Michael Monteón - Latin America and The Origins of Its Twenty-First Century

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, 1946-
Latin 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
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This book is printed on acid-free paper
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For Betty, who loved and endured
And for my students, my teachers
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Structure of an Interpretation xi
Chapter 1 The Long Nineteenth Century, Caudillaje,
Power, and the People 1
City and Countryside 3
Labor: Indian, Slave, and Free 15
The Origins of National Governments 27
Pax Britannica 36
Chapter 2 Oligarchy and the Impact of New Wealth,
1880–1914 49
The Newest City 52
Boulevards and Streetcars 52
The Working Class 60
Buenos Aires 63
Peasants and Landed Power 70
The Challenges to Oligarchy 75
Imperial Shift 84
Chapter 3 Revolutions and Modernization,
1910–1955 91
A Different Direction 94
Chilangolandia 95
The Mexican Revolution 108
viii Contents
Populism and the Oligarchies 125

Peronismo 130
Populist Frustrations 141
The United States as a Hegemonic Power 160
The Anticommunist Crusade 161
Two Revolutionary Movements: Bolivia
and Guatemala 165
Chapter 4 Modern Life and Modern Conflicts, 1956–1985 175
Santiago and the Pinochet Dictatorship 176
The Population Explosion 187
Causes and Consequences of the
Population Boom 188
The Misinterpretations of
Urban Poverty 194
Arts and Communication 196
The Cold War and Guerrilla Dreams 199
The Cuban Revolution 201
The Brazilian Model 207
Guerrilla Warfare 214
The Dilemmas of Development 228
Chapter 5 Launched into the Present 233
São Paulo, the Newest City 237
The Collapse of Military Capitalism 245
The Shock Treatment 249
The End of the Guerrilla Left 255
Mexico Revisited 269
The Latin-Americanization of the
United States 280
Blowback 290
Migration 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 ques-
tions 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 under-
standing 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 distri-
bution 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 Introduction: The Structure of an Interpretation
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 some-
times 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 tech-
nology, 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
Introduction: The Structure of an Interpretation 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 pres-
idents 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 move-
ments 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 inter-
ests 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 mil-
itary or supported militarism in Latin America.
xiv Introduction: The Structure of an Interpretation
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 twenti-
eth 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 twenty-
first. 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 historiogra-
phy had foreseen some of what would follow—the increase in the
size of the middle class, the modernization of life, the rise of a con-
sumer 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 pop-
ulation in most Latin American nations. Far from establishing a
better age, the crisis of economic growth and social needs led to mil-
itary 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
Introduction: The Structure of an Interpretation xv
without massive government spending. If this is true of the most suc-

cessful capitalist country in the world, how can we expect that Latin
America will not find some way to revive a form of a political econ-
omy 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 popula-
tions 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 prein-
dustrial colonies, that is, peoples whose cultures and racial makeup
were largely determined by having been conquered by Spain or Por-
tugal. 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 soci-
eties 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 some-
what 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 Latin America and the Origins of Its Twenty-First Century
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 institu-
tions 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 mobiliza-
tions 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 oppor-
tunity—a chance to seize office, to assert a regional or rural inde-
pendence, 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 lit-
tle to declare its importance. Two of the major urban centers of Latin
America stood out in size and beauty, Mexico City and Lima, respec-
tively 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,
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 Amer-
ica 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 viceroy-
alties 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.
The colonies had complex societies, but in form, there was an

imperial aristocracy and a mass of commoners. However, a com-
moner 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 administra-
tive 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 Amer-
ica 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
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 col-
onization 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 cri-
sis 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
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 inde-
pendence. 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 independ-
ence). 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 govern-
ments 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
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.
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 coun-
tryside 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, con-
servative federalist, liberal centralist, and conservative centralist (see
Table 1.1). These rough divisions appeared in the wars of independ-
ence 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 view-
points 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

Liberal Conservative
Federalist Porfirio Cipriano Juan Manuel José Antonio
Díaz (1876), Castro Rosas Paez
Mexico (1901), (1828), (1830s),
Venezuela Argentina Venezuela
Centralist Simón Bolívar Bernardo José de Diego
(1820), O’Higgins Iturbide, Portales
Liberator of (1820), (1820), (1833),
Northern Liberator Emperor Chile
South of Chile of Mexico
America
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’ backward-
ness 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 through-
out 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
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
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 popula-
tions governed themselves and in such numbers that they were able
to resist simple incorporation into landlord rule. In all of these coun-
tries, 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 men-
tioned, 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 aforemen-
tioned 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
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) improve-
ment. Here, the evolution of Chile is enlightening. The conservative
regime was highly repressive but effective in creating legal continu-
ity. 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, espe-
cially 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 civi-
lization.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 condi-
tions 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 civi-
lization, 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 sym-
bols of masculinity and national fortitude.12
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 insta-
bility, 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 1790 1850 1890
Bogotá 18,000 30,000 96,000
Buenos Aires 22,000 99,000 433,000
Guatemala City 37,000 72,000
Havana 2,000 28,000
Lima 53,000 70,000 101,000
London 675,000 2,605,000 5,638,000
Madrid 109,000 281,000 470,000
Mexico City 131,000 170,000 327,000
New York 33,000 696,000 2,507,000
Paris 576,000 1,053,000 2,448,000
Rio de Janeiro 29,000 166,000 523,000
São Paulo 8,000 15,000 65,000
Source: B.R. Mitchell, International, Historical Statistics, 1750–1993. The
Americas, pp. 47–57; and Europe, pp. 74–76.
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 manufac-
tures from Europe. Although conservative and rural cultures influ-
enced 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 tech-
nology 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
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 soci-
ologist—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 asso-
ciated 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 demon-
strated, 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
those areas today.18 In Haiti, slaves and free people gained independ-
ence 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 fron-
tier offered new profits to slave masters and so refinanced a labor sys-
tem 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 senti-
ment 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 popula-
tion in the United States, which banned the importation of slaves in
1808, slave populations in Latin America never reproduced in num-
bers 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 pros-
perous 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
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 con-
tact 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
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. Munici-
palities 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 back-
ground. 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 agri-
culture, 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 govern-
ments, 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 politi-
cians—whether White, mestizo, or even Juárez himself—had little
sympathy for native cultures and did little or nothing to protect or
extend native populations. Indeed, the best policy natives could hope
for was to be left alone. As late as 1850, native communities control-
ling 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 inde-
pendence 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 dif-
ferent 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
class needed free Blacks and mulattos to serve as their allies in con-
trolling 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, how-
ever. 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 cen-
tral 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
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 par-
alleled 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,
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 prosti-
tution 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, substan-
tial 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 essen-
tial to social life; one of the most common was the cofradía
(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 pre-
Colombian or African pasts. At times, these became entirely differ-
ent 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
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 cos-
tumes. It would take a lengthy catalog to list just the forms of danc-
ing 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 every-
where. Meat, outside of cattle zones, was scarce and expensive. But just
as every region had its political climate and its religious peculiarities,
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: reli-
gious confraternities, Masonic and political clubs, guilds, and com-
mercial 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 Colom-
bia, 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 peti-
tioned 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
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 consti-
tutional 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-
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 constitu-
tional 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 lib-
eral enthusiasm in the 1820s, Mexico had not only abolished slav-
ery 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 citi-
zens 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 pris-
ons to contain any social threat.
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 under-
lined 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 them-
selves 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 over-
throw 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 con-
stitution 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 avail-
able to “civilized” people. Wars between nations helped create cohe-
sion 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
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 communi-
ties. Formally, the Church was divided into religious orders and
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 plan-
tations, 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 independ-
ence 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 conser-
vative government of President Manuel Montt Torres (1851–1861),
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 conserva-
tive 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,
and although a monarchy, the country had strong republican senti-

ments. 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, gov-
ernments 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 nineteenth-
century 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
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 separa-
tion; 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 fam-
ily 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 consis-
tently 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
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 gen-
eral 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. Anglo-
American 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 techni-
cal 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
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 romanti-
cized) gave way. People did not expect to take part in peaceful
politics and were often drawn into or victimized by war and rebel-
lion. 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 depen-
dentistas 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 devel-
oped economically so much as it had gone from one stage of under-
development to another—never to catch up with developed coun-

tries 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, inter-
est 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
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 histori-
ans 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 manipu-
lated whom? The government was not to blame for what British
entrepreneurs and investors did in far-flung regions, and the busi-
nessmen 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 untan-
gle 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 seg-
ments 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 eighteenth-
century world of empire. As already mentioned, the wars that
engulfed them and reshaped the fate of Latin America grew out of
dynastic collapse and nationalist expansionism. The French Revolu-

tion 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 Colom-
bia, and the rebellion of Tiradentes in Brazil had already been sup-
pressed. 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 Viceroy-
alty 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 aggres-
sion, 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
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 inde-
pendence. 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 nine-
teenth 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 foot-
ing 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 block-
ades (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
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 use-
ful 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 circu-
late 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 rela-
tive 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.
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 food-
stuffs, 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 specula-
tion, 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
schools and maintaining whatever ties they could to their emo-

tional 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 capi-
tal, credit to governments, railroad technology, shipping, and mar-
keting 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 refer-
ring 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
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 acci-
dent 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
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 rail-
road 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
Civilistas) dependent on dwindling tariff revenues, and agrarian soci-

eties 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 out-
weighed 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 con-
flict, Brazil’s White officers led largely Black troops and began to
recoil at the thought that this same army was used to enforce slav-
ery. 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, respec-
tively. 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 develop-
ment. 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 Ameri-
can 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 con-
vinced, 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
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 walk-
ing 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
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 intellectu-
als 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 increas-
ing 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 popula-
tion—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 51
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 popu-
lation groups were involved in Latin America. As part of their
efforts to whiten their populations and in admiration of what immi-
gration 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 popu-
lation 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 com-
pletely 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 popula-
tions 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
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 inter-
esting 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
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 semitrop-
ical 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.
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 family-
owned 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
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.
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, auto-
mobiles, 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 pre-
Colombian civilizations. John Lloyd Stephens found Palenque in the
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 light-
skinned 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 rational-
ized 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 off-
spring.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
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 intel-
lectual development. Societies began as theological entities, explain-
ing 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 evi-
dence and reasoning improve. People who had read Comte’s volu-
minous writings and understood him had obviously entered the
scientific stage; unfortunately, that was only a minority of any pop-
ulation. Comte had spent his youth in the tumult of the French Rev-
olution 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 curi-
ously 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)
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
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 improve-
ments. 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
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.
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 mecha-
nized 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.
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, influ-
enced 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 “admin-
istrative 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 exter-
minated the native population. This genocidal act, still celebrated in
Argentine historical narratives, opened vast tracts of land to settle-
ment 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,
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 Afro-
Argentine 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 immi-
grants 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 inter-
national 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 con-
tinent. They gave the Atlantic world its first dance craze, the tango,
which originated in the brothels of the city, paralleling the develop-
ment 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
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 commemo-
rated in Argentina much as Elvis Presley’s death is remembered in the
United States.34
Working people also brought their politics. Europe already had rad-
ical 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
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, industrializ-
ing 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 revolu-
tion, 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
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 con-
servatives, 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,
people leaving Argentina exceeded those coming in.39 The combina-

tion 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 dissi-
dents 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 des-
peration, 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 geograph-
ically 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 eco-
nomic 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 pro-
tecting 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 fastest-
growing 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
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 characteris-
tics 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
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 resent-
ments between the area of Buenos Aires and the nation’s interior.43
Prosperity sometimes intensifies social conflict. No capitalist econ-
omy 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. Govern-
ments 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
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 independ-
ence, 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 doc-
umentation 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
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 recon-
struction 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 there-
after.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 charac-
terized 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
money and military experience. They were mistaken. The conserva-

tives 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 war-
riors. 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
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 conser-
vatives, 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 intellec-
tual 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 govern-
ment 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
movements fought for small farmers and rural improvements. Mod-

ernization 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 strug-
gling 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
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 sev-
eral decades for the ruling groups in liberal societies to indoctrinate
the general populace with the thought that using the vote to redis-
tribute 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 aristoc-
racies ran most of Europe, and Latin American conservatives could
look to them as a bastion of beliefs. Even so, by the 1920s, conser-
vatives 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 con-
trol 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
European centers, the commissions mapped out an agenda for gov-

ernment 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 authoritar-
ian 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.
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 fed-
eralism 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 impor-
tance 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 “combi-
nations”—associations of nitrate producers that raised prices by
reducing output. The Chilean government tried to increase produc-
tion 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 strengthen-
ing 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
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 threat-
ened 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 over-
thrown 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 infla-
tionary 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,
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 pro-
longed 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 educa-
tion, 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 liberal-
conservative 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 harass-
ment, and no unions.60
Chile moved during the export boom from a presidential, central-
ized republic to a congressional, centralized one. Venezuela demon-
strates 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 popula-
tion hugged the coast near Caracas and fanned out into the
countryside. To the south of the major city was the ranching land
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 pro-
duced 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, newspaper-
man, 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 adminis-
tration 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
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 circum-
stances 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 con-
tinued. 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.
The United States, under President Theodore Roosevelt, refused to

send ships to stop the blockade but did recommend that the interna-
tional court at The Hague arbitrate the dispute. The conflict would
involve the United States in another way, with disastrous conse-
quences 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 else-
where, 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 under-
stood 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 politi-
cal 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 con-
solidated 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
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-of-
the-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
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
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 protec-
torates 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 offi-
cials. 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
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 sig-
nificant 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
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 transforma-
tion 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
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 politi-
cal 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 reshap-
ing 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 soci-
eties. 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
capitalism. Largely, it was the result of necessity. The Great Depres-

sion 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 author-
ity in the hands of the national governments, more specifically, in
their presidencies; and they played up nationalism and national sym-
bols 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 federal-
ism, 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 encourag-
ing 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 gen-
eral instability of the 1920s made leaders believe that nineteenth-cen-
tury 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
Revolutions and Modernization, 1910–1955 93
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 Ben-
ito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy. But disenchantment with
democracy did not always move to the right. When Ibáñez was over-
thrown 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 fundamen-
tally 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 lan-
guage of class warfare, denouncing the native oligarchy, and with
economic nationalism, denouncing the dominant foreign power in the
economy—usually the United States.6
As events in the first decade of the twenty-first century have demon-

strated, Latin American populism is alive and an essential part of the
range of political styles employed by the region’s leaders. In its origi-
nal 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 pop-
ulism.
They shared many qualities with the liberals they rejected, espe-
cially 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 mar-
ket 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 indus-
trialization 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
revolutionary potential. In Latin America, just as in nineteenth-

century 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
highways connected the city to outlying urban centers in the states of

Mexico, Morelos, and Hidalgo, making travel from the capital to sur-
rounding 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 cam-
paigns were being run in the United States), and to hold youth to a
higher standard of morality than their parents practiced.7 Activists in
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 mid-
1930s, they ran the country as a one-party state with a market
economy. That party, the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institu-
cional), 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 Institu-
cional (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
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
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 revolu-
tion, 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
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 chi-
langos, 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 out-
side 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 candi-
dates. The PRI’s reach seemed omnipresent. Anyone who joined a
labor union had to join an organization approved by the govern-
ment 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 communi-
cations 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, Azcar-
raga 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
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 con-
trolled 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 state-
subsidized credit.
The party controlled the CTM (or Confederación de Trabajadores
Mexicanos)—the umbrella organization of numerous unions organ-
ized 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
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 denomi-
nates 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
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 gov-
ernment 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
to the left and included Marxists. Its teaching school produced ideal-
ists who wanted to continue the transformation of the country in lit-
eracy 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 preten-
sions 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 six-
teen 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 mas-
terpiece 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 vil-
lagers 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 mid-
1950s, he edited the multivolume Historia moderna de México (A
Modern History of Mexico), which presented the belief that the deci-
sive 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
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 tor-
tillas, 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 accommo-
dation, 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
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 mid-
dleweight 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
the English call football, and what the Mexicans and other Spanish-
speaking 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 con-
temporary 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 emo-
tions; 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 neighbor-
hood 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.
The renewed Mexico had, of course, grown out of the old one.
The country had always had a market economy; now it was increas-
ingly 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 elabo-
ration of an industrialized, urban culture with its radios, new televi-
sions, 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 darker-
skinned 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
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 weak-
ened 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 elec-
tions, 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 munici-
pality 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
four years. As his successive presidencies unfolded, he became more

autocratic. Opponents, many of them liberals, were physically intim-
idated and, if they persisted, thrown in prison or killed. Social move-
ments 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 prefec-
tures, 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
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 alter-
native. 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 celebra-
tion 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
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 vul-
nerable 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 agro-
capitalist 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 middle-
class 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 move-
ment 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
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 revolu-
tionaries 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 edu-
cation 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, invok-
ing the legal concerns of the martyred president. One of Carranza’s
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 Constitutional-
ists 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 Constitution-
alists 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 revo-
lution 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 Constitu-
tionalists 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
army was reduced to a guerrilla force, and Villa eventually surren-

dered. 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 move-
ments 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 distribu-
tion 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 “effec-
tive 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. Car-
ranza 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 con-
flicts toppled the new order that Obregón and his handpicked
successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, imposed. But they left the govern-
ment insolvent, struggling to gain and sustain recognition from the
United States, and unable to carry through many promises, how-

ever 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. Mor-
gan, 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 Agree-
ments—Mexico promised to pay its foreign debt, and it did, inter-
mittently. In the meantime, Obregón and Calles were forced to resort
to short-term loans, many of them totally inadequate to the govern-
ment’s needs. One final possibility was difficult to carry out. Hacen-
dados, 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 threat-
ened 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
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 ele-
ments 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 Con-
federation 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, ordi-
nary 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 lead-
ers 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 celebra-
tory banquet, putting the government in crisis. Obregón’s support-
ers, 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 ene-
mies 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
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 any-
way 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 mock-
ery 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 unem-
ployment. 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 pro-
motion 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, includ-
ing 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
was well liked among the military men who dominated the govern-
ment. 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 redistrib-
ution 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
power of the official party; establishing roads, schools, and cooper-

atives on every side; and promoting everything from industrializa-
tion 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 author-
ities. Cárdenas could not fight a battle for every locality, and locali-
ties 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 pro-
duction 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 con-
struction 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 inhab-
itants and polluting the ground for miles around. Laboring
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 Car-
denismo. 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 them-
selves, 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 Cárde-
nas 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 hier-
archy 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 conse-
quences. For the rest, Cárdenas declared his party “socialist” and
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 govern-
ment 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 busi-
nessmen 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 incor-
porate 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 con-
servative 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
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 con-
flict, 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.
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 chil-
dren acquired a good education and were better fed, better clothed,
and better housed than any other generation before. Nor were work-
ers 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 Amer-
icans 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 Organi-
zation 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 surpris-
ing. 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,
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 pro-
letarian 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 indus-
trial 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 some-
thing 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
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 economi-
cally 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 some-
thing 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 com-
petitive 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 com-
mercial agricultural class; in doing so, it must weaken the precapi-
talist 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-
low a trajectory like this. As Moore notes, undemocratic societies

have little difficulty creating industrial capitalism; it is the demo-
cratic 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 under-
stand 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 impor-
tant. In other words, its members gradually merged into the bour-
geoisie, 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 inter-
fere 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
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. Govern-
ments 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 invest-
ments even as they built their industrial zones.66
Latin American cities outpaced the growth of industry. Still, indus-
try 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.
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 manu-
factures. In a more telling observation, Prebisch noted that this was
the only way that Latin American nations would develop the techni-
cal 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. Industrial-
ization created unions and moved the center of political gravity away
from older divisions between conservatives and liberals; the upper
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 provin-
cial 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. Ten-
ants 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 through-
out 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 down-
turn 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.
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 them-
selves 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 him-
self 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 intensify-
ing. 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 com-
petition 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
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 pre-
ferred to use taxes and regulations to diminish oligarchic authority.
They concluded that the landed elite had merged with the bour-
geoisie 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 inter-
ests. 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 dissolu-
tion,” 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 establish-
ment 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
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, pop-
ulism 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 bene-
fits 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 com-
pletely 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, well-
crafted 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.
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 defini-
tively 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 pop-
ulism, 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 radical-
ism 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 ten-
dencies 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
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 recog-
nition 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
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 prom-
ised 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
workforce was oppressed—and to economic nationalists. It bashed

the agrarian and finance oligarchy that had ruled the nation illegiti-
mately 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 condi-
tions.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 gov-
ernment 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
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 pam-
phlet denouncing Perón. Thereafter, Perón created a campaign slo-
gan: ¡Braden ó Perón! (Braden or Perón!). His enemies concentrated
on denouncing him rather than on undercutting his appeal by mak-
ing 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 some-
thing 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
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 vice-
presidential 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 simulta-
neously undercut Argentina’s foreign earnings and increased the cost of
food in Buenos Aires and other major cities. As early as 1949, beef pro-
duction 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
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 radical-
ism, 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 reces-
sion hit the meat and grain markets in the early 1950s, reducing their
price just as agrarian producers cut their output. Somehow, the gov-
ernment 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.
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 mix-
ture, 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 con-
tained 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
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 pop-
ulist 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,
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 politi-
cos 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 for-
eign 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 govern-
ment; 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
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 popula-
tion voted in 1934.102 Even so, important changes were under way.
In Rio de Janeiro, an openly populist candidate, with Vargas’s sup-
port, ran for and was elected mayor. Pedro Ernesto, who called him-
self “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
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 com-
munists rebelled. They were brutally put down, tortured, and impris-
oned 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 dicta-
torship 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
prepared for the coming war. To do it, he had to end the formal influ-
ence 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; industrial-
ists in São Paulo and Rio made patent deals with American corpo-
rations 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 sophis-
ticated 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 cir-
cumscribed. 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
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 infec-
tious 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 possibil-
ities. This meant that, à la Ms. Miranda, it presented itself as some-
thing 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 democ-
racy,” 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 danc-
ing 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 connota-
tions, 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
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 infu-
riated 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
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 con-
flicts 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 oppo-
nents, 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 rela-
tion 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 cre-
ated 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 revolu-
tionaries. 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
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 pro-
ceeded 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 nineteenth-
century liberal party, the Civilists (Civilistas). The rest of the popu-
lation 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 Spanish-
speaking, 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. Conserva-
tives, in the sense of those who still preserved the practices of the
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 com-
mercial 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 com-
munists, 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 fif-
teen. 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 Revolu-
cionaria Americana, or American Popular Revolutionary Alliance).
Mariátegui’s intellectual vehicle was Amauta, his own radical news-

paper, 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 materi-
alism to Peru’s evolution and centered its possibilities not on the
appearance of a revolutionary proletariat, but on the need to incor-
porate 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 Inter-
pretación de la Realidad Peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays on Peru-
vian 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
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 educat-
ing 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 pre-
Colombian 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
socialism—in this regard, he was adopting the Mexican perspective

that the collectivist farm, the ejido, could solve that nation’s agrar-
ian 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 interna-
tional 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 mas-
sive 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 edu-
cated young people to the left.118 In 1932, apristas attacked a mili-
tary 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, periodi-
cally 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.
The saddest consequence is that the efforts of Mariátegui to incor-

porate 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 deep-
ened, 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 sophis-
ticated forms of extermination, until the original characters of the
novel are reduced to dust. If any novel could be said to be emblem-
atic 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
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 organ-
izations 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 organiza-
tion.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 col-
lection 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 poli-
tics; 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.
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 counter-
protests. 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 con-
servative 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 busi-
nesses. 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
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 unprece-
dented 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
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 pop-
ular 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 govern-
ments 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 com-
ing from the middle class; in some nations, a few came from labor-
ing 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 uni-
versities 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
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 diversi-
fied 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 cer-
tainly capable of joining the civilized world to an extent that would
allow Latin Americans to buy goods from the United States and sup-
ply 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
Depression. By 1932, world trade had spiraled down to such a low

point that Latin Americans lacked the means to buy much of any-
thing 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 pur-
chases, 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 depress-
ing 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
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 Interna-
tional 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 develop-
ment: 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 fol-
lowed 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 com-
munists 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.
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 every-
one 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 through-
out 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 corpora-
tions. Any failure of a Latin American government to give a U.S.
corporation what it wanted ran the risk of provoking foreign
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 national-
ism, 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 igno-
rance of Latin America, and that is its general disinterest in the non-
White 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 industrializa-
tion (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 capi-
talism 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
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 anti-
communism to regain the White House. A series of surprising devel-
opments 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 impe-
rial 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 end-
less 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 deficien-
cies and injustices inherited from a premodern era—were
monumental. In addition to these tasks, each nation had to face the
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 mil-
lion 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 cul-
tures) 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 econ-
omy 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
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 com-
pletely 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 improve-
ments, 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 Boli-
viana, 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 pro-
duction just as the tin mines had run through many of the richest
veins. Reviving the industry would have required making major capi-
tal 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.
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 divi-
sions 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 pres-
sures 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 trans-
formation. 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
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 middle-
class 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
nation’s powerful coffee barons and had kept the native population
(the majority) out of politics. Most educated people had been com-
promised 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 Roo-
sevelt, 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 sena-
tor 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 sup-
ported 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 confis-
cated the unused lands of the United Fruit Company and opened the
roads to colonos, natives subject to debt peonage decrees on the cof-

fee 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 left-
wing 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 govern-
ment 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 oppo-
nents; 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 sup-
porters.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
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 sup-
porters. 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 with-
drawing 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 commu-
nist rule in the Soviet Union and China. Latin American nations were
told to choose between becoming U.S. allies or being labeled com-
munist 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 flour-
ished; 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 popu-
lation. 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.
The United States government became openly hostile to all such

proposals. Its ties to the region now ran through the nation’s corpo-
rations, 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 corpo-
rate 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 con-
trol. 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 pri-
mary 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
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 popula-
tion living in modern housing and driving a car. The arrival of the
rural poor with their darker skins led to the expansion of shanty-
towns. The crush of new demands for urban services scared politi-
cians 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
Modern Life and Modern Conflicts, 1956–1985 177
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 above-
mentioned 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 pedes-
trian 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 compar-
ison 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 premod-
ern 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.
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 govern-
ment 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 finan-
cial 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 underde-
veloped 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
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 justi-
fied 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 associa-
tion, of political assembly, and civil rights. All political parties and
the national labor federation were disbanded. He and his subordi-
nate 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
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 sus-
pended 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 dissi-
dents 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 reviv-
ing 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
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 dis-
agreements 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 fright-
ened 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 democ-
racy, 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 influ-
enced 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
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 com-
munists 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 estab-
lished party. As an example, the Radical Party, so dominant in the
late 1930s and 1940s, had almost disappeared by the 1960s and the
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 sen-
timents 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 sup-
port 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.
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 clan-
destinely. 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 paramil-
itary 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 tra-
dition, 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, some-
thing 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 confronta-
tions over the election, he faced the open hostility of the wealthy and
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.” Inter-
national 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 anticommu-
nist groups in labor organizations and political parties and sup-
ported 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 propa-
ganda 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
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 national-
ism, agrarian reform, bureaucratic reorganization, and labor eman-
cipation in one six-year term. Two years into his administration, his
ministers were still trying to pull together basic policies on every-
thing 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 differ-
ence. 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 domes-
tic 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 con-
gressional 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 involve-
ment. 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
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
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 anni-
hilate 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 pop-
ulations 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 explo-
sion 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 popu-
lation 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.
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 repro-
duction 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 preindus-
trial 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 sub-
stantial 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 seventy-
one 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
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 destabi-
lizing 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. Every-
where, 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.
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 demo-
cratic 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 com-
bine 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 con-
struct “base communities” in which Catholics would live out Christ-
ian 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
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 coura-
geous 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 rev-
olution. 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
messianic belief in redemption and justice in this life as well as the

next.43 As even supporters of a “progressive Church” noted, grass-
roots efforts at social change require “the acquiescence of institu-
tional 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, rein-
forced 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. govern-
ment. 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,
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 collec-
tive 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
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 accom-
panying 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.
ARTS AND COMMUNICATION
As educational levels increased and the population grew, Latin

America underwent a cultural renaissance. There were enough read-
ers 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 middle-
class income at such institutions as the UNAM (the Autonomous
National University of Mexico), the Colegio de México, and the Uni-
versity 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 devel-
oped 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
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 recon-
figure 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 stun-
ning 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 super-
highway as Latin America’s future. Latin America followed the
transport model of the United States, gradually abandoned its rail-
roads, 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 corpo-
rations in the United States, Britain, and European nations.
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 wonder-
ful 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
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 every-
thing 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 fos-
tered 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
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 vio-
lent 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 Eisen-
hower, 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, John-
son passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reviving the right of south-
ern 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 possi-
ble. 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.
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 sad-
dled 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 prostitu-
tion. 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
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 revolu-
tionary 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 close-
mouthed.” 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 indus-
trialization 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 work-
force 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 con-
sciousness. As the rural poor were brought into a foco, they would
be trained to fight and taught why they were fighting; military disci-
pline 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 biol-
ogy) 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
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 bar-
barous, 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, pub-
licly 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
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 dis-
tanced 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 ultra-
communist secretary of state John Foster Dulles died in the spring of
1959, but his brother Allen still ran the CIA.
The United States took an instant disliking to Castro and thought

the tactics it had used in Guatemala and Bolivia—economic sanc-
tions, 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 inher-
ited the plan of Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, whom he had retained
as head of the CIA, and launched an invasion in April 1961, by anti-
Castro 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 counterrevolu-
tionaries. 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
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 dan-
gerous,” 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.
On the positive side, Cuba confronted many of its severe injus-

tices. 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 micro-
manage 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 multi-

faceted. Kennedy created the Peace Corps to fight hunger and under-
development 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 invest-
ment; 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
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 invest-
ment; 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 govern-
ments 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 reputa-
tion, 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 Interna-
tional 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
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 bombas-
tic 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.
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. reac-
tion 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 import-
substitution 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
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 sup-
porters 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
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
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 prej-
udices 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 “subver-
sives.” 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 “disap-
peared” opponents or people thought to be opponents. In Argentina,
agents of each military branch cruised around in Ford Falcons, grab-
bing 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.
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
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 insti-
tutions. 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 undemoc-
ratic. 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
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 depend-
ence 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 com-
pete 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
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. Industrializa-
tion 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 increas-
ing 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 retalia-
tion 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
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 ele-
ments 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 agrar-
ian 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 sup-
porters 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 gov-
ernment. Ongonía, in an attempt to win international financial sup-
port, had followed the IMF line of freezing wages, devaluing the peso,
and suspending the minimum wage. The result was a general strike in
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 objec-
tives 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 gov-
ernments that followed Ongonía. There was a generational dimen-
sion 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
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 over-
whelmed 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 tor-
mentors 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 anticom-
munists. Like many Latin American governments, they hit the debt
wall of late 1982 and unlike them, they launched an attack against
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
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 commu-
nists 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 à la foco the-
ory. 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
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 impris-
oned colleagues. One of those released was Daniel Ortega.
As in Cuba, the demand for democracy coincided with a compe-
tent guerrilla effort and multiclass and varied efforts to change the
government. The movement against Somozo ranged from business-
men 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 solu-
tion. 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 com-
rades. 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
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 hold-
ings. 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 mar-
ginalized by Somoza, was broken.109 The two basic dilemmas for the
Sandinistas, however, would be the same as that of any left govern-
ment in Latin America. The circumstances under which it had gained
power—the crisis of the entire political economy—presented prob-
lems 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,
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 def-
inition.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,
calling its members Freedom Fighters and “contras” for counterrev-

olutionaries, 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 oli-
garchic 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 reform-
ers, 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 right-
wing 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.
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 left-
wing 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 “inter-
rogated, 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 mil-
itary 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 any-
one 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
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 inter-
nal 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, under-
development, 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.
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 effec-
tive 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 com-
pletely 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 pres-
sure 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 hous-
ing in either urban or rural zones with subsidized materials or by
deploying architects and engineers to aid the residents. Greater invest-
ment 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 suffi-
cient 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, rein-
forcing 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,
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 dif-
ficult. Still, there was little point in staying in the countryside. By the
early 1980s, almost every Latin American nation had reached the tip-
ping 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 sub-
stantial 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 situ-
ated, 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 worsen-
ing despite the threats from guerrilla movements. U.S. foreign cor-
porations 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 pros-
perous 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
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 embarrass-
ment of another Cuba.
Latin America felt the impact of all these events. The region main-
tained 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 infla-
tion rose to three digits or more a year. In Chile, hyperinflation helped
undermine Allende’s administration. In Argentina, it fed people’s dis-
gust 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 ill-
considered nationalization of the banks that only accelerated the gov-
ernment’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 govern-
ment 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
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 import-
substitution 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 adminis-
tration 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 indus-
trialization 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
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 consid-
ered 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 235
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 passen-
gers 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, resort-
ing 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
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 legit-
imize 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.
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 cen-
ter. 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, gener-
ated for tourist dollars, or original but long since overshadowed and
hidden by skyscrapers. Nor would walking around be very advis-
able. 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 any-
one 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 pre-
dominantly 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
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 immi-
grants 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 cof-
fee zone remained relatively cheap, opening an opportunity for an
army of smallholders.4 Higher real wages and agricultural opportuni-
ties 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
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 nine-
teenth 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, includ-
ing 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 immi-
grant 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 indus-
trialist’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
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 geograph-
ically 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 prob-
lems 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 cosmo-
politan 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
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, cen-
tered 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 them-
selves 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
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 rich-
est 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 per-
sistence 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 divid-
ing 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-ladies-
walking-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
noticeable decline occurred after the military left power, but Diana
Deere gives the communities high marks for raising the political con-
sciousness 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 Catholi-
cism, it has priests and priestesses—the faith thus provides Black
women an opportunity for leadership.22
Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and Mormons are also gaining sub-
stantial 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 car-
nival, 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
major parade of carnival is heavily commercialized. Corporate spon-

sors 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 Spanish-
speaking countries. This format, like its use in Mexico, has devel-
oped 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 prob-
lems, 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
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 igno-
rance.”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 twenty-
one 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 eco-
nomic 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 cre-
ated 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 reme-
died this by ending restrictions on foreign investment and reducing
tariffs to drive producers of any nationality into ruin or greater effi-
ciency. 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 impe-
tus 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
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 gov-
ernments 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 per-
cent 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
rose sharply in the 1960s and 1970s and reached the same levels as
those working in the cities34—something that did not happen any-
where 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 govern-
ments 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 collabo-
rators, 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 politi-
cal 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 param-
eters of the 1980 constitution, a crucial source of the encapsula-
tion and consensus of the past decade has been latent fear. This
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 seven-
ties 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 experi-
ences of people caught up in a system that is predatory and evokes
some nobility or moral collapse in its characters: Manuel Puig’s won-
derful 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 “disap-
peared” 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
the left were muted or silenced altogether. There are still mass move-
ments 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 imple-

mented 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 adminis-
tration 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 unemploy-
ment 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 descen-
dents 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
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 plum-
meted but Pinochet survived and modified his policies to avoid
another financial balloon. His policies survived despite the impover-
ishment 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 com-
manded 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 inflam-
ing 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
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 bring-
ing 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 politi-
cians and journalists.” He, like the rest of the naval torturers,
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 occa-
sion 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 gov-
ernment killed Spaniards as well as other foreigners it believed sup-
portive of Allende or opposed to Pinochet’s regime. An ambitious
Spanish prosecutor went after Pinochet on the grounds that inter-
national law prohibited what his government had done; Spain
intended to bring him to its country for trial and possible punish-
ment. It is important to note that Spain had done nothing to prose-
cute the accomplices of Francisco Franco, its own dictator from
1939 to 1975. In addition to those his forces had killed in the Span-
ish Civil War (1936–1939), and the numerous reprisals his govern-
ment carried out after the war, it had regularly tortured and
murdered until Franco died. Indeed, seeing the industrial develop-
ment 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
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 over-
turned 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 estab-
lishments. 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 pro-
ceedings 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 vacillat-
ing.”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 commit-
tees investigated the sequence of tortures and mass murders in
Central and South America, no U.S. administration under a Repub-
lican or Democratic president repudiated the U.S. role in promoting
Latin American militarism during the Cold War. In 1989, the Berlin
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 inhu-
manities, but they also resurrected the issue of human rights in gen-
eral. Western Europe now paid more attention to what had
happened in Latin America. European nations used judicial author-
ity 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, pre-
sented 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 res-
olution. 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 dis-
appeared 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 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 three-
pronged attack on the Sandinistas: an armed force that served as the
U.S. proxy, in this case called the “contras” (for counterrevolution-
aries) 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 Conta-
dora Agreement, designed by four Latin American governments, and
promised to hold elections in 1990. Elections had been held before

but the Sandinistas’ opponents refused to participate, claiming cor-
ruption 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 cap-
tain 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 prom-
ise 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
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 cap-
italism” 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, includ-
ing 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 dis-
puted 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 uni-
versity 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
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 govern-
ment as an architect would, expanding state spending on infrastruc-
ture 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 impover-
ished 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 expendi-
tures 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
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 bor-
rowing 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 pop-
ulist 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 popula-
tion 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 adminis-
tration, 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
population. The legacy of military rule hit him full force as the econ-
omy 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 inter-
national 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 con-
tracts, 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
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, help-
ing 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 enter-
prises. 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 coopera-
tion, which was true in some cases. But in many areas, the natives
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 condi-
tions 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.
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 regula-
tions 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
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 direc-
tion. 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 popula-
tion’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 numer-
ous 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 any-
thing. 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 appear-
ance 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?
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 num-
ber 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 home-
made 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 dis-
appeared. Cuban machismo never succumbed to the regime’s ser-
mons 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
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 Cas-
tro 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 private-
sector 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 tal-
ented. 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
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 apocalyp-

tic premonition, especially in the cities: major urban thorough-
fares 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 sup-
ply 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 redevelop-
ment of both. There were, of course, major differences. For once, for-
eign 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
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 rev-
olution, 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
defiance of American demands.98 The revolution’s continued exis-

tence 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 regard-
ing 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 govern-
ments 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 presi-
dency; until then, the PRI in Mexico had run the nation longer than
any other single-party state. The winner represented the conserva-
tive 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 sexe-
nio. 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
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 succes-
sor, 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 dis-
asters 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 infra-
structure 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
the PRI lost the presidency, the populace hoped that genuinely con-
tested 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, com-
mercial 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 atten-
uate government rather than innervating it and giving it a clear direc-
tion. 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 govern-
ment 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. gov-
ernment 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
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 con-
cludes 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 extra-
dite 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 special-
ist 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 pro-
vide growth in place of the revolution they abandoned. Desperate to
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, encour-
aged rapid development. In 1981, however, when oil made up three-
quarters 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
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 revo-
lution. In its place, he took attitudes to fruition that had been ges-
tating 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 gener-
ation 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 peas-
ant 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 school-
teacher, 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 com-
monplace. Nothing stopped the neoliberal juggernaut. While Mexico
contained substantial automobile factories—it was the last place in
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 drug-
based 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 hyper-
bole 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
of them employed women at dismal wages. The government pro-

moted 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 remit-
tances, 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 deval-
ued 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 signif-
icant native uprising since the Mexican Revolution. An armed
coalition of Mayan villages, pulled together by a mestizo intellec-
tual 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
(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 govern-
ment 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 even-
tually 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 insti-
tuted. These were accompanied, as they had been under Salinas, by
minimum government programs to ameliorate the greatest levels of
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 sec-
ondary 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 wor-
ried 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 conser-
vative 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
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 enforce-
ment officials shut down a good deal of the methamphetamine pro-
duction 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 con-
cluded, “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 intellec-
tual 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
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 capi-
tal 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 con-
cluded, “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 mov-
ing 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
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 def-
initions. 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 North-
east, 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 struc-
ture: 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 man-
ufacturing 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
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 clarifica-
tion 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 govern-
ments 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
U.S. government, under Republican administrations for most of this

time, attacked the poor by calling them “welfare moms” and devel-
oped 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 pro-
duction” 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 hold-
ing 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 recruit-
ment of Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and Catholics by denouncing sex-
ual 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
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 Founda-
tion, the Cato Institute, and so on—to grind out policy studies for a
government preaching tax cuts, deregulation, and smaller govern-
ment 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 sus-
tained 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 reviv-
ing 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 eco-
nomic direction and opposed the U.S. role in sponsoring military
regimes and paramilitary terror in Latin America, but they seemed
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 mem-
bers 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 depres-
sion and foster a “multiplier effect” of government-induced jobs, he
never argued that such borrowing and spending should go on indef-
initely.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 engen-
dered. There would be no new social programs. The neoconserva-
tives’ 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
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 chil-
dren. Local governments have laid off tens of thousands of teachers,
police, and firemen. Refusing any thought of raising taxes, Repub-
lican 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 inau-
gural 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 sec-
tor. 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, con-
fessed 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 specu-
lation, flourished by gambling on ever more complex financial
contracts. Banks, freed of New Deal controls, issued mortgages to
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 fore-
seen 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 specula-
tion 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 mid-
1960s, 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
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 foreign-
ers might refuse to continue financing U.S. external deficits, a ques-
tion 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 seg-
ment 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 quick-
ening consequences of global warming, and, when a flood wrecked
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 govern-
ment funds to save failed institutions—lemon socialism. He has pro-
posed 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 infla-
tion 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. bank-
ing system was saved; Latin America was not. This interaction was
an instance of “blowback,” a term that Chalmers Johnson appro-
priated from U.S. intelligence jargon.141 It refers to the unintended
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 occu-
pation of that country (1979–1989). Osama-bin-Ladin became anti-
American 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 foist-
ing 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,
however, that reveal how the attitude of the United States—the com-
bination 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 over-
throwing 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 con-
victed 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
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 investiga-
tion 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 decep-
tion, 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 Iran-
Contra 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
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 national-
ism, 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 con-
cealed 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
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 with-
out 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 inter-
ested 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
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 oppo-
nents 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.
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 inva-
sion 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 con-

trolled 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.
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 differ-
ential 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 govern-
ments 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
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 develop-
ing 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 affect-
ing 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 Oppo-
nents 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 promi-
nent 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 mistreat-
ment 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 through-
out 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
label. For one thing, those from Oaxaca or the Yucatán are proba-
bly native and may not even speak Spanish. For another, those who
have lived in the United States for years choose labels such as Mex-
ican, Mexican American, Chicano, Hispanic, and Latino—each of
them resonant with differences in values and even politics. The per-
cent 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 bor-
der 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 down-
turn 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 govern-
ment, and those sums are not used to support local needs.168 This is a
problem in the centralization of government; a federal support
program to aid areas hit by an influx of new migrants would allevi-

ate 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 immigra-
tion 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
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
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. What-
ever 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, eco-
nomically 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 catastro-
phes 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 pres-
ent has been shaped by three periods that ended in economic col-
lapse: 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
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 con-
fronting 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 Chicago-
Chile 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 com-
mercial 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, some-
times, 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 305
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 Ameri-
cans 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 constitu-
tional 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 every-
thing from pulque to cement, from sugar to sewing machines.
Mexico was becoming a modern nation—albeit still filled with
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 sub-
stantial 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 politi-
cal orders, outside of Central America and a few predominately
Indian nations, went into a crisis in which they recruited profes-
sional 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 pro-
moted 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 previ-
ous 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
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 dem-
ocratic 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 eco-
nomic 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. govern-
ment. 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
government of Nicaragua in 1909 to prevent a liberal nationalist

from reframing the goals of his country. It invaded Mexico and inter-
fered 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 con-
flated 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 commu-
nism 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 national-
ism 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 cor-
porate plutocrats included a change in capitalist culture. The mass
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 the-
ory, 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 gov-
ernments 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 facil-
itate 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
embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, busi-

nesses, 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 corpo-
rations 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 eco-
nomic 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 gov-
ernment. Allowing efforts to improve social welfare and education to
go by the board has high social costs and these have been accumulat-
ing 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
the suffrage, the more people will vote for public goods and relief
from savage capitalism. The greater the strength of popular move-
ments, 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 con-
trol and use of its natural gas reserves. Leaders such as Chávez and
Morales polarize the electorate for they cannot possibly gain the rev-
enues 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 understud-
ied 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
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 ecologi-
cal 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
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 intel-
ligent. 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
$5,000 million in profit to $1 million in paste, making drug traffick-

ing “the most lucrative business in the world.”6 In the age of neolib-
eralism 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 Colom-
bia; a good part of the population was inured to violence. His com-
mercial 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 business-
men— 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
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 disap-
pearing 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, transport-
ing, 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
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 contem-
porary 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 formula-
tions 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 diffi-
culty imposing orthodox rules on others. And as that nation enters
another Depression, the real “tigers” of China and India are expand-
ing their economies—having been financed in a major part by U.S.
purchases of their consumer goods and cheaper technical labor. The
Euro from an integrated Europe is also playing a major role in devel-

oping 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 govern-
ments from north to south denounced the possible creation of
another military regime. The coup failed. If Latin American govern-
ments 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 demon-
strations 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 entrepre-
neurs 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 effec-
tive 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).
320 Notes
4. João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of

1835 in Bahia, Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture (Bal-
timore: 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:
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).
Notes 321
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 Nineteenth-
Century 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
322 Notes
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:
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:
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
Notes 323
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 Under-
development 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).
324 Notes
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 Devel-
opment 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
Notes 325
Formation of Peruvian Political Culture, 1871–1919” (PhD diss., Univer-

sity 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, Post-
Contemporary 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).
326 Notes
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
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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 posi-
tivismo 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: Individual-
ism 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).
Notes 327
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: Uni-
versity 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: Poli-
tics and Rural Labor in Chile, 1919–1973 (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity 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 Univer-
sity 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,
328 Notes
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 Competi-
tion 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).
Notes 329
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 Univer-
sity 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; Moderniza-
tion 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,
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
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 Coun-
try: José Batlle y Ordoñez of Uruguay, 1907–1915 (Hanover, NH: Univer-
sity 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
330 Notes
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 Depen-
dence, 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).
Notes 331
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: histo-
ria 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,
71. The classic indictment of U.S. conduct remains; see Philip Sheldon
Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Impe-
rialism, 1895–1902 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). There is a
vast bibliography on this subject; for example, see Jim Milio et al., Remem-
ber 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
332 Notes
(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 Com-
memorate the Centenary in 1962 of the Bank of London & South America
Limited (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); D.C.M. Platt, Busi-
ness 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 Enter-
prise in Latin America, 1900–1945 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1996).
77. Jonathan C. Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico (Berkeley: Uni-
versity 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
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).
Notes 333
8. Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture

9. Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931
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 concen-
tración 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
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.
334 Notes
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 Per-
spective (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.
Notes 335
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: Edi-
ciones El Caballito, 1981); Jorge Fernando Iturribarría, Porfirio Díaz ante
la historia (México, D.F: [s.n.], 1967); Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Rev-
olution: 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 Fixa-
tions 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 revolu-
ción, 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
336 Notes
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:
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
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
Notes 337
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
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 Moderniza-
tion, 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 Argen-
tine 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:
338 Notes
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 Transi-
tions, 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
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
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.
Notes 339
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 Cali-
fornia–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 Foun-
dation,” Buenos Aires, Argentina, FIHEP, 2008.
95. J.M. Taylor, Eva Peron: The Myths of a Woman (Chicago: Univer-
sity 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: Uni-
versity 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 After-
math (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.
340 Notes
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
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 Real-
ity, 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.
Notes 341
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 Pol-
itics: 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 Revo-
lution: Bolivia since 1952, ed. James M. Malloy and Richard S. Thorn
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 Revolu-
tion: Bolivia since 1952, ed. James M. Malloy and Richard S. Thorn
136. James M. Malloy, Bolivia: The Uncompleted Revolution (Pittsburgh,
PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), 191.
342 Notes
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 Revolu-
tions, 125–127.
CHAPTER 4 MODERN LIFE AND MODERN

CONFLICTS, 1956–1985
1. See the reflections of Jotabeche, Chile’s famous columnist of the mid-

nineteenth 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 Univer-
sity’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.
Notes 343
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,
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 Develop-
ment: 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
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.
344 Notes
21. United States, Congress, Senate, Select Committee to Study Govern-

mental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in
Chile, 1963–1973: Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Govern-
mental 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 Popula-
tion 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.
Notes 345
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 Democ-
racy 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: Uni-
versity 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: Univer-
sity 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 Migra-
tion in Comparative Perspective, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2003), 3–7.
49. Robert McCaa, Marriage and Fertility in Chile: Demographic Turn-
ing Points in the Petorca Valley, 1840–1976 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1983).
346 Notes
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: Univer-
sity 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 Long-
man, 2009); K.S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Rev-
olution, 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
Notes 347
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 Polit-
ical 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).
348 Notes
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: Brazilian-
American 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 Com-
parative 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 Univer-
sity 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: Ideol-
ogy, 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).
Notes 349
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 Revolu-
tions: 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.
350 Notes
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 Elec-
tions,” 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 Rev-
olution 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 Strug-
gles 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
Notes 351
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 Adjust-
ment 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 Rela-
tionships 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, Uni-
versity 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 Citi-
zenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 46.
15. Ibid., 254.
352 Notes
16. Ibid., 122, 61–62.

17. Luisa Kroll, The World’s Billionaires (Forbes, Mar. 5, 2008), avail-
able from http://www.forbes.com/2008/03/05/richest-people-billionaires-
billionaires08-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 Univer-
sity 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 commercial-
ization 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 Devel-
opment: 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).
Notes 353
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).
354 Notes
47. Staff, “Mexico: Impunity for Past Rights Abuses Continues,”

Human Rights Watch (April 4, 2007).
48. Tim Weiner, “Despite New Violence, Prosecutor Presses His Investi-
gation into Mexico’s ‘Dirty War,’” The New York Times, Feb. 23, 2009.
49. Michael A. Meyer, “Liability of Prisoners of War for Offenses Com-
mitted 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 Roht-
Arriaza, 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 Commu-
nity 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 Inti-
macy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
60. Katherine Isbester, Still Fighting: The Nicaraguan Women’s Move-
ment, 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 Pol-
itics in Neoliberal Nicaragua (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 259.
Notes 355
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
70. Oscar Ugarteche, “Peru: The Foreign Debt and Heterodox Adjust-
ment 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.
356 Notes
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 Autobiog-
raphy 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 Govern-
mental 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).
Notes 357
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 Projec-
tions,” American Journal of Public Health 85, no. 7 (July 1995), 963.
92. Piero Gleijeses, Conflict Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa,
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 Long-
man, 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).
358 Notes
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 pres-
idencia, 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 Uni-
versity 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 Rela-
tions 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.: Edi-
torial 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).
Notes 359
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 Cor-
porations, 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 Law-
makers 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.
360 Notes
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 Congres-
sional 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 Iran-
Contra 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 Explo-
sion, 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: Partner-
ship 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 Rela-
tions, 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.
Notes 361
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 Califor-
nia 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 Salva-
trucha (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.
362 Notes
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, Com-
parative and International Working-class History (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity 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: Metropoli-
tan/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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Allende Gossens, Salvador (president crisis of 2001–2002, 287

of Chile), 249, 253, 290 Dirty War (El Proceso), 213–214,
coup in Venezuela compared to 218–221, 227, 242
Chile’s, 317 Duarte de Perón, Eva (Evita),
cut off of international loans to, 208 136–137, 139
death of, 179 economic development of, 42,
dependency theory and, 309 62–63, 69, 88, 130–131, 139,
Mapuches and, 190 146
presidency of, 185–187, 190, 208 economic puzzle of, 1
Soviet Union and, 206 elections, 29
U.S. subversion of his presidency, gaucho (cowboy), 13
265, 308 Great Depression, 129
Unidad Popular (U.P. or Popular hyperinflation, 231
Unity}, 184 illiteracy, 35, 60
See also Chile immigration, 51, 64, 136
anarchism, 79, 125 independence and early nineteenth
Argentina, 65–66, 70, 130, 135, century, 8, 39–40
138 industry and industrialization in,
Chile, 181, 183 128, 129, 137, 220, 233
Mexico, 111, 115, 117 internal migration in, 91, 148
Peru, 153 labor movements in, 130, 132–136,
Argentina, xi, 65, 70–71, 80, 82, 92, 138
142, 170, 182, 199, 211, 230, legacy of Dirty War, 251–252, 254
282 Malvinas War (Falklands War), 250
Baring Crisis, 67–68 Martínez de Perón, Isabel
Borges, Jorge Luis, poet, 133 (president), 231
Catholic Church, 32, 192, 242 middle class, 66–67
caudillos, 12 military and military rule, 77, 131,
Conservatives in, 77 141, 208–209, 218, 250–251
408 Index
Argentina (continued) race mixture in Peru, 150

Moore, Barrington, theory of, 139 United Fruit and, 169
music, 196 United States and, 194, 200, 281,
national consolidation, 44, 46 283
neoliberalism, 289 See also slavery
oligarchy, 66–67, 74–75, 128, 131, Bolivia, 144, 153, 167, 173, 203
134, 135, 149 influence of APRA in, 154
peronismo, 130–141, 218 Lechín Oqueando, Juan (labor
population growth, 189 leader), 167
populism, 94, 132, 144 military and military rule, 169, 214
progressive nation, 160 MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista
property rights, 23, 69 Revolutionario or National Revo-
Radical Civic Union or Radical lutionary Movement), political
Party (Unión Cívica Radical), 68, party, 167
75–76, 130–131, 139, 217–219, national characteristics before the
251 revolution, 166
relations with Great Britain, 30, Native Americans and, 125
37–40, 42, 63, 88, 160 Native Americans and Internet, 236
relations with United States, 161 Paz Estenssoro, Victor (president),
Rosas, Juan Manuel de, 9, 11, 12, 167–168
32, 40, 43, 63, 64, 80 Revolution of 1952, 165–169
rural labor, 126 role of IMF, 168
secondary cities, 236 tenements, 105
sports, 107 Trotskyists, 167
tenements, 105 United States and, 168
United States aid for See also IMF; Peru
counterinsurgency, 208–209 Brazil, xi, 30–32, 49, 105, 102, 150,
urbanization, 96 160, 246–247, 280, 289, 294
World War II, 129, 131, 150, 161 agrarian population, percentage of,
Yrigoyen, Hipólito (president of 128
Argentina), 68, 75, 92, 130–132, belief in “racial democracy,” 30,
217 147, 238
See also Anarchism; caudillos and Blacks, and commercial possibilities,
caudillismo; conservatives, Drago 147–148
Doctrine; Great Britain; IMF; lib- Brasilia, 197
erals; Perón, Juan; railroads; War Brazilian model, 207–214
of the Triple Alliance carnival, 147–148, 150
Catholic church and religions, 24,
Blacks. 8, 10, 55, 57, 61, 76, 246, 32, 191, 242–243
299, 304–305, 310 coffee production, 44, 62, 81, 239
Brazil and, 72, 144, 147, 213, 237, communists, 145
240–241 coroneis, local bosses, 11–12
Colombia and, 26 coup of 1964, 159, 190, 207–211,
Cuba and, 203–204, 207, 265–266 308
Cuban independence and, 47, 86 crisis of 2002, 210
disappearance in Argentina, 64 debt crisis of 1982, 180, 234
legacy of slavery, 20–21, 23, 71 democratic campaign of 1984, 236
Index 409
Dom Pedro I, 7, 35 tenements, 105

Dom Pedro II, 7, 10, 12, 32, 35, 46 Tiradentes rebellion, 5, 39
early commerce, 4 urbanization, 9
early tariffs, 7 World War II, 145–146
ecology of, 312 See also Freyre, Gilberto; honor
economic development, 37–38, 129, code; IMF; Miranda, Carmen;
146, 212–214, 230, 237–238, Moore, Barrington; racial systems
246, 249, 280 and racism; Rio de Janeiro; São
Empire of, 3–7, 10, 18, 27, 59 Paulo; slavery; Vargas, Getulio;
Falangists, 93, 145 War of the Triple Alliance
fears of degeneration, 57
films, 241 Cárdenas del Río, Lázaro, president of
food of, 25 Mexico, 94, 165, 306
free Blacks and mulattos, 20, 238 allows more conservative successor,
gaucho (cowboy) in, 13 122
Germans in, 51, 145–146 Cárdenas Solorzáno, Cuahtemoc,
Great Depression, 143, 239–240 son of, 273
hyperflation, 241 Church and, 119
illiteracy, 35 exiles Calles, 119
immigration, 51, 238 labor organizations and, 119
independence, 2, 5, 7, 40 left and, 122
industry and industrialization, 129, loyal figure of Calles machine, 118
233, 238–239 Mexican localism and, 120
Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 240 middle class and, 150
labor, 62, 212, 238, 310 nationalization of oil, 121–122
landlessness, 229 reorganizes official party, 97, 121
military and military rule, 59, 77, Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, and
195, 207–215, 247, 250–251 legacy of, 269, 273
music and amusements, 25, 196 social goals of the Revolution and,
Native Americans, 15 125
neoliberalism, 242 U.S. frightened by, 120
Northeast, impoverished, 72, 91, See also Mexican Revolution; Mex-
142, 148, 190 ico
population growth, 189, 298 Castro, Cipriano (Venezuelan
populism, 94, 142, 144 president)
positivists, 58–59 career of, 81–84
regency, 10 Roosevelt Corollary, 82
regional oligarchies, 57, 142–143 Castro, Fidel (president of Cuba) 157,
regionalism, 8, 4 308
relations with Great Britain, 16, 17, anticipated U.S. hostility, 205
30, 37, 40, 42, 305 career of, 201–202
relations with the United States, crisis of 1990s and, 264
144–146, 207–214 Cuban-American exiles hatred of,
samba, 147, 243–244 266
soccer, 107, 244 dominated Cuba for fifty years, 207
sugar plantations, 16, 71 identity as the Cuban Revolution,
television, 198, 244 264–265
410 Index
Castro, Fidel (continued) Vatican, 30–31, 33, 191, 269, 295

impact on author, 208 women and, 33–34, 54, 103
insults Cuban exiles, 205 See also specific nations and other
involvement in African wars, 266 religious faiths
moral crusade against Batista, 203 Caudillo and caudillismo (caudillaje),
origins of the revolution and, 201 15, 29, 30, 269
played up African heritage of Cuba, age had passed, 52
266 Argentine liberals and, 46, 68
presented himself as a democrat, 215 Central America and, 46
revolutionary promise of social jus- charisma of, 14
tice, 204 duration of, 13
sources of support for guerrilla eventually limited to the provinces,
struggle, 203 77
tried to micromanage economy, 206 larger armies and, 44
as university student in Bogota, 157 liberal economic ideology and, 305
U.S. attempts to kill him, 265 liberal version of, 14
use of emigration, 265 local notables and, 11
use of U.S. hostility, 265 Mexican Revolution and 1929, 116,
See also Cuba; Cuban Revolution; 122
United States Páez, José Antonio, 80
Catholic Church, 242 political shift away from, 48
Brazilian slavery, 16 railroads and, 42
colonial, 2, 4, 31 Sarmiento, Domingo, opinions cri-
conflict with Chilean president, tiqued, 13
31–32 tasks of, 29
Education and, 34–35, 56, 118 Uruguay and, 74
fueros (special rights), 29–30 various names for, 12
hierarchy, 30, 193 Venezuela and, 82
independence of Latin America, 31 Chile, xi, 60–61, 63, 197, 220, 233,
landholding, 30–31 262, 271
liberalism and, 32, 46, 67, 72–73, agrarian reform, 190, 229
78, 104 agricultural exports, 254
liberation theology, 191–192, 242 Alessandri, Arturo, (president) 132
loss of influence, 33–34, 46, 54–55, automobile sector, 245
96, 101, 110, 115, 147, 159 Balmaceda, José Manuel (president),
PAN (Mexican Party), 97 78
patronato (appointment of bishops), birth control, 195
31 British in, 88
Pope John XXIII, 191 Castro, Fidel, visit of, 225
Pope John Paul I, 191 “Chicago Boys,” 178–180, 308
Pope John Paul II, 191–192, 267 centralized, liberal regime after
popular beliefs, 23–24, 30–31 1870, 78
populism, 119, 121–122, 138, 140, civil war of 1891, 78–79
146, 150, 154, 157, 159, 171 copper, 164
priestly celibacy, 56 copper miners, 164
racial classifications, 20 coup 1973, 179, 196, 211, 214,
sexuality and, 32, 147, 191–193, 216, 249, 264, 289
229, 243, 283 debt crisis, 250
Index 411
economic constraints during Great CIA (United States Central Intelligence

Depression, 161 Agency)
end of Mapuche independence, 70 attempted coup in Venezuela, 315
Germans in, 51 attempts to kill Castro, Fidel, 265
hyperinflation, 231 biological warfare in Cuba, 265
Ibáñez, Carlos (president), 92–93, mystery of Gaitán’s death and, 157
132 Noriega, Manuel, and, 296
impact of nitrate economy, 77 overthrow of Guatemalan
industry and industrialization, 29 government and, 171, 205
influence of APRA, 154, See: Peru U.S. war against Nicaragua and,
large estate owners, 130, 159 225, 291
laws protecting women and See also United States
children, 80 Cold War, xiv, 124, 157, 164, 187,
legacy of Pinochet’s rule, 247, 249, 199, 290, 292, 297, 301
251, 254, 310–311 China and, 288
military, 77, 131, 265 Cuban Revolution and, 200, 206
militias in, 93 guerrilla warfare and, 199–207,
Neruda, Pablo (poet), 196 214–228, 255–265, 281
nitrate labor, 92 Korean War, 170
origin of neoliberalism, 249 migration to the United States and,
Parliamentary Regime, 79–80 297
Parra, Violeta (singer, composer) neoliberalism and, 269
and the Nueva Canción, 196 Nicaragua and, 292
per capita income, 246 OAS (Organization of American
Perón, Juan and, 134 States) and, 124, 157
Pinochet dictatorship, 176–189, 192, origins of, 162
213, 214, 227, 230, 236, 247 Somoza’s use against domestic
plutocrats, 249 opponents, 222
progressive changes, 84 “Third Way,” proposed by Perón,
Radical Party, 76 Nasser, and Nehru, 164
Recabarren, Luis Emilio (labor threat of nuclear war, 188
leader), 79–80 Truman, Harry S., international
relations with Axis powers, strategy, 162, 163, 200
131–132 U.S. hysteria, 165, 188, 200
revolutionary tourists, 199 U.S. indifference to Latin America,
salitre (sodium nitrate), 62, 78, 306 230, 234, 253, 391
Santiago, 53–54, 99–100, 176–189, U.S. promotion of militarism,
193 207–214, 230, 253
tenements, 105 Vietnam War, 199, 231, 234, 315
urbanization, 96 See also Chile; Cuba; guerrilla war-
U.S. companies in, 88 fare; Nicaragua; United States;
U.S. military assistance, 209 military and military rule under
Valparaiso, 1, 49 specific countries
See also Allende Gossens, Salvador; Colombia, 12, 23, 34, 37, 74, 232,
Frei Montalva, Eduardo; liberals 236, 228, 304, 312, 315
and liberalism; Pinochet Ugarte, coffee and, 49, 72–73, 81, 155
Augusto; United States; War of Comunero Rebellion, 5, 39
the Pacific Contadora Group, 317
412 Index
Colombia (continued) “constabulary” regimes, 169

drugs and 275, 294–295, 313–314 Batista in Cuba and, 201
early democratic efforts in, 26 Somoza in Nicaragua and, 221
as example of future, 313 U.S. involvement in, 308
Escobar, Pablo, 313–314 Costa Rica, 20, 228
FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Cuba, 7, 18, 21, 27, 40, 46, 47, 60,
Revolucionarias de Colombia or 72, 188, 193, 210, 257, 258, 294,
Revolutionary Armed Forces of 305
Colombia), 314 baseball and, 54
Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 155–158 Batista, Fulgencio, 169, 172
García Marquez, Gabriel (novelist), Blacks excluded from civic life, 204
155 depression in 1990s, 207
Gran Colombia, 6, 72 importance of Black music, 204
illiteracy, 35, 60 income distribution in, 203
industry and industrialization in, racial make-up in 1840, 20
129, 311 Spanish-American War, 86–88, 307
La Violencia, the violence, 156–158 sugar and, 17, 61, 71, 92, 306
Panama’s independence and, 87 tourism in, 207
Plan Colombia of U.S., 314 United States and, 86, 307
Populism and, 142, 150, 155–159 U.S. corporate interests in, 204
regionalism, 8, 47 See also Blacks; Castro, Fidel;
rural laborers, 130 Cuban Revolution; guerrilla war-
slavery, 17 fare; racial systems and racism;
slums. 105 slavery
Torres, Camilo, 192 Cuban Revolution, 163, 255, 289
working class, 61 achievements of, 265–266
See also Populism; United States aid from Soviet Union, 206
conservatives, 52 Bay of Pigs, 204
Catholic Church and, 9–10, 31, 55, confronts injustices, 207
159 control of army, 265
Chilean coup and, 187 decay of Havana, 229
in Colombia, 12, 72–73, 155–158 failures of, 266–267
federalism and, 11 flight of Cubans from, 205, 215
honor code and racial attitudes, 22 foco theory, 200, 202
ideological dilemma of, 28, 76 impact of end of Cold War, 264
influence of Europeans upon, 76 influence of Cuban exiles in U.S.
liberal-conservative axis, 9–10, 15, politics, 264
129 influence of U.S. attitudes toward
loss to liberalism, 9, 28, 77 Blacks, 204
military and, 150 influence on Latin America in
objectives and tactics, 77 1960s, 190, 308
in Peru, 153 influence on U.S. 1960 election, 205
predominance in Chile before investment in rural housing, 229
1860s, 11, 15, 80–81 Mexico refuses U.S. blockade, 208
undemocratic, 28 missile crisis of 1962, 205–206, 265
in Venezuela, 81 narrative of, 199ff
women and, 133 not characteristic of Latin America,
See also liberals 127, 214
Index 413
OAS and, 208 Mexican border and, 301

Panama and, 294 Mexico and national political scan-
population detested Batista, 203 dal, 272
population growth during, 208 Mexico City and, 275, 278
possibilities for change, 268–269 within United States, 283
reversals suffered, 264 U.S. drug agencies, including DEA
U.S. anti-communism and, 185, or Drug Enforcement Agency,
200, 205, 207–208, 215, 228, 263, 295
231 U.S. “War on Drugs,” 260, 290,
U.S. attempt to shape Batista’s after- 300
math, 204 young men and drug trade, 279
U.S. plans for coup, 204 See also Colombia; Mexico;
U.S. policies after Cold War, 264 Noriega, Manuel; Peru
women in militias of, 199
See also Castro, Fidel; Cuba; United economy, informal. See informal econ-
States omy
Ecuador, 6, 236
Degler, Carl, theory of racial Barrington, Moore, theory of, 125
differences, 20–21 influence of APRA and populism,
dependency theory 154
Alliance for Progress and, 216 legal code, 34
Brazilian twist on, 146 Native Americans, 12, 18
Chilean copper and, 182 elections, 29, 142, 158–159, 307, 311,
Cuba and, 201 313
explained, 36 anti-communism and, 163
government benefits from export Argentina and, 29, 67–68, 70, 93,
development, 46 130–131, 134, 138, 141, 148,
heyday of, 199 182, 217, 219, 251
issues in debate about, 38ff. Bolivia and, 173
Latin America’s general dependence Brazil and, 7, 144, 146, 197, 210,
on Great Britain, 37 236, 245
loss of academic influence, 285, Chile and, 79–80, 181, 183–186,
308–309 196, 247, 310
Mexico and, 279 Cuba and, 201, 203–205
most radical views on, 38 democracy and, 2
not forgotten in Latin America, 301 Guatemala and, 177
Peru and, 155 Mexico and, 46, 48, 109, 111,113,
redefined, 234, 309 115, 118–119, 121, 269–273,
See also Great Britain; United States 277, 280, 306
Dominican Republic, 54, 86, 87, 221 neoliberalism and, 269
Trujillo, Rafael, 132, 201, 248 Nicaragua and, 207, 256–257
United States invasion, 209, 308 Panama and, 295
Drago Doctrine (of Luis Maria Peru and, 153–155, 258–259,
Drago), 82 261–262
drugs, 297 populists and, 133
Colombia and, 158 United States and, 200, 225, 283,
history of trade in Mexico, 275 289–290, 296
legal drugs from Mexico, 280 Uruguay and, 75
414 Index
El Salvador, 34, 128, 192, 251 abolitionist movement in, 17, 305
abortion in, 312 Baring crisis in Argentina, 1890, 67
Carter, Jimmy, and, 226 British capture of torturer Astiz,
civil war, 226, 292 251–252
Faribundo Marti Liberation Front, British ministers, 41, 116
226 British navy, 7, 77
refugees to U.S., 301 Canning, George, 39
entertainment, Chile and, 42
brothels and, 64 Chilean nitrates and, 54, 78
carnival, 147–148, 243–244 competition with U.S., 87–88
Cuba and, 267 conflict over Falkland Islands, 221
elections and, 29 conflict with Venezuela, 82, 85
European influence on, 75 conflicts with France, 5, 38
films and records, 120, 147 creation of Uruguay, 6, 30
late nineteenth century, museums, debt crisis, first Latin American,
etc., 54 and, 7, 304
literate, 103 decline in Latin America after World
modern art, 196, 204 War I, 151, 163–164, 168
music, 24–25, 65, 196, 198, 204, dependency theory and, 36–40, 43
263, 266, 267–268, 279, 295, extradition of Pinochet, 252–253
298, 302 involvement of Guatemalan coup,
new forms of, 182 1954, 171
tourism, 267–268 late nineteenth century imperialism, 85
See also television Latin American admiration of, 10,
Evangelicals, 243 41, 53, 59, 68, 69, 84
gaining on Catholic Church, 243 Latin American sports and, 107
Ríos Montt, General Efraín, oil and Chaco War, 166
murderer in Guatemala, 227 oil interests in Mexico, 120
ties to U.S. television preachers, 193 Peruvian guano trade and, 44–45
and U.S. politics, 283 Roca-Runciman Treaty with
See also Catholic Church Argentina, 131, 137
Spencer, Herbert, influence of, 59
Frei Montalva, Eduardo, president of supplier of capital, 42, 43, 63, 70,
Chile 81, 101
as alternative to Allende, 187 support for powerful in Latin Amer-
CIA help for his election, 185 ica, xiii, 68, 139
Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Eduardo (son and trade with Latin America, 36–37,
president), 253 44, 73, 129
international loans, 208 See also Argentina; Chile;
leader of Chilean Christian Democ- dependency theory; Mexico;
rats, 183 United States
See also Chile Guatemala, 12, 14, 86, 128, 173, 251
Freyre, Gilberto, and “racial after overthrow of government in
democracy” in Brazil, 16, 147 1954, 227
attempt at Central American federa-
Gardel, Carlos (tango singer), 65 tion, 30
Great Britain, 197, 199 coffee, 44
Index 415
landowners of, 27 Peruvian, 263

Moore, Barrington, theory of, São Paulo and, 241
125–126 self-help housing, 263
overthrow of government in 1954,
205, 264–265, 289 Liberals and liberalism, 44, 52, 129,
revolution after 1944, 165, 169–172 144, 297
violence against population, 292 acceptance of inequality, 28
See also United States Argentina and, 11, 44, 67–69, 220
guerrilla warfare, 214–231, 308 Catholic Church and, 30–32, 55–56
Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 202, 205, Chile and, 78–80, 183–184, 253,
207, 209, 214 285
Colombia and, 72–73, 155–158
Haiti conservatives and, 9
Duvalier, François (Papa Doc), 169 constitutional order, 7, 26–27, 35
slave rebellion, 10, 17 economic liberalism, xiv, 38, 47, 69,
U.S. invasion of, 86–87 92, 175, 178, 303, 305–306
voodoo, 294 education and, 57–58, 60
homosexuality, 198, 242, 248, 250, elites and, 75
268, 283 fascism and, 89
Honduras goals in nineteenth century, 10
legal code, 34 Guatemala and, 170–170
role in U.S. war on Nicaragua, 225, influence of London on, 39
255 liberal caudillos, 14
U.S. gunboat era and, 87 liberal land laws, 70–71
honor code, 22–23, 30, 33–34, 57, 77, Mexican Revolution and, 108–113
126 Mexico and, 19
military and, 77
IMF (International Monetary Fund) Native Americans and, 20, 22
Argentina and, 218 neoliberalism, xiv, 179, 234–242,
Bolivia and, 168–169 245, 248, 249, 254, 257,
Brazil and, 310 260–262, 266, 269, 271–280,
Cuban Revolution and, 205 285, 289–290, 302–305, 309–317
Latin American feelings against, 290 Nicaragua and, 87, 222, 208
origins of, 162 oligarchy and, 84–85
Peru and, 259–260, 263 opposed to military rights, 30
policies imposed on Latin America Peru and, 150, 153
and current U.S. economic political liberalism, 47, 76
choices, 289 populism and, 94, 133
United States control of, 208 rural populations and, 11, 13, 24
informal economy scientific racism and, 23
changes in Latin American economy, “shock treatment” and, 249–250, 260
235 social liberalism, xiv
class struggle and, 311 success over conservatives, 11–13,
defined, 233 15, 28, 46
garbage in Mexico and, 235 taxes and, 36
Mexican, 279, 299 United States and, 200, 283–284
migrants to U.S. and, 312 uprising in Chiapas and, 236
416 Index
Liberals and liberalism (continued) CTM (Confederación de

Uruguay and, 74 Trabajadores Mexicanos or Mexi-
Vatican, 30 can Labor Confederation), 101
Venezuela and, 81–82 debt crisis, 180, 231, 234, 273
women and, 34 drug cartels, 275, 278–279, 290, 315
See also conservatives economic growth, 37
education in, 35, 118, 275
Mexican Revolution, 59, 108–125 elections, 26, 280
bloodiest war, 108–109 empire to republic, 6–7, 151
Calles, Plutarco Elías (president), end of slavery, 17, 28
115–121 federalism, 98
Carranza, Venustiano (president), festivals and amusements, 24–25,
113–115, 124 102, 106, 198, 244
Díaz, Porfirio (president), 47, 57, film industry, 106
108 foods of, 25
Madero, Francisco I. (president), French invasion, 32, 41, 109
104, 111–115, 118 Golden Shirts (Fascists), 93
Morones, Luis (labor leader) Great Depression, 92, 117
Obregón, Álvaro (president), guerrilla warfare, 228, 251
114–118 honor code, 22
PNR (Partido illiteracy, 35
NacionalRevolucionario or independence, 12, 20, 39
National Revolutionary Party), industry and industrialization, 99,
97, 118 101, 108, 129, 233
PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institu- labor, 101, 113, 117, 119, 121–122,
cional or Institutional Revolution- 124, 233, 249
ary Party, members called loss of land to United States, 12
priistas), 91, 94, 269–271, 273 major authors, artists, intellectuals,
PRM (Partido Revolucionaio Mexi- 104, 196
cano or Mexican Revolutionary Mexican-American War, 30
Party), 7, 31, 97, 100, 102, 104 “Mexican miracle”, 99, 230, 270
Villa, Francisco “Pancho” migration, 91, 98, 148, 297,
(revolutionary), 104, 112–115 298–299, 312
Zapata, Emiliano (revolutionary), Moore, Barrington, theory of, 149
104, 112–115, 117, 126 national debt, 116
See also Mexico, United States Native Americans in, 21–22, 71,
Mexico, xi, 49, 62, 175, 180, 217, 110, 125, 168, 194, 304
290, 297, 305–306, 317 neoliberalism, 236, 269–280
agrarian Reform, 190, 229 oil, 110, 120, 197, 231, 270,
baseball, 54 273–274
billionaires, 242 oligarchs and oligarchies, 52, 97,
caciques, 12 130, 168
Castro, Fidel and Cuban PAN (Partido Acción Nacional or
Revolution, 201, 208 National Action Party, members
Chiapas, uprising in, 276–277 called panistas), 269, 280
civic life, 160 per capita income, 246
Constitution of 1917, 97, 115 political parties, 117–118, 121, 172,
Contadora Group, 31 236, 269–271, 280
Index 417
population and population growth, Allende, Salvador, and, 190

189, 199, 233, 235, 279, 297 Amazon and, 142, 176
populism, 94, 306 Argentine conquest of, 63
positivists (científicos), 58–59 Bolivian and Guatemalan
PRD (Partido de la Revolución Revolutions and, 165
Democrática or Party of the Bolivian middle class and, 168
Democratic Revolution), 271, 280 Bolivian neopopulism and, 236
presidential system, 98, 115, 228, Cárdenas, Lázaro, and, 119–120
236, 269–272 caudillismo and, 29
public Services, 193 Chaco War and, 167
pursuit of modernity, 96, 305 Chiapas uprising and, 276–277
race relations, 19, 47, 50, 108 Church and, 31, 60
railroads, 42, 110 colonial uprising of Tupac Amaru II,
relations with United States, 87–88, 5
110–112, 120, 123–124, 150, comparison of, in Brazil and Span-
168, 279, 298, 308 ish America, 15
rural property, 23 complexities of native experiences in
secondary cities 236 Mexico, 19
silver, 44 cowboys and, 13
student rebellion of 1968, 190, 199, Díaz, Porfirio, support for, 110
270 discovery of ancient cities and, 57
technological possibilities, 280 enslavement in Brazil, 15
television, 198, 244, 269–270 European racial strategy and, 16
university students, 190, 199, 227 foods of, 25
urban poor, 105 governed themselves, 12
vaqueros, charros (cowboys), 13 Guatemala and, 44
War of the Reform (1859–1861), Guatemalan debt peonage and, 170
14, 32, 46, 109 Guatemalan politics and, 169–171
See also Bolivia; Catholic Church; imperial exploitation of, 15
Cold War; conservatives; depend- Indigenismo, defined, 57
ency theory; liberals and Latin American music and, 25
liberalism; Mexican Revolution; loss of freedom, 70–71, 75
Mexico City; Moore, Barrington, loss of lands, 22, 70, 305
theory of; racial systems and loss of market power in Bolivia, 42
racism mestizos and, 21
Miranda, Carmen, actress, 147 migrants to the U.S., 299
Moore, Barrington Moore, Barrington, theory applied
omissions of, 150 to, 125
theory applied to Latin American neoliberalism and, 310
oligarchies, 149 nineteenth century and, 18, 304
theory of origins of dictatorships not politically passive, 26
and democracy, 125–126 Perón, Juan, and, 133
See also populism Peruvian mistreatment, 45–46, 155,
260
Napoleanic Wars, Latin America’s Inde- Peruvian politics and, 152–155, 258
pendence and, 5–7, 38–39, 84 population decline, 49
Native Amerians, xii, 38, 55, 61, 76, population sizes in Bolivia and
84, 150, 235, 237, 246 Meso-Amerca, 20, 166
418 Index
Native Amerians (continued) origins, 294

radio and, 198 sentenced, 296
religions of, 24 Spadafora, Hugo, murder of, 295
Sarmiento, Domingo, views of, 23 statement about U.S. invasion, 296
Sendero Luminoso, Peruvian guerril- U.S. overthrow of, 295–296
las, and, 257–258, 261–262 See also Panama; United States
Spanish American tributary systems,
15–16 OAS (Organization of American
U.S. assistance to Bolivian States)
repression of, 227 Cuba and, 208
War of Triple Alliance and, 30 U.S. intentions about, 157, 172
within modern cities, 96, 108 oligarchy, xiii, 3, 42, 48–49, 95, 269,
See also Bolivia, Mexico, Peru 305, 306, 309
Nicaragua, 21, 86, 193, 255 achievements, 84
attempt at democracy, 222 alliance with military, 141
Somoza García, Anastasio Argentine, 70, 131–133, 135,
(“Tacho”), 169, 221 137–139
U.S. invasions of, 87, 222 Bolivian, 167–168
See also Nicaraguan Revolution Brazilian, 143, 145, 149, 239
Nicaraguan Revolution, 221, 257, Catholic Church and, 56
264, 265, 295 Chilean, 130, 181, 183, 249
Catholic Church and, 192 defensive position of, 158–159
compared to Cuba, 224–225 defined, 27, 47, 59
early economic recovery and, 224 era of consolidation, 128
Fonseca, Carlos, 222–223 failure in Venezuela, 83–84
FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Gaitán, Eliecer, in Colombia, and,
Liberación Nacional, Sandinista 156
or National Liberation Front, Guatemalan, 227
commonly called Sandinistas), guerrilla rhetoric and, 308
222–223, 234, 255, 256, 257, internally divided, 68
257 make-up of, 127
Iran-Contra and, 291–292 Mexican Revolution and, 97, 108,
mistakes of Sandinistas and, 255 149
Ortega, Daniel, 234 middle class and, 67–68
Reagan, Ronald, and attack upon, Moore, Barrington, theory and, 149
225, 255, 265, 292 Panamanian, 294
rebel army, 223 Peruvian, 259
Somoza Debayle, Anastacio populists and, 93, 125, 127, 132, 142
(“Tachito”) and, 224 regional elites and, 47
Somoza dictatorship in 1979 and, Salvadoran, 226
214 scientific racism and, 56
Violeta, Chamorro’s elected, end of, taxes and, 60
256 United States and, 85, 164, 172
visit by Castro, 225 urbanization and, 97, 130
See also Nicaragua; United States Uruguayan, 74
Noriega, Manuel
control of Panama, 294–295 Páez, José Antonio (president of
drugs and, 294–295 Venezuela), 80
Index 419
Panama, 141, 221, 291 Evita and, 137–140

Arías, Arnulfo (president), fascism and, 134
annoyance to U.S., 293 followers tortured and killed, 217
Contadora Group, 317 influence in Brazil, 211
drugs and, 293 influence on Ibáñez, Carlos, of
French efforts at canal, 43 Chile, 182
Panama Canal, 86, 292 invents “Third Way”, 164
Roosevelt, Theodore, engineers labor and, 135, 140
independence, 73, 87, 307 landlord power and, 134
School of the Americas and Latin middle class and, 150, 159
American military training, 208 Montoneros (guerrillas) and, 219
as tax haven, 293 October 17, 1945, 135–136
Torrijos, Omar, career of, 293–294 sent into exile, 141, 217
U.S. abuse of, 292–293 settles in Spain, 218
U.S. invasion, 295–296 spending of, 138
See also Noriega, Manuel; United upper middle class and, 133
States (U.S.) See also Argentina; populism
Paraguay, 251 Peru, 8, 18, 37, 49, 61, 125, 142, 150,
Francia, José Rodriguez Gaspar de 159, 233, 236, 312
(“El Supremo”), and his rule, APRA (Alianca Popular
18–19, 248 Revolucionaria Americana or
independence, 6 American Popular Revolutionary
Moore, Barrington, theory of, 125 Alliance), 151, 153–154, 258,
Paraguayan tea, 6 260
populism and, 154 Belaúnde Terry, Fernando, 258–261
Roa Bastos, Augusto (novelist), 248 collapse of unions, 249
Solano López, Carlos, 30 copper, 62
See also War of the Triple Alliance De Soto, Hernando, critique of
Pentecostals political economy, 262–263
competition with Catholic Church, dependence on United States, 151
243 drugs and, 261, 313
permitted in Cuba, 267 economic growth, 151
political role in U.S., 283 era of guano trade, 44–46
spread in the 1960s, 193 extension of franchise, 84
support from U.S. televangelists, Fujimori, Alberto, 261–263, 289
243 gamonales, local bosses, 12
Universal Church, 243 García, Alan, 260–263, 310
See also Evangelicals Haya de la Torre, Victor Raúl, 151,
Perón, Juan (president of Argentina), 153, 258, 260
94, 156, 157, 165, 306 independence, 39
after military coup of 1943, influence of colonial past, 151
134–135 investment in Pinochet’s Chile, 178
background of, 134, 215 landlessness, 214
Braden, Spruille, and campaign of, Leguía, Augusto B., 153–154
138 Machu Picchu, 47
British pounds and policies of, 137 Mariátegui, José Carlos, influence
Church and, 138 of, 151–153
elected in 1973, 219–220 military, 77, 214, 230, 250
420 Index
Peru (continued) positivists

Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), influence of Comte, August, 58
257–262 influence of Spencer, Herbert, 59
tenements, 105 technocrats in Mexico, 274
uprising of Tupac Amaru II, 39 primary cities
U.S. military aid, 209 Bogotá before primacy, 151
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 248 Buenos Aires, 63
Viceroyalty divided into, 6 expansion of, 175
Viceroyalty of, 3 great landowners and, 75
wars with Chile, 30, 78 importance of votes within, 76
women in, 33 liberal regulations and, 76–77
See also Chile, United States, Mexico City, 96
populism middle class in, 102
Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto (dictator migration to, 91
and president of Chile) 176, 179, modernizing cultures in, 84
214 Montevideo, 73
Catholic Church and, 192 power and, xi–xii
coup of 1973, 187 provincial centers and, 52
debt crisis of early 1980s, 180, 250 provincial power and, 130
economic expansion, 230 roads and, 75
enduring impact on Chile, 220,248, São Paulo, 238
250, 310 Sendero in Lima, 257
loses plebiscite, 236 tax incentives and, 229
Protestants and, 193 ungovernable zones, 236
rich under his rule, 180 prostitution, 22, 61, 76, 201
secret police and, 247 Perón and, 140
trial in London, 252–225 Cuba and, 267–268
See also Chile São Paulo and, 241–242
populism, 55, 142, 165, 167
Argentina and, 134 racial systems and racism, xi–xii, 20,
Bolivia and, 167 27–28, 30, 35, 51, 60–61, 77,
Brazil and, 142, 146 126, 293, 305
Colombia and, 155 Brazil, 16, 20–21, 27–28, 57, 72,
contest for middle class, 133, 142, 144, 147, 242
150–151 Colombia, 150, 156
crucial moment of, 172 Cuban independence, 47, 86
defined, 93–94, 141 legacy of, 1, 16, 20, 22
elite and, 159 Mexico, 26
high point of, 93 Moore, Barrington, and theory of,
landed power and, 132 125
link to urbanization, 94 Native Americans and, 18
Mexico and, 97, 119–125 Peace Corps and, 215
Moore, Barrington and, 149 Peru, 150
Peru and, 151, 153–154 populism and, 141
race and, 150 São Paulo, 237, 240, 244
range of politics, 132 scientific racism, 57, 160, 195
thesis about, 127 United States, 72, 282–283, 293, 298
Index 421
railroads, 35, 49, 73, 75, 129 end of Brazilian Empire and, 18, 47
Argentina, 63, 69, 88, 131, 138 legacy in Brazil, 72, 142
Brazil, 197 link to racism, 16, 21
British financing of, 42, 43, 63 Native American, in colonies, 15
Mexico, 110, 117, 120, 305 need for slave trade to continue, 17
Peruvian gamble on, 45 Peru and, 45
skilled labor and, 62 São Paulo and, 238
Venezuela, 81 Spanish America and, 16
Rio de Janeiro See also Blacks
arrival of Portuguese royal family, 3, socialism
5, 40 Avila Camacho, Manuel, abandons,
beach culture, 159, 175 122
Belle Epoque, 50 Catholic Church and, 159
colonial administrative center, 4 dependency theory and, 36
influence of Paris, 53 Haya de la Torre, Victor Raul,
internal migration to, 91 beliefs of, 154
political alliance during First Repub- lemon socialism, 231, 289
lic, 239 Mexican Revolution and, 306
population of, 14 middle class and fears about, 249
populist mayor, 144 underdeveloped countries and, 164
regional mutual defense pact, 124 Spanish Civil War, 252, 307
slavery and, 238 sports, 25, 151, 160
Acapulco, 102
São Paulo baseball (beisbol), , 54, 106, 160,
construction of, 238 268
contrasts in income and wealth, 241 influence of United States and
gangs in, 315 Europe, 54
industry and industrialization, 239 nineteenth century, 25
internal migration and poverty, São Paulo, 244
240–241 soccer (futbol or futebol), 54,
as megalopolis, 237–249 106–107, 268
night life, 242
rebellion of 1932, 239 tango, 64–65
religiosity, 243 television, 158, 177, 249
television, 244 Argentina, 198
uprising against republic (1930), Brazil, 198, 244
239 Chile, 179
slavery Mexico, 100, 108, 198, 271, 280,
abolition of, 17, 28, 45, 305 297
Brazil and, 17–18, 21, 46–47, 72, United States elections and, 284
238, 305
British support for abolition, 40 United States (U.S.), xi, 5, 13, 26, 29,
cane sugar and, 16, 47 35, 40, 43, 62, 91, 106, 307
consequences for Northeast Brazil, abolition in Latin America and, 72
142 Acapulco and, 102
Cuba and, 17, 46–47, 72, 305 against Perón, 137
economic mobility and, 21 Al-Qeada attack upon, 290
422 Index
United States (continued) Latin America and U.S.

anarchists, 66 Republicans, 200
anti-Communist crusade, 161–165 Latin American backwardness and.
Argentina neutrality and, 132 23
blowback and, 290–291 Latin American baseball and, 106
Bolivian Revolution and, 165–169 Latin American debt crisis of 1982,
British not Monroe Doctrine 231–235, 303–304
protected Latin America, 39 Latin American dependence upon,
capitalist excesses within the, xiv 110–112, 123–124, 307
Chilean Unidad Popular and, Latin American drug trade and,
184–187 275, 279, 260–261, 263, 275,
and civil war in El Salvador, 312–314
226–227 Latin American imports from, 108
coffee and, 41 Latin American liberals compared to
comparison of immigration in Latin those in, 74
America and, 51 Latin American military regimes
Cuba and U.S. capitalists, 71 and, 176–181, 213–214, 227,
Cuban Revolution and, 201–205, 230, 253, 284, 309, 314
208, 264–266, 268 Latin American model of progress
cultural influence of, xiii, 198 and, 10, 56, 58–59
dependency theory, redefined, and, Latin American populism and, 133,
309 158
discovery of native ruins, 56–57 Latin American rejection of depend-
economic hegemony in Latin Amer- ence, 315–316
ica, 87–89 Latin American technologies and,
end of Native American freedom in, 129
70 Latin American youth culture and,
expansion of power after 1898, xiii, 249, 267
87, 160 Latin Americanization of the United
Freyre, Gilberto, trained in, 16 States, 280–290
Freyre and Tannenbaum comparison Mexican comic books and, 96
of Brazil and, 16 Mexican de Unidad Popular and,
Guatemalan Revolution and, 182, 184–186
169–172 Mexican migration to, 148,
hegemon in Latin America, 160–173 275,297–301, 311, 313
homesteading in Latin America and, Mexican oil and, 108, 273
23 Mexican politics and, 270, 272
ideologies in Latin Americas Mexican Revolution and, 112–123
compared to those of, 126 Mexican wars with, 12, 40
importance of Vietnam War, 209 miscegenation in Latin America and,
indifference to poverty of, social 20, 57
injustice, xii Moore, Barrington, theory of, and,
interventions in Central America 125
and Caribbean, 86–87 NAFTA (North American Free
Iran-Contra, 290–291 Trade Agreement), 276
kidnapping of U.S. Ambassador in neoliberalism and, 249, 271,
Brazil, 212 309–310
Index 423
neopopulists and, 311 Uruguay, 1, 13, 18, 76, 160, 189, 199,
New Deal, influence of, 94 211, 216
Nicaraguan Revolution and, Batlle y Ordoñez, José, as brilliant
221–226, 255–256 statesman, 74
opposed to fascism and caudillos, 29–30, 46
communism, 89, 127, 145 economic development, 73
origins of Argentine dependence immigration, 23, 51, 63, 73
upon, 88 killing of Goulart, 211
overthrow of Brazilian government liberals vs. conservatives in
in 1964, 210–211 nineteenth century, 74
overthrow of Panamanian military rule, 213–214, 250–251,
government and, 292–296 308
Peru’s dependence upon, 151, 263 rising standard of living, 128
political changes within after 1980, soccer, 107
200 state formation, 6, 30, 40
promotion of “Asian Tigers” by, See also Catholic Church, Great
246 282 Britain, War of the Triple Alliance
proposes OAS, 157–158
racial political exclusion in Latin Vargas, Getulio (Brazilian president),
America and, 28 94, 141, 150, 165, 210
rise of corporations within, 69 centralizes government, 144
Roosevelt Corollary, 83 Communists and, 145
Roosevelt, Theodore, president, and constitution of 1934 and, 144
arbitration of Venezuelan conflict economic nationalism, 146
with Great Britain, Europe, 73 elected in 1950, 148
Salvadoran gang within, 301 Estado Novo (New State), 145
shift in power away from Europe Falangists and, 145
and toward, 84–85, 93 populism and, 147
slavery in Brazil and South in, 17 reduces political power of Paulistas,
slavery in Latin America and, 17, 239
19–21 removed in 1945, 148
Spanish America War, 86 suicide in 1954, 149
support for the Latin American uprising of 1930, 143, 239
elites by, xiii, 160, 193, 308–309 Venezuela, 9, 197, 228, 231, 278
tango compared to jazz in, 65 baseball, 54
televangelists in, and influence on Bello, Andrés, 34
Latin America, 193, 243 Chávez, Hugo, 236, 310
women’s suffrage, 76 confrontation with Britain,
World War II and, 129, 131 Germany, and Italy, 82–83
See also Argentina; Bolivia; Brazil; Contadora Group, 317
CIA; Cuba; Cuban Revolution; export economy and, 77
drugs; Freyre, Gilberto; German investments, 81
Guatemala; Mexican Revolution; Great Depression, 92
Mexico; Native Americans; independence, 6
Nicaragua; OAS; Panama; Perón, industry and industrialization in,
Juan; Peru; populism; Slavery; 129
Vargas, Getulio liberal federalism and, 78
424 Index
Venezuela (continued) industrial labor of, 61, 137, 211,

llaneros (cowboys), 13–14 311
oil, 81, 88, 121 left out of Chilean agrarian reform,
population, 190 190
slavery, 17 liberal law codes and, 34
See also Castro, Cipriano; railroads longevity of 189
magazines devoted to, 67
War of a Thousand Days (Colombia), Mexican maquiladoras and,
32, 73, 77, 155, 313 275–276
War of the Pacific, involving Bolivia, Mexican oil confrontation and, 121
Chile, and Peru, 46, 78 march of women’s pots against
War of the Reform (Mexico), 14, 32, Allende, 185
109 marriage, 33–34
War of the Triple Alliance, involving middle class and, 105
Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, most powerful woman, Perón, Eva,
Uruguay, 30, 46 140
Wars of Latin American independence, as participants in War of a
6–9, 29, 31, 35, 39–40 Thousand Days, 35
women poor wanted birth control, 195
Afro-American religions and, 24, poorest people in Latin America, 53,
243 312
begging with children, 96 prosperous, 53, 96, 103,, 160
Black, 16 prostitution in contemporary Cuba.
and carnival in Brazil, 243–244 367–358
Catholic Church and, 32–34, 54, prostitution in pre-Revolutionary
56, 105, 242–243 Cuba, 203
Chilean agricultural exports and, punished for abortions in El
254 Salvador, 312
Chilean resort to violence, 180 raped in military terror, 226
Cuban Revolution and, 199, 207, in Santiago, Chile in 1980s, 177
233, 265 service sector and, 61, 95, 108
denied the vote, 28, 34,, 133 sports and, 54
divorce in Cuba, 266 spread of birth control in 1980s,
downward economic pressures in 189
United States and, 281 suffrage, 76, 144, 181, 307
education of, 35, 199 tasks in nineteenth century, 8, 25
fertility in preindustrial cultures, Unidad Popular in Chile and, 184
189 U.S. Equal Rights Amendment, 284
fleeing Peruvian collapse, 262 World War I, 1, 49, 54, 56, 68, 76,
flirting, 65 79–80, 92, 107, 130, 132, 151,
Fujimori’s law of gender representa- 161
tion, 161 decline of Great Britain, 87
guerrillas in Nicaraguan Revolution influence on Mexican Revolution, 114
and, 256 origin, 85
honor code and, 22–23, 33, 57 and Panama Canal, 292
ideas of Spencer, Herbert and, 35 and rise of United States, 87–89,
indecent tango and, 64–65,103 160
Index 425
World War II, 16, 93, 98, 101, end of British power, 188
121–123, 129, 131–134, 146–148, Guatemala and, 169
153, 158, 161–162, 167, 169, human rights and, 251
175, 187–188, 250, 299, 308 impact on Latin America, 129, 158,
Argentine labor and, 134 262
Brazil and, 146–148 Latin American labor and, 133
Bretton Woods, 162 Mexican labor and, 101
Catholic Church and, 191 Mexico and, 122–123
Chilean and Argentine neutrality, Panama, 293
131–132 Peru and, 153
consolidation of United States populism and, 167
power, 93, 172 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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Latin America and

the Origins of Its

Populism and the Oligarchies 125

Ramón E. Ruiz started this program and was instrumental in

twentieth century the region’s primary cities. The mutation of these

became constitutional republics, yet not a single one has effectively

The conﬂuence of domestic issues and foreign demands changed in

without massive government spending. If this is true of the most suc-

The Long Nineteenth

region that Latin America was not ready to become a series of

colonial past. To explain how that happened requires looking always

CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE

Latin America in the twentieth century grew out of a long crisis in

was larger than Madrid, nominally the center of royal authority,

The colonies had complex societies, but in form, there was an

political instability by raising the question of who should rule in the

and Mexico became a republic as well—completing the sweep of

down, and so did the imperial monetary systems. The absence of an

Throughout Spanish America, in a pattern imposed during the

TABLE 1.1 Political Axes of Latin America, 1820–1914

as a state religion, and they wanted to maintain social practices and

wanted each province to have considerable autonomy from the

mine owners.8 Overall, the economies of Latin America grew. But

Caudillismo was more than just cowboy practices. It involved a

TABLE 1.2 Major Cities in the Atlantic World, 1790–1890

it had been in 1790, or failed to continue expanding into 1890. The

LABOR: INDIAN, SLAVE, AND FREE

As soon as the Europeans arrived in the Americas, they began to

certain number of men were handed over to work, usually on roads

societies in the colonial period than the nineteenth century. Mexico

called ladinos in many areas) lined up generally with Whites and

urban–rural, men–women—to which the liberals would add

(brotherhood), dedicated to the veneration of a saint, of the Virgin

owed to the government by working it off—governments began to

THE ORIGINS OF NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS

On paper, Latin America—with the exception of Cuba and Puerto

ment, their societies proclaimed other values that directly

The secret ballot was invented in Australia in 1856, but voting in

Gervasio Artigas, it was Great Britain that created the nation in

secular parishes. The orders, in turn, were divided by gender into

the archbishop of Santiago ﬁred a sacristan (someone who took care

and although a monarchy, the country had strong republican senti-

women married, even in modest circumstances, they brought money

ﬁrst universities—all of them run by the Church—in the New

development to another—never to catch up with developed coun-

third of the deposits of the Brazilian banking system and over a

dynastic collapse and nationalist expansionism. The French Revolu-

world’s greatest navy and merchant marine (shipping in the early

the Americas. It also took part in the invasion of Mexico in 1861.

British merchants and banks also became involved in Latin

schools and maintaining whatever ties they could to their emo-

taxation tied to commerce, especially tariff revenues. All kinds of

minister of ﬁnance. Guano exports soared and were ten times as

Civilistas) dependent on dwindling tariff revenues, and agrarian soci-

Lerdo de Tejada in 1876, he proclaimed that the government had

Oligarchy and the

contained the beginnings of a middle class and even some laborers

America had two or three times as many people in 1900–1910 as

with the introduction of European sciences, gave new rationale to

THE NEWEST CITY

BOULEVARDS AND STREETCARS

The cities consumed and controlled larger amounts of terrain.

home; the novel began to ﬂourish, ﬁrst in translation from English