael L. Smith, “Peru’s President Plans Bank Nationalization,” The Washington Post, July 19, 1987.

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75. John Crabtree, Peru under García: An Opportunity Lost (Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press, 1992), 115–118. The best study of the rondas and the reasons peasants joined them is Miguel La Serna, “The Corner of the Living: Local Power Relations and Indigenous Perceptions in Ayacucho, Peru, 1940–1983” (University of California, San Diego, 2008). 76. Gregory D. Schmidt, “All the President’s Women: Fujimori and Gender Equity in Peruvian Politics,” in The Fujimori Legacy: The Rise of Electoral Authoritarianism in Peru, ed. Julio E. Garrión (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 154. 77. Carlos Iván Degregori, “Cosechando tempestades: las rondas campesinas la derrota de Sendero Luminoso en Ayachucho,” in Los senderos insólitos del Perú: Guerra y sociedad, 1980–1995, ed. Steve J. Stern (Lima: IEP Instituto de Estudios Peruanos UNSCH Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga, 1999), 154–159. 78. María Elena Moyano and Diana Miloslavich Túpac, The Autobiography of María Elena Moyano: The Life and Death of a Peruvian Activist (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). 79. Kristen Hill Maher and Silke Staab, “The Dual Discourse about Peruvian Domestic Workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, Race, and a Nationalist Project,” Latin American Politics and Society 48, no. 1 (2006), 90; Soledad Ortega, “In Search of the Chilean Paradise,” NACLA Report on the Americas 35, no. 2 (Oct. 2001), 18. 80. Hunefeldt, A Brief History of Peru, 242. 81. Hernando de Soto and Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Lima, Peru), The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 5, 56. 82. Ibid., 156. 83. Mark Weisbrot, “Peru’s Election: Background on Economic Issues,” review of reviewed item, Center for Economic and Policy Research (2006). 84. Staff, “Recession Proof,” The Economist (Mar. 5, 2009). Of course, The Economist always cheers any sign of economic growth and tends to overlook what happens to people in brief booms. 85. Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cuban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 173. 86. Susan Iva Eckstein, Back from the Future: Cuba under Castro (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 213. 87. Lewis Carroll, “Obama Will Use Spring Summit to Bring Cuba in from the Cold,” The Observer, Mar. 8, 2009. 88. United States, Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976).

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89. Louis A. Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 3rd ed., Latin American Histories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 265. 90. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 221; Anthony D. Smith, “The Origins of Nations,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 91. Eckstein, Back from the Future, 226; G.K. Singh and S.M. Yu, “Infant Mortality in the United States: Trends, Differentials, and Projections,” American Journal of Public Health 85, no. 7 (July 1995), 963. 92. Piero Gleijeses, Conflict Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 93. Lois M. Smith and Alfred Padula, Sex and Revolution: Women in Socialist Cuba (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 155. 94. Pérez, Cuba, 295. 95. Rosalie Schwartz, Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 204. 96. Julia O’Connell Davidson and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, “Child Prostitution and Sex Tourism: Cuba” (paper presented at the World Congress Against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, 1996), 5–6. 97. Antoni Kapcia, Havana: The Making of Cuban Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 189–206. 98. Louis A. Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 273. 99. Sebastian Balfour, Castro, 3rd ed. (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2009), 194. 100. World Bank, “Mexico Fact Sheet,” (2002), http://go.worldbank.org/ MDXERW23U0. 101. Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz (New York: Farrar, 1964). 102. Jorge G. Castañeda, Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen, trans. Padraic Arthur Smithies (New York: Distributed by W.W. Norton & Co., 2000). 103. The murder has never been properly explained; Rafael Medina Martínez, El enigma de Colosio, 1. ed. (México, D.F.: Plaza y Janés, 2001); Guillermo Samperio, Por qué Colosio?: una historia, un relato, 1. ed., Tiempo de México (México, D.F.: Oceano, 1995); José Luis Trueba Lara, Magnicidio: la muerte de un candidato, 1. ed. (México, D.F.: Editorial Posada, 1994). 104. Tim Golden, “Mexico’s Ex–Drug Chief, Indicted, Is Found Dead in U.S.,” The New York Times, Sept.16, 1999. 105. Associated Press, “Mexican Drama Centers upon Two Families,” The Intelligencer, Mar. 6, 1995; Jorge Carpizo, Anatomía de perversidades: reflexiones sobre la moral pública de México, Nuevo siglo (México: Aguilar, 2000); José Luis Trueba Lara, El derrumbe: del asesinato de Ruiz Massieu al gobierno de Ernesto Zedillo, 1. ed., Colección México vivo (México: Grupo Editorial Planeta, 1995).

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106. Judith Adler Hellman, Mexico in Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 74–84, 225–229. 107. BajaEco.com, “Cuanto Costaba?,” (Freefind, 2004–2009). 108. Elena Poniatowska, Nothing, Nobody: The Voices of the Mexico City Earthquake, trans. Aurora Camacho de Schmidt and Arthur Schmidt (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). 109. Ginger Thompson, “Ex-President in Mexico Casts New Light on Rigged 1988 Election,” The New York Times, Mar. 9, 2004. See also Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, Cambio de Rumbo: Testimonio de una presidencia, 1982–1988 (México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004). 110. Miguel Angel Centeno, Democracy within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 109. 111. See comparison of data from Banco de México and INEGI, the nation’s historical agency, Centro de Estudios de las Finanzas Públicas. H. Congreso de la Unión Camara de Diputados, “Encadenamiento de series históricas del producto interno bruto de México, 1970–2001,” (Palacio Legislativo de San Lázaro, Abril, 2003), 6. 112. Latin American Centre at Oxford University, “Oxford Latin American Economic History Database.” 113. Jonathon Jakubowicz, “Secuestro Express” (Venezuela: 2005). 114. Stephanie Hanson, “Mexico’s Drug War,” Council on Foreign Relations Backgrounder (2009), http://www.cfr.org/publication/13689/. 115. Joel Millman, “U.S. Gun Trial Echoes in Drug-Torn Mexico,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 2, 2009. 116. Rafael Segovia, La política como espectáculo: El sexenio de Vicente Fox (México, D.F.: Ediciones Cal y Arena, 2008), 285. 117. Marc Lacey and Ginger Thompson, “As Clinton Visits Mexico, Strains Show in Relations,” The New York Times, Mar. 24, 2009. 118. Fermán Pérez Fernández del Castillo, México 2006: Las elecciones que dividieron al país (México, D.F.: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2008), 77. 119. Lucrecia Lozano, “El sistema político mexicano,” in Sociedad, desarrollo y ciudadanía en México, ed. Laura Guzmán (México, D.F.: Editorial LUMISA, 2008), 129; Pérez Fernández del Castillo, México 2006: Las elecciones que dividieron al país, 102–105. 120. James C. McKinley Jr., “Amid Fights and Catcalls, Mexico’s President Is Sworn In,” The New York Times, Dec. 2, 2008. 121. Chapter 9 in Richard Barnet and Ronald E. Müller, Global Reach: The Power of Multinational Corporations (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974). 122. Jacob S. Hacker, The Great Risk Shift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 123. Teresa Ghilarducci, When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

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124. Charles M. Blow, “Cocaine and White Teens,” The New York Times, Jan. 10, 2009; Editorial, “Racial Inequity and Drug Arrests,” The New York Times, May 10, 2008. 125. Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 126. Staff, “Gun Ownership at All-Time High, Violent Crime Near 30-Year Low,” review of reviewed item, National Rifle Association—Institute for Legislative Action, 2009, http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read .aspx?id=206&issue=007. 127. Barnet and Müller, Global Reach: The Power of Multinational Corporations, 253. 128. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936). 129. Michael Rothfeld and Shane Goldmacher, “Governor Pushes Lawmakers for Quick Action on Budget Cuts,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 2009. 130. Ronald Reagan, “First Inaugural Address,” (Ronald Reagan Library, 1981). 131. Editorial, “Michael Milken’s Guilt,” The New York Times, April 26, 1990. 132. Jeff Madrick, “Enron: Seduction and Betrayal,” New York Review of Books 49, no. 4 (Mar. 14, 2002); Staff, “The Fall of Enron,” (chron.com Special Report, 2009). 133. Diana B. Henriques and Jack Healy, “Madoff Goes to Jail after Guilty Pleas,” The New York Times, Mar. 12, 2009; Mark Seal, “Madoff’s World,” Vanity Fair (April 2009). 134. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-twenties (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931); Vikas Bajaj, “Household Wealth Falls by Trillions,” The New York Times, Mar. 13, 2009. 135. Hyman P. Minsky, Can “It” Happen Again?: Essays on Instability and Finance (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1982). 136. United States Executive Branch, Office of Management and the Budget, “Historical Tables,” (Washington, DC: United States Government, 2009), 5. 137. Ibid., 21, 335. 138. United States Census Bureau. Foreign Trade Statistics, “Historical Series, Annual totals, 1960–present,” (United States Government, 2009). 139. Mieczyslaw Karczmar, “The U.S. Balance of Payments: Widespread Misconceptions and Exaggerated Worries,” Deutsche Bank Research. Current Issues (Oct. 1, 2004). 140. Rebecca Hellerstein and Cédric Tille, “The Changing Nature of the U.S. Balance of Payments,” Current Issues in Economic and Finance (Federal Reserve Bank of New York) 14, no. 4 (June 2008), 2, 4. 141. Chalmers A. Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2004); Chalmers A.

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Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). 142. John Dinges, Our Man in Panama: How General Noriega Used the U.S.—and Made Millions in Drugs and Arms (New York: Random House, 1990), 251. 143. Alan L. McPherson, Yankee No!: Anti-Americanism in U.S.–Latin American Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 144. Robert Busby, The Iran-Contra Affair: The Politics of Presidential Recovery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). 145. Daniel K. Inouye and Lee H. Hamilton, “Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, with a Minority View,” ed. United States Senate and United States House of Representatives (Random House, 1988), 83. 146. Peter Kornbluth and Malcolm Byrne, eds., The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993). 147. Jonathon Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The IranContra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 85–91. 148. An investigative journalist tracked this story a decade after it occurred. His account is overdrawn but its facts are quite believable, given what else the U.S. agencies were doing in Central America at this time; Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, 1st ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998). 149. Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); John Major, Prize Possession: The United States and the Panama Canal, 1903–1979 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 150. John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 92–95. 151. Official History, Staff, “United States Southern Command: Partnership for the Americas,” (United States Government, 2009). 152. Dinges, Our Man in Panama. 153. Frederick Kempe, Divorcing the Dictator: America’s Bungled Affair with Noriega (New York: Putnam Adult, 1990), 75. 154. Ibid. 155. Margaret E. Scranton, The Noriega Years: U.S.-Panamanian Relations, 1981–1990 (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers, 1991). 156. Barbarta Trent, The Panama Deception (New York: New Video Group, 2007). 157. Manuel Noriega and Peter Eisner, The Memoirs of Manuel Noriega: America’s Prisoner (New York: Random House), 62. 158. Mark Lacey, “In Court Ruling, Noriega Is Cleared for Extradition to France,” The New York Times, Aug. 25, 2007.

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159. R.M. Koster and Guillermo Sánchez, In the Time of the Tyrants: Panama, 1968–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990). 160. George J. Borjas, ed., Mexican Immigration to the United States, A National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Report (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007). 161. Celia W. Dugger, “Abortion Complicates Congressional Debate over Foreign Aid Bill,” The New York Times, Dec. 9, 2007. 162. Gautam Naik et al., “Fertility ‘Revolution’ Lowers Birth Rates,” The Wall Street Journal, 2003. 163. Pew Hispanic Center study cited in Lynette Clemetson, “Latino Population Growth is Widespread,” The New York Times, July 31, 2002. 164. Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). 165. Samuel G. Freedman, “On Education; It’s Latino Parents Speaking Out on Bilingual Education Failures,” The New York Times, July 14, 2004. 166. Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), 215. 167. Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, “Real Wages Fail to Match a Rise in Productivity,” The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2006. 168. Eduardo Porter, “Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security with Billions,” The New York Times, April 6, 2005. 169. Juan Ramon García, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). 170. David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 171. Telles and Ortiz, Generations of Exclusion. 172. Jesus Pérez Varela, “Between Many Worlds: The Diaspora of the Mara-Salvatrucha” (University of California, San Diego, 2005). 173. Mandalit del Barco, The International Reach of the Mara Salvatrucha (New York: National Public Radio, Mar. 24, 2009).

CONCLUSION: THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY HAS BEGUN 1. Mark Landler, “World Bank Expects Pain Worldwide,” The New York Times, Dec. 10, 2008. 2. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.

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3. Tony Smith, “Brazil Teeters. Will It Be Contagious?,” The New York Times, Aug. 4, 2002. 4. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men and Women in Colombia’s Industrial Experiment, 1905–1960, Comparative and International Working-class History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity, Latin America Otherwise (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 5. For an acute analysis of why American laborers have stopped voting their interests, see Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan/Owl Books, 2005). 6. Jenny Pearce, Colombia: Inside the Labyrinth (London: Latin American Bureau Limited, 1990), 110–112. 7. James Mollison and Ranbow Nelson, The Memory of Pablo Escobar (London: Chris Boot, 2007). 8. Gabriel García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping (New York: Vintage, 2008). 9. Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001); Alonso Salazar J., La parábola de Pablo: auge y caída de un gran capo del narcotráfico ( Bogotá: Planeta, 2001). 10. Robin Kirk, More Terrible than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia, 1st ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2003). 11. Eliza Griswold, “The 14-Year-Old Hit Man,” The New York Times Magazine, April 28, 2002. 12. Staff, DEA History (U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, 2009), available from http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/history.htm. 13. Matt Elrod, Drug War Clock (Drug Sense, 2009 [cited Mar. 25, 2009]); available from http://www.drugsense.org/wodclock.htm. 14. Unfortunately, the author uses a term I have come to detest, “subaltern,” as in “to manage subaltern labor.” Curtis Marez, Drug Wars: The Political Economy of Narcotics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 225. 15. Leslie Berestein, Sandra Dibble, and Dave Hasemyer, “U.S.-Mexico Tensions Simmering—Cartels’ Guns Flow from U.S.,” The San Diego Union-Tribune, Mar. 25, 2009; Mark Landler, “Clinton Says Demand for Illegal Drugs in the U.S. ‘Fuels the Drug Trade’ in Mexico,” The New York Times, Mar. 26, 2009.

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Index

Allende Gossens, Salvador (president of Chile), 249, 253, 290 coup in Venezuela compared to Chile’s, 317 cut off of international loans to, 208 death of, 179 dependency theory and, 309 Mapuches and, 190 presidency of, 185–187, 190, 208 Soviet Union and, 206 U.S. subversion of his presidency, 265, 308 Unidad Popular (U.P. or Popular Unity}, 184 See also Chile anarchism, 79, 125 Argentina, 65–66, 70, 130, 135, 138 Chile, 181, 183 Mexico, 111, 115, 117 Peru, 153 Argentina, xi, 65, 70–71, 80, 82, 92, 142, 170, 182, 199, 211, 230, 282 Baring Crisis, 67–68 Borges, Jorge Luis, poet, 133 Catholic Church, 32, 192, 242 caudillos, 12 Conservatives in, 77

crisis of 2001–2002, 287 Dirty War (El Proceso), 213–214, 218–221, 227, 242 Duarte de Perón, Eva (Evita), 136–137, 139 economic development of, 42, 62–63, 69, 88, 130–131, 139, 146 economic puzzle of, 1 elections, 29 gaucho (cowboy), 13 Great Depression, 129 hyperinflation, 231 illiteracy, 35, 60 immigration, 51, 64, 136 independence and early nineteenth century, 8, 39–40 industry and industrialization in, 128, 129, 137, 220, 233 internal migration in, 91, 148 labor movements in, 130, 132–136, 138 legacy of Dirty War, 251–252, 254 Malvinas War (Falklands War), 250 Martínez de Perón, Isabel (president), 231 middle class, 66–67 military and military rule, 77, 131, 141, 208–209, 218, 250–251

408 Argentina (continued) Moore, Barrington, theory of, 139 music, 196 national consolidation, 44, 46 neoliberalism, 289 oligarchy, 66–67, 74–75, 128, 131, 134, 135, 149 peronismo, 130–141, 218 population growth, 189 populism, 94, 132, 144 progressive nation, 160 property rights, 23, 69 Radical Civic Union or Radical Party (Unión Cívica Radical), 68, 75–76, 130–131, 139, 217–219, 251 relations with Great Britain, 30, 37–40, 42, 63, 88, 160 relations with United States, 161 Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 9, 11, 12, 32, 40, 43, 63, 64, 80 rural labor, 126 secondary cities, 236 sports, 107 tenements, 105 United States aid for counterinsurgency, 208–209 urbanization, 96 World War II, 129, 131, 150, 161 Yrigoyen, Hipólito (president of Argentina), 68, 75, 92, 130–132, 217 See also Anarchism; caudillos and caudillismo; conservatives, Drago Doctrine; Great Britain; IMF; liberals; Perón, Juan; railroads; War of the Triple Alliance Blacks. 8, 10, 55, 57, 61, 76, 246, 299, 304–305, 310 Brazil and, 72, 144, 147, 213, 237, 240–241 Colombia and, 26 Cuba and, 203–204, 207, 265–266 Cuban independence and, 47, 86 disappearance in Argentina, 64 legacy of slavery, 20–21, 23, 71

Index race mixture in Peru, 150 United Fruit and, 169 United States and, 194, 200, 281, 283 See also slavery Bolivia, 144, 153, 167, 173, 203 influence of APRA in, 154 Lechín Oqueando, Juan (labor leader), 167 military and military rule, 169, 214 MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolutionario or National Revolutionary Movement), political party, 167 national characteristics before the revolution, 166 Native Americans and, 125 Native Americans and Internet, 236 Paz Estenssoro, Victor (president), 167–168 Revolution of 1952, 165–169 role of IMF, 168 tenements, 105 Trotskyists, 167 United States and, 168 See also IMF; Peru Brazil, xi, 30–32, 49, 105, 102, 150, 160, 246–247, 280, 289, 294 agrarian population, percentage of, 128 belief in “racial democracy,” 30, 147, 238 Blacks, and commercial possibilities, 147–148 Brasilia, 197 Brazilian model, 207–214 carnival, 147–148, 150 Catholic church and religions, 24, 32, 191, 242–243 coffee production, 44, 62, 81, 239 communists, 145 coroneis, local bosses, 11–12 coup of 1964, 159, 190, 207–211, 308 crisis of 2002, 210 debt crisis of 1982, 180, 234 democratic campaign of 1984, 236

Index Dom Pedro I, 7, 35 Dom Pedro II, 7, 10, 12, 32, 35, 46 early commerce, 4 early tariffs, 7 ecology of, 312 economic development, 37–38, 129, 146, 212–214, 230, 237–238, 246, 249, 280 Empire of, 3–7, 10, 18, 27, 59 Falangists, 93, 145 fears of degeneration, 57 films, 241 food of, 25 free Blacks and mulattos, 20, 238 gaucho (cowboy) in, 13 Germans in, 51, 145–146 Great Depression, 143, 239–240 hyperflation, 241 illiteracy, 35 immigration, 51, 238 independence, 2, 5, 7, 40 industry and industrialization, 129, 233, 238–239 Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 240 labor, 62, 212, 238, 310 landlessness, 229 military and military rule, 59, 77, 195, 207–215, 247, 250–251 music and amusements, 25, 196 Native Americans, 15 neoliberalism, 242 Northeast, impoverished, 72, 91, 142, 148, 190 population growth, 189, 298 populism, 94, 142, 144 positivists, 58–59 regency, 10 regional oligarchies, 57, 142–143 regionalism, 8, 4 relations with Great Britain, 16, 17, 30, 37, 40, 42, 305 relations with the United States, 144–146, 207–214 samba, 147, 243–244 soccer, 107, 244 sugar plantations, 16, 71 television, 198, 244

409 tenements, 105 Tiradentes rebellion, 5, 39 urbanization, 9 World War II, 145–146 See also Freyre, Gilberto; honor code; IMF; Miranda, Carmen; Moore, Barrington; racial systems and racism; Rio de Janeiro; São Paulo; slavery; Vargas, Getulio; War of the Triple Alliance Cárdenas del Río, Lázaro, president of Mexico, 94, 165, 306 allows more conservative successor, 122 Cárdenas Solorzáno, Cuahtemoc, son of, 273 Church and, 119 exiles Calles, 119 labor organizations and, 119 left and, 122 loyal figure of Calles machine, 118 Mexican localism and, 120 middle class and, 150 nationalization of oil, 121–122 reorganizes official party, 97, 121 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, and legacy of, 269, 273 social goals of the Revolution and, 125 U.S. frightened by, 120 See also Mexican Revolution; Mexico Castro, Cipriano (Venezuelan president) career of, 81–84 Roosevelt Corollary, 82 Castro, Fidel (president of Cuba) 157, 308 anticipated U.S. hostility, 205 career of, 201–202 crisis of 1990s and, 264 Cuban-American exiles hatred of, 266 dominated Cuba for fifty years, 207 identity as the Cuban Revolution, 264–265

410 Castro, Fidel (continued) impact on author, 208 insults Cuban exiles, 205 involvement in African wars, 266 moral crusade against Batista, 203 origins of the revolution and, 201 played up African heritage of Cuba, 266 presented himself as a democrat, 215 revolutionary promise of social justice, 204 sources of support for guerrilla struggle, 203 tried to micromanage economy, 206 as university student in Bogota, 157 U.S. attempts to kill him, 265 use of emigration, 265 use of U.S. hostility, 265 See also Cuba; Cuban Revolution; United States Catholic Church, 242 Brazilian slavery, 16 colonial, 2, 4, 31 conflict with Chilean president, 31–32 Education and, 34–35, 56, 118 fueros (special rights), 29–30 hierarchy, 30, 193 independence of Latin America, 31 landholding, 30–31 liberalism and, 32, 46, 67, 72–73, 78, 104 liberation theology, 191–192, 242 loss of influence, 33–34, 46, 54–55, 96, 101, 110, 115, 147, 159 PAN (Mexican Party), 97 patronato (appointment of bishops), 31 Pope John XXIII, 191 Pope John Paul I, 191 Pope John Paul II, 191–192, 267 popular beliefs, 23–24, 30–31 populism, 119, 121–122, 138, 140, 146, 150, 154, 157, 159, 171 priestly celibacy, 56 racial classifications, 20 sexuality and, 32, 147, 191–193, 229, 243, 283

Index Vatican, 30–31, 33, 191, 269, 295 women and, 33–34, 54, 103 See also specific nations and other religious faiths Caudillo and caudillismo (caudillaje), 15, 29, 30, 269 age had passed, 52 Argentine liberals and, 46, 68 Central America and, 46 charisma of, 14 duration of, 13 eventually limited to the provinces, 77 larger armies and, 44 liberal economic ideology and, 305 liberal version of, 14 local notables and, 11 Mexican Revolution and 1929, 116, 122 Páez, José Antonio, 80 political shift away from, 48 railroads and, 42 Sarmiento, Domingo, opinions critiqued, 13 tasks of, 29 Uruguay and, 74 various names for, 12 Venezuela and, 82 Chile, xi, 60–61, 63, 197, 220, 233, 262, 271 agrarian reform, 190, 229 agricultural exports, 254 Alessandri, Arturo, (president) 132 automobile sector, 245 Balmaceda, José Manuel (president), 78 birth control, 195 British in, 88 Castro, Fidel, visit of, 225 “Chicago Boys,” 178–180, 308 centralized, liberal regime after 1870, 78 civil war of 1891, 78–79 copper, 164 copper miners, 164 coup 1973, 179, 196, 211, 214, 216, 249, 264, 289 debt crisis, 250

Index economic constraints during Great Depression, 161 end of Mapuche independence, 70 Germans in, 51 hyperinflation, 231 Ibáñez, Carlos (president), 92–93, 132 impact of nitrate economy, 77 industry and industrialization, 29 influence of APRA, 154, See: Peru large estate owners, 130, 159 laws protecting women and children, 80 legacy of Pinochet’s rule, 247, 249, 251, 254, 310–311 military, 77, 131, 265 militias in, 93 Neruda, Pablo (poet), 196 nitrate labor, 92 origin of neoliberalism, 249 Parliamentary Regime, 79–80 Parra, Violeta (singer, composer) and the Nueva Canción, 196 per capita income, 246 Perón, Juan and, 134 Pinochet dictatorship, 176–189, 192, 213, 214, 227, 230, 236, 247 plutocrats, 249 progressive changes, 84 Radical Party, 76 Recabarren, Luis Emilio (labor leader), 79–80 relations with Axis powers, 131–132 revolutionary tourists, 199 salitre (sodium nitrate), 62, 78, 306 Santiago, 53–54, 99–100, 176–189, 193 tenements, 105 urbanization, 96 U.S. companies in, 88 U.S. military assistance, 209 Valparaiso, 1, 49 See also Allende Gossens, Salvador; Frei Montalva, Eduardo; liberals and liberalism; Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto; United States; War of the Pacific

411 CIA (United States Central Intelligence Agency) attempted coup in Venezuela, 315 attempts to kill Castro, Fidel, 265 biological warfare in Cuba, 265 mystery of Gaitán’s death and, 157 Noriega, Manuel, and, 296 overthrow of Guatemalan government and, 171, 205 U.S. war against Nicaragua and, 225, 291 See also United States Cold War, xiv, 124, 157, 164, 187, 199, 290, 292, 297, 301 China and, 288 Cuban Revolution and, 200, 206 guerrilla warfare and, 199–207, 214–228, 255–265, 281 Korean War, 170 migration to the United States and, 297 neoliberalism and, 269 Nicaragua and, 292 OAS (Organization of American States) and, 124, 157 origins of, 162 Somoza’s use against domestic opponents, 222 “Third Way,” proposed by Perón, Nasser, and Nehru, 164 threat of nuclear war, 188 Truman, Harry S., international strategy, 162, 163, 200 U.S. hysteria, 165, 188, 200 U.S. indifference to Latin America, 230, 234, 253, 391 U.S. promotion of militarism, 207–214, 230, 253 Vietnam War, 199, 231, 234, 315 See also Chile; Cuba; guerrilla warfare; Nicaragua; United States; military and military rule under specific countries Colombia, 12, 23, 34, 37, 74, 232, 236, 228, 304, 312, 315 coffee and, 49, 72–73, 81, 155 Comunero Rebellion, 5, 39 Contadora Group, 317

412 Colombia (continued) drugs and 275, 294–295, 313–314 early democratic efforts in, 26 as example of future, 313 Escobar, Pablo, 313–314 FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), 314 Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 155–158 García Marquez, Gabriel (novelist), 155 Gran Colombia, 6, 72 illiteracy, 35, 60 industry and industrialization in, 129, 311 La Violencia, the violence, 156–158 Panama’s independence and, 87 Plan Colombia of U.S., 314 Populism and, 142, 150, 155–159 regionalism, 8, 47 rural laborers, 130 slavery, 17 slums. 105 Torres, Camilo, 192 working class, 61 See also Populism; United States conservatives, 52 Catholic Church and, 9–10, 31, 55, 159 Chilean coup and, 187 in Colombia, 12, 72–73, 155–158 federalism and, 11 honor code and racial attitudes, 22 ideological dilemma of, 28, 76 influence of Europeans upon, 76 liberal-conservative axis, 9–10, 15, 129 loss to liberalism, 9, 28, 77 military and, 150 objectives and tactics, 77 in Peru, 153 predominance in Chile before 1860s, 11, 15, 80–81 undemocratic, 28 in Venezuela, 81 women and, 133 See also liberals

Index “constabulary” regimes, 169 Batista in Cuba and, 201 Somoza in Nicaragua and, 221 U.S. involvement in, 308 Costa Rica, 20, 228 Cuba, 7, 18, 21, 27, 40, 46, 47, 60, 72, 188, 193, 210, 257, 258, 294, 305 baseball and, 54 Batista, Fulgencio, 169, 172 Blacks excluded from civic life, 204 depression in 1990s, 207 importance of Black music, 204 income distribution in, 203 racial make-up in 1840, 20 Spanish-American War, 86–88, 307 sugar and, 17, 61, 71, 92, 306 tourism in, 207 United States and, 86, 307 U.S. corporate interests in, 204 See also Blacks; Castro, Fidel; Cuban Revolution; guerrilla warfare; racial systems and racism; slavery Cuban Revolution, 163, 255, 289 achievements of, 265–266 aid from Soviet Union, 206 Bay of Pigs, 204 confronts injustices, 207 control of army, 265 decay of Havana, 229 failures of, 266–267 flight of Cubans from, 205, 215 foco theory, 200, 202 impact of end of Cold War, 264 influence of Cuban exiles in U.S. politics, 264 influence of U.S. attitudes toward Blacks, 204 influence on Latin America in 1960s, 190, 308 influence on U.S. 1960 election, 205 investment in rural housing, 229 Mexico refuses U.S. blockade, 208 missile crisis of 1962, 205–206, 265 narrative of, 199ff not characteristic of Latin America, 127, 214

Index OAS and, 208 Panama and, 294 population detested Batista, 203 population growth during, 208 possibilities for change, 268–269 reversals suffered, 264 U.S. anti-communism and, 185, 200, 205, 207–208, 215, 228, 231 U.S. attempt to shape Batista’s aftermath, 204 U.S. plans for coup, 204 U.S. policies after Cold War, 264 women in militias of, 199 See also Castro, Fidel; Cuba; United States Degler, Carl, theory of racial differences, 20–21 dependency theory Alliance for Progress and, 216 Brazilian twist on, 146 Chilean copper and, 182 Cuba and, 201 explained, 36 government benefits from export development, 46 heyday of, 199 issues in debate about, 38ff. Latin America’s general dependence on Great Britain, 37 loss of academic influence, 285, 308–309 Mexico and, 279 most radical views on, 38 not forgotten in Latin America, 301 Peru and, 155 redefined, 234, 309 See also Great Britain; United States Dominican Republic, 54, 86, 87, 221 Trujillo, Rafael, 132, 201, 248 United States invasion, 209, 308 Drago Doctrine (of Luis Maria Drago), 82 drugs, 297 Colombia and, 158 history of trade in Mexico, 275 legal drugs from Mexico, 280

413 Mexican border and, 301 Mexico and national political scandal, 272 Mexico City and, 275, 278 within United States, 283 U.S. drug agencies, including DEA or Drug Enforcement Agency, 263, 295 U.S. “War on Drugs,” 260, 290, 300 young men and drug trade, 279 See also Colombia; Mexico; Noriega, Manuel; Peru economy, informal. See informal economy Ecuador, 6, 236 Barrington, Moore, theory of, 125 influence of APRA and populism, 154 legal code, 34 Native Americans, 12, 18 elections, 29, 142, 158–159, 307, 311, 313 anti-communism and, 163 Argentina and, 29, 67–68, 70, 93, 130–131, 134, 138, 141, 148, 182, 217, 219, 251 Bolivia and, 173 Brazil and, 7, 144, 146, 197, 210, 236, 245 Chile and, 79–80, 181, 183–186, 196, 247, 310 Cuba and, 201, 203–205 democracy and, 2 Guatemala and, 177 Mexico and, 46, 48, 109, 111,113, 115, 118–119, 121, 269–273, 277, 280, 306 neoliberalism and, 269 Nicaragua and, 207, 256–257 Panama and, 295 Peru and, 153–155, 258–259, 261–262 populists and, 133 United States and, 200, 225, 283, 289–290, 296 Uruguay and, 75

414 El Salvador, 34, 128, 192, 251 abortion in, 312 Carter, Jimmy, and, 226 civil war, 226, 292 Faribundo Marti Liberation Front, 226 refugees to U.S., 301 entertainment, brothels and, 64 carnival, 147–148, 243–244 Cuba and, 267 elections and, 29 European influence on, 75 films and records, 120, 147 late nineteenth century, museums, etc., 54 literate, 103 modern art, 196, 204 music, 24–25, 65, 196, 198, 204, 263, 266, 267–268, 279, 295, 298, 302 new forms of, 182 tourism, 267–268 See also television Evangelicals, 243 gaining on Catholic Church, 243 Ríos Montt, General Efraín, murderer in Guatemala, 227 ties to U.S. television preachers, 193 and U.S. politics, 283 See also Catholic Church Frei Montalva, Eduardo, president of Chile as alternative to Allende, 187 CIA help for his election, 185 Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Eduardo (son and president), 253 international loans, 208 leader of Chilean Christian Democrats, 183 See also Chile Freyre, Gilberto, and “racial democracy” in Brazil, 16, 147 Gardel, Carlos (tango singer), 65 Great Britain, 197, 199

Index abolitionist movement in, 17, 305 Baring crisis in Argentina, 1890, 67 British capture of torturer Astiz, 251–252 British ministers, 41, 116 British navy, 7, 77 Canning, George, 39 Chile and, 42 Chilean nitrates and, 54, 78 competition with U.S., 87–88 conflict over Falkland Islands, 221 conflict with Venezuela, 82, 85 conflicts with France, 5, 38 creation of Uruguay, 6, 30 debt crisis, first Latin American, and, 7, 304 decline in Latin America after World War I, 151, 163–164, 168 dependency theory and, 36–40, 43 extradition of Pinochet, 252–253 involvement of Guatemalan coup, 1954, 171 late nineteenth century imperialism, 85 Latin American admiration of, 10, 41, 53, 59, 68, 69, 84 Latin American sports and, 107 oil and Chaco War, 166 oil interests in Mexico, 120 Peruvian guano trade and, 44–45 Roca-Runciman Treaty with Argentina, 131, 137 Spencer, Herbert, influence of, 59 supplier of capital, 42, 43, 63, 70, 81, 101 support for powerful in Latin America, xiii, 68, 139 trade with Latin America, 36–37, 44, 73, 129 See also Argentina; Chile; dependency theory; Mexico; United States Guatemala, 12, 14, 86, 128, 173, 251 after overthrow of government in 1954, 227 attempt at Central American federation, 30 coffee, 44

Index landowners of, 27 Moore, Barrington, theory of, 125–126 overthrow of government in 1954, 205, 264–265, 289 revolution after 1944, 165, 169–172 violence against population, 292 See also United States guerrilla warfare, 214–231, 308 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 202, 205, 207, 209, 214 Haiti Duvalier, François (Papa Doc), 169 slave rebellion, 10, 17 U.S. invasion of, 86–87 voodoo, 294 homosexuality, 198, 242, 248, 250, 268, 283 Honduras legal code, 34 role in U.S. war on Nicaragua, 225, 255 U.S. gunboat era and, 87 honor code, 22–23, 30, 33–34, 57, 77, 126 IMF (International Monetary Fund) Argentina and, 218 Bolivia and, 168–169 Brazil and, 310 Cuban Revolution and, 205 Latin American feelings against, 290 origins of, 162 Peru and, 259–260, 263 policies imposed on Latin America and current U.S. economic choices, 289 United States control of, 208 informal economy changes in Latin American economy, 235 class struggle and, 311 defined, 233 garbage in Mexico and, 235 Mexican, 279, 299 migrants to U.S. and, 312

415 Peruvian, 263 São Paulo and, 241 self-help housing, 263 Liberals and liberalism, 44, 52, 129, 144, 297 acceptance of inequality, 28 Argentina and, 11, 44, 67–69, 220 Catholic Church and, 30–32, 55–56 Chile and, 78–80, 183–184, 253, 285 Colombia and, 72–73, 155–158 conservatives and, 9 constitutional order, 7, 26–27, 35 economic liberalism, xiv, 38, 47, 69, 92, 175, 178, 303, 305–306 education and, 57–58, 60 elites and, 75 fascism and, 89 goals in nineteenth century, 10 Guatemala and, 170–170 influence of London on, 39 liberal caudillos, 14 liberal land laws, 70–71 Mexican Revolution and, 108–113 Mexico and, 19 military and, 77 Native Americans and, 20, 22 neoliberalism, xiv, 179, 234–242, 245, 248, 249, 254, 257, 260–262, 266, 269, 271–280, 285, 289–290, 302–305, 309–317 Nicaragua and, 87, 222, 208 oligarchy and, 84–85 opposed to military rights, 30 Peru and, 150, 153 political liberalism, 47, 76 populism and, 94, 133 rural populations and, 11, 13, 24 scientific racism and, 23 “shock treatment” and, 249–250, 260 social liberalism, xiv success over conservatives, 11–13, 15, 28, 46 taxes and, 36 United States and, 200, 283–284 uprising in Chiapas and, 236

416 Liberals and liberalism (continued) Uruguay and, 74 Vatican, 30 Venezuela and, 81–82 women and, 34 See also conservatives Mexican Revolution, 59, 108–125 bloodiest war, 108–109 Calles, Plutarco Elías (president), 115–121 Carranza, Venustiano (president), 113–115, 124 Díaz, Porfirio (president), 47, 57, 108 Madero, Francisco I. (president), 104, 111–115, 118 Morones, Luis (labor leader) Obregón, Álvaro (president), 114–118 PNR (Partido NacionalRevolucionario or National Revolutionary Party), 97, 118 PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional or Institutional Revolutionary Party, members called priistas), 91, 94, 269–271, 273 PRM (Partido Revolucionaio Mexicano or Mexican Revolutionary Party), 7, 31, 97, 100, 102, 104 Villa, Francisco “Pancho” (revolutionary), 104, 112–115 Zapata, Emiliano (revolutionary), 104, 112–115, 117, 126 See also Mexico, United States Mexico, xi, 49, 62, 175, 180, 217, 290, 297, 305–306, 317 agrarian Reform, 190, 229 baseball, 54 billionaires, 242 caciques, 12 Castro, Fidel and Cuban Revolution, 201, 208 Chiapas, uprising in, 276–277 civic life, 160 Constitution of 1917, 97, 115 Contadora Group, 31

Index CTM (Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos or Mexican Labor Confederation), 101 debt crisis, 180, 231, 234, 273 drug cartels, 275, 278–279, 290, 315 economic growth, 37 education in, 35, 118, 275 elections, 26, 280 empire to republic, 6–7, 151 end of slavery, 17, 28 federalism, 98 festivals and amusements, 24–25, 102, 106, 198, 244 film industry, 106 foods of, 25 French invasion, 32, 41, 109 Golden Shirts (Fascists), 93 Great Depression, 92, 117 guerrilla warfare, 228, 251 honor code, 22 illiteracy, 35 independence, 12, 20, 39 industry and industrialization, 99, 101, 108, 129, 233 labor, 101, 113, 117, 119, 121–122, 124, 233, 249 loss of land to United States, 12 major authors, artists, intellectuals, 104, 196 Mexican-American War, 30 “Mexican miracle”, 99, 230, 270 migration, 91, 98, 148, 297, 298–299, 312 Moore, Barrington, theory of, 149 national debt, 116 Native Americans in, 21–22, 71, 110, 125, 168, 194, 304 neoliberalism, 236, 269–280 oil, 110, 120, 197, 231, 270, 273–274 oligarchs and oligarchies, 52, 97, 130, 168 PAN (Partido Acción Nacional or National Action Party, members called panistas), 269, 280 per capita income, 246 political parties, 117–118, 121, 172, 236, 269–271, 280

Index population and population growth, 189, 199, 233, 235, 279, 297 populism, 94, 306 positivists (científicos), 58–59 PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática or Party of the Democratic Revolution), 271, 280 presidential system, 98, 115, 228, 236, 269–272 public Services, 193 pursuit of modernity, 96, 305 race relations, 19, 47, 50, 108 railroads, 42, 110 relations with United States, 87–88, 110–112, 120, 123–124, 150, 168, 279, 298, 308 rural property, 23 secondary cities 236 silver, 44 student rebellion of 1968, 190, 199, 270 technological possibilities, 280 television, 198, 244, 269–270 university students, 190, 199, 227 urban poor, 105 vaqueros, charros (cowboys), 13 War of the Reform (1859–1861), 14, 32, 46, 109 See also Bolivia; Catholic Church; Cold War; conservatives; dependency theory; liberals and liberalism; Mexican Revolution; Mexico City; Moore, Barrington, theory of; racial systems and racism Miranda, Carmen, actress, 147 Moore, Barrington omissions of, 150 theory applied to Latin American oligarchies, 149 theory of origins of dictatorships and democracy, 125–126 See also populism Napoleanic Wars, Latin America’s Independence and, 5–7, 38–39, 84 Native Amerians, xii, 38, 55, 61, 76, 84, 150, 235, 237, 246

417 Allende, Salvador, and, 190 Amazon and, 142, 176 Argentine conquest of, 63 Bolivian and Guatemalan Revolutions and, 165 Bolivian middle class and, 168 Bolivian neopopulism and, 236 Cárdenas, Lázaro, and, 119–120 caudillismo and, 29 Chaco War and, 167 Chiapas uprising and, 276–277 Church and, 31, 60 colonial uprising of Tupac Amaru II, 5 comparison of, in Brazil and Spanish America, 15 complexities of native experiences in Mexico, 19 cowboys and, 13 Díaz, Porfirio, support for, 110 discovery of ancient cities and, 57 enslavement in Brazil, 15 European racial strategy and, 16 foods of, 25 governed themselves, 12 Guatemala and, 44 Guatemalan debt peonage and, 170 Guatemalan politics and, 169–171 imperial exploitation of, 15 Indigenismo, defined, 57 Latin American music and, 25 loss of freedom, 70–71, 75 loss of lands, 22, 70, 305 loss of market power in Bolivia, 42 mestizos and, 21 migrants to the U.S., 299 Moore, Barrington, theory applied to, 125 neoliberalism and, 310 nineteenth century and, 18, 304 not politically passive, 26 Perón, Juan, and, 133 Peruvian mistreatment, 45–46, 155, 260 Peruvian politics and, 152–155, 258 population decline, 49 population sizes in Bolivia and Meso-Amerca, 20, 166

418 Native Amerians (continued) radio and, 198 religions of, 24 Sarmiento, Domingo, views of, 23 Sendero Luminoso, Peruvian guerrillas, and, 257–258, 261–262 Spanish American tributary systems, 15–16 U.S. assistance to Bolivian repression of, 227 War of Triple Alliance and, 30 within modern cities, 96, 108 See also Bolivia, Mexico, Peru Nicaragua, 21, 86, 193, 255 attempt at democracy, 222 Somoza García, Anastasio (“Tacho”), 169, 221 U.S. invasions of, 87, 222 See also Nicaraguan Revolution Nicaraguan Revolution, 221, 257, 264, 265, 295 Catholic Church and, 192 compared to Cuba, 224–225 early economic recovery and, 224 Fonseca, Carlos, 222–223 FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, Sandinista or National Liberation Front, commonly called Sandinistas), 222–223, 234, 255, 256, 257, 257 Iran-Contra and, 291–292 mistakes of Sandinistas and, 255 Ortega, Daniel, 234 Reagan, Ronald, and attack upon, 225, 255, 265, 292 rebel army, 223 Somoza Debayle, Anastacio (“Tachito”) and, 224 Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and, 214 Violeta, Chamorro’s elected, end of, 256 visit by Castro, 225 See also Nicaragua; United States Noriega, Manuel control of Panama, 294–295 drugs and, 294–295

Index origins, 294 sentenced, 296 Spadafora, Hugo, murder of, 295 statement about U.S. invasion, 296 U.S. overthrow of, 295–296 See also Panama; United States OAS (Organization of American States) Cuba and, 208 U.S. intentions about, 157, 172 oligarchy, xiii, 3, 42, 48–49, 95, 269, 305, 306, 309 achievements, 84 alliance with military, 141 Argentine, 70, 131–133, 135, 137–139 Bolivian, 167–168 Brazilian, 143, 145, 149, 239 Catholic Church and, 56 Chilean, 130, 181, 183, 249 defensive position of, 158–159 defined, 27, 47, 59 era of consolidation, 128 failure in Venezuela, 83–84 Gaitán, Eliecer, in Colombia, and, 156 Guatemalan, 227 guerrilla rhetoric and, 308 internally divided, 68 make-up of, 127 Mexican Revolution and, 97, 108, 149 middle class and, 67–68 Moore, Barrington, theory and, 149 Panamanian, 294 Peruvian, 259 populists and, 93, 125, 127, 132, 142 regional elites and, 47 Salvadoran, 226 scientific racism and, 56 taxes and, 60 United States and, 85, 164, 172 urbanization and, 97, 130 Uruguayan, 74 Páez, José Antonio (president of Venezuela), 80

Index Panama, 141, 221, 291 Arías, Arnulfo (president), annoyance to U.S., 293 Contadora Group, 317 drugs and, 293 French efforts at canal, 43 Panama Canal, 86, 292 Roosevelt, Theodore, engineers independence, 73, 87, 307 School of the Americas and Latin American military training, 208 as tax haven, 293 Torrijos, Omar, career of, 293–294 U.S. abuse of, 292–293 U.S. invasion, 295–296 See also Noriega, Manuel; United States (U.S.) Paraguay, 251 Francia, José Rodriguez Gaspar de (“El Supremo”), and his rule, 18–19, 248 independence, 6 Moore, Barrington, theory of, 125 Paraguayan tea, 6 populism and, 154 Roa Bastos, Augusto (novelist), 248 Solano López, Carlos, 30 See also War of the Triple Alliance Pentecostals competition with Catholic Church, 243 permitted in Cuba, 267 political role in U.S., 283 spread in the 1960s, 193 support from U.S. televangelists, 243 Universal Church, 243 See also Evangelicals Perón, Juan (president of Argentina), 94, 156, 157, 165, 306 after military coup of 1943, 134–135 background of, 134, 215 Braden, Spruille, and campaign of, 138 British pounds and policies of, 137 Church and, 138 elected in 1973, 219–220

419 Evita and, 137–140 fascism and, 134 followers tortured and killed, 217 influence in Brazil, 211 influence on Ibáñez, Carlos, of Chile, 182 invents “Third Way”, 164 labor and, 135, 140 landlord power and, 134 middle class and, 150, 159 Montoneros (guerrillas) and, 219 October 17, 1945, 135–136 sent into exile, 141, 217 settles in Spain, 218 spending of, 138 upper middle class and, 133 See also Argentina; populism Peru, 8, 18, 37, 49, 61, 125, 142, 150, 159, 233, 236, 312 APRA (Alianca Popular Revolucionaria Americana or American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), 151, 153–154, 258, 260 Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 258–261 collapse of unions, 249 copper, 62 De Soto, Hernando, critique of political economy, 262–263 dependence on United States, 151 drugs and, 261, 313 economic growth, 151 era of guano trade, 44–46 extension of franchise, 84 Fujimori, Alberto, 261–263, 289 gamonales, local bosses, 12 García, Alan, 260–263, 310 Haya de la Torre, Victor Raúl, 151, 153, 258, 260 independence, 39 influence of colonial past, 151 investment in Pinochet’s Chile, 178 landlessness, 214 Leguía, Augusto B., 153–154 Machu Picchu, 47 Mariátegui, José Carlos, influence of, 151–153 military, 77, 214, 230, 250

420 Peru (continued) Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), 257–262 tenements, 105 uprising of Tupac Amaru II, 39 U.S. military aid, 209 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 248 Viceroyalty divided into, 6 Viceroyalty of, 3 wars with Chile, 30, 78 women in, 33 See also Chile, United States, populism Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto (dictator and president of Chile) 176, 179, 214 Catholic Church and, 192 coup of 1973, 187 debt crisis of early 1980s, 180, 250 economic expansion, 230 enduring impact on Chile, 220,248, 250, 310 loses plebiscite, 236 Protestants and, 193 rich under his rule, 180 secret police and, 247 trial in London, 252–225 See also Chile populism, 55, 142, 165, 167 Argentina and, 134 Bolivia and, 167 Brazil and, 142, 146 Colombia and, 155 contest for middle class, 133, 150–151 crucial moment of, 172 defined, 93–94, 141 elite and, 159 high point of, 93 landed power and, 132 link to urbanization, 94 Mexico and, 97, 119–125 Moore, Barrington and, 149 Peru and, 151, 153–154 race and, 150 range of politics, 132 thesis about, 127

Index positivists influence of Comte, August, 58 influence of Spencer, Herbert, 59 technocrats in Mexico, 274 primary cities Bogotá before primacy, 151 Buenos Aires, 63 expansion of, 175 great landowners and, 75 importance of votes within, 76 liberal regulations and, 76–77 Mexico City, 96 middle class in, 102 migration to, 91 modernizing cultures in, 84 Montevideo, 73 power and, xi–xii provincial centers and, 52 provincial power and, 130 roads and, 75 São Paulo, 238 Sendero in Lima, 257 tax incentives and, 229 ungovernable zones, 236 prostitution, 22, 61, 76, 201 Perón and, 140 Cuba and, 267–268 São Paulo and, 241–242 racial systems and racism, xi–xii, 20, 27–28, 30, 35, 51, 60–61, 77, 126, 293, 305 Brazil, 16, 20–21, 27–28, 57, 72, 142, 144, 147, 242 Colombia, 150, 156 Cuban independence, 47, 86 legacy of, 1, 16, 20, 22 Mexico, 26 Moore, Barrington, and theory of, 125 Native Americans and, 18 Peace Corps and, 215 Peru, 150 populism and, 141 São Paulo, 237, 240, 244 scientific racism, 57, 160, 195 United States, 72, 282–283, 293, 298

Index railroads, 35, 49, 73, 75, 129 Argentina, 63, 69, 88, 131, 138 Brazil, 197 British financing of, 42, 43, 63 Mexico, 110, 117, 120, 305 Peruvian gamble on, 45 skilled labor and, 62 Venezuela, 81 Rio de Janeiro arrival of Portuguese royal family, 3, 5, 40 beach culture, 159, 175 Belle Epoque, 50 colonial administrative center, 4 influence of Paris, 53 internal migration to, 91 political alliance during First Republic, 239 population of, 14 populist mayor, 144 regional mutual defense pact, 124 slavery and, 238 São Paulo construction of, 238 contrasts in income and wealth, 241 gangs in, 315 industry and industrialization, 239 internal migration and poverty, 240–241 as megalopolis, 237–249 night life, 242 rebellion of 1932, 239 religiosity, 243 television, 244 uprising against republic (1930), 239 slavery abolition of, 17, 28, 45, 305 Brazil and, 17–18, 21, 46–47, 72, 238, 305 British support for abolition, 40 cane sugar and, 16, 47 consequences for Northeast Brazil, 142 Cuba and, 17, 46–47, 72, 305 economic mobility and, 21

421 end of Brazilian Empire and, 18, 47 legacy in Brazil, 72, 142 link to racism, 16, 21 Native American, in colonies, 15 need for slave trade to continue, 17 Peru and, 45 São Paulo and, 238 Spanish America and, 16 See also Blacks socialism Avila Camacho, Manuel, abandons, 122 Catholic Church and, 159 dependency theory and, 36 Haya de la Torre, Victor Raul, beliefs of, 154 lemon socialism, 231, 289 Mexican Revolution and, 306 middle class and fears about, 249 underdeveloped countries and, 164 Spanish Civil War, 252, 307 sports, 25, 151, 160 Acapulco, 102 baseball (beisbol), , 54, 106, 160, 268 influence of United States and Europe, 54 nineteenth century, 25 São Paulo, 244 soccer (futbol or futebol), 54, 106–107, 268 tango, 64–65 television, 158, 177, 249 Argentina, 198 Brazil, 198, 244 Chile, 179 Mexico, 100, 108, 198, 271, 280, 297 United States elections and, 284 United States (U.S.), xi, 5, 13, 26, 29, 35, 40, 43, 62, 91, 106, 307 abolition in Latin America and, 72 Acapulco and, 102 against Perón, 137 Al-Qeada attack upon, 290

422 United States (continued) anarchists, 66 anti-Communist crusade, 161–165 Argentina neutrality and, 132 blowback and, 290–291 Bolivian Revolution and, 165–169 British not Monroe Doctrine protected Latin America, 39 capitalist excesses within the, xiv Chilean Unidad Popular and, 184–187 and civil war in El Salvador, 226–227 coffee and, 41 comparison of immigration in Latin America and, 51 Cuba and U.S. capitalists, 71 Cuban Revolution and, 201–205, 208, 264–266, 268 cultural influence of, xiii, 198 dependency theory, redefined, and, 309 discovery of native ruins, 56–57 economic hegemony in Latin America, 87–89 end of Native American freedom in, 70 expansion of power after 1898, xiii, 87, 160 Freyre, Gilberto, trained in, 16 Freyre and Tannenbaum comparison of Brazil and, 16 Guatemalan Revolution and, 169–172 hegemon in Latin America, 160–173 homesteading in Latin America and, 23 ideologies in Latin Americas compared to those of, 126 importance of Vietnam War, 209 indifference to poverty of, social injustice, xii interventions in Central America and Caribbean, 86–87 Iran-Contra, 290–291 kidnapping of U.S. Ambassador in Brazil, 212

Index Latin America and U.S. Republicans, 200 Latin American backwardness and. 23 Latin American baseball and, 106 Latin American debt crisis of 1982, 231–235, 303–304 Latin American dependence upon, 110–112, 123–124, 307 Latin American drug trade and, 275, 279, 260–261, 263, 275, 312–314 Latin American imports from, 108 Latin American liberals compared to those in, 74 Latin American military regimes and, 176–181, 213–214, 227, 230, 253, 284, 309, 314 Latin American model of progress and, 10, 56, 58–59 Latin American populism and, 133, 158 Latin American rejection of dependence, 315–316 Latin American technologies and, 129 Latin American youth culture and, 249, 267 Latin Americanization of the United States, 280–290 Mexican comic books and, 96 Mexican de Unidad Popular and, 182, 184–186 Mexican migration to, 148, 275,297–301, 311, 313 Mexican oil and, 108, 273 Mexican politics and, 270, 272 Mexican Revolution and, 112–123 Mexican wars with, 12, 40 miscegenation in Latin America and, 20, 57 Moore, Barrington, theory of, and, 125 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 276 neoliberalism and, 249, 271, 309–310

Index neopopulists and, 311 New Deal, influence of, 94 Nicaraguan Revolution and, 221–226, 255–256 opposed to fascism and communism, 89, 127, 145 origins of Argentine dependence upon, 88 overthrow of Brazilian government in 1964, 210–211 overthrow of Panamanian government and, 292–296 Peru’s dependence upon, 151, 263 political changes within after 1980, 200 promotion of “Asian Tigers” by, 246 282 proposes OAS, 157–158 racial political exclusion in Latin America and, 28 rise of corporations within, 69 Roosevelt Corollary, 83 Roosevelt, Theodore, president, and arbitration of Venezuelan conflict with Great Britain, Europe, 73 Salvadoran gang within, 301 shift in power away from Europe and toward, 84–85, 93 slavery in Brazil and South in, 17 slavery in Latin America and, 17, 19–21 Spanish America War, 86 support for the Latin American elites by, xiii, 160, 193, 308–309 tango compared to jazz in, 65 televangelists in, and influence on Latin America, 193, 243 women’s suffrage, 76 World War II and, 129, 131 See also Argentina; Bolivia; Brazil; CIA; Cuba; Cuban Revolution; drugs; Freyre, Gilberto; Guatemala; Mexican Revolution; Mexico; Native Americans; Nicaragua; OAS; Panama; Perón, Juan; Peru; populism; Slavery; Vargas, Getulio

423 Uruguay, 1, 13, 18, 76, 160, 189, 199, 211, 216 Batlle y Ordoñez, José, as brilliant statesman, 74 caudillos, 29–30, 46 economic development, 73 immigration, 23, 51, 63, 73 killing of Goulart, 211 liberals vs. conservatives in nineteenth century, 74 military rule, 213–214, 250–251, 308 rising standard of living, 128 soccer, 107 state formation, 6, 30, 40 See also Catholic Church, Great Britain, War of the Triple Alliance Vargas, Getulio (Brazilian president), 94, 141, 150, 165, 210 centralizes government, 144 Communists and, 145 constitution of 1934 and, 144 economic nationalism, 146 elected in 1950, 148 Estado Novo (New State), 145 Falangists and, 145 populism and, 147 reduces political power of Paulistas, 239 removed in 1945, 148 suicide in 1954, 149 uprising of 1930, 143, 239 Venezuela, 9, 197, 228, 231, 278 baseball, 54 Bello, Andrés, 34 Chávez, Hugo, 236, 310 confrontation with Britain, Germany, and Italy, 82–83 Contadora Group, 317 export economy and, 77 German investments, 81 Great Depression, 92 independence, 6 industry and industrialization in, 129 liberal federalism and, 78

424 Venezuela (continued) llaneros (cowboys), 13–14 oil, 81, 88, 121 population, 190 slavery, 17 See also Castro, Cipriano; railroads War of a Thousand Days (Colombia), 32, 73, 77, 155, 313 War of the Pacific, involving Bolivia, Chile, and Peru, 46, 78 War of the Reform (Mexico), 14, 32, 109 War of the Triple Alliance, involving Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, 30, 46 Wars of Latin American independence, 6–9, 29, 31, 35, 39–40 women Afro-American religions and, 24, 243 begging with children, 96 Black, 16 and carnival in Brazil, 243–244 Catholic Church and, 32–34, 54, 56, 105, 242–243 Chilean agricultural exports and, 254 Chilean resort to violence, 180 Cuban Revolution and, 199, 207, 233, 265 denied the vote, 28, 34,, 133 divorce in Cuba, 266 downward economic pressures in United States and, 281 education of, 35, 199 fertility in preindustrial cultures, 189 fleeing Peruvian collapse, 262 flirting, 65 Fujimori’s law of gender representation, 161 guerrillas in Nicaraguan Revolution and, 256 honor code and, 22–23, 33, 57 ideas of Spencer, Herbert and, 35 indecent tango and, 64–65,103

Index industrial labor of, 61, 137, 211, 311 left out of Chilean agrarian reform, 190 liberal law codes and, 34 longevity of 189 magazines devoted to, 67 Mexican maquiladoras and, 275–276 Mexican oil confrontation and, 121 march of women’s pots against Allende, 185 marriage, 33–34 middle class and, 105 most powerful woman, Perón, Eva, 140 as participants in War of a Thousand Days, 35 poor wanted birth control, 195 poorest people in Latin America, 53, 312 prosperous, 53, 96, 103,, 160 prostitution in contemporary Cuba. 367–358 prostitution in pre-Revolutionary Cuba, 203 punished for abortions in El Salvador, 312 raped in military terror, 226 in Santiago, Chile in 1980s, 177 service sector and, 61, 95, 108 sports and, 54 spread of birth control in 1980s, 189 suffrage, 76, 144, 181, 307 tasks in nineteenth century, 8, 25 Unidad Popular in Chile and, 184 U.S. Equal Rights Amendment, 284 World War I, 1, 49, 54, 56, 68, 76, 79–80, 92, 107, 130, 132, 151, 161 decline of Great Britain, 87 influence on Mexican Revolution, 114 origin, 85 and Panama Canal, 292 and rise of United States, 87–89, 160

Index World War II, 16, 93, 98, 101, 121–123, 129, 131–134, 146–148, 153, 158, 161–162, 167, 169, 175, 187–188, 250, 299, 308 Argentine labor and, 134 Brazil and, 146–148 Bretton Woods, 162 Catholic Church and, 191 Chilean and Argentine neutrality, 131–132 consolidation of United States power, 93, 172

425 end of British power, 188 Guatemala and, 169 human rights and, 251 impact on Latin America, 129, 158, 262 Latin American labor and, 133 Mexican labor and, 101 Mexico and, 122–123 Panama, 293 Peru and, 153 populism and, 167 United Nations, 162


About the Author Michael Monteón was born in Mason City, Iowa, of Mexican parents. He attended its public schools, the University of Denver (BA), and Harvard University (MA, PhD). He has taught at the University of California, San Diego, for thirty-six years. He also taught at University College, Cardiff (now the University of Wales) and was a Fellow of the Brookings Institution. He has lectured throughout the United States, in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Mexico, and South America. He is married, has two daughters, two stepsons, and two grandchildren.

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