History of Latin America

In urban settings the most important social development in the short run was the steady expansion of middling white-collar and professional groups. The extent to which these can be termed a “middle class” is open to question, for, while “middle” by the economic indicators of property and income, they were often ambivalent about their place in society—uncertain whether to embrace the work and savings ethic conventionally associated with the middle class of the Western world (or, later, of East Asia) or to try to emulate traditional elites. The middle sectors were, in any case, the chief beneficiaries of the expansion of educational facilities, which they strongly supported and used as means of upward mobility. Urban workers, for their part, had access to primary education but rarely secondary; at least they were now mainly literate, whereas most rural Latin Americans still were not.

Lack of formal education had long reinforced the relative isolation of the peasantry from political currents at their nations’ centres, not to mention from new fads and notions from abroad. Yet, starting in the 1920s, the rapid spread of the new medium of radio throughout Latin America exposed even illiterate people to an emerging mass culture. Additions to transportation infrastructure also contributed to greater integration of isolated population clusters. The most essential rail lines had already taken shape by 1910, but the coming of automotive transport led to a major upgrading and extension of highways, and the airplane introduced an entirely new mode of transportation. One of the oldest airlines in the world is Colombia’s Avianca, whose founding (under a different name) in 1919 was of particular importance for a country where railroad and highway building had lagged because of difficult topography. Air travel similarly played a key role in knitting together far-flung sections of Brazil previously connected by coastal steamer. Transport improvements of all kinds favoured the creation not only of national markets but of shared national cultures, in the latter respect reinforcing the effects of popular education and radio. Challenges to the political order

The economic and social changes taking place in Latin America inevitably triggered demands for political change as well; political change in turn affected the course of socioeconomic development. As the 20th century opened, the most prevalent regime types were military dictatorship—exemplified by that of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and after 1908 Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela—and civilian oligarchy—as in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia. Even in Díaz’s Mexico the constitution was not entirely meaningless, while civilian governments commonly used some combination of electoral manipulation and restricted suffrage to keep control in the hands of a small minority of political leaders allied with landed and commercial elites. Neither dictatorial nor oligarchic regimes gave due representation to the majority of inhabitants.

Porfirio Díaz.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The Mexican Revolution

The immediate challenge to existing regimes in country after country usually came from disaffected members of the traditional ruling groups and from the expanding middle sectors resentful of their exclusion from a fair share of power and privilege. This was evident at the outset of Latin America’s bloodiest 20th-century civil conflict, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when a dissident member of the large landowning class, Francisco Madero, challenged Díaz for reelection, lost, and rose in rebellion, promising to bring genuine political democracy to Mexico. The dictatorship, decaying from within, collapsed, but it was many years before the country settled down, since Madero’s uprising unleashed forces that neither he nor anyone else could control. Miners, urban workers, and peasants saw an opportunity to seek redress of their own grievances, while rival revolutionaries bitterly fought against each other. The end result was a system built around an all-powerful political party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), as it ultimately called itself—that skillfully co-opted labour and peasant organizations. More benefits accrued to labour leaders than to the rank and file, and implementation of the land reform proclaimed by the new constitution of 1917 was mostly halfhearted until the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). But it superficially appeared that almost everybody received something, and after Cárdenas Mexico became a model of political stability in Latin America. Broadening of political participation

The Mexican Revolution evoked widespread admiration elsewhere in Latin America, especially for its commitment to socioeconomic reform, but the Mexican political system had few imitators. In the Southern Cone, a common pattern was the broadening of participation within a more conventional democratic system where at least the middle sectors gained a meaningful share of power and benefits. This happened in Argentina following an electoral reform of 1912 that made universal male suffrage effective for the first time and paved the way for the Radical Civic Union party, with strong middle-class support, to take power four years later. In Chile a reformist coalition won the election of 1920, but strife between president and parliament brought a relapse into instability and short-lived military dictatorship. By the time Chile returned to stable political life in 1932, it had been equipped with a new constitution that was less susceptible to oligarchic obstructionism and an apparatus of social legislation that benefited both the middle class and urban workers, though it largely ignored the peasantry. However, Uruguay outstripped all others both in political democratization and as a pioneer welfare state, with minimum-wage legislation, an advanced social security system, and much else, even before 1930.

Elsewhere the record was mixed. Costa Rica came close to approximating the pattern of the Southern Cone, and in Colombia the Liberal Party, after its return to power in 1930, went partway toward incorporating labour as an actor on the national scene. Ecuador in 1929 became the first Latin American nation to adopt woman suffrage, though it still required literacy to vote (and far fewer women than men could read). Within four years Brazil, Uruguay, and Cuba—of which only the first retained a similar literacy test—had followed suit. But in Peru a president who flirted too far with social and political reform at the time of World War I was ousted by military coup. In the following decade the banner of reformism in Peru was taken up by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, founder of the Aprista party and heavily influenced by the example of the Mexican Revolution. The Apristas’ program combined economic nationalism with Latin American solidarity and called for incorporation of the Indians into the mainstream of national life, but the party never gained control of government until the 1980s, by which time it had lost much of its original character. In Venezuela, thanks to oil revenue and effective use of the military, Juan Vicente Gómez stayed firmly in control as dictator until his final illness in 1935; and in Brazil the oligarchic regime of the so-called Old Republic held on until the economic crisis of the Great Depression through careful sharing of power among political factions of the largest states. Expanding role of the state

The world depression—which saw governments changed by irregular means in every Latin American country except Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Honduras—temporarily ended the progress being made toward political democracy. Even where constitutional rule was not interrupted, chief executives felt the need (as also in the United States) to take emergency measures, and the enlargement of government functions in dealing with the economy outlasted the emergency itself. At the same time, leaders everywhere were coming to the conclusion that social ills must be ameliorated, if only to ward off revolutionary threats from below. Various countries (such as Colombia in 1936 and Cuba in 1940) adopted constitutional reforms incorporating the principle already enshrined in Mexico’s constitution of 1917, of expressly subordinating property rights to social need.

Brazil had actually pioneered large-scale state intervention in the economy with its coffee “valorization” program, which was finally abandoned during the depression as too expensive; but between 1930 and 1945, under President Getúlio Vargas, the national government for the first time actively sponsored social legislation, encouraged labour unions while tying them closely to the state, and began construction of a major iron and steel complex under state auspices. Vargas was an authoritarian ruler but a constructive one. Nor was he the only military or civilian strongman who moved to expand the functions of the state both to take the edge off worker discontent and, if possible, to strengthen the national economy against new emergencies. A paradoxical but instructive example was Cuba’s notoriously corrupt Fulgencio Batista, who in 1933 staged a military coup to overthrow a government of the reformist Authentic Party, then preserved most of its social and labour reforms and added some more. After sponsoring the liberal Cuban constitution of 1940, he managed to become a democratically elected president. Socialism, communism, fascism

Latin America in the first half of the 20th century was feeling the impact of outside events not only on its economy but also politically, by the spread of imported ideologies and through the examples both of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the United States and of emerging totalitarianisms of the left and right in Europe. The European anarcho-syndicalism that had provided a model for many of Latin America’s earliest radical cadres declined sharply in importance after World War I. Henceforth, the left consisted of socialist parties of generally moderate bent, inspired in large part by European social democracy; breakaway socialists who admired the Russian Revolution of 1917 and proceeded to found communist parties in their own countries; and, not least, such strictly Latin American expressions as the Mexican agrarian reform movement. Socialist parties were strongest in the Southern Cone, the Chilean briefly gaining a share of national power as a member of a Popular Front government elected in 1938. The communists were also strong in Chile but first entered a national administration in Cuba, after Batista had been elected president with their support in 1940. Once the Soviet Union entered World War II in 1941, communist parties in several other countries, including Brazil and Nicaragua, formed alliances with local strongmen, but they nowhere became a true mass party, and an exaggerated fear of Bolshevism on the part of Latin American elites meant that the communist parties were subject to widespread repression except during the war itself.

Some other political organizations were frankly influenced by European fascism, but in most countries their membership was numerically insignificant. The chief exception was Brazil, whose green-shirted Integralistas (Ação Integralista Brasileira) emerged as the largest single national party in the mid-1930s until involvement in a foolhardy coup attempt led to their suppression. Hence the influence of fascism was more often exercised through homegrown authoritarians who were attracted to certain aspects of it but carefully avoided any open embrace. Vargas was one such leader, who, after suppressing the Integralistas, put the finishing touches on his own dictatorial regime, officially dubbed Estado Novo or “New State.” Good Neighbor Policy and World War II

One reason Latin American nations avoided an overly close association with fascism was a desire not to offend the dominant power of the hemisphere, the United States. During the 1920s it had already begun a retreat from the policy of active intervention in Latin America. This policy, adopted in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War and the United States’ open support of Panamanian secession from Colombia, had featured the creation of formal and informal protectorates over many Caribbean and Central American states. Franklin D. Roosevelt completed the shift. His domestic policies were much admired in Latin America and in some cases copied by moderate reformists, but his Good Neighbor Policy won the warm approval of almost all Latin American rulers, since it entailed formal renunciation of the right of intervention in favour of peaceful cajoling and assorted economic, military, and technical aid programs. These programs were launched on the eve of World War II to help hemispheric neighbours prepare for the emergency. They were expanded after the start of the conflict, whose economic impact on Latin America was generally comparable to that of World War I but more intense because of the earlier and deeper involvement of the United States. The war emergency naturally gave still further impetus to the development of national industries to replace scarce imports.

The Good Neighbor approach proved far more effective in promoting U.S. hegemony than the occasional dispatch of gunboats. In 1938 Roosevelt calmly accepted Mexico’s expropriation of the petroleum installations of U.S. and British companies, and he was rewarded several times over when Mexico loyally cooperated with the United States in World War II, even sending an air force squadron to serve in the Philippines. The one other Latin American country to send forces overseas was Brazil, which put an expeditionary force in Italy. In general Latin America’s wartime collaboration left little to be desired. In the end all countries not only broke relations with the Axis powers but declared war, though Argentina took the latter step only at the last possible moment, in March 1945. Latin America since the mid-20th century The postwar world, 1945–80

In Latin America as elsewhere, the close of World War II was accompanied by expectations, only partly fulfilled, of steady economic development and democratic consolidation. Economies grew, but at a slower rate than in most of Europe or East Asia, so that Latin America’s relative share of world production and trade declined and the gap in personal income per capita separating it from the leading industrial democracies increased. Popular education also increased, as did exposure to the mass media and mass culture—which in light of the economic lag served to feed dissatisfaction. Military dictatorships and Marxist revolution were among the solutions put forward, but none were truly successful. Economic agenda and patterns of growth

The economic shocks delivered by the depression and two world wars, in combination with the strength of nationalism, tilted economic policy after 1945 strongly toward internal development as against the outward orientation that had predominated since independence. The outward policy had been partially undermined by the trade controls and industrial promotion schemes adopted essentially as defensive measures in the aftermath of the depression and during World War II. Now, however, a reorientation of policy was explicitly called for by some of Latin America’s most influential figures, such as the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America. Prebisch and his followers insisted that the terms of trade and investment in the contemporary world were stacked in favour of the developed industrial nations of the “centre” as against the developing nations of the “periphery.” Their strategy therefore included emphasis on economic diversification and import substitution industrialization (ISI) for the sake of greater economic autonomy. They called for economic integration among the Latin American countries themselves, with a view to attaining economies of scale. And they recommended internal structural reforms to improve the economic performance of their countries, including land reform both to eliminate underutilized latifundios and to lessen the stark inequality of income distribution that was an obstacle to growth of the domestic market.

In the small Caribbean and Central American republics and also some of the smaller and poorer South American nations, the prospects for ISI were sorely limited by market size and other constraints, and governments still hesitated to promote manufacturing at the expense of traditional primary commodities. But in countries accounting for a disproportionate share of Latin America’s population and gross domestic product (GDP), the new approach received full play through protective tariffs, subsidies, and official preferences. Overvalued exchange rates, which hurt traditional exports, made it easier to import industrial machinery and equipment. Manufacturing costs generally remained high, and factories were overly dependent on imported inputs of all kinds (including foreign capital), but advances were not limited to consumer goods production. In all major countries the output of intermediate and capital goods rose appreciably too. For example, in Argentina the state undertook construction of a steel industry, and in numerous other ways national governments further expanded their economic role. Brazil nationalized its incipient oil industry in 1953, creating the state firm Petrobrás that eventually ranked alongside Mexico’s PEMEX (outcome of the 1938 oil expropriation) and Venezuela’s PETROVEN (1975) as one of Latin America’s three largest economic enterprises, all state-run.

Starting in 1960 with agreements fostering economic union, such as the Latin American Free Trade Association and Central American Common Market, and continuing with the Andean Pact of 1969, some progress was made toward regional economic integration, but the commitment to eliminate trade barriers was not as strong as in postwar Europe. Intra-Latin American trade increased, but probably not much more than would have happened without special agreements. In any case, quantitative economic growth was visible almost everywhere. It was evident even when expressed as per capita GDP—that is, factoring in a population growth that in most countries was accelerating, because death rates had finally begun to fall sharply while birth rates remained high. (In the 1960s in much of Latin America the annual rate of population increase came to exceed 3 percent.) But there were clear differences in economic performance among countries. Brazil, with a diversified economic base and much the largest internal market, and Panama, with its canal-based service economy, posted the best records, their GDP per capita doubling between 1950 and 1970; Mexico and Venezuela did almost as well, as did Costa Rica. But the Argentine economy seemed to stagnate, and few countries scored significant gains. Moreover, the conviction eventually grew in countries where ISI had been vigorously pushed that the easy gains in replacement of imports were coming to an end and that, to maintain adequate growth, it would be necessary to renew emphasis on exports as well. World market conditions were favourable for a revival of export promotion; indeed, international trade had begun a rapid expansion at the very time that inward-directed growth was gaining converts in Latin America.

The promotion of industrial exports was slow to appear. Brazil was the most successful, selling automobiles and automotive parts mainly to other less-developed countries but at times even to the industrial world. A slightly less satisfactory alternative was the setting up of plants to assemble imported parts or semifinished materials into consumer goods that were immediately exported, thus taking advantage of Latin America’s low labour costs, particularly for women workers. Such plants proliferated along Mexico’s northern border (where they were known as maquiladoras) but sprang up also in Central America and around the Caribbean.

In other instances Latin Americans tried to develop new, nontraditional primary commodity exports. Colombian cut flowers were a highly successful example, promoted from the late 1960s through special incentives such as tax rebates; Colombia became the world’s second leading flower exporter. It also assumed a leading role in the illicit narcotics trade. It enjoyed a brief boom of marijuana exports in the 1970s and in the following decade became the world’s leading supplier of cocaine, which was processed in clandestine Colombian laboratories from leaf paste that at first came mostly from Bolivia and Peru, though eventually Colombia displaced them as producers of the raw material. Developments in social policy

Continued advances in public health were the principal basis for the explosion of population growth, which in turn made more difficult the provision of other social services. Nevertheless, educational coverage continued to expand, and state schools increased their share of students at the expense of private (often church-affiliated) institutions. Social security systems were introduced in countries that previously had none and expanded where they already existed. Yet such benefits chiefly went to organized urban workers and members of the middle sectors so that the net effect was often to increase, rather than lessen, social inequality.

Moreover, structural land reform received more lip service than actual implementation. Extensive land distribution did occur in Bolivia following that country’s 1952 revolution, and in Cuba large private estates were eliminated after 1959; but Mexico, which had been the leader in this area, now tended to favour capitalist agribusinesses rather than peasant communities. The poor were also hurt by the high inflation that in the 1950s and after became endemic in Brazil and the Southern Cone and was intermittently a problem elsewhere, resulting in considerable part from an inability or unwillingness to generate by taxation the fiscal resources needed for economic and social development programs. The United States and Latin America in the Cold War era

Whatever policies Latin American countries adopted in the postwar era, they had to take into account the probable reaction of the United States, now more than ever the dominant power in the hemisphere. It was the principal trading partner and source of loans, grants, and private investment for almost all countries, and Latin American leaders considered its favour worth having. Policy makers in Washington, on their part, were unenthusiastic about ISI and state-owned enterprises, but, as long as North American investors were not hindered in their own activities, the inward-directed policy orientation did not pose major problems. Moreover, as the Cold War developed between the United States and the Soviet Union, the great majority of Latin American governments sided willingly with the former, even though they complained of being neglected by Washington’s preoccupation with the threat of communism in Europe and Asia.

A threat developed in Central America when the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz (1951–54), which frankly accepted the support of local communists, attacked the holdings of the United Fruit Company as part of an ambitious though ultimately abortive land reform. This combined political and economic challenge caused the United States to assist Guatemalan counterrevolutionaries and neighbouring Central American rulers in overthrowing Arbenz. The reversion to interventionist tactics featured use of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) rather than landing of military forces. But it foreshadowed later CIA assistance to the Chilean military in ousting their country’s Marxist president, Salvador Allende, in 1973, not to mention the U.S. vendetta against the Sandinista revolutionary government that took power in Nicaragua in 1979, only to be worn down by covert action and economic harassment to the point that it peacefully accepted defeat in a free election in 1990. Impact of the Cuban Revolution

By most social and economic indicators, Cuba by mid-century was among Latin America’s most highly developed countries. However, in the postwar period it was afflicted with lacklustre economic growth and a corrupt political dictatorship set up in 1952 by the same Batista who earlier had helped put his country on a seemingly democratic path. It was also a country whose long history of economic and other dependence on the United States had fed nationalist resentment, although control of the sugar industry and other economic sectors by U.S. interests was gradually declining. While conditions for revolutionary change were thus present, the particular direction that Cuba took owed much to the idiosyncratic genius of Fidel Castro, who, after ousting Batista at the beginning of 1959, proceeded by stages to turn the island into the hemisphere’s first communist state, in close alliance with the Soviet Union.

Fidel Castro, 1960.© Bettmann/Corbis

The Cuban Revolution achieved major advances in health and education, though frankly sacrificing economic efficiency to social objectives. Expropriation of most private enterprise together with Castro’s highly personalistic dictatorship drove many members of the middle and upper classes into exile, but a serious decline in productivity was offset for a time by Soviet subsidies. At the same time, thanks to its successful defiance of the United States—which tried and failed to overthrow it by backing a Cuban exiles’ invasion in April 1961—and its evident social advances, Castro’s Cuba was looked to as a model throughout Latin America, not only by established leftist parties but also by disaffected students and intellectuals of mainly middle-class origin.

Over the following years much of Latin America saw an upsurge of rural guerrilla conflict and urban terrorism, in response to the persistence of stark social inequality and political repression. But this upsurge drew additional inspiration from the Cuban example, and in many cases Cuba provided training and material support to guerrillas. The response of Latin American establishments was twofold and eagerly supported by the United States. On one hand, governments strengthened their armed forces, with U.S. military aid preferentially geared to counterguerrilla operations. On the other hand, emphasis was placed on land reform and other measures designed to eliminate the root causes of insurgency, all generously aided by the United States through the Alliance for Progress launched by President John F. Kennedy.

Even though much of the reactive social reformism was cosmetic or superficial, the counterrevolutionary thrust was nonetheless generally successful. A Marxist, Salvador Allende, became president of Chile in 1970, but he did so by democratic election, not violent revolution, and he was overthrown three years later. The only country that appeared to be following the Cuban pattern was Nicaragua under the Sandinista revolutionary government, which in the end could not withstand the onslaughts of its domestic and foreign foes. Moreover, the Cuban Revolution ultimately lost much of its lustre even in the eyes of the Latin American left, once the collapse of the Soviet Union caused Cuba to lose its chief foreign ally. Although the U.S. trade embargo imposed on Cuba had been a handicap all along, shortages of all kinds became acute only as Russian aid was cut back, clearly revealing the dysfunctional nature of Castro’s economic management. Political alternatives Movement toward democracy

The Latin American countries that did not opt for the Cuban model followed widely varying political paths. Mexico’s unique system of limited democracy built around the Institutional Revolutionary Party was shaken by a wave of riots in the summer of 1968 on the eve of the Olympic Games held in Mexico City, but political stability was never seriously in doubt. A somewhat analogous regime was devised in Colombia as a means of restoring civilian constitutional rule after a brief relapse in the mid-1950s into military dictatorship: the dominant Liberal and Conservative parties chose to bury the hatchet, creating a bipartisan coalition (called the National Front) whereby they shared power equally between themselves while formally shutting out any minor parties. Once this arrangement expired in 1974, Colombia became again a more conventional political democracy, such as Costa Rica had been since before 1950 and Venezuela became in 1958 after the overthrow of its last military dictator.

In Latin America generally, the practice of democracy was somewhat sporadic, but, wherever regular elections took place, they involved an enlarged electorate. The last Latin American countries adopted woman suffrage in the 1950s, and literacy test requirements continued to fall (as did illiteracy itself). Women also began to occupy high political office, including the presidency in Argentina (1974–76), Bolivia (1979–80), and Chile (2006–10). Moreover, Violeta Chamorro won the Nicaraguan vote of 1990 that put a temporary end to Sandinista rule (in 2006 the Sandinistas took power once again when former president Daniel Ortega was reelected). The advent of populism

The amorphous phenomenon of populism was another feature of the mid-20th-century political scene. Its consummate practitioner was Juan Perón of Argentina, who as a member of a military regime that seized power in 1943 took a special interest in social policy. Perón wooed Argentine labour by means of wage increases and bonuses, pensions and fringe benefits, while also exploiting widespread resentment of an oligarchy that in the 1930s had reasserted its political as well as economic dominance. He promised social justice without violent class struggle and national greatness on the basis of industrial and military strength. His message, delivered in popular language, won Perón a clearcut victory when he ran for president in 1946.

Perón was not the first Latin American leader to reward his followers with social benefits or to rail against native oligarchs and foreign imperialists, but he established a personal, charismatic link with ordinary citizens in a way that no one before him had done as successfully. “In the Argentina of Perón,” he boasted, “the only privileged ones are the children.” Yet Perón did not even pretend to be heading a revolution. As president, aided by his wife Evita until her death in 1952, he continued to cultivate mass support while signally neglecting to lay a sound basis for long-term economic growth. Perón nevertheless did not lack imitators and counterparts in other countries of Latin America.

The leading party of postdictatorial Venezuela, Democratic Action (Acción Democrática; AD), was basically reformist in orientation but with populist overtones. Rómulo Betancourt and other AD leaders were less personalistic in style than Perón, who was finally overthown in 1955, but like him they stood for the granting of lavish benefits to the working and middle classes within a general framework of capitalism. In Venezuela oil wealth ultimately encouraged the national government to squander resources without adequate regard for the future. A similar charge was leveled against Juscelino Kubitschek, who became president of Brazil (1956–61) through his skill at old-style machine politics. He was technically not a populist but had the same bent for extravagant promises and freewheeling expenditure. Kubitschek’s best-known achievement was the building of Brasília, the architecturally striking but fabulously expensive new capital city. Its construction aggravated inflationary woes but nicely epitomized his pledge to bring “fifty years’ progress in five.” Christian Democracy

A new feature since World War II was the appearance of a number of Christian Democratic parties, which offered a program of moderate reform inspired by Roman Catholic social teachings. Most were small splinter groups, but Christian Democrats eventually achieved power in Venezuela, El Salvador, and Chile. In Venezuela they alternated with the social democratic AD and in their policies became almost indistinguishable from it. In El Salvador in the 1980s they were enmeshed in a preexisting struggle against leftist guerrillas. In Chile, where they came to power first, under President Eduardo Frei (1964–70), they launched an ambitious land reform and partially nationalized the copper industry. They received enthusiastic support from the United States via the Alliance for Progress as presenting a promising alternative to Cuban-style revolution, but they failed to extend their mandate, going down to narrow defeat in a three-way contest won by Salvador Allende. Bureaucratic authoritarianism

Allende as president combined Marxist assault on the owners of the means of production with populist lavishing of short-term benefits on his working-class followers, and on both counts he stirred violent resentment among upper- and middle-class Chileans as well as attracting the adamant hostility of the United States. In September 1973 he was ousted in favour of General Augusto Pinochet, who proved the most successful exponent of a new style of military dictatorship defined by political scientists as bureaucratic authoritarianism. It was not, of course, a complete novelty. It reflected the 20th-century Latin America-wide phenomenon whereby the leadership of increasingly professionalized armies passed to sons of the middle class who had a commitment to modernizing the infrastructure of their societies. Such earlier dictatorships as that of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927–31) during another Chilean relapse from constitutional rule had shown marked developmentalist tendencies. Bureaucratic authoritarianism, however, as practiced in Brazil after the coup of 1964, in Argentina by officers dedicated to keeping the Peronistas from regaining power, or in Chile under Pinochet, was a response to the perceived mismanagement of the economy by populists and other demagogues. It rested on the conviction that no democratically elected regime could afford to take the harsh measures needed to curb inflation, reassure foreign and domestic investors, and thereby quicken economic growth to the point that untrammeled democracy could be safely practiced. While military men kept order with varying degrees of harshness and human rights violations, civilian economists and technocrats would direct most other policy—whence the term “bureaucratic authoritarianism.”

Under Pinochet, the guiding voice in Chilean economic matters was assigned to a group of economists, some of whom had been trained at the University of Chicago and who were strongly influenced by the monetarist school of Milton Friedman, according to which money supply and interest rates rather than governmental fiscal policy primarily determine the business cycle. Political authoritarianism stood in apparent contradiction to the generally free-market, laissez-faire policies prescribed in economic and social affairs; and, though inflation fell sharply, industrial production also dropped with the decline in the level of official protection. A similar combination of approaches arose under the military governments in Argentina in the 1960s and again from 1976 to 1983 and in Uruguay after 1973, again with mixed economic results. In Brazil from 1964 to 1985 military presidents and their technocratic advisers assigned a larger role in economic affairs to the state, while a Peruvian military regime that took power in 1968 undertook a radical program of social and economic reforms, giving way to a more typical bureaucratic-authoritarian regime only after running into serious economic difficulties. In these countries, political repression fell lightly on most of the population, but anyone suspected of engaging in—or simply encouraging—active resistance was liable to arrest, torture, and in extreme cases forced “disappearance”; this was a notable feature of the last Argentine military regime. Moreover, military rule of one sort or another did spread until by 1980 democratically elected civilian governments could be found only in Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and (by stretching the definition just a bit) Mexico. Latin America at the end of the 20th century

The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed a generalized economic crisis in Latin America, triggered in large part by external factors but aggravated by domestic mismanagement; in search of a way out, countries put their trust in neoliberal approaches favouring a free flow of trade and investment and reduction of the role of the state, all as recommended by the International Monetary Fund or other lending and advisory agencies. Even Castro’s Cuba hesitantly embarked on the neoliberal economic path—to the extent of inviting foreign investment and enlarging the scope of permitted private enterprise by Cubans—though Castro did not show equal enthusiasm for the parallel political tendency, which was a turn to democratic procedures. Debt crisis

The ingredient of economic crisis that attracted widest attention was Latin America’s inability to maintain full service on its foreign debt, which had grown to dangerously high levels. Both Mexico and Venezuela, as major petroleum exporters, benefited from rising international oil prices during the 1970s, but, instead of concluding that foreign credit was no longer necessary, they assumed that any amount of indebtedness would be easy to pay back. Brazil’s generals drew a similar conclusion from their country’s better-than-average economic growth. Even where no such circumstances were present, foreign private and institutional lenders had lost their depression-induced caution in lending to Latin America, and they had at their disposal an ever-greater flood of dollars to be placed in world financial markets. Bankers used often aggressive tactics in pressuring Latin American governments to borrow, and the region’s total foreign debt increased from 1970 to 1980 by more than 1,000 percent.

Developments in the world economy soon brought Latin America a rude awakening. Whereas commodity prices were generally favourable in the 1970s, a world recession in the following decade caused them to fall sharply. At the same time, interest rates rose in the United States and western Europe as governments sought to curb inflationary pressures and make other difficult adjustments. Latin America thus faced an increased debt bill, with fewer resources to pay it. Colombia alone managed to avoid default or compulsory rescheduling, and all countries faced severe fiscal problems. Domestic expenditures had to be cut back or financed through unsupported issues of paper money. Most of Latin America experienced slow or negative economic growth, together with inflation; indeed, hyperinflation was the rule in Argentina and Brazil and in some smaller countries. Real wages fell everywhere except Colombia and Chile. Return to democracy

Latin America’s democracies, and quasi-democratic Mexico, were politically less vulnerable to economic hard times than the dictatorships: their governments could be and were changed by regular electoral procedures, whereas dictatorial regimes that encountered similar problems had to be removed by other means. Armed force, however, was seldom necessary, and in Argentina change came from outside, in the form of Great Britain’s embarrassing defeat of the Argentine military government’s 1982 attempt to reoccupy the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands that Britain had seized a century and a half before. That fiasco completed the discrediting of the Argentine regime and forced it to reinstate elective civilian government sooner than intended. A return to overt U.S. intervention assisted in the 1989 overthrow of General Manuel Noriega in Panama, who had run afoul of the new U.S. obsession with curbing drug trafficking. The United States also helped remove the military regime of Haiti in 1994, where the institutions of civil society were particularly weak. Elsewhere, the force of domestic opinion—aided by foreign disapproval, internecine squabbling, and sheer discouragement on the part of ruling military officers—was usually enough to bring about a transition to democracy. Cuba’s Fidel Castro was the longest serving dictatorial ruler in Latin America, and today Cuba remains the only country in the region under dictatorship.

Even democratically elected presidents were sometimes high-handed in their style of ruling, and in three major countries—Peru, Argentina, and Brazil—they pushed through constitutional amendments to allow their immediate reelection, which would otherwise have been illegal. Significantly, in each case the incumbent’s success in taming inflation helped make it possible to win the additional term without recourse to force or fraud. (Peru’s Alberto Fujimori later obtained still another reelection but by slightly more-questionable tactics.) At the turn of the millennium, the most troubled country, politically, was Colombia, where a democratic regime had lost control over much of the national territory to illegal drug traffickers, leftist guerrillas, and counterguerrilla paramilitaries. The most important of the guerrilla organizations was the FARC, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, which enjoyed scant popular support but profited greatly from the sale of protection to drug producers and dealers. A shift to neoliberalism

One of the last countries to return to democracy was Chile, where the Pinochet dictatorship had been more successful than most in economic management. After first imposing harsh readjustments and committing its share of mistakes, it had launched the country on a steady course of economic growth that made it a much-admired model in Latin America and continued even after the dictator finally turned over the presidency (though not control of the armed forces) to an elected Christian Democrat in 1990. The Chilean model was based, in any event, on the application of neoliberal policies—reduction of trade barriers, privatization of state companies, encouragement of foreign as well as domestic private investment, and lessening of regulation generally—that to one degree or another were ultimately adopted by all countries, including (within limits) the surviving communist dictatorship of Cuba.

A clear example of the new approach to economic affairs was Mexico’s joining Canada and the United States in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994. Intra-Latin American free-trade arrangements moved forward too, with Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur, “Common Market of the South”)—which was organized in 1995 by Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay—easily the most important. Country after country sought private buyers for inefficient state-owned firms, and several countries, led by Chile, moved to privatize social security systems. There were nevertheless certain limits to neoliberal reforms: in Mexico and Venezuela, for example, state oil firms were exempt from the privatization process (though not in Argentina, a second-string oil producer). Neither did bureaucracies and government expenditures shrink very rapidly, if they shrank at all.

Results of the new economic policies were, not surprisingly, mixed. Latin America remained vulnerable to the vagaries of world markets, and the greater opening to international trade often led to a dangerous upsurge in nonessential imports. At the end of the 20th century, the region’s share of world exports hovered around 6 percent, less than half what it had been in 1950. In the final decade of the century, most countries experienced a resumption of modest economic growth after the disastrous 1980s, an often dramatic fall in inflation, and a strengthening of the private sector of the economy. Social changes, however, impacted different groups within each country. In the short term at least, efforts to become more competitive in capitalist markets contributed to record levels of formal unemployment in many countries and, at the same time, widespread subcontracting of operations to home workers, chiefly women, who laboured for subsistence income. In Mexico, for instance, the reorientation of economic policy aggravated the plight of Indian peasants in the southern state of Chiapas, who unleashed a renewal of guerrilla insurgency just as the country was entering NAFTA. Yet Latin America’s revitalized commitment to political democracy—which did not mean sudden elimination of all human rights abuses and other deficiencies any more than in the rest of the world—appeared to face few serious challenges. Religious trends

Roman Catholicism continued to be a powerful force in the second half of the 20th century. Its influence could be seen in the continuing prohibition, almost everywhere, of abortion and in the tendency to play down official support (which nevertheless existed) for birth control campaigns. Relations of the Roman Catholic Church with the state and with society at large were meanwhile affected, however, by new currents within the church itself. The movement of renewal and reform undertaken by the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) favoured mainstream Catholic teaching and practice at the expense of popular “folk Catholicism” yet led to a somewhat more tolerant approach toward other denominations. In addition, coinciding as it did with the impetus given to leftist movements by the Cuban Revolution, the call for renewal inspired an influential minority of priests and nuns to seek a synthesis of religious faith and political commitment under the banner of liberation theology. Some priests actually joined guerrilla bands, while others laboured to “raise the consciousness” of their flocks concerning social injustice. This brand of activism met with general disapproval from Latin American governments, especially military regimes, some of which brutally persecuted the clergy involved. It also divided the church, and without gaining the widespread popular allegiance that “liberationist” clergy had hoped for.

In the late 20th century the principal religious development was a rapid expansion of Protestantism, especially the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches. With a primary emphasis on individual spiritual improvement and salvation and a closeness between ministers and laity that neither traditional nor renewed Catholicism could match, the Protestants rapidly increased their numbers throughout Latin America. In countries as diverse as Brazil and Guatemala there were by the end of the century more Protestants than actively churchgoing Roman Catholics. Protestantism was not strong among traditional elites or in intellectual circles, but its adherents were beginning to attain positions of influence. One of them, General Efraín Ríos Montt, briefly served as military dictator of Guatemala (1982–83). A changing society

Despite the expansion (sometimes impressive, sometimes not) of the middle strata of Latin American society, by the late 20th century, progress toward reducing historically high levels of social inequality was disappointing almost everywhere save in communist Cuba. Also, the poorest countries of western Europe enjoyed greater per capita income than the wealthiest in Latin America. Yet, with regard to such social indicators as literacy and life expectancy, Costa Rica, Cuba, and the nations of the Southern Cone approximated the standards of the industrialized world, and, for Latin America as a whole, the lag was substantially less than in 1900 or 1950.

The rate of population growth, having peaked in the third quarter of the century, fell significantly with wide variations among countries. In parts of northern Latin America, a factor contributing to this decline was emigration to the more prosperous and politically stable United States, where large metropolitan centres—such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami—were home to large and growing Latin American communities. By the beginning of the 21st century, the population of Latin America and the Caribbean was more than 550 million, with about four-fifths of the population residing in urban areas. Latin America also contained two of the world’s largest metropolitan areas—Mexico City and São Paulo. The region’s principal cities grew more slowly than intermediate centres; in Venezuela, for example, Maracaibo and Valencia were expanding faster than Caracas. In the cities, where literacy and then access to television were nearly universal, people were exposed more and more quickly to new trends and ideas emanating from the United States or western Europe; to a lesser degree the same forces, and the continuing improvement of road transportation, were also decreasing the isolation of rural Latin Americans.

With social and economic modernization came changes, too, in gender relations. In most of Latin America women achieved full legal equality with men only gradually and usually later than winning the vote. In Argentina, for example, wives gained equal authority with husbands over minor-aged children only after the return of democracy in the 1980s. Traditions of patriarchy remained strong, and Latin American women’s groups were more prone than those in the United States or western Europe to exploit the symbolic discourse of motherhood in gaining their objectives. No significant number of women in this predominantly Roman Catholic region took up the cause of women’s ordination to the priesthood. As in most of the world, furthermore, equal pay for women remained elusive. Yet women did take advantage of increased educational and employment opportunities to gain more control of their lives. As many women as men were enrolled in secondary education, and the traditional alternatives for those women who chose or were obliged to work outside the home—e.g., domestic service and prostitution—had been supplemented by an array of clerical, professional, and light factory jobs. From the 1960s to the ’90s the proportion of women in the general labour force increased substantially. Falling birth rates likewise indicated that women were pursuing new options. The fact that domestic servants were still relatively inexpensive made it easier for middle- and upper-class women to pursue professional careers. Servants, however, were less inclined than they once were to accept their position as permanent; realistically or not, they dreamed of something better and to that extent epitomized a more general yearning for personal and social improvement that posed a challenge for all Latin American nations.

Ethnic minorities also sought greater opportunities and respect from society at large. Afro-Latin Americans increasingly questioned the long-accepted notion that racism did not exist in their countries and that such discrimination as existed was merely class-based; across Latin America, they formed social movements demanding their economic and political rights. In some countries, minority groups formed militant organizations. In Colombia, Afro-Latin Americans obtained rights to special legislative representation (as did Indian communities) in a new constitution in 1991. The peasant uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, was the best-known example of greater militancy among indigenous peoples. Yet even more striking was the appearance of a strong nationwide Indianist movement in Ecuador, which sought not only immediate improvements for Native Americans but also formal recognition that Ecuador was a multiethnic, multicultural nation. By the end of the 20th century, these Ecuadoran indigenous groups had already gained influence in national politics and demanded economic improvements. In 2000 a coup led by indigenous Indian leaders and military members briefly toppled the ruling government, removing the president from power. However, the coup leaders eventually agreed to let Vice President Gustavo Noboa Bejerano ascend to the presidency, which effectively ended the coup. This agreement emerged partly from military opposition of a junta-ruled government and also from the adamant refusal of the United States to accept a new government imposed by unconstitutional means. The last has not been heard from the indigenous movement in Ecuador—or elsewhere in Latin America. David Bushnell

Citation Information

Article Title: History of Latin America

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 23 January 2019

URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Latin-America

Access Date: August 19, 2019

Additional Reading General works

Leslie Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America (1984– ), is a general reference work with essays by recognized specialists on many aspects of the region’s development. Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America (1992); and Simon Collier, Harold Blakemore, and Thomas E. Skidmore (eds.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (1992), offer introductory material. Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America (1993; originally published in Spanish, 1970), focuses on the region’s colonial and neocolonial relations with North Atlantic nations. Early Latin America General

Overviews are presented in James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz, Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil (1983); and Mark Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, Colonial Latin America, 2nd ed. (1994), both emphasizing analysis over narrative detail and treating all of Latin America as a unit. Spanish America

C.H. Haring, The Spanish Empire in America (1947, reprinted 1985), is an institutionalist classic. Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History, 3 vol. (1971–79), is by the field’s most illustrious demographers.

A number of works treat 16th-century Spanish American history. Carl Ortwin Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (1966, reissued 1992), is a thoroughly outdated treatment of early Spanish activity in the Caribbean but has yet to be replaced. William Hickling Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, 3 vol. (1843), and History of the Conquest of Peru, 2 vol. (1847), both available in many later printings, contain archaic, invalid interpretations but, as literary classics, are famous almost in the manner of historical novels. Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949, reprinted 1965), concentrates on the ideological crusades of fray Bartolomé de las Casas. James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Social History, 2nd ed. (1994), surveys Hispanic conquest society in a central area. Ida Altman, Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and America in the Sixteenth Century (1989), follows people across the Atlantic. Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572 (1966; originally published in French, 1933), is a masterpiece of institutionalist historiography but ignores the roles of the indigenous people and the Spanish civil population. George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century, 2 vol. (1948, reissued 1972), attempts to combine mainline history and the history of art. Philip Wayne Powell, Soldiers, Indians & Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600 (1952, reprinted 1975), shows how Spaniards operated in areas of nonsedentary Indians. Nobel David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (1998), thoroughly treats the postconquest decline of the Indian population.

The mature period in Spanish colonial history is addressed in the following works. Studies of indigenous society include Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1880 (1964), a large work based mainly on Spanish sources; William B. Taylor, Drinking, Homicide & Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (1979), showing the relative normality of indigenous behaviour in central areas after the arrival of the Spaniards; Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival (1984, reissued with corrections, 1992), a broad treatment combining historical and anthropological techniques; James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (1992), based largely on sources in Nahuatl; and Karen Spalding, Huarochirí: An Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (1984), which begins to bring the level of Peruvian ethnohistory up to that of its counterpart for Mexico. Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (1974), thoroughly investigates the role of Africans in a Spanish American area. P.J. Bakewell, Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico: Zacatecas, 1546–1700 (1971), broadly treats a major silver mining centre. Louisa Schell Hoberman, Mexico’s Merchant Elite, 1590–1660 (1991), describes changes in the commercial world after the conquest period. Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (1991), analyzes intellectual developments with a strong awareness of the European background. Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720 (1973, reprinted 1984), is the cornerstone of early Guatemalan historiography. Robert J. Ferry, The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation & Crisis, 1567–1767 (1989), investigates society in a fringe area. Asunción Lavrin (ed.), Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (1989); and Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (eds.), The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (1998), are anthologies.

The following are among the more notable works on Spanish American history during the late period. Christon I. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (1977), is a social-institutional study. D.A. Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (1971), is a massive social and economic study of Mexico’s late-colonial international economy and government, and Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío: León, 1700–1860 (1978), shows the rationality and market orientation of the agricultural sector. John K. Chance, Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca (1978), studies urban demography. John E. Kicza, Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City (1983– ), broadly surveys urban society. Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826 (1993; originally published in Spanish, 1992), facilitates comparison between the Mexican and Peruvian silver industries. Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (1981), links the growth of agrarian estates to the size and nature of urban populations. Jacques A. Barbier, Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755–1796 (1980), views all the governmental institutions of a single region as an interlocking unit, including their socioeconomic dimension. Susan Migden Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810: Family and Commerce (1978), is a prosopographical study. William B. Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (1996), studies the role of parish priests in New Spain. Brazil

Alexander Marchant, From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500–1580 (1942, reissued 1966), though badly outdated in its ethnohistorical aspect, shows typical European economic procedures in a fringe area. C.R. Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624–1654 (1957, reprinted 1973), and The Golden Age of Brazil, 1695–1750 (1962, reissued 1995), extract a maximum of social, economic, and general information from institutional-narrative materials. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-Grande & Senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, 2nd ed., rev. (1946, reissued 1986; originally published in Portuguese, 4th ed., 2 vol., 1943), concerns the society of northeastern Brazil in the time of sugar production; most scholars today can credit very little of it, but it is read because it changed the direction of Brazilian historiography. A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casada Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550–1755 (1968), though nominally institutional, is tantamount to a study of northeastern urban society and partly updates Freyre. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and Its Judges, 1609–1751 (1973), combines social and institutional approaches, and his Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (1985), embraces many methods, materials, and topics. Dauril Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil, with Special Reference to the Administration of the Marquis of Lavradio, Viceroy, 1769–1779 (1968), is broader than its title implies, dealing also with demographic and economic matters. Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580–1822 (1992), illuminates fringe-area society. Independence to 1910 General works

David Bushnell and Neill Macauly, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. (1994), focuses particularly on politics in the middle decades of the century. E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (1980), creatively argues that modernization hurt the majority of Latin Americans. Spanish America

John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (1986), reviews rural rebels’ motives from the wars preceding independence to those of the Mexican Revolution. John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826, 2nd ed. (1986), is the best account of the political and military events of the wars for independence. Kenneth J. Andrien and Lyman L. Johnson (eds.), The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (1994), compiles essays on economic aspects of the transition to independence. Verena Martinez-Alier (Verena Stolcke), Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed. (1989), links race, gender, and class factors. Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (1985), portrays the abolition of slavery in Cuba as the result of social, political, and economic factors. Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (1989), examines the complicated social contests through which integration into global economic relations emerged after independence. Jonathan C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (1979), challenges assumptions about Latin America’s economic dependence on North Atlantic powers. Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru’s Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860–1940 (1983), details the social and political aspects of a period of economic overhaul. Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (1968), provides a model of intellectual history. John Charles Chasteen, Heroes on Horseback: A Life and Times of the Last Gaucho Caudillos (1995), is an exciting, highly readable study of two caudillo brothers and their divergent legacies in Brazil and Uruguay. Robert H. Jackson (ed.), Liberals, the Church, and Indian Peasants: Corporate Lands and the Challenge of Reform in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America (1997), explores control and land-use reforms after independence. Brazil

Emília Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (1985; originally published in Portuguese, 1977), collects well-written essays on liberalism, slavery, the end of the empire, and other major topics. C.H. Haring, Empire in Brazil: A New World Experiment with Monarchy (1958, reissued 1968), is a somewhat dated but still useful political history. Warren Dean, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820–1920 (1976), examines changing labour arrangements during the growth and demise of slavery. João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993; originally published in Portuguese, 1986), weighs African cultural contributions and other factors in analyzing one of the century’s most influential revolts. Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900: The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society (1985), studies the rise and decline of a traditional coffee zone. Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraíba: A Case Study of Family-Based Oligarchy in Brazil (1987), analyzes in detail the patronage system that defined politics in late 19th- and early 20th-century Brazil; and Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (1990), does the same, specifically for the empire period. Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930 (1971), presents a strong regional history of politics. Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934 (1980), analyzes how two million European immigrants worked and lived. Twentieth-century Latin America General works

Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America, 4th ed. (1997); and Peter Calvert and Susan Calvert, Latin America in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (1993), are good introductions to the period. Political developments

Now somewhat dated in interpretation but extremely influential when it appeared is John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (1958, reissued 1965). Treatments of political topics that cross national boundaries include A.E. Van Niekerk, Populism and Political Development in Latin America (1974; originally published in Dutch, 1972); Edward J. Williams, Latin American Christian Democratic Parties (1967); and John A. Peeler, Latin American Democracies: Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela (1985), assessing variants of liberal democracy. The impact of the Cuban Revolution and associated leftist currents is explored in Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (1993), by a frustrated sympathizer; and William E. Ratliff, Castroism and Communism in Latin America, 1959–1976: The Varieties of Marxist-Leninist Experience (1976), a conservative perspective. Frederick M. Nunn, The Time of the Generals: Latin American Professional Militarism in World Perspective (1992); and J. Samuel Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (1998), discuss the political role of the military. Sandra M. Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890–1939 (1999), examines an important part of the political spectrum often neglected by scholars. Ronald M. Schneider, Latin American Political History: Patterns and Personalities (2007), details Latin America’s struggles to establish viable participatory political systems. Economics

Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence (1994), provides the best overall treatment. Labour issues are examined in Hobart A. Spalding, Jr., Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Workers in Dependent Societies (1977), a helpful introduction; and Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (1986). William C. Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino (1995), covers the rise and fall of agrarian reformism. The essays in Paul W. Drake (ed.), Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the 1890s to the Present (1993), deal with varied aspects of economic policy. Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer, Cities of Hope: People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870–1930 (1998), surveys the urbanization process. International relations

Bill Albert and Paul Henderson, South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile (1988); and R.A. Humphreys, Latin America and the Second World War, 2 vol. (1981–82), examine the repercussions of foreign conflicts. Good examples from the vast literature examining the role of the United States are Bryce Wood, The Dismantling of the Good Neighbor Policy (1985), covering a broad spectrum of 20th-century issues; Lester D. Langley, The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, 4th ed. (1989), treating a critically important theatre; Barbara Stallings, Banker to the Third World: U.S. Portfolio Investment in Latin America, 1900–1986 (1987); and Fredrick B. Pike, FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (1995). Culture and society

Jean Franco, The Modern Culture of Latin America: Society and the Artist, rev. ed. (1970), covers cultural history. Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (1991), discusses the changing role of women and women’s movements. David Stoll, Is Latin America Turning Protestant? The Politics of Evangelical Growth (1990); and David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America (1996), treat the rise of Protestantism and, less directly, changes in the Roman Catholic Church. David Bushnell