Forgotten Continent: A History of the New Latin America

by Michael Reid

José Mujica, who as a captured Tupamaro guerrilla had spent ten years in solitary confinement, two of them at the bottom of a well with only ants and rats for company, was elected president of Uruguay in 2009 for the left-wing Frente Amplio (Broad Front). In office, he continued to live austerely in his three-room farmhouse, drove an ancient VW Beetle and lunched in the nondescript cafeterias of Montevideo’s Avenida 18 de Julio, its main commercial street. He attracted worldwide attention not just for his modest lifestyle, but also for successfully promoting the legalisation of marijuana in Uruguay.

the population of greater São Paulo leapt from 69,000 in 1890 to 12 million in 1976 and 21 million today.

Spanish is spoken by perhaps 560 million people, making it the fourth most-spoken tongue after Mandarin, English and Arabic. Spanish is the second most-studied foreign language, after English, with 21 million students, up from 14 million a decade ago.27 Portuguese, spoken in Brazil, is in eighth place, with 250 million speakers, behind Hindi, Russian and Bengali, but ahead of German and French.

number of indigenous languages remain important, each spoken by several million people. They include Quechua in the countries of the former Inca empire (Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, where it is called Quichua); Aymara, too, is spoken widely in Bolivia and around the Peruvian shore of Lake Titicaca; Guaraní is the lingua franca of Paraguayans, spoken at home even by members of the country’s elite; a score of Mayan languages are spoken in Guatemala and parts of southern Mexico. In all, Mexico has more than 50 Indian languages in current use, including Nahuatl, the tongue of the Aztecs.

the hedgehog way of thinking carries the seeds of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, while that of the foxes embodies liberal pluralism. Véliz argues that Latin American culture is like a ‘hedgehog’: he sees it as marked by a monolithic, ordering vision composed of centralisation, civil law, Baroque classicism, and a notion of society as a hierarchical, organic whole, in which each person has his or her place. For Véliz, English-speaking North Americans, by contrast, are ‘foxes’. Their culture has featured decentralisation, the common law, romanticism and the Gothic.

the two periods when the gap in average incomes between Latin America and the United States widened were during the wars of independence and their aftermath in the first half of the nineteenth century and the period from 1970 to 2000, when political conflicts engendered dictatorship and poor economic policies.

Perhaps because of the prevalence of slavery and forced Indian labour during the colonial period, Latin American landowners were reluctant to pay higher wages, preferring continued coercion. There was a profusion of different forms of servitude associated with the haciendas or large estates. Indeed, the desire to gain control of labour, rather than the accumulation of land itself, was probably the main factor driving the expansion of haciendas at the expense of communal landholdings in the nineteenth century. These patterns in land and labour markets discouraged both innovation and the growth of the domestic market, and thus were an important factor delaying industrialisation.

Colombia, along with Costa Rica and Uruguay, stands out from the rest of Latin America: in all three countries, authoritarian dictatorships have been brief and rare.

Meanwhile, Yucatán was for practical purposes all but independent during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1849, it asked to be annexed by the United States, but was turned down. It had no road or rail link with Mexico City until as late as the 1950s.

Pinochet’s standing among his own supporters suffered when it was revealed that he had $27 million stashed away in foreign bank accounts, as well as several false passports.

On the evening of 2 October, a march by a few thousand students reached the square at Tlatelolco. As the marchers prepared to listen to speeches, watched over by an army detachment, members of a government-organised plain-clothes paramilitary squad, acting as agents provocateurs, fired on the crowd from a balcony in one of the apartment blocks, wounding the army general in charge. That prompted the army to rake the square with fire from armoured cars, bazookas and machine guns, as well as small arms. The exact death toll is still not known. The student movement put the figure at 150 civilians and 40 members of the security forces killed.

On 1 January 1994, the date that NAFTA came into effect, several hundred indigenous guerrillas seized the colonial town of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern state of Chiapas in the name of the previously unknown Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).

As Luis de la Calle, another Mexican economist, put it, formal companies are subject to ‘multiple windows’ of extortion – by unions, municipal officials, labour inspectors, IMSS inspectors, the tax office, the police and the Zetas, none of which are in practice subjected to legal restraint. Stay informal, and ‘you benefit from a “single window” of extortion: you pay the Zetas and they protect you’, he noted.

That obviously applied to Cuba, where 29 independent journalists were arrested in 2003 and given prison terms averaging 27 years, after summary trials.

Between 2005 and 2016, the China Development Bank and China Export-Import Bank extended credits to Latin American governments totalling $141 billion – more than the World Bank and the IDB combined. The vast majority went to just four countries: Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador.