By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

 

Introduction: State Formation In South America

What does one mean when one talks of ‘Latin America’? The term itself is a relatively recent invention, and it is fraught with difficulties. It was popularized by José Maria Torres Caicedo, a Colombian writer, in 1856.36 It was quickly taken up by French propagandists, ever conscious of Anglo-Saxon power and keen to stake out a claim for their country’s influence in the ‘other America’ (a claim that Louis Napoleon pushed beyond prudence with a tragic attempt to install Maximilian, a Habsburg prince, as emperor of Mexico). Unfortunately, it is geographically vague. Pace my own misuse of the term in the title of this book, Latin America is not itself a continent. Clearly it includes South and Central America, but most of Mexico is in North America (geographers normally place the sub-continental divide at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec). And what of the Caribbean? Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti clearly qualify. But Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since the Spanish, American war of 1898. And the English-speaking Caribbean (along with Belize and Guyana), though included with Latin America in many international bodies and sharing some of its problems (e.g. the drug trade), constitutes a distinct sub-region. On the mainland, Cayenne is a département of France; Suriname, a former Dutch colony, is independent but separated from the other republics by language. But language is not a defining criterion either. While Spanish is the official language of i8 republics spread across Central and South America and the Caribbean, Portuguese is spoken in Brazil. As well as in Haiti, Cayenne, Guadeloupe and Martinique, French is spoken in Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada. And a number of indigenous languages remain important, each spoken by several million people. They include Quechua in the countries of the former Inca empire (Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, where it is called Quichua); Aymara, too, is spoken widely in Bolivia and around the Peruvian shore of Lake Titicaca; Guarani is the lingua franca of Paraguayans, spoken at home even by members of the country’s elite; a score of Mayan languages are spoken in Guatemala and parts of southern Mexico. In all, Mexico has more than fifty Indian languages in current use, including Nahuati, the tongue of the Aztecs.

For the purposes of this research report we will use Latin America to refer to the Spanish-speaking countries and Brazil (and only occasionally to Haiti). But even in this more restricted universe, there are obvious differences. The problems of Haiti are more akin to those of Africa, whence most of its inhabitants originally came against their will, than to those of Chile, a Europeanised country whose income per head is six times as large. Brazil is a country of continental scale; El Salvador is the size of Wales or Massachusetts. Peru and Mexico are the seats of sophisticated ancient civilizations; Brazil and Argentina are ‘new’ countries. In an attempt to do justice to the diversity of Latin America, let us start with a rapid explanatory tour — the equivalent in reverse of the kind of package tour of Europe that middle-class Latin Americans hope to make at least once in their lifetime, its purpose is to review briefly some of the differences in culture, history and outlook among the region’s constituent countries.

Start with Brazil. It has a strong sense of its own separateness, a result not just of its vast size and different language but also of history and geography. Portuguese colonialism was a looser affair than its Spanish counterpart: while the Spaniards sought treasure and the domination of new lands, the Portuguese were predominantly traders. Uniquely in Latin America, Brazil was a constitutional monarchy for the first seven decades after independence. Until recently, Brazilians have felt self-contained by the vastness of their territory, separated from their neighbors by the Amazon rainforest, the swamps of the Pantanal, and the mighty Paraná river. Brazil’s Indian tribes were mainly nomadic, and had erected no great civilizations at the time of their conquest. But the import of African slaves had a far more profound influence on Brazil than on anywhere else in the region except Cuba and the island of Hispaniola. Of the 8 million or so Africans who survived the passage to the Americas, at least 3.65 million and perhaps more were shipped to Brazil in the four centuries to 1850, considerably more than the number taken to the United States. Along with Cuba, Brazil was the last American country to abolish slavery, in 1888 (a decision that brought down the monarchy). Despite the huge impact of slavery, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, one of Brazil’s most distinguished essayists, noted ‘the practically complete absence among (the Portuguese) of any racial pride’, the result he said of their prior mixing with North Africans. Brazil’s long-standing claim to be a ‘racial democracy’ is now widely viewed as exaggerated. But if racism is not absent from contemporary Brazil, it is far more subtle than in many other countries. Walk through Parque Ibirapuera, São Paulo’s equivalent to London’s Hyde Park, and you see Brazilians of all colors playing football or volleyball together. In Brazil, unlike the United States or South Africa, racism never implied racial segregation.

Unlike Mexico, Brazil has long felt confident about absorbing cultural influences from Europe and the United States and melding them into something uniquely Brazilian. Oswald de Andrade, a modernist writer and critic, called this ant rop ofagia, or cultural cannibalism. During a fertile period in the mid twentieth century, Brazil forged a self-image as a self-consciously modern nation. That period began with the Modern Art Week, held in São Paulo in 1917, which influenced the country’s architecture in particular, bringing the ideas of Le Corbusier to South America. It climaxed with the whispery, cool jazz music of bossa nova and the building of Brasilia, the new capital, where the modernist palaces of Oscar Niemeyer added grace to an otherwise Orwellian project. ‘Le Corbusier took the right angle while I was concerned with the creation of curves,’ Niemeyer explained, in an example of architectural antropofagia. That was because curves are found in ‘the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean, and on the body of the beloved woman’. (Financial Times Magazine, 7 June 2003.) Like Australians, Brazilians live their culture out of doors, in the street and on the beach, in carnival, football and the weekly churrasco or barbecue at which friends and family gather.

Brazilian officials dislike the idea that their country is part of Latin America. Especially since Mexico signed NAFTA, throwing in its lot with the United States, Brazil prefers to talk of the unity of South America as a counterweight. In 2000, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso called the first of what have become regular South American summits. They began by promoting better transport links across the continent. In November 2004, at a meeting in Cusco, the former Inca capital in Peru, Brazil’s vision of South American unity took a further step forward when all 11 South American countries (including Guyana and Suriname) proclaimed a South American Community of Nations, with the eventual aim of a common passport and common currency. As always with such schemes in Latin America, proclamation and rhetoric come more naturally than the hard slog of integration.

In Brazil itself, change has tended to be peaceful and evolutionary. The country lacks the tradition of political violence of some of its Spanish-speaking neighbors. After a difficult transition from military rule in the 1980s, democracy has recently seemed more robust as two contrasting reformers, Cardoso, an urbane sociologist, and Lula, a former lathe operator and trade union leader, succeeded each other in the presidency. But Brazil continued to grapple with relatively slow economic growth, a bloated state, social injustice, violent crime and political corruption.

In some ways, Mexico, the region’s other giant, could hardly be more different. It is intensely proud of being an ancient society, the site of several Indian civilizations dating back millennia. For most of the colonial period, after the decline of the Potosi silver mine in what is today Bolivia, it was Spain’s richest and most populous possession. In comparison, the United States seems a brash parvenu. The conservative bedrock of Mexican society is the heavily Indian centre and south, where communalism and the Catholic Church were powerful influences. Change has tended to come from the freewheeling north, a frontier society of more individualist farmers and ranchers. Mexico’s revolution of 1910-17 (some argue it lasted until 1940) forged a distinct political system, under which the official Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled continuously until 2000. It also spawned an official culture of indigenismo, aimed at promoting (or at least proclaiming) the country’s racial integration. One of the early ideologues of the post-revolutionary period, José Vasconcelos, the education minister in the 1920s, argued that Latin America was in essence mestizo (a ‘cosmic race’, he called it, referring to its claimed spirituality). Having lost half its territory to the United States in a war of 1846-8, and living cheek by jowl with the twentieth century’s superpower, Mexico developed a defensive, almost xenophobic nationalism. ‘Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,’ Porflrio Diaz famously said of his country. As a result, official Mexico felt it could not afford to be as easygoing about its culture as Brazil was. And while Brazilians live in the street, Mexicans, or at least the better-off among them, live behind the high walls of houses vaguely modelled on the colonial hacienda. Those defensive walls are also metaphorical. ‘The Mexican,’ wrote Octavio Paz, the country’s Nobel-prize-winning poet and essayist, ‘builds a wall of indifference and remoteness between reality and himself.’ (Paz The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings,1985, Grove Press, p.29).

 Mexico’s political culture remains relatively opaque. Its transition to democracy was slow and late, culminating with Vicente Fox’s historic defeat of the PRI in 2000. Until then, never in the history of Mexico had power passed peacefully to an opposition party as the result of a democratic election. As Enrique Krauze, a historian, has pointed out, the norm in Mexico has been the concentration of power in a single person: the Aztec tiatoani (meaning he who speaks’), the colonial viceroy, the nineteenth-century caudillos, the revolutionary chiefs, and the PRI’s omnipotent presidents. The absence of even a truncated democratic tradition long distinguished Mexico from South America. That made the narrowness of the mandate won by Felipe Calderón, a conservative from Fox’s party, in the 2006 presidential election, a potential problem.

Argentina, Uruguay and Chile, South America’s southern cone, are yet another story. Sparsely populated in the colonial era, they were the great success stories of the first era of sustained economic growth in Latin America, from 1870 until World War One. They were blessed with fertile land, extraordinarily so in the case of the vast, flat grasslands of the Pampas, and, for the most part, temperate climate. Argentina and Uruguay (along with southern Brazil) attracted large numbers of European migrants.

Argentina, a puzzling story in the annals of modern economic history, became the first ‘developed’ country in Latin America. In 1913, income per head in Argentina was slightly higher than in France and Germany, and far ahead of that in Italy or Spain. It lagged only the United States, the United Kingdom and three British colonies, which Argentina resembled in some ways, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. That followed three decades of growth averaging 5 per cent a year, driven by exports from the Pampas, foreign (mainly British) investment, especially in railways, and immigration (mainly from Spain and Italy). Growth then slowed, but on the eve of the Second World War, Argentina remained a relatively rich country. It has been pretty much downhill ever since. Argentina is thus not a ‘developing country’. Uniquely, development slipped from its grasp. That is a haunting condition: it may explain why psychoanalysis and the nostalgia-ridden tango are so popular in Argentina. It is reflected, mockingly, in the fading belle epoque splendour of Buenos Aires. In 1913, Argentina’s capital had more sewerage connections per head than Paris. It was the second-largest city in the Americas, after New York; the second to boast an underground railway; the only city outside London to boast a branch of Harrods (it closed in 1995 and the building remained empty in 2006). Argentina’s long decline reached rock bottom in the financial and economic collapse of 2001-2. This saw tens of thousands of young Argentines migrating to Spain and Italy in search of work, repeating in reverse the journey made by their grandparents. Despite a vigorous economic recovery, the scars from the collapse have not entirely healed. In the rustbelt suburbs, a generation of young adults has grown up in mass unemployment. No longer an offshoot of Europe in the Americas, Argentina has become a Latin American country.

Across the broad silt-brown estuary of the River Plate lies Uruguay, a small, compact country of temperate climate. It prospered by exporting beef and wool to Britain from the port of Montevideo. It became urbanized early, with European migrants setting up manufacturing industries. Uniquely in Latin America, Uruguay established a European-style welfare state, before most of Europe. Two loose parties, the Colorados (‘Reds’, or Liberals) and Blancos (‘Whites’, or Conservatives, also known as the National Party), had dominated politics in the nineteenth century, a system which evolved into democracy in the early years of the twentieth century. With its middle-class society, economic stability and use of referendums, Uruguay liked to consider itself the ‘Switzerland of South America’. Argentines and Brazilians traditionally holidayed on its beaches and kept their money in its banks. This reputation was first strained by economic stagnation and a period of dictatorship (1973-84) that saw many younger Uruguayans seek opportunities abroad. More recently, Uruguay has suffered the knock-on impact of Argentina’s economic collapse. But its response was riarkedly different. Unlike its neighbour, it did not default on its debts, and it actively sought foreign investment. These policies were maintained when the left-wing Frente Amplio (‘Broad Front’) took power in 2005. They achieved an economic recovery that was at least as fast as Argentina’s.

Paraguay could hardly be more different to Uruguay. The Gran Chaco, a parched, empty, sweltering scrubland, makes up half of its territory. Paraguay is poor, Indian, and has a powerful authoritarian tradition. Its destiny was shaped by being landlocked, its trade on the River Paraguay a potential hostage to Argentine interference. That led its first dictator, the implacable Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia (1816—40), known by his subjects as el Supremo (the supreme one), to close Paraguay to the world and pursue autarky. To neuter potential rivals, he expropriated many landowners, and turned the Guarani peasantry into tenants of the state. His authoritarian egalitarianism would be hailed by left-wing writers more than a century later. Yet out of this paranoid dictatorship developed a militarism which led to disaster. Francia’s successor, Carlos Solano Lopez, built up a massive and well-equipped standing army of 50,000 troops. Its alarmed neighbors saw in Paraguay a South American Prussia. In 1865, Solano’s son, Francisco, allowed himself to be trapped into war with a Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. After five years of fighting, largely against Brazilian armies, Paraguay was destroyed. Its prewar population of 1.2 million was said to have been reduced to 300,000, of whom very few were males (recent scholars suggest that these casualty figures are exaggerated). In the 1930S Paraguay would fight another war, this time with success, wresting part of the Chaco from Bolivia. It long remained an enclave of dictatorship and smuggling, culminating in the kleptocratic rule of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89). Yet it is perhaps the national football team, with its almost unbeatably stubborn defense, which expresses the essence of Paraguayan identity.

Chile represents a sharp contrast to Argentina, its trans-Andean neighbor to the east. Its compact geography, or at least that of its populated central third, and relative ethnic homogeneity helped it to become a cohesive nation- state long before many others in the region. Simon Bolivar, South America’s independence hero, spotted Chile’s potential early: ‘If any American republic is to endure,’ he wrote in 1815, ‘I am inclined to believe it will be Chile ... Its territory is limited; it will always be free of contagion from other peoples; it will not alter its laws, its customs, or its habits; it will preserve its uniformity in political and religious ideas; in a word, Chile can be free.’(In his ‘Jamaica Letter’ of 1815. El Libertador: Writings of Simon Bolivar (2003), Chile achieved political stability by the 1830s. But it suffered national trauma in the early 197Os. First Salvador Allende tried to use a narrow electoral mandate to impose socialism on a deeply polarized country. Then General Augusto Pinochet ended more than a century of almost uninterrupted civilian rule, installing a dictatorship that cruelly repressed Allende’s supporters. Despite that trauma, some would say because of it, Chile has subsequently become the big success story of contemporary Latin America. Since 1990 the country has been governed by a stable centre-left coalition that has retained the free- market economic policies imposed by the dictatorship. Economic growth has gone hand in hand with an increasingly solid democracy. Chileans worry that, in the terminology of an estate agent, they are a good house in a bad neighborhood.

Further north, what are commonly referred to as the Andean countries are culturally very different from the southern cone. While Bolivia and Ecuador retain large Indian populations, Colombia is mainly mestizo; Peru is somewhere in between. Venezuela, like Brazil and Cuba, has a large black and mulato population. All the Andean countries suffer from difficult geography. In Bolivia’s case, that was aggravated by the War of the Pacific of 1879-83, which led to Chilean annexation of its mineral-rich coastline, leaving the country landlocked, isolated from most of its neighbors by the Andean cordillera, Amazon rainforest and endless tropical savannahs. Nowadays, a socio-economic divide has emerged between the poor, Indian Altiplano, the bleak 4,000-metre-high inter-montane plain, and the eastern tropical lowlands, the centre of commercial farming and the oil and gas industry. Peru and Ecuador also suffer a sharp geographical divide: coastal lowlands are the centre of commercial farming; subsistence farming by indigenous communities is predominant in the valleys and mountainsides of the Andean cordillera; while to the east lies the Amazon jungle, where indigenous tribes have clashed with oil companies. In recent decades the trade in cocaine, whose production is centered in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, has hindered democracy and provided a ready source of finance for illegal armies: it is no accident that the only Latin American guerrilla groups to have outlived dictatorship and the ending of the Cold War are in Colombia and Peru.

Peru was both the seat of the most sophisticated of the pre-Columbian states, the Inca empire (which stretched as far as southern Colombia and northern Argentina), and the administrative centre of Spanish South America. As a republic, it has dealt with its geographical challenge by excessive centralisation of economic and political power in Lima, with consequent regional rebellions. Even more so than the Latin American norm, the army has been a powerful force in Peruvian political history. It took the military dictatorship of Juan Velasco (1968-74), a left-leaning nationalist much admired by Hugo Chavez, to break the power of the landlord oligarchy, something achieved earlier by revolution or civilian politics in many other countries. But Velasco left a socio-political vacuum, especially in the Peruvian Andes. That was exploited by Sendero Luminoso Litminoso (Shining Path), a fundamentalist Maoist group. After passing through the traumas of hyperinfiation, the murderous insurgency of Sendero and its heavy-handed repression, which between them left 70,000 dead between 1980 and the mid-199os, and the increasingly corrupt and authoritarian rule of Alberto Fujimori, Peru is trying to rebuild democracy amid promising economic growth but continuing sociopolitical fragility. Peru’s cultural richness is expressed in music, literature and handcrafts such as weavings and pottery. Thanks to its varied microclimates and the rich fisheries of the cold Humboldt current, coastal Peru boasts South America’s richest cuisine, involving a fusion of Andean, African, Spanish, Italian and Japanese elements.

Bolivia and Ecuador are the most volatile polities in the Andean region. The poorest South American republic, Bolivia (or Upper Peru as it was then known) was for a few decades Spain’s most valuable colony, thanks to the fabulous silver mountain at Potosi. Discovered in 1545, the Cerro Rico (literally ‘rich hill’) provided the main source of treasure for Spain’s European wars for more than a century. Tens of thousands of Indians, forced to labor in the deep and narrow mine shafts, perished in extracting the silver. At its zenith, Potosi, a bitterly cold place 4,070 meters (13,380 feet) above sea level on the Altiplano, was the largest city in the Americas. Its population of 160 thousand, was similar to London’s at the time. City and country then sank back into obscurity. Potosi is today a quiet place of too many colonial churches, where a few thousand miners, working informally and in dangerous conditions, pick over the dregs of the mineral ore. Between 1825 and 1980 Bolivia suffered almost 200 coups, although a nationalist revolution in 1952 began to lay the basis of a modern state and started to address the exclusion of the Andean Indian majority from political and economic power. For two decades until 2003, Bolivia was an unexpected success story for democracy and economic reform. Then two presidents were toppled in as many years by mass demonstrations led by radical left-wingers. Economic stagnation, the discredit of traditional political parties, resentment at the US-backed ‘war on drugs’, demands for greater political participation by indigenous Bolivians and regional tensions all combined to produce a seeming political deadlock. It was not clear whether the election, in December 2005, of Evo Morales, a socialist of indigenous extraction who pledged to ‘refound the nation’, would resolve this.

Ecuador has failed to resolve the geographical tension between coast and sierra which has dominated its history. That has resulted in political fragmentation and extreme instability: since it became an independent republic in 1830, the average life of Ecuador’s constitutions has been just ten years. Since the 1930s, the average president has survived in office no more than two years. Between 1997 and 2005, Ecuador had six different presidents, with none of the three elected in that period lasting longer than 27 months. Since the 1970s, oil has provided booty for the politicians to contest and reduced the incentives for economic reform. In recent years, Ecuador has seen the emergence of Latin America’s most powerful indigenous movement.

Both Colombia and Venezuela resisted dictatorship in the 1970s, but both have had more than their share of problems since. Colombia is cursed with a geography that by one count is the world’s third-most adverse for economic development.47 The Andes break into three chains, separated by deep valleys; much of the country’s two coasts are backed by jungles, swamps or semi-desert. Colombia’s population of 44 million is the third largest in Latin America; it is also the most dispersed. These factors combined to make Colombia inward-looking but difficult to govern and to police. That impeded authoritarian government. With one brief interlude, Colombia has been ruled since the mid-nineteenth century by only two parties, the Liberals and Conservatives. Party loyalty was fierce, passed on within villages and families. This arrangement generated periodic civil wars but also a certain stability: Colombia was unusual in the region in avoiding populism; for half a century until 1995 its economy grew at an annual average rate of almost per cent, avoiding both recession and debt default. Colombians long prided themselves on their country’s cultural prowess: their cities teem with bookshops and public libraries, and the country is the largest exporter of books in Latin America. In Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Fernando Botero Colombia boasts the region’s best-known living novelist and painter respectively.

The past three decades have been difficult for Colombia. Weak government allowed the drug trade to flourish. Drug income helped to fuel the rise of three illegal armies: the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) and their foes, the rightwing paramilitaries of the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC). Colombia’s violent conflicts gave it the worst human-rights record in the hemisphere in the 199os. At its peak, the conflict claimed the lives of some 7,000 people a year, while another 3,500 or so were kidnapped. A total of perhaps 2 million were ‘internally displaced,’ refugees forced to flee from their homes in the countryside, often at gunpoint. In response, Colombian governments have forged a strategic alliance with the United States. ‘Plan Colombia’ was controversial, but in some ways it has been effective. It will not end the illegal drug trade (only legalization in the consumer countries could do that) but it gave Colombia’s armed forces the mobility needed to regain the strategic initiative against the guerrillas. Colombians themselves have recognized that without greater security their country cannot prosper, and they have given strong backing to Alvaro Uribe, their tough conservative president since 2002. Violence declined steadily from its peak in the late 1990S and economic growth resumed.

Like Argentina, Venezuela once glimpsed prosperity. In the 1970S, it was the richest country in Latin America, thanks to oil. The oil money transformed what had been a sleepy agricultural country. It also helped to make Venezuela the most ‘Americanised’ country in South America, the only one where baseball is more popular than football. Venezuela’s political tradition was in marked contrast to Colombia’s. Dictators and strongmen were the norm until 1958, when a democracy based on two seemingly strong parties was installed. Oil financed a welfare state, but also a spoils system and much corruption. By the 199os, as the population grew while the price of oil languished, oil revenue per head had declined steeply from its peak of two decades earlier. But attempts to reform a bloated state met fierce popular resistance, not east because corruption robbed many Venezuelan politicians of the moral authority required to impose austerity. In desperation, Venezuelans turned to Hugo Chavez, who had been jailed (and then amnestied) for leading a coup attempt against a democratic government. A charismatic mestizo, Chavez has attracted almost religious devotion among many poorer and darker-skinned Venezuelans. But in many ways, his Bolivarian Revolution is a repeat of the policies of unsustainable redistribution of oil revenues pursued by his predecessors, but with one party in power rather than the previous, alternating, two. Partly in response to a short-lived coup in 2002, and an attempt by the opposition to unseat him through a recall referendum in August 2004, Chavez’s rule has become increasingly authoritarian and his revolution has moved in the direction of military socialism. Democracy is in greater danger in Venezuela than anywhere else among the larger countries f Latin America. As long as oil prices remain high, Chavez seems likely to continue in power. But when they fall, Venezuela faces a reckoning.

For most of their independent history, the small countries of the Central American isthmus were an obscure backwater. Costa Rica apart, they were marked by repressive dictatorships. Following the Sandinista revolution of :99 in Nicaragua, they were suddenly thrust into the spotlight as a theatre the Cold War. As well as Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador suffered civil wars, as left-wing guerrillas backed by Castro’s Cuba battled dictatorships supported, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by the United States. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the administration of George H W Bush wisely decided that democracy was the only solution for Central America’s conflicts. Central America is once again a backwater. It has close ties with the United States, partly through migration. American-style youth gangs are among the less desirable imports from the north. All the countries of the isthmus are grappling without much success with the twin problems of crime and youth unemployment. But even within Central America there are differences. Relatively equitable landholding, European migration and a strong democratic tradition mark Costa Rica out from the others. Guatemala, with a large Indian population, suffers from a racist and backward political elite and an over-mighty army, but is showing timid signs of democratic progress. In El Salvador, the right has held a monopoly on power since democracy was established in the early 1990s. That applied to Nicaragua until Daniel Ortega profited from a split in the Liberal Party to win the 2006 election. Honduras is poor but politically stable.

Like Central America, the Dominican Republic has seen much interference from the United States. Culturally, Dominicans (or at least the better-off among them) have largely defined themselves in racial terms, in being mulatos or mestizos but not black and therefore not like the impoverished French-speaking Haitians next door. Under Leonel Fernández, a pragmatic social-democrat who was president from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2004, the Dominican Republic has enjoyed bursts of rapid economic growth based principally on tourism and maquiladoras (export assembly plants).

Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean. Like Haiti, it was marked by its history as a sugar colony. In both places, African slaves were imported on a large scale to work in the plantations. While the countries on the mainland gained their independence in the 182os, Cuba’s island status allowed Spain to hang on there until the Spanish-American war of 1898 (in which Spain lost Puerto Rico and the Philippines as well). The United States opted to keep Puerto Rico, because of its strategic position close to the entrance of the Caribbean. Cuba was forced to swap colonial status for that of an American neo-colony: under the notorious Platt Amendment, the United States reserved the right to intervene in the government of the island at will. This was unilaterally abrogated by a Cuban government in 1933.

But Americans controlled much of the island’s economy. Fidel Castro’s revolution was first and foremost a nationalist one. By adopting communism and placing Cuba under the Soviet Union’s protection, Castro forged the only alliance certain to keep the United States at bay and ensure his own exercise of total power for an indefinite period. Just as it delayed independence, Cuba’s island status delayed the fall of communism, long enough for Castro to find a new external sponsor in Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. As successive waves of richer Cubans fled to Florida, the population of Castro’s island -- though not the leadership of the communist government, became darker skinned.

In August 2006, on the eve of his eightieth birthday, Castro underwent serious intestinal surgery: he transferred power to Raül, his brother, the defense minister and his designated successor. Rafli Castro was himself aged 75 in 2006. He lacked Fidel’s charisma and mythical aura. For the immediate future, Cuba was likely to be governed by a collective leadership in which the armed forces would play a central role. Looking further ahead, a transition to capitalism and democracy (perhaps in that order) looked inevitable. What was not clear was how long this might take, whether it would happen peacefully, what the roles of the United States and Venezuela would be, and whether the two Cubas -- the richer, whiter one in Florida, and the poorer, blacker one on the island, would reach reconciliation, or would fight over property and power.

Finally, there is now another Latin America, in the United States. Some 41 million Latinos live there, of whom some 26 million are of Mexican descent, 2 million are from Puerto Rico, 1.6 million from Cuba, 1.3 million from El Salvador and 1.2 million from the Dominican Republic.

Latinos are now not only the largest minority in the US, making up 14 per cent of the total population, but also the fastest-growing demographic group. The Latino population is highly varied. Some two-thirds were born in the United States -- they are hyphenated Latino-Americans. There are differences according to national origin, by generation, between migrants and those born in the United States, and among the former, between those with legal residence and illegal’s. What is indisputable is that Latinos are having an impact on the United States, on its politics as well as on its economy and culture. Although only 47 per cent of Latinos voted in the 2004 presidential election, compared with 60 per cent of blacks, they split their vote more evenly between the two parties, making them more sought after. Although many are trapped in low-wage jobs, their remittances are having a similarly important impact on Latin America itself. What is less clear is whether their presence will effect significant changes in relations between the United States and Latin America. Certainly, George W Bush’s rhetorical interest in Latin America would appear to owe much to the Latino presence. At the same time, the increasingly bitter debate about immigration control in the United States has the potential to complicate relations with Mexico and Central America.

Such diversity defeats some casual generalizations. Latin America is far from being a monolith. But it is built from many common materials. The former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America share more than the same corner of the world. They have a shared experience of Iberian colonialism, of Catholicism, similar languages and, with many variations, similar ethnic identities. As already noted, that legacy has involved a further shared characteristic: deep inequality in the distribution of income, wealth and (until recently, at least) political influence. Many, but not all, of the larger countries suffer from challenging geography. Indeed, one of the most striking differences in Latin America is between coastal and mountain peoples, irrespective of country. As elsewhere in the world, the coast tends to be more outward-looking, commercially minded and racially mulato, while people of the mountains are more conservative and more Indian. This similarity has led Sergio Ramirez, a Nicaraguan writer and politician, to describe Brazil as a ‘Caribbean country’ despite its purely Atlantic seaboard. (Ramirez, ‘El Caribe Somos Todos’, in El Pals (Madrid) in 2001,).

But all Latin Americans share to a greater or lesser extent some social attitudes and a common culture. Many of those who can afford to do so work to live rather than live to work. Many of Octavio Paz’s observations regarding the central place of the fiesta in Mexican life apply to the region as a whole, and along with the fiesta goes the importance of music and dance. Despite their prowess at football, a team sport, Latin Americans are torn between gregarious and anarchic impulses. Across the region, the family functions as both a powerful bulwark of social stability and an economic network. Until recently, there was a striking absence in the region of the kind of voluntary civic groups that Alexis de Tocqueville so admired in the United States.

Brazilian pop music and Mexican rancheras, along with telenovelas from both countries, are popular throughout the region. So are the novels of Gabriel Garcia Márquez (a Colombian who lives mainly in Mexico and Cuba), and Mario Vargas Llosa (a Peruvian who lives mainly in Europe). The love poems of Chile’s Pablo Neruda have been recited by several generations of adolescents across Latin America. There have been other shared ways of thinking as well. From the Jesuits and scholasticism, to liberalism and positivism, corporatism and Marxism, and liberalism again, Latin American countries have drawn from the same European political philosophies and often adapted them to the conditions of the New World in similar ways. Broadly speaking, their economic and political histories since independence have been similar. It is not coincidental that events have sometimes been strikingly synchronized across the region. Thus, Cuba and the Dominican Republic apart, all the Latin American countries gained independence between i8io and 1830. Once independent, the Latin American republics have often copied from each other. Thus, as Bushnell and Macaulay have pointed out, six South American republics completed the abolition of slavery between 1851 and 1854, while five expelled the Jesuits between 1848 and 1859. There have been several waves towards and away from authoritarianism. In the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the resulting world economic depression, no less than 16 countries suffered military coups or authoritarian takeovers of other kinds. That democratization and liberal economic reform in the 198os and 1990S took the form of a region wide wave was thus far from coincidental.

Indeed,- some writers have argued that so great are the similarities among the Latin American countries, and so great their differences with other parts of the world, that the region constitutes a distinct civilization. Samuel Huntington, a conservative American political scientist, is the most prominent proponent of this view. ‘Latin America has a distinct identity which differentiates it from the West ... it has a corporatist, authoritarian culture,’ he argues. (Huntington, (1998), The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Touchstone Books, p. 46).

However, most Latin Americans would see themselves as part of the ‘Western world’. Their cultures are a unique mix of European, indigenous and African elements. But there is nothing in the historical record to suggest that Latin America is intrinsically incapable of following Europe and the United States down the path of democracy and capitalism, even if both will be of a distinct, Latin American kind. Alain Rouquié, a French political scientist and former diplomat, seems near the mark when he describes Latin America as the ‘far west’ -- the west’s most challenging frontier of democracy and development.) Rouquié, (1997), America Latina: Introducción al Extremo Occidente, 4th edition, Siglo XXI Editores, Mexico).

Venezuelan state oil major Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) said Feb. 12 that it will “paralyze” all commercial contact with U.S. supermajor ExxonMobil in retaliation for the firm obtaining international judgments that effectively freeze $36 billion in PDVSA assets. The two companies are engaged in a legal battle, with ExxonMobil attempting to gain compensation for a heavy oil project that PDVSA expropriated in 2007. But while the threat certainly sounds good, it changes very little on the ground.

Venezuela’s crude oil production stands at 2.8 million barrels per day (bpd); roughly 600,000 bpd is consumed locally, and the rest is exported. Yet, courtesy of an international build out of PDVSA assets that predates President Hugo Chavez’s accession to power in 1998, Venezuela owns refining assets of approximately 2.5 million bpd.

At one time, PDVSA was able to supply all of these refineries, roughly 1.3 million bpd in Venezuela, 600,000 bpd in the Caribbean, 300,000 bpd in Europe and 950,000 bpd in the United States (under the local brand Citgo). But in order to maintain political supremacy, Chavez felt forced to purge the once engineer-heavy PDVSA of political opposition. The result was the loss of approximately 1 million bpd of PDVSA output on Chavez’s watch.

This means that the threat against ExxonMobil does not amount to much. Because PDVSA’s output steadily has declined since Chavez took over, the state oil company now has more capacity at its refining assets at home and abroad than it has oil to put in them, which means it is very rare that the firm has extra cargos of crude oil to sell to anyone with whom it is not already involved in a joint venture.

Ironically, ExxonMobil is a partner in one such venture. The Chalmette, La., refinery is a joint project between the now-rivals that processes 185,000 bpd. Yet, even here there is minimal danger for ExxonMobil; PDVSA explicitly said in its recent announcement that it will honor all existing contracts, although it added that it will attempt to extricate itself from the deals as quickly as possible. Total Venezuelan oil sales to ExxonMobil in November 2007, the last month for which complete data is available, excluding Chalmette were only 90,000 bpd, an amount that easily can be compensated for by other sellers.

For the past few years, the Chavez government has been shopping around its U.S. assets for buyers, with some success. The Chalmette facility likely will be next on the auction block. Of course, none of this is over, and all of these moves, the injunction and the ExxonMobil cutoff, are minor and relatively inconsequential steps on the road to the court battle between the two.

 

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