Why
does Latin America
so lag behind North America?
By
Jonathan
Power
April 23rd, 2004
LONDON - From the headland here,
the most easterly point of the Americas, where Brazil
juts out towards Africa- the locals tease visitors that
on a clear day you can see Nigeria- one question looms
before all others. Why did this bounteous continent to
the south do so much less well than its counterpart to
the north?
North America was settled by
pilgrims, idealists, political and religious refugees.
They wanted to create a New World and early on democracy
became the chosen instrument. It was flawed, of course.
It did not protect the Indians and it didn't encompass
the slaves, but it laid the basis for economic advance
first and social and political reform later.
The Brazilian historian Sergio
Buarque de Holanda wrote that the English pioneers went
to North America to build a paradise whereas the
Portuguese went to Brazil to enjoy a ready made paradise.
The Spanish and Portuguese
conquistadores were not fleeing persecution. They were
adventurers and mercenaries. They lived under the
Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation. They mostly did
not question it, and authoritarianism and feudalism were
second nature. They were not interested in development
and society. They were there to conquer and pillage, to
extract the mineral and agricultural wealth as fast as
they could and ship it home. "The bloody trail of the
conquest", as the continent's earliest foreign
correspondent, the fifteenth century friar,
Bartolomé de Las Casas, put it. Particularly in
Brazil and Paraguay the Jesuits fought a rearguard battle
to protect the Indians from the depredations of their
countrymen, but in the end to little effect.
The high Indian civilizations, the
Incas and the Aztecs (the Mayans were already in decline
for other, still disputed, reasons) were destroyed
mercilessly. To read Prescott's great accounts of the
advance of empire is to understand brutal ignorance at
its worst. No wonder that modern day Peru and Bolivia are
so race ridden, corrupt and feudal, with the Indians of
the Andes treated more badly than the blacks in South
Africa ever were. No wonder that the Indians of Brazil's
Amazon have been treated for centuries as less than
chattels.
Only three countries, which lacked
mineral wealth and a large Indian population, managed to
escape the worst. Chile was one, protected by desert in
the north, the high ridge of the Andes to the east and
Antarctica to the south. Farmers were settled and, bereft
of Indian workers, run on their own by individual
families. Trade was mainly with England, not Spain and
democracy arrived 170 years ago only to be usurped in
1973 with U.S. connivance (for a relatively short period)
by a brutal dictatorship led by General Augusto
Pinochet.
Costa Rica, too, was poor and had a
small Indian population and was far away from Guatemala,
the Spanish Central American capital. Farmers could not
grow rich on the backs of the Indians. There was no
powerful elite. Today Costa Rica is one of the most
stable, least militaristic, long-lasting democracies in
the world. Third, there was Uruguay, which has long
pioneered a benign distribution of income.
Not only was political and
educational evolution suffocated at birth for the best
part of four centuries in most of Latin America so was
economic development. The Counter-Reformation state
banned and restricted enterprise in the private sector.
It licensed chosen entrepreneurs to develop state
monopolies. It favored mercantilism. Individual
inventiveness and endeavor were stifled. Brazil didn't
build its first university until 1922.
Here were two continents,
side-by-side, equally endowed by God and nature. One
prospered whether in its U.S. or Canadian variants. The
other, including Mexico, crawled from one upheaval to
another. Only in the last sixty or seventy years did
Latin America step by difficult step start to engage the
engine of individual initiative and economic growth. Not
too far behind followed democracy.
Now in a few parts of Latin
America, especially here in Brazil, which makes up half
of this continent, one senses that the moment to surge
ahead is at last at hand. Importantly for Brazil a
radical but sophisticated Catholic church, organizing
from the late 1970s on, hand in glove with the unusually
perspicacious workers' movement of the recently elected
president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
has been instrumental in creating a mood not only
receptive to democracy, land re-distribution and human
rights, but also to capitalistic advance. Brazil, with an
economy already the size of Canada's, is likely to be the
first Latin American country, along with Chile, to
emulate the northern continent.
But it is still too early to say if
Lula, and the many who say they want to walk behind him
elsewhere in Latin America, will be able ensure for the
future a more selfless spirit in human nature that
convinces these still relatively archaic societies that
the Indians, the blacks, the poor and the underprivileged
are owed a debt with half a millennium's worth of
accumulated interest.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
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written for the
40th Anniversary of
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"Like
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