The Latin American experiment

Whereas much of the Anglo-Saxon expansion during the period 1600­1850 took place against the background of almost empty continents, the same was not true of the Spanish colonization of Central and South America.

Between 1542 and 1549, fears of feudalization, as well as horrifying reports concerning the atrocities being inflicted on the Amerindians, caused Emperor Charles V to change his mind. Working through the Conseio de las Indias (Council of the Indies) as the highest organ respon­sible for the colonies, he tried to abolish the encomiendas. A massive revolt ensued and Charles had to retreat; in the event the only change in­troduced was to limit inheritance, so that encomiendas that fell vacant reverted to the crown and all did so after the fifth generation.

⁵⁸ For figures on the population in general, see A. Rosenblat, La poblacion indigena de America dese1492 hasta la actualidad (Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1954), as well as W. Borah, The Aboriginal Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Data on the ratio of whites to Amerindians in Mexico can be found in W. Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 18.

⁵⁹ For the early history of the encomienda, see B. Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginning of Spanish Mexico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). six months every seven years in the infamous silver mines.^[337] Other natives remained bound to the haciendas by means of debt peonage, living and dying on the farms where they received their wages in kind. Particularly in the more remote regions where government power did not penetrate, this meant that they were completely at the mercy of the owners who both exploited them economically and exercised ‘‘political” rule over them. One way or another Amerindian labor provided the foundation both for any economic progress in the colonies and for the wealth that soon began to flow from them to Spain. Without them neither Peru nor, later, Mexico could have turned into the treasure-houses that they did.

Politically speaking, the government of Latin America was an extension of the one at home.^[338] Discovered by Europeans at a time when the separation between ruler and state was only beginning to crystallize, the lands in question were seen as the property of the king who ran them with the aid of the above-mentioned conseio.

As in contemporary Europe, the bureaucratic pyramid that eventually emerged was venal and shot through with corruption, as officials, having bought their posts, tried to compensate themselves and make a profit if possible. As in Europe, too, it tended to become more so as time went on. Its venality even constituted a check on the authority of the crown which it was supposed to serve - all the more so because, owing to distance and the difficulty of communication, many officials could do as they pleased. At a time when towns back home were being brought under control, an element of self-government was provided to those in the New World in the form of the cabildos or municipal councils. Each Spanish town had one, made up of twelve regidores who were elected by the well-to-do citizens or vecinos and approved by the governor or captain-general; some even had the right to appoint their own successors. Under these circum­stances the cabildos quickly turned into closed, self-perpetuating oligar­chies which, as was often the case in early modern Europe also, ran the towns primarily in their own interests.

These institutions, as well as the minor officials - scribes, constables, supervisors of markets, etc. - were not particularly original when com­pared to those of the homeland. The factor that modified, even transfor­med, them was the existence in Latin America of deep racial divisions. White females, whether free or slave, entered the colonies almost from the beginning. Here they formed a small minority, initially perhaps no more than 10 percent; thus the Spanish conquest of America was at the same time a conquest of native women who, in the words of one German mercenary serving the Spaniards in the Rio de la Plata area, were con­sidered ‘‘very handsome and great lovers, affectionate and with ardent bodies.”^[339] By making the possession of the encomiendas dependent on the production of an heir, initially at any rate the crown encouraged those encomenderos who could not obtain spouses from Spain to marry local women; other cases (especially among the clergy) involved concubinage, outright sexual slavery, or casual liaisons. Whatever their duration and legal status, inevitably these unions resulted in mixed offspring. The situation was further complicated by the presence of black slaves. The first ones were brought in as early as 1502 from Spain itself. Later several millions were imported from Africa to replace the dwindling Amerindian labor force. Since, among them too, men formed the great majority, they had to turn to such Amerindian or mestizo females as came their way. The end result was the appearance of a fantastic number of different com­binations which the Spaniards, always scholastically inclined, did their best to classify and catalogue.^[340]

Though the gradations were often absurd, the prejudices behind them were very real.

In the case of individuals it was often all but impossible to determine who belonged to what group. No registers were kept, and people who looked white could usually pass as such; however, society as a whole had no doubt that dark was synonymous with inferior and mixed descent with illegitimacy. Throughout Latin America, the top of the sociopolitical heap was formed by recent arrivals from Spain and Portugal, known as gapuchines (spurred ones) and chapetones; they looked down on everybody else and monopolized all the most important offices, secular as well as ecclesiastical. Then came the native-born whites or creoles whose well-to- do members occupied seats on the cabildos and who also proved lower- level officials.

64

It was only during the last third of the eighteenth century, under the reign of the Bourbon King Carlos III, that attempts were made to reform the system in the interest of strengthening royal control, reducing corrup­tion, and giving the bulk of the population a somewhat greater stake in the government. The two top echelons of the administration, i.e., the viceroyalties and captaincies-general, were decentralized and their hol­ders given greater power over defense in particular - including the raising of the first standing forces which, toward 1800, numbered approximately 20,000 men all told. Under them a new tier of government was in­troduced in the form of the intendants, salaried officials modeled upon those of France with responsibility for financial matters and public works. In an attempt to breathe new life into the cabildos, the old office of corregidor was abolished; henceforward the Spanish towns came under nonvenal subdelegados whose powers were less extensive. Another set of subdelegados was put in charge of Amerindian affairs with the aim of protecting them against the worst abuses committed by the landowners. In the event, and except for its success in ending the repartimiento, by and large the attempt to help the non-white population proved a failure as other forms of exploitation persisted, including tribute and the system whereby the subdelegados and other officials forced the population to buy from them specified quantities of specified products at prices which they themselves determined.

Visiting Mexico in 1803, the German explorer Alexander von Hum­boldt estimated that only one-third of the inhabitants lived even as well as the lower people in Spain, already at that time the most backward country in Western Europe;^[342] in Peru, farther away from Madrid and harder to reform, the situation was even worse. However, for the upper classes the period following the end of the Seven Years War was one of considerable economic expansion.^[343] In Europe demand for tropical products such as hides, cacao, coffee, tobacco, and sugar was soaring. The output of the latter alone is said to have grown tenfold between 1756 and 1800, whereas in the decades after 1788 total trade between Spain and its colonies grew fourfold. The profits provided the capital for a renewed interest in mining. After a long period of stagnation, technical improve­ments began to be introduced, often at the hands of German or German- trained experts who were recruited, paid, and sent to the colonies by the crown. Combined with a population increase that made the necessary labor available, they soon led to a renewed flow of silver from Mexico in particular.

In theory these and other economic advances would have made the creoles grateful to the government which, by reforming the administration, had assisted them or at any rate made them possible. In practice, the opposite happened. At the top, the establishment of a modern civil service merely emphasized the extent to which the americanos, as they now started calling themselves, were excluded from it in spite of their property and other qualifications. At the bottom, the shift from venality to salaries caused many of the minor officials to lose their perks. An expanding economy found itself constricted by the old imperial system by which trade among the various colonies was prohibited and all transoceanic commerce had to be carried out exclusively with Spain by way of the famous casa de la contratacion in Seville. Though some of the more onerous restrictions began to be removed during the 1770s, the situation resembled that which had existed in North America on the eve of the Revolution, with the difference that poor, backward Spain was far less capable of meeting its colonies' demand for manufactured goods than was Britain, the undisputed industrial giant of the age.

Beginning in the 1780s liberal ideas, imported first from France and then from North America, were able to pass censorship and began cir­culating. However, at best they touched only the wealthier part of the white population - the gente distinguida, consisting of government of­ficials, army officers, merchants, professionals, and landowners who, though refusing any sort of self-rule to their dependent populations, wanted it for themselves. When the struggles for independence, promp­ted by Napoleon's conquest of the Iberian peninsula, broke out during the second decade of the nineteenth century, they were almost exclusively a question of whites fighting other whites as to who could participate in the government. A case in point is provided by one of the earliest ‘‘pat­riotic societies'' which was formed in Buenos Aires in 1801. Membership was restricted to ‘‘men of honorable birth and good ways'': in a racially based society, this translated into a ban on foreigners, blacks, mulattos, zambos (the offspring of blacks and mulattos), mestizos, and numerous other persons of mixed descent. Though the prohibition on the mestizos was subsequently dropped, the others remained in force, showing that there were limits to how low the society was prepared to stoop even in an enterprise so noble as wresting power from Spain.^[344] Only in Mexico did the Amerindian and mixed-blood masses join the initial revolt, terrifying their betters and leading to a temporary rally to Spain. Here and else­where, the upshot was to replace a remote set of masters by another which was closer at hand, and one which turned out to be even more ruthless than those sent out by Madrid or Lisbon.

For this episode, see Rosenblat, La poblacion indigena, vol. II, p. 155.

As Bolivar himself saw clearly enough,^[345] against a background of slave ownership on the one hand and widespread poverty, apathy, and de facto serfdom on the other, the construction of abstract states would have proved very difficult - indeed the future which he forecast was one of ‘‘petty tyrants.” It was made even more so because the politically con­scious populations were very small and, in sharp contrast to the situation in the United States where the original colonies were strung out along the seaboard and in easy contact with each other, scattered all over the rims of a vast continent. For example, Brazil in 1823 had fewer than 4 million inhabitants. At first sight this compared favorably with the United States in 1776; but, whereas the latter was a nation of flourishing farmers and urban residents, in Brazil the great majority were either black slaves or else a formless, near-destitute, racially diverse mass that included a remarkably high percentage of vagabonds. Other examples are Uruguay, which when it started its struggle for independence against Argentina had just 60,000 inhabitants, as well as Argentina itself which even as late as 1852 had 1,200,000 all told - including another class of men without fixed addresses, the gauchos. It is true that, between 1811 and 1821, all the newly independent countries adopted constitutions. They eman­cipated their colored populations, abolished tribute, and made all non- ecclesiastical civilians equal before the law (the military and the church were another matter, enjoying as they did fueros or privileges that put them beyond the reach of ordinary courts). However, centuries of dis­crimination, poverty, and isolation cannot be removed by fiat. In Brazil even slavery persisted until 1888.

Whatever the precise circumstances in which they lived, over 95 per­cent of the population continued to be in a position from which they could neither influence the government nor, which is even more sig­nificant, be controlled by it.^[346] Among the tiny minority to whom this did not apply, to separate private interests from public affairs was almost impossible. Politics became, as they have often remained, a game of musical chairs between very small coteries; for example, in Chile the wife of one president (Manuel Bulnes, 1841-51) was the daughter of a presi­dent, the sister of a president, and the mother of a president. Taking into consideration local variations, generally one faction consisted of land­owners who supported centralized, authoritarian government with the aim of denying the rest of the population personal freedom (to say nothing of the right to participate in politics) and exploiting it more effectively. Their liberal opponents were typically urbanites, merchants, and professionals, but including a sprinkling of nonwhites who had somehow made good - often by way of the professions or the army which they joined and in which, thanks to exceptional ability, they rose. Their principal demands were drastic reductions in the influence of the church, including the confiscation of its immense landed property and the elimin­ation of ecclesiastical courts; a federal, more democratic form of govern­ment; and the realization of personal freedom for their social inferiors from whom they hoped to receive support.^[347] But even in those places where they could implement their platforms, democracy, hemmed in by a requirement for literacy and a high property qualification, never meant the enfranchisement of more than between 2 and 4 percent of the popula­tion, while the number of those entitled to hold public office was limited to a few thousand.

Against those handicaps, the only country that somehow succeeded in maintaining a political tradition unbroken by violence was Chile.^[348] Here as elsewhere the bulk of the population was rural, illiterate, and dirt-poor, Between 1830, the year in which the opposing factions fought their last battle, and 1870, government tended to be in the hands of the conser­vative landowners. However, thanks to the fact that there were few Amerindians and that those who did exist were largely concentrated in the far south, at any rate a tradition of slavery, serfdom, and proprietary government were absent. When the transition to liberal rule came it was achieved by constitutional means; except for the privileged position of the armed forces and the fact that the franchise always remained rather narrow (when it ceased to be narrow it quickly led to the election of Salvador Allende as president in 1970), the resulting system of gover­nment was in many ways like that of the United States. This was not so in the remaining countries, where the wars of liberation merely marked the beginning of the struggles between the two groups. Often they were extremely violent with kidnapping, assassination, and sometimes the extermination of entire families used as common weapons. Very fre­quently they created room for the emergence of caudillos or strongmen, a phenomenon once considered unique to Latin America but one which, following the establishment of many new states from 1945 on, has spread into other parts of the world as well.

Among the caudillos some stood at the head of one faction or another and mobilized their supporters from among their personal friends.^[349] Many were army officers who sought to impose order even as they helped themselves to power at the head of juntas made up of their fellow officers. All had to be muy hombres, real he-men, but the few who came from obscure rural backgrounds were even more so; starting as bandit leaders of the oppressed local populations, they sometimes obtained local promi­nence if, fighting hard all the way, they did not get themselves killed first. Whatever the origins of the leading characters, during the century after independence virtually all of the newly created states underwent an endless series of civil wars: so in Argentina (until 1862), Bolivia (which, with no fewer than sixty revolutions, broke all records), Brazil, Colombia (some thirty civil wars), Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela (which had some fifty revolutions all told). From then to the present day perhaps the best thing that can be said of these and other Latin American states is that they did not wage too many wars against each other - though some of those they did wage, like the four-cornered struggle between Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in 1865-70, counted their victims in the hundreds of thousands and left the first- named country almost empty of male inhabitants. However, what they lacked in external conflict, they easily made up in terms of internal anarchy, coups, and countercoups.

To the extent that the endless civil wars permitted any economic development at all, the first half of the nineteenth century created a new situation. As Western Europe and North America entered the age of the industrial revolution the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies were unable to follow. Riddled with smuggling and corruption, the old im­perial system had begun to break down even before independence was achieved;^[350] but now it was abolished at the hands of both parties which, for once, found something on which they could more or less agree. Influenced by European ideas, the liberals favored free trade within the continent. Influenced by their interests, the conservatives were loud in demanding the right to exchange the crops and minerals that they pro­duced for goods imported from overseas. As political instability preven­ted the accumulation of capital, industry was unable to develop. The stream of factory-made European products easily overwhelmed the local workshops, many of which were still home-based, nor was that stream discouraged by government which often received the lion's share of its revenue from tariffs. In particular, shipbuilding (which had been prac­ticed in Mexico from the very beginning) and the manufacturing of metals and of all but the most elementary textiles almost ceased. Luxury goods came from France, those intended for mass consumption from Britain and, increasingly, the United States. As had happened in much of Eastern Europe during the sixteenth century and in Russia and India during the nineteenth, the outcome was deindustrialization.⁷⁴

To the extent that they were not limited to mere subsistence - still the lot of a considerable part of the population - the new states' contribution to the world economy was made almost exclusively in the form of food­stuffs and raw materials. Though the towns did not disappear, their economic role declined compared to the last decades of colonial rule. They remained in existence mainly as administrative centers or, if their geographical position permitted, entrepots through which foreign prod­ucts entered the country and spread inland. The towns' plight enabled the various conservative factions - parties is too grand a word - to maintain their power in opposition to the liberals and at the expense of the remainder of the population. Particularly in Mexico and Brazil, the shift of landed wealth out of the hands of Amerindian communities and into those of private individuals went on throughout the nineteenth century, whereas in Argentina, as in the United States, ownership of ‘‘empty'' spaces (meaning spaces inhabited by the native population) was settled by means of the gun. In all three countries, and in others as well, the resulting estates could often be measured in square miles rather than acres. Except for luxury articles for the use of the master and his family, they were almost entirely self-sufficient; regardless of what the law might say, many landowners retained their own police forces, prisons, and even instruments of torture as means for keeping their Amerindian and mestizo dependents in check. Nor did conditions change very much during the second half of the nineteenth century when an influx of foreign capital, first British and then American, started. On the contrary, the foreigners often conspired with the conservatives in order to preserve political tranquility and a dirt-cheap, semi-servile labor force in what were known as banana republics.

⁷⁴ On the emergence of the neocolonial economy, see C. Furtado, The Economic Develop­ment of Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and Stanley and Stein, Colonial Heritage of Latin America, ch. 5.

Entering the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many of the Latin American states were states mainly in name. If only because the various caudillos sought to reinforce their position by means of elections, almost all had gone through periods, albeit usually ones that were very brief, of constitutional government; Ecuador, for example, by 1895 had been blessed with no fewer than eleven constitutions. All had some kind of government bureaucracies, albeit ones that were very undeveloped and, owing to the extremely low salaries which were received by the em­ployees, wide open to corruption. Each one also had its national currency, though all tended to be highly inflationary and none was ever able to develop into a recognized international means of exchange. Amply pro­vided with national flags, anthems, postage stamps, and similar parapher­nalia, they claimed to be sovereign in their external relationships; but even that claim was made somewhat doubtful by episodes that led to the creation of Panama out of Colombia’s rib in 1903. They maintained a diplomatic apparatus, often one whose external splendor stood in inverse proportion to economic conditions at home. Several of them also sent representatives to the various international conferences that took place from 1864 on.

Another feature of the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the beginning of large-scale immigration into what had hitherto been a re­markably underpopulated continent. Previously, several Latin American governments had tried to attract immigrants; but the persistence of civil wars and the greater attractiveness of other regions, primarily the United States, made this impossible. Now, the largest numbers of immi­grants came from Italy, Spain, and Portugal (most of the latter went to Brazil); but there were also numerous other groups including Irish, Germans, Chinese, and Japanese. Depending on the makeup of their original populations and on the number whom they absorbed, some countries became virtually white, as Argentina and Uruguay did. Others, such as Mexico and Brazil, turned into truly multiracial socie­ties, whereas others still (particularly in the northeastern part of the continent) found that the entry of additional groups caused the distinc­tions between whites and Amerindians to become blurred and the regi­men de castas to break down. Moreover, though immigration benefited agriculture - in Argentina alone the number of square miles under the plow increased from 3,730 in 1865 to 95,000 in 1915 - most of the newcomers came to live in cities. There they took on urban occupations in trade, industry, and services, thus forming the nucleus of a true proletariat. In the larger countries at any rate, the rise of mass societies finally put an end to the rule of the unstable, family-based coteries. Instead it gave rise to something like modern political parties, whether conservative or liberal, centralist or federalist, socialist, or even com­munist in outlook.

In the most important countries these factors, along with a degree of industrialization that began in the 1920s, brought the old tradition of caudillismo to an end. However romantic they may have been, Emilio Zapata and Pancho Villa - both of them rising from extremely humble rural backgrounds - had no successors. Their role in staging coups was soon filled by the various national armies. Not that those armies had been politically inactive during the previous century, but at that time they had often amounted to undisciplined rabbles hardly different from those raised, privately, by the various caudillos. While that situation has persis­ted in some of the smaller countries - notably those of Central America and the Caribbean - the armies which, starting with the 1930 coup in Argentina, began to play a dominant role in the life of some of the major ones were a different matter. Between 1890 and 1910 several of them were kicked into shape by foreign experts, whether German (who left their mark in the form of the goose-step and a predilection for Wagnerian music), French, or American. As of the last years before World War I all came to be based on conscription, though in practice it applied only to the lower classes whereas the rest either bought substitutes or, later, fled into the universities. Commanded by lifelong professionals, bureaucratically managed, and disciplined, after 1930 or so they often developed fascist and even nazi sympathies. Looking around, they saw civilian institutions as weak and corrupt, and themselves as the true embodiments of the state, the only organizations capable of rising above the narrow interests of faction and class.⁷⁵

Disciplined or not, the long tradition of civil wars and coups meant that a key characteristic of the modern state - a clear separation between the forces responsible for waging external war and those charged with main­taining internal order - did not emerge. Busy as they were with the latter, the armies in question never became very good at the former. There was a time, toward the end of the nineteenth century, when the Chilean armed forces in particular seemed about to develop into a modern military organization; but in the face of opponents such as Peru and Bolivia there was little incentive for keeping them so even if the economic situation (governed by the collapse of guano prices after the outbreak of World War I when a method for capturing nitrogen from the air was discovered) had permitted it. Compared to other continents, military expenditure in Latin America had never been particularly high, usually amounting to no more than 3 or 4 percent of GNP. On a per capita basis it had even been

75 conspicuously low, e.g., $58 in Argentina, $40 in Brazil, $61 in Chile, and $11 in Mexico (figures for 1990-2).^[351] However, the money that they do get they tend to spend less on modern arms than on instruments of internal control, including also extensive perks for the personnel in ques­tion. Outsiders have often been bemused by Latin American generals with their splendid uniforms and bemedaled chests - in a continent that, since the Chaco War of the 1930s, has been virtually free of interstate armed conflict, one wonders where they could have been earned. To their own people the armies in question took on a much more serious, not to say menacing aspect: true juggernauts whose power vis-à-vis their civilian society is mitigated primarily by the tendency of many of them toward corruption.

For the development of Latin American armed forces during this period, see J. J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1976), chs. 3 and 4.

The years since 1940 have, in fact, witnessed any number of military coups which were naturally followed by military regimes. To adduce but a few examples, Argentina was under military government from 1943 to 1946 (when a colonel, Juan Peron, became president) and again in 1955-8, 1970-3, and 1976-83. Bolivia was under military rule in 1936-9 and 1943-6, whereas the period from 1964 to 1982 saw a whole series of military regimes. Brazil suffered a military coup in 1945 and another one in 1954; then came a period of military government that lasted from 1963 until 1978. Chile was under military rule from 1973 to 1990, Colombia from 1953 to 1957, Costa Rica in 1947 (after which the army was formally abolished) - and this list does not even exhaust the first three letters of the alphabet. In them and elsewhere both the periods of military rule and the intervals between them have often been marked by outbreaks of violence, some of which cost the lives of tens of thousands. Much of the time the military saw itself as the only institution capable of creating order out of the chaos left by corrupt, self-seeking politicians. Usually their intervention was meant to oppose a drift toward socialism or even com­munism - notoriously so in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile where, against the background of the Cold War, they received American backing in the form of advisers, funds, weapons, training, and sometimes much more. However, there were also cases when the army took power in the name of a left-wing social and economic program, as in Peru between 1968 and 1975.^[352]

In minor republics such as Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, and Colombia, the military takeovers were often merely the instrument for advancing the interests of a few senior - sometimes even not so senior - officers and their families. In the major ones the slogan under which the new rulers operated was usually modernization. Taking Brazil as our example, they sought to achieve economic stability, create the conditions for growth (as an alternative to revolution from below), and improve the infrastructure - including also educational and medical facilities for which purpose they often made use of their own, uniformed personnel. Above all else, they sought to end the traditional ‘‘coffee economy” by encouraging industrialization. Taking a strongly interventionist ap­proach, they poured money into energy, transportation, and state-owned plants for import substitution, protecting them by tariff walls. They also tried to attract foreign capital by providing benefits such as tax breaks and the free withdrawal of hard currency; and they did their best to discipline the labor force by emasculating trade unions, prohibiting strikes, im­posing wage controls, and the like.⁷⁸

Often these measures worked for a while, bringing down inflation and creating the illusion of prosperity and progress - in Brazil, for example, economic growth between 1964 and 1968 was among the highest in the world. However, sooner or later a recession would occur owing to a drop in the value of exports, the tendency of the new state-sponsored industries to become entangled in their own bureaucracies, or both. Against a background of declining real wages, the ruling clique found themselves confronted by left-wing labor organizations. Suppressing the latter's open activities merely drove them underground, leading to acts of terrorism and sabotage. When the opposition was joined by the sons and daughters of the middle classes, often university students who were disturbed by the persecution and torture as well as the lack of political freedom, the game was up. As their own military supporters split between hardliners and those who favored greater freedom, the generals would give way, hold elections, and return to the barracks. Often, however, they did not go without dictating terms to their successors. This included an amnesty for the torturers, hardly any of whom were ever put on trial, as well as their own continuing right to act as the self-appointed watchdogs of the con­stitution, ready to step in again if they deemed it appropriate. Sometimes the military has formed a state within a state: so, for example, in Chile where they have their own delegates in parliament as well as dedicated sources of revenue (deriving from the export of copper) that are outside government control.

As the 1980s changed into the 1990s, the threat of communism re­ceded - indeed Chile's military proudly proclaimed that it was in their country, and thanks to them, that the red tide first began to turn. Almost

78

SeeT. E. Skidmore, The Politics of Military Rule in Brazil (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), for an analysis of the period in question. all countries returned to civilian government, while the enfranchisement of the poor and the illiterate, as well as women, created vastly larger electorates. These changes made some observers feel that armies were going the way of the caudillos and that the period of coups, revolutions, and military rule in the continent was finally coming to an end.⁷⁹ Even assuming this to be true, many Latin American states were confronted with a new problem. During the first century or so after independence it had been the rural areas, remote and often isolated owing to poor com­munications, that escaped the control of the state - which incidentally explains why, from Zapata down, they served as the starting point for so many caudillos. As of the last quarter of the twentieth century some governments still have difficulty controlling the countryside - one need only think of the civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the Sendoso Luminoso in Peru, and the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico. How­ever, another and often more serious problem has risen in the form of their inability to run the cities including, often, their own capitals.

The root of the problem is to be found in population growth. Since the end of World War II it has often been running at 2.5 to 3 percent a year; pushing millions of people out of the countryside and into the towns. Between the 1960s, when it was still possible to speak of the ‘‘urban-rural imbalance” as the root cause of all problems,⁸⁰ and 1990, many countries have seen the percentage of their people who live on the land and live by agriculture drop by some 60 percent. The winners, if that is the word, were the larger cities which witnessed phenomenal growth. The Federal District of Buenos Aires had 3,400,0000 inhabitants in 1950 and over 9,000,000 in 1992 (out of a total population of 33,000,000). For Caracas the figures are 700,000 and 2,000,000; for Lima 950,000 and 6,000,000; for Rio de Janeiro 3,000,000 and 5,000,000; for Santiago 1,280,000 and 5,300,000; and for Mexico City 2,800,000 and a whopping 16,000,000.⁸¹ The centers of these and other cities - Latin America now has twenty-one urban concentrations with over a million people each, up from six in 1950 - often present the visitor with stunning displays of ultramodern architecture and all that is most advanced in contemporary Western civilization, including some of the world's heaviest concentra­tions of smog. However, they are surrounded by areas which, in develop­ed countries, would not be recognized as cities at all: without paved streets, running water, sewers, illumination, or public buildings, merely

⁷⁹ For some optimistic views on the future of Latin America, see L. Diamond, et al., eds., Democracy in Developing Countries: LatinAmerica, vol. IV (Boulder: Rienner, 1989); and O. Gonzalez Casanova, LatinAmerica Today (Tokyo: United Nations University, 1993).

⁸⁰ J. M. Schmitt and D. D. Burks, Evolution or Chaos: Dynamics of Latin American Government and Politics (New York: Praeger, 1963), pp. 95ff.

⁸¹ Figures from Encyclopaedia Britannica (London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1956); and the Britannica Book of the Year, 1993.

endless shanties grouped in slums variously known as favelas, callamoas, barrios, chiampas, or - in Argentina - villas miseria.

The populations of these slums are, of course, poorer than poor. Often their extreme want excludes them from the state-run education system; in spite of massive investments in education during the last few decades, the absolute number of illiterates in most Latin American countries is con­stant or growing.⁸² The physical distance between barrios and the modern parts of the cities in question is often measured in hundreds of yards. The political distance is measured in centuries because, as far as the formers' inhabitants are concerned, president, cabinet, parliament, and even the bureaucracy might as well be on Mars. Here and there a clinic or a club for the elderly may be in operation, its dedicated personnel doing what they can to alleviate some of the worst misery. That apart, the only representatives of the state whom the slum residents are at all likely to encounter are the police. Often the latter are reinforced by military or paramilitary organizations as things become particularly bad and the inhabitants of more affluent neighboring areas demand action.

In brief, just as Latin American states seem to be approaching some kind of political stability at the top, most of them also appear to have failed in their attempt to integrate the poorer quarters of their cities as European ones did during the nineteenth century.⁸³ On the contrary, given the still continuing pressure of population the situation in many places may be worse than it was twenty or thirty years ago, with ‘‘stark poverty and the income distribution problem... measuring the failure of the post-war development process.''⁸⁴ Like the underclasses of eight­eenth-century Europe, the residents of the barrios are too poor and inarticulate to pose a political threat in the ordinary sense of that term. If they live outside the law, this lawlessness is directed primarily against each other; hence it is rarely even registered by the police who, in any case, are perceived as the enemy. In most cases the absence of leadership and organization means that the occasional riot which does take place is not translated into an uprising, let alone revolution; usually it fizzles out with a few dead but without the need for large-scale repression. On the other hand, the slums represent a place of refuge from the state, as well as an inexhaustible reservoir from which individuals and organizations oper­ating outside the law can draw their followers.

Relying on the gun - in most Latin American countries weapons are

⁸² Calculated from B. Klein and M. Wasserman, A History of Latin America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), appendix, tables 1 and 3.

⁸³ See M. Edel and R. E. Hullman, eds., Cities in Crisis: The Urban Challenge in the Americas (New York: University of New York Press, 1989).

⁸⁴ Quote from the concluding section of E. Cardoso and A. Fishlow, ‘‘Latin American Economic Development, 1950-1980,” Journal of Latin American Studies, 24, 1992, supplement, pp. 197-219. easily available - these organizations and these individuals often create enclaves inside which their power is absolute or nearly so. Nor is it merely a question of the slums remaining outside the state's control; using a combination of threats and the economic benefits that drugs in particular can yield, strongmen emerge from the underworld to influence local and even national politics. Often they are able to corrupt the police, the armed forces, the bureaucracy, and the legislatures; nor are all heads of state necessarily out of their reach. Perhaps it is here that the state's greatest failure may be found. From Mexico down to the smaller republics, in many cases it is hard to say whom the members of its organs are really working for, which vice versa is one cardinal reason why the drug problem cannot be brought under control. All this is fed by, and comes on top of, the vast socioeconomic inequalities which, though perhaps no longer as firmly rooted in race as they used to be, still cause much of the population to live in what it pleases their governments to call ‘‘absolute poverty.''^[353] Enfranchised or not, they feel themselves excluded from any meaningful form of political participation; and indeed often the state's most impor­tant presence takes the form of brutalities inflicted by the police or the military as they raid the slum-dwellers' miserable quarters while sear­ching for drugs, rebels, or - since the latter not seldom finance their operations by trading in the former - both.

In marked contrast to the situation in the United States and the British Dominions, the construction of states in Latin America has succeeded only up to a point. With few exceptions, most have been able neither to put all of their people under the rule of law, nor establish firm civilian control over the military and the police,^[354] nor discover a durable balance between order and freedom; externally the invasions suffered by Granada in 1983, Panama in 1989, and Haiti in 1993 (to say nothing of the role played by the CIA in Chile as recently as 1973) are but the latest in a long series of reminders that the sovereignty of the smaller ones at any rate is conditional and depends on the goodwill of Big Brother. The history of many has amply confirmed the judgment of their founder, Simon Bolivar:

I agree with you [Gran Columbian foreign minister Estanislao Vergara] that the American continent is attracting attention by its scandalous behavior... order, security, life and everything else are constantly moving farther and farther away from our continent, which is fated to destroy itself.^[355]