THE WORLD OF LATIN AMERICA

The population of Latin America and the Caribbean reached 519 million people at the close of the twentieth century. Yet in twentieth-century world history Latin America was usually marginalised, perhaps because it did not in the first half of the century play a major role in the global conflicts of this century, which had their epicentres in Europe and Asia. Perspectives began to change only in the 1950s - not because of a belated recognition that millions of the world’s population deserved better, but because of the Cold War. Before then only Argentina’s flirtation with fascism had aroused wider interest. After the Second World War the spread of Marxism and the influence of the Soviet Union aroused Western concern, especially that of the US. Attention focused on Arbenz’s Guatemala, on Che Guevara’s efforts to spread communism from Cuba to the mainland, on Allende’s Chile, on the Sandanistas in Nicaragua and on the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Peru.

With the launching of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in 1961 the US made an attempt to address the social, economic and political injustices of Latin America. But as the fear of Marxist revolution grew in the 1970s and 1980s, positive policies took second place to ensuring the military defeat of revolutionary movements. Then, as the 1980s drew to a close, two new issues attracted world attention to South America. One was the dangers besetting the global environment. Life on earth is dependent on careful balances, on a shield in space enveloping the world. The ruthless destruction of Brazil’s huge rainforest could have incalculable consequences for the world’s climate. Attention was thus drawn to the plight of the Indians in Brazil and to the devastation of large forest areas.

The second problem was drugs - cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Heroin was trans-shipped mainly from Asia, where the poppies grew, and also from Mexico. Marijuana was cultivated in Mexico, Colombia and Jamaica. The greatest demand, especially in the US, came to be for cocaine and its derivative, crack. Drugs posed an immediate threat to the well-being and lives of mankind. It was estimated that in 2000 there were 14.5 million addicts in the US alone, spending a hundred billion dollars annually. The drug scourge had a particular hold on the deprived and unemployed, so it was rife in the poor black ghettos. But it was by no means confined to the poor: crack was used by the jaded and hedonistic of all social classes. Yet the illegal drug trade was associated with crime and violence on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

For many peasants in Latin America in the last decades of the twentieth century the growing of the coca leaf was their only source of income. They were paid little for it. Most of the leaves were grown in Peru and Bolivia, but Colombia, with its illegal refineries, was the drug centre of Latin America; here cartels and drug barons reap colossal rewards.

The economic problems of these debt-ridden countries gave the US some leverage in its battle against the drug scourge. In return for aid and trade concessions, President George Bush hoped to cooperate with the governments of the three Andean nations, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. Peru was in bad shape economically and politically. It was beset by a hardline active Maoist guerrilla movement, the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path, which specialised in killing supporters of the government. Peru also had a large foreign debt equivalent to half its gross national product. Neighbouring Bolivia was one of the poorest countries of Latin America, with a crushing foreign-debt burden. The armed forces of these countries, with US help, destroyed some of the plantations of coca in almost impenetrable jungle clearings, but the growing of coca leaves continued in many others. Medellin, the drug capital of Colombia, became the centre of violence too, with determined government efforts to strike against the drug barons being answered by bombs and assassinations. In Paraguay, where the dictator General Alfredo Stroessner ruled for thirty-four years supported by the military, government enjoyed a cosy relationship with the drug barons. A military coup finally overthrew him in 1989. It was uncertain whether his successors would end the corruption and curb the trade in drugs. Drug trafficking involved the whole of Latin America in shipments to North America and Peru from the Atlantic ports as well as those of the Pacific. As long as so profitable a market existed in the West, the chances of suppressing it at its source were slim.

With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the problems of Latin America were viewed in less ideological terms. It was an important world trading partner, most US exports going to the region, and its debts were a significant factor impeding trade and development; to default on them would present a serious problem to Western banking. Latin America was also a vital source of raw materials, not least Venezuelan oil. In Latin America, the Third World and the Western world lived side by side. But the enormous economic growth since the 1960s did not improve social justice; democracy remained weak, the military strong; the rich became richer, the poor benefited little, if at all. Latin America presents a rich palette of cultures; there is racial injustice but also much intermarriage and blending of races. As the twentieth century neared its end, a demographic time-bomb was ticking away: could the rapid population growth be slowed to a manageable increase? The problems of the continent were enormous, and it was vital to find solutions for them. Latin America was not likely to disappear from the agenda of world history again.

In the nineteenth century, investment in Latin America became a profitable destination for the venture capitalists of Western Europe and the US. Britain built railways and became the principal investor before the First World War, and the US invested particularly in Cuba and Central America, buying up many great plantations. While coffee-growing remained largely in Central American hands, American investment and political influence at its height was epitomised by the United Fruit Company, which monopolised the banana plantations and trade, owning its own shipping line and much else besides by the close of the nineteenth century.

Despite this large influx of foreign money, the masses of Latin America remained poor and the disparity of wealth and poverty extreme. During the first half of the twentieth century, moreover, there was only a small manufacturing industry throughout South America. Essentially there existed an alliance between the Latin American elites - the cattle-raisers of the Argentine, the owners of the coffee plantations of Brazil and local merchants - and foreign-owned enterprises, from which both drew immense profits in good times, to the exclusion of the subsistence masses. For the consumption of manufactured goods and luxuries the Latin American market remained small, since 90 per cent of the population did not earn enough to buy them. This has been one of the principal impediments to the continent’s industrial diversification. Without an adequate domestic base the difficulties of establishing manufactures that can be profitable at home and competitive abroad are immense.

Accumulated foreign debt (US$ billions as percentage of Gross Domestic Products)

Foreign debt as percentage of GDP in 2000

Foreign debt

Latin American governments are also characterised by instability, which, in the past, has discouraged investment - the local elites simply sent their money abroad to safer havens. It is instructive to compare the heavy indebtedness of Latin American nations with the estimated flight of capital abroad from 1982 to 1988. Nevertheless, state sponsorship and foreign investment since 1945 are gradually transforming Latin America, and large-scale industries have been established in all the major Latin American nations, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. As in industrial Europe, there has been a shift from agricultural pursuits to manufacture, from rural society to urban. But the forced pace of rapid industrial development has left many Latin American states burdened with huge debts to the West which most have no prospects of repaying at high interest rates. The expectation that with modernisation, with the expansion of a professional middle class, with the growth of an urban skilled workforce, their standard of living rising, and with increasing education and literacy Latin American authoritarian politics would give way to Western-style democracies is not yet being fulfilled. In Latin America, as in other developing regions, there is no such automatic and inevitable link between economic progress and democracy.

In many Latin American states in the 1980s, the military handed government back to democratic civilian rule. But frequently this represented an improvement only on the surface. Amnesty International publishes an annual survey of human-rights violations. It makes salutary reading. Torture and killings were still widespread in the exercise of political power against opposing groups. During the 1970s and early 1980s this barbarism probably reached heights not witnessed before in modern Latin American history and, one hopes, not to be reached again. At least 90,000 people simply ‘disappeared’; no one knows for certain how many were picked up from their homes or in the street, never to be heard of again. At the trial of the Argentinian junta chiefs in 1985, it was estimated that 9,000 had disappeared during the six years of military rule from 1976 to 1982; in Guatemala, Chile, Haiti and El Salvador, torture and executions without trial by ‘security forces’ or death squads were widespread.

In the 1960s a powerful new voice of protest against oppression made itself heard. The Catholic Church, which for centuries had been a pillar of conservative society, ceased to give unconditional support to the ruling elites. But the Vatican and Pope John Paul watched with consternation any Marxist leanings of bishops, priests and nuns amid the social tensions and political struggles of Latin America. In its most extreme form, ‘liberation theology’ looked to Marxism for an explanation of poverty and oppression but rejected atheism. But mostly the Church was simply speaking out against the extreme inequalities of wealth and against the unjustified and indiscriminate use of force.

This became clear to the rest of the world in 1968 when the bishops of Latin America met at Medellin in Colombia in the presence of Pope Paul VI and published a most remarkable declaration which read in part:

Latin America still appears to live under the tragic sign of under-development. . . Despite all the efforts that are made, we are faced with hunger and poverty, widespread disease and infant mortality, illiteracy and marginalism, profound inequalities of income, and tensions between the social classes, outbreaks of violence and a scanty participation of the people in the management of the common good - Complaints that the hierarchy, the clergy, the religious are rich and allied with the rich also come to us.

The Church dedicated itself to becoming the Church of the poor and oppressed. In 1978 the Latin American bishops met again in Puebla, Mexico, and the majority progressives pressed on with the new liberation action. ‘Between Medellin and Puebla, ten years have gone by’, the bishops declared.

If we focus our gaze on our Latin American region, what do we see? No deep scrutiny is necessary. The truth is that there is an ever increasing distance between the many who have little and the few who have much. . . we discover that this poverty is not a passing phase, instead it is the product of economic, social and political situations and structures.

What was needed, the progressive Church leaders urged, was ‘personal conversion and profound structural changes that will meet the legitimate aspirations of the people for authentic social justice’.

In Latin America the leading members of the Church hierarchy knew that if the Church failed to take the side of the poor the masses in their desperation would turn for their salvation away from the Church to a godless Marxism. The Church soon discovered the inevitable political implications of its new role. It spoke out against the ‘disappearance’ of people in Argentina and Chile and against the death squads of El Salvador during the 1970s; it defended the rights of labour

Homeless children huddle together for warmth, Bolivia. © Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos unions and spoke up for the Indians excluded from the mainstream of development in Bolivia and Peru.

The most far-reaching change in the attitude of sections of the Catholic Church took the form of a campaign to reach out to the ordinary people, to give practical help, to communicate and to organise by creating thousands of grass-roots community groups. These Christian communities in Latin America sought to ‘liberate’ the people through exercise of the faith and through stress on the value and dignity of human life. They were based on selfhelp through discussion and common action concerned with the practical issues of life and politics. Priests, nuns and Catholic laity provided leadership and teaching. But, unlike a left-wing party under rigid hierarchical control, the groups that sprang up relied on their own initiative. In Brazil, where the communities were developed to their greatest extent, tens of thousands of such groups had been formed in the countryside and in the shanty towns by the early 1990s, and as many as half a million of the disadvantaged poor had been brought together. A community might consist of twenty or thirty people meeting in a simple building. They would celebrate mass with a priest, and then discuss their immediate problems and concerns. They would decide on action: to demonstrate, to petition, to demand basic services for their community, such as electricity and housing or perhaps a health centre. They acquired a sense of self-worth and confidence in acting together against corrupt local authorities. Devoted priests, nuns and laity served them. They taught respect for Christian values, as well as basic democracy and non-violent methods of action to improve their lives. In Brazil, the hierarchy spoke strongly in support of this community movement and accepted the strained relations thereby created with the state.

Repressive governments understood the risk nationally and internationally of taking any drastic steps against such a strongly united Church. Nevertheless, there were many martyrs when the military, no longer confining themselves to accusations of communist infiltration, resorted to harassment and murder. One such incident which attracted worldwide attention in 1980 was the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken critic of the regime in El Salvador, who was shot dead while administering mass in a hospital chapel. Where military regimes suppressed opposition, the Church became the sole national voice of freedom. It was itself deeply divided in some Latin American states, where the hierarchy might be more ready to support the fight against communism than criticise authoritarian governments. In others, as in Brazil and El Salvador, the Church was more united in opposition. On the whole the Church was not revolutionary in action, but where it took a clear spiritual stand against injustice and economic exploitation it became a force that weakened the standing of repressive authoritarian regimes and tore aside the veil of secrecy with which these regimes attempted to hide their crimes. In the longer term the Church functioned as an opposition which, because of the international respect it enjoyed, undermined Western, especially American, support for regimes whose human-rights records had become indefensible. Other organisations, such as Amnesty, trade unions and resistance groups, also highlighted the practices of torture and murder, but the majority of the church representatives when they spoke out enjoyed the inestimable advantage of not being identified as part of the left of politics, despite the attempts by regimes seeking to silence them to slander and misinterpret their motives.

In the early 1990s the Church was still making great efforts to improve the lot of the poor masses. But on the crucial issue of population control Pope John Paul’s pronouncements were uncompromising. The only means of birth control permitted by the Church, the rhythm method, was too unreliable and was anyway not effectively practised. Millions of women suffered the dangers and misery of repeated abortions. But high rates of infant mortality and poverty were also responsible for the poor desiring large families. So there were multiple reasons for high birth rates. Whatever its cause, the galloping population growth undermined progress. It is characteristic of regions with high birth rates for the young to predominate, and boys and girls from the shanty towns surrounding many of Latin America’s major cities turned to begging, stealing and prostitution. Young lives became cheap, for instance in Rio de Janeiro, where vagrant children and petty criminals were found shot dead by vigilante groups. Moreover, millions of peasants and urban poor in Latin America were malnourished. Much of the increase achieved in agricultural production, including coffee, was sent for export - it did not feed the peasants, who were landless or eking out a living on the small areas of arable land divided between them. Most of the land was allotted to the larger estates. Only two Latin American countries had low rates of birth in the early 1990s and these were the two with predominantly European populations, Argentina and Uruguay. Without population control, modernisation would do little to help the urban poor or the peasants.

With an average annual rate of increase of 3.4 per cent, the population doubled every twenty-one years. Population growth in different countries varied enormously. Cuba under Marxist policies cut its increase to just 1 per cent; the highest rates, above 3 per cent, were to be found in Central America and Mexico. More than half the population of the continent lived in two countries, Brazil and Mexico, with a growth rate above 2 per cent in Brazil and 3.5 per cent in Mexico.

Generalisations about Latin America tend to require many qualifications. For instance, it is true that only two languages predominate, Portuguese in Brazil and Spanish in the remainder of Latin America (except for French in Haiti), but numerous Indian languages are still spoken, such as Quechua and Aymara, derived from the Incas and Maya and Guarani. Cultural traditions originate not only from the indigenous Indians but from the waves of immigrants through the centuries: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, French, slaves from Africa and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, labourers from Italy, Germany, North America and Asia.

Population (millions)