CH 6 Neocolonialism

1.What was the Liberal Plan ? Who prospered? Who remained impoverished ? PAG 181
The liberal plan to make Latin America resemble Europe or the United States partly
succeeded. But Progress turned out differently in Latin America.
Landowners and urban middle-class people prospered, but the life of Latin America’s
rural majority improved little, if at all. To the contrary, agrarian capitalism
laid waste to the countryside and
destroyed traditional lifeways, impoverishing the rural people spiritually and
materially.

2. What was there to gain from Progress ? Who were the direct beneficiaries of this
? PAG 182
Elite and middle-class Latin Americans had a lot to gain from Progress. First and
foremost, they stood to profit from the great export boom, over half a century of
rapid, sustained economic growth, never
equaled in Latin America before or since. The direct beneficiaries of this export
bonanza were the large landowners, whose property values soared with the approach
of the railroad tracks

3. How did Italian immigrants join The Brazilian cofee trade? PAG 185
Coffee boomed in the tropics, creating several kinds of neocolonial landscapes. In
the deep red soils of São Paulo, Brazil, Italian
immigrants tended coffee after abolition because freed slaves wanted nothing to do
with plantations.

4. How did the rubber trade expand in Brazil? What was the end of result for
indigenous people? PAG 187
In the rain forests of Amazonia, neocolonialism brought a rubber boom. Rubber
harvesters lived isolated along riverbanks deep in the Amazon basin, tapping sap
from rubber trees. In Brazil, the tappers were
mainly refugees from droughts of the arid sertão lands of northeastern Brazil.
Meanwhile, the rubber boom ravaged indigenous people, their tribes decimated by
alcohol and disease.

5. What were the "Banana Republics "? How did they maintain their banana enclaves ?
PAG 188
United Fruit made several Central American nations into “banana republics,” where
it could keep governors, cabinet ministers, even presidents in its deep corporate
pockets.
The banana companies acquired millions of acres for their plantations, millions
more for future use, and millions more simply to head off possible competition.
Companies like United Fruit reserved managerial positions for white US personnel
and hired “natives” for the machete work.

6. How did the change in Education open up opportunities? PAG 192

Still, as part of a slow, steady process happening all across Latin America,
talented mestizos were joining the middle classes of Latin American countries,
finding more opportunities and meeting
less prejudice than did socially ascendant black people in the United States.

7. How did governance change in the Neocolonial period ? What kind of government
did Latin America have? PAG 192
Until 1930, the balance of population and power rested in the countryside, where
landowners controlled not only the national wealth but also the electoral system.
Such “managed elections” were essential to the political system of neocolonialism

8. What are oligarchies? How do they differ from Dictatorships? How are they the
same? PAG 195
Oligarchies (from Greek, meaning “rule by a few”) represented a narrow ruling
class. Within oligarchies, elections served to measure the strength of client
networks. Even when ballots were
not freely cast or fairly counted, they still showed who controlled what, and where
—information that helped negotiate oligarchic power sharing. Dictatorships, on the
other hand, centered on one all-powerful
individual. Dictators might hold elections purely for the aura of legitimacy or to
impress their foreign associates. Oligarchies and dictatorships provided
stability, the virtue always most desired by foreign investors

9. How did the US and Europe trade and finance influence Latin America? PAG 200
In ideology and values, as in trade and finance, neocolonialism meant the
absorption of Latin America into an international system dominated by Britain and
the United States.
It is here, in friction with powerful outsiders, that Latin Americans began to feel
the colonial in neocolonialism.

10. What was the United States vision of Manifest Destiny? What was the Monroe
Doctrine? How did the Roosevelt Corollary extend the Monroe Doctrine? PAG 205
In the United States, visions of a Manifest Destiny of irresistible, inevitable US
expansion into Latin America had stirred some people’s imaginations for
generations.
Since 1823, the reader may recall, US diplomats had proclaimed the Western
Hemisphere off-limits to powers outside it. In 1905, Theodore
Roosevelt provided the Monroe Doctrine with a corollary. The Roosevelt Corollary to
the Monroe Doctrine made the US Marines a sort of hemispheric police force to
prevent European
military intervention in Latin America.

CH7 NATIONALISM

1. Who were the Nationalist? What was their vision of Latin America? PAG 217
The nationalists very often were urban, middle-class people, recent immigrants or
of racially mixed heritage.
Nationalism fostered collective self-respect by positively reinterpreting the
meaning of Latin American racial and cultural difference.

2. Why did Latin American nationalsit call for "race mixing " ? PAG 219
Latin American nationalists celebrated the mixing of indigenous, European, and
African genes. Each country’s unique physical type, argued some nationalists, was
an adaptation to its environment.

3. Wha did the Mexican constitution of 1917 call for ? How did it change the power
of the church and foreigners? PAG 222
The Constitution of 1917, still Mexico’s constitution, showed strong nationalist
inspiration. Article 27 reclaimed for the nation all mineral rights, for instance,
to oil, then in the hands of foreign companies.
The new constitution also sharply limited the privileges of foreigners and, as a
legacy of earlier Mexican radicals, curbed the rights of the Catholic Church.

4. How was Nationalism in Argentina and Uruguay different than in Mexico ? PAG 225
In Argentina and Uruguay, nationalism showed a different face. In this most
urbanized, literate, and middle-class
part of Latin America, the core constituency of nationalism was stronger than in
Mexico.

5. What was the " tragic week "of 1919 ? PAG 227
During the presidency of Yrigoyen', the greatest stain on his record is his violent
repression of organized labor during the “Tragic Week” of 1919 and the strike of
Patagonian sheep herders in 1921.

6. How did the Great Depression change Latin America? PAG 229
The Great Depression of the 1930s finished the demolition of neocolonialism and
energized nationalist movements throughout Latin America.

7. How did the Estado Novo get created in Brazil? PAG 233
Vargas deftly negotiated the political tangles of the early 1930s, playing
liberals, conservatives, communists, Tenentes, and Integralists against each other.
Then, in 1937 he assumed dictatorial power
with the support of the army and went on the radio to announce a nationalist
institutional makeover for Brazil: the Estado Novo, or New State.

8. How did Lazaro Cardenas transform Mexico ? What was Article 27 about ? PAG 237
During his six years in office, he distributed almost forty-five million acres of
land, twice as much as in the previous twenty-four years put together.
The foreign owners were shocked when Cárdenas then decreed the expropriation of the
oil companies in accord with Article 27 of the Mexican constitution.

9. What was the U.S. " Good Neighbor Policy " ? PAG 238
The world seemed a dangerous place in the 1930s, and FDR thought the United States
badly needed allies in Latin America. As world war loomed on the horizon, he did
everything possible to cultivate Latin American goodwill. In his inaugural address,
he announced a “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America.

10. Why did Central America not get the same nationalist results as the rest of
Latin America? PAG 240
The growth of an urban middle class had left some parts of Latin America virtually
untouched. Central America provides a good example. The internal markets of Central
American countries
were too small to support much industrialization. So old-style landowning
oligarchies had not, for the most part, ceded control to more progressive
nationalist coalitions on the isthmus between Panama and Guatemala.

CH9 REACTION

1. What did the US do to counter the rise of Marxism in Latin America? PG 280
The working alliance between the US military and Latin American armed forces,
dating from World War II, had become an explicitly anticommunist alliance after the
war.

2. What was the Alliance for Progress ? How was it used to counter the rise of
revolutions ? PAG 281
The creation of the military alliances was complemented in the 1960s by a new US
aid policy. In 1961—a sort of Marshall Plan for Latin America, to be called the
Alliance for Progress. The basic idea of the Alliance for Progress was exactly that
of the Marshall Plan: to reduce revolutionary pressures by
stimulating economic development and political reform.

3. How did the US trigger the rise of dictatorships in Latin America? PAG 283
US policy called for democracy but helped trigger dictatorship. National security
doctrine encouraged Latin American armed forces to take an increasingly active role
in national life, promoting
economic development and public health, for example.

4. How did military rule in Brazil change the country? How were the people affected
by the control of the military? PAG 286
The Brazilian military had a nationalist commitment to industrialization, too. It
drove relentlessly toward a new level of heavy industrialization, the manufacture
of durable consumer goods.
Therefore, most people in Brazil, where the middle class was a distinct minority,
benefited little or not at all from the “miracle” of the early 1970s. Military
policies put more money and credit not in the
hands of the poor who most needed it, but in the hands of better-off people likely
to buy cars, electronics, and domestic appliances.

5. How did the Peronist control Argentina? How were the Montoneros just like the
Peronist? PAG 288/289
A few years after ousting Perón in 1955, the Argentine military had stepped aside
and allowed civilian rule to resume, but whenever it allowed the Peronists to
compete in elections (1962, 1965), the military
came hurrying back to annul a Peronist victory.
Many Montoneros, the best known guerrillas, came from Peronist families and still
considered themselves Peronists, although their ideology had swerved left.

6. Who were the Tupamaros? How were they defeated by the government of Uruguay ?
PAG 290/291
Formed in 1964, the Tupamaro urban guerrilla movement was directly inspired by the
example of the Cuban Revolution.
In 1967, the Uruguayan president declared martial law to fight the Tupamaros. The
military began a gradual takeover, completed in 1973.

7. What hapened in Chile on September 11th, 1973? Who was responsible for this
attack? What did this attack lead to? PAG 294
Then Chilean army tanks rolled into the streets on September 11, 1973. Refusing
safe passage out of the country, Allende went to his office and died under attack
by his own armed forces. Here,
in the estimation of US Cold Warriors, was yet another victory for democracy.

8. What happened in Guatemala during the 1970´s and the 1980´s? What was the reason
behind these acts? PAG 298
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Guatemalan armed forces carried on a dirty war against
rural guerrilla armies and urban opponents such as student activists and labor
leaders.
To deprive the guerrillas of support, indigenous peasants were herded into new
“model” villages that served as rural concentration camps.

9. Who were the Contras? What was their purpose in Nicaragua during the 1980´s ?
PAG 301
The Argentine military government, triumphant in their dirty war, sent trainers for
this new US proxy force called the Contras, for counterrevolutionaries.
Through the 1980s, the Contras raided Nicaragua from bases on the Honduran side of
the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. Reagan called them “Freedom Fighters” and supported
them unwaveringly.

10. What happened at El Mozote, El Salvador? How did this act reflect what was
hapening in El Salvador during the 1980´s ? PAG 304
One day in 1981, for example, an elite US-trained battalion entered the tiny
village of El Mozote and systematically slaughtered almost everybody there,
hundreds of unarmed, unresisting men, women, and children.
Ironically, their military intelligence was not very good: El Mozote, it turned
out, was not a guerrilla base at all.
El Mozote illustrates the grisly, indiscriminate violence of military anticommunism
in Central America.

CH10 NEOLIBERALISM

1. What is neoliberalism? What did neoliberalism call for? PAG 311

The new generation of liberals are called neoliberals because they are new, not
because their ideology differs from that of previous liberals.
For better or worse, neoliberalism—with a familiar emphasis on free trade, export
production, and the doctrine of comparative advantage—reigned supreme in Latin
America at the turn of the third millennium.

2. What happened with debt in Latin America during the 1980´s ? PAG 312
During the 1980s, many Latin American countries had struggled to keep up payments
on foreign debts. These debts had grown suddenly huge, thanks to high world oil
prices and heavy short-term borrowing in the 1970s. Overwhelmed,
Mexico and Brazil temporarily stopped payments in 1982.

3. What is NAFTA? What is Mercosur? PAG 313/315

In 1994, the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the
linchpin of Mexican neoliberalism in the 1990s, seemed portentous to people on both
sides of the border.
One year later, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay inaugurated their own
free-trade zone, called MERCOSUR.

4. How were the impacts of neoliberalism similiaar to the liberal reforms of the
1870-1930´s? PAG 317
In many ways, the impact of neoliberal reforms resembled the impact of liberal
reforms in 1870–1930. Latin America became more “modern” in the technological
sense. Foreign capital and foreign products
poured in.

5. How did the indigenous people of Latin America rise up against liberal reforms?
PAG 319
Whether gathering in Mexico or Ecuador or Bolivia, indigenous leaders demanded
sufficient land to farm and a fair share of government benefits.

6. What was the reason for the slogan "racial democracy" in Brazil? PAG 321
The Slogan " racial democracy " incorrectly suggest an absence of racism, and even
though Brazilians used the ocasion of the hundredth anniversary of abolition
to denounce the massive presence of racism with unanimity, they have not give up
the idea that racial and cultural mixing lies at the heart of Brazilian identity.

7. How has the migration from Latin America changed the United States? PAG 324
Immigration from Latin America is changing US culture. Spanish-language
publications abound. There are Spanish-language television networks. Supermarkets
all over the country carry tortillas,
cilantro, and plantains.

8. How is Environmental Devastation affecting the Amazonian Rainforest? PAG 324/325

Environmental devastation is worse in developing countries than in developed ones,
because avoiding or fixing it is expensive.
Perhaps a tenth of the Amazonian rain forest has already been destroyed, but still
occupies roughly a third of Brazil´s national territory, as wel as parts of
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

9. How did the "political pendulum" change after the 9/11 attacks? PAG 327
In fact, the blush was off the neoliberal rose already by 11 September 2001, when
terrosit attack brought down the twin towers of New York´s World Trade Center.

10. What is the outlook for Latin America for the near future? PAG 328
Today, the vitality and creativity of Latin American life attract interest aound
the world, the neoliberals have their own model to impose,
but they also have free elections to win. With a bit of lucj, the potential losers
in the neoliberal model will have a better chance to make their voice heard.