Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America

by Michael Reid

will use ‘neoliberal’ far more narrowly to refer to those who believe that macro-economic stability, free markets and free trade on their own are sufficient to achieve economic development, rather than being necessary conditions which require the complement of an effective state.

So here is my own definition. By ‘populism’, I mean two things: first, a brand of politics in which a strong, charismatic leader appeals to ‘the people’ by counterposing it to a rhetorical oppressor such as the ‘oligarchy’ or ‘establishment’ (or ‘Washington’ in Trump’s case). He or she purports to be a saviour, blurring the distinction between leader, government, party and state, and ignoring the need for the restraint of executive power through checks and balances. Secondly, populism has often, but not always, involved redistribution of income and/or wealth in an unsustainable fashion.

When Latin Americans contemplated Trump, many found him uncannily familiar. Maybe, in an unexpected fashion, the United States was at last joining the Americas.

importance of music and dance.

Despite their prowess at football, a team sport, Latin Americans are torn between gregarious and anarchic impulses.

Polls regularly show that Latin Americans stand out from the rest of the world in their low levels of inter-personal trust, which is probably a product of the lack of the rule of law.

Thus, Cuba and the Dominican Republic apart, all the Latin American countries gained independence between 1810 and 1830.

six South American republics completed the abolition of slavery in 1851–54,

there is nothing in the historical record to suggest that Latin America is intrinsically incapable of following Europe and the United States down the path of democracy and capitalism

Some scholars reckon that by 1800 its income per head was twice that of Latin America, while others say that it was broadly similar, though income and wealth were much more unevenly shared out in Iberian America, which lacked the puritan egalitarianism of New England.

The diverging fortune of the two halves of the Americas has generated a deep and abiding sense of failure.

By 1998, he calculated, Western Europe was three times as rich, and the United States more than four times, as Latin America.

income per person in Latin America was about a quarter of that in the United States in 1900 and remained so a century later.

United States preferred reactionary military dictators to reformist democrats. To varying extents it backed military coups, from Guatemala to Argentina.

Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, is a scorching denunciation of foreign exploitation.

Latin America, because of its mineral and agricultural wealth, is rich. If most of its people are poor, it follows that someone must be stealing the wealth.

Dependency theory also nourished a view of trade as a zero-sum game, rather than a source of mutual profit. This is strikingly similar to eighteenth-century mercantilism – or indeed to the views of Donald Trump.

dependency theory remains an important prism through which Latin American studies are taught in the United States and Europe.

The main tenets of dependency theory have been disproved by later empirical research.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, an Anglo-Spanish historian, has recently summarised the comparative impact: the independence wars were, in short, the making of the United States and the ruin of much of the rest of the Americas . . . To fight the wars, all the affected (Spanish-American) states had to sacrifice liberties to caudillismo and civil values to militarism . . . People in the Americas often speak of the chaotic politics, democratic immaturity, and economic torpor of Latin American tradition as if they were an atavistic curse, a genetic defect, a Latin legacy. Really, like everything else in history, they are products of circumstance, and of the circumstances, in particular, in which independence was won.12

Legislation in Latin America often embodies an ideal world, impossible to carry out in practice.

At the time of their respective European conquests, Latin America may have contained some 20 million people, compared with some 3 million spread across what would become Canada and the United States.

Nevertheless, as J.H. Elliott points out in his masterly comparative study, indigenous people in Spanish America ‘were given at least a limited space of their own’ in a philosophically inclusive society, while their counterparts in British North America were simply excluded.

caudillismo

The great achievement of the post-revolutionary system was to bring lasting stability by institutionalising political conflict and allowing for regular political renewal. Thus, almost uniquely in Latin America, in Mexico the army was politically neutralised.

The peasants were tied into the PRI system. They were demobilised, not empowered. They had won land, but not freedom.51 Nor did many of them escape poverty. Cárdenas also set up a national trade-union

The Church, too, was subordinated to the state:

During the revolution, the United States twice sent troops to Mexico: in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson sent marines to Veracruz, to prevent arms from reaching Huerta; when, in March 1916, Villa, resentful at American recognition of the Carranza government, briefly raided the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, Wilson dispatched a futile ‘punitive expedition’ under General John Pershing (who the following year commanded a much more significant force in France).

In 1938, Cárdenas acted: he nationalised the oil industry, declaring ‘el petróleo es nuestro’ (‘the oil is ours’),

The PRI’s rule gave Mexico stability, and laid the basis of a modern nation state and an industrialised economy. From 1930 until at least 1968, it was highly successful.

The liberal order lasted for two decades longer in South America than in Mexico. Its death knell was sounded by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929 – as it was in Europe.

Latin America, Mussolini and Franco were more influential than Marx and Lenin.

Perón’s government of 1946–55 was the closest Latin America came to a fascist regime. It gave refuge to at least 180 Nazis and their collaborators,

the larger countries, only Colombia and Chile remained relatively aloof from populism.

populist movements were often seen as a threat by conservative agro-exporting interests (and by the United States).

Overall, populism had a negative impact on Latin American democracy and development. Four defects stand out.

populism was in many ways less than democratic.

A second, linked failing was the reliance on charismatic leadership.

charismatic leadership is inimical to the rule of law

Thirdly, perhaps the most disappointing feature of populism was its failure to make a serious attack on inequality.

fourth defect of populism: its economic policy.

constant tension in populist governments between industrialisation and welfarism (as Drake puts it) led them to rely on over-expansionary macroeconomic policies and made them prey to extreme economic volatility. While claiming to champion the creation of a modern

over the past two or three decades Latin America has forged a broad consensus in favour of democracy, macroeconomic stability, economic openness and social inclusion (the importance of eliminating poverty and reducing inequality). Those countries that have strayed from this consensus have, to varying degrees, foundered.

One task facing the region is thus to stay the course. Another is to forge new consensus on three basic things. The first is to improve the rule of law and tackle more effectively the scourge of violent crime and citizen insecurity. The second is to entrench and extend the still tentative progress in education and health and to move beyond conditional cash transfers to improve skills training, and also to work out what kind of welfare state Latin America needs and can afford. And the third issue is that of productivity itself, of encouraging more efficient and diversified economies. Some of these tasks require more tax revenue. But all of them require a different kind of state and the forging of broad political consensus.

No country has solved the problem of judicial reform. Ways have to be found of making the judiciary accountable to society.

the main obstacle to consolidating the new middle class is the poor quality of education,

the entrenchment of informality undermines productivity, since informal workers are less productive than formal ones.

move to universal systems of health care, pensions and social protection that are not

One is the weight of the informal economy and small businesses in Latin America.

Informal firms are a drag on productivity: they tend to lack economies of scale and up-to-date technology, and they invest little in their workers’ skills.