Modern Latin America

Overview of Latin America

The term Latin America refers to the large geographic region that encompasses South America, Central America and the Caribbean. It is a large diverse region that is grouped together by aspects of a common history and culture that began with the European “discovery” of the Americas in the fifteenth century.

The history of Latin America has many similarities with that of the United States and the histories of each region are very closely connected. However, there are many important differences in the way the two regions developed that explains the current differences, and sometimes difficult relationship, between the two regions.

Pre-Colombian History of the Americas

The human race entered the Americas when people crossed the overland bridge from Asia to the Americas around 18,000 years ago – during the last Ice Age. As the Ice Age ended, the ocean levels rose, isolating the part of the human race in the Americas from the rest of the human race. As a result, the civilizations in the Americas developed without any knowledge or contact with the civilizations in Eurasia and Africa. In general, the civilizations that developed in North America were tribal. Only a few groups developed into larger societies that were based around cities and had systems of written record keeping. The combination of a harsh environment and a small population spread out over a large continent were factors against the development of large-scale civilizations. All of the large civilizations of the Americas developed in the area that is now considered Latin America. The Maya are one of the oldest recorded civilizations in the Americas. The Maya were centered in the Yucatan peninsula of modern Mexico. The Maya were organized as city-states and based on farming. Archaeologists have uncovered 50 Mayan cities. These cities were built around large stone pyramids – the pyramid at Tikal is 212 feet high and was the tallest building in the Americas until 1903. November 4, 291 B.C. is the oldest date in the Mayan records – this is around the time of the Roman Republic and the Qin Dynasty in China. Mayan civilization reached its high point in 250 A.D. It is believed that the Mayan civilization collapsed because of environmental problems. The Maya had clear-cut the forests to make agricultural fields, but soil erosion destroyed the fields. Unable to grow enough food, the Maya collapsed into civil war and they disappeared around 900 A.D.

The Aztecs were a warrior society that migrated into central Mexico around 1200 A.D. Over the course of 300 years they built an empire of 15 million people in the center of Mexico. Their capital city, called Tenochtitlan, had a population of 200,000 – larger than most cities in Europe at the time. The center of the Aztec religion was human sacrifice carried out on large stone pyramids at the center of their cities. The Aztecs believed that the blood from the sacrifices helped the sun rise every day. In order to get victims for sacrifice, the Aztecs turned to raiding neighboring tribes. They forced conquered peoples to pay annual tribute, with included sacrificial victims.

The Inca, called the “children of the sun” ruled an empire that ran for 2,300 miles along the Andes Mountains in South America and held a population of 16 million people. The name Inca actually refers to the leader of the empire. Inca culture was based on the idea that the entire empire, including the people, was possessions of the Inca. High in the Andes they build stone cities, such as Machu Picchu, without the use of concrete – they carved stones to fit each other exactly, like puzzle pieces. In addition, they build a network of 14,000 miles of stone roads that connected their cities together, even though they did not have either horses or the wheel.

Columbus' Voyages to the Americas & Spanish America

Christopher Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492 with the hope of establishing to a trade route directly to Asia. After 33 days at sea, Columbus reached the Caribbean Islands and he claimed the islands for Spain. Columbus never realized that he had found a new continent – he died thinking he had reached Asia. The continents “discovered” by Columbus were named the “Americas” because the mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci was the first to recognize that the Americas were a “new world” and not part of Asia. It was on Columbus' second voyage to the Americas that he established the Spanish colony on Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and Dominican Republic). The Spanish used the island as a base from which they quickly moved out to explore and establish colonies in North and South America. Spanish explorer-soldiers called Conquistadors traveled across North and South America seeking “Gold, Glory, and God” – they wanted to find gold, win glory, and convert Native Americans to Christianity.

The two most famous Conquistadors were Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro. In 1519, Cortes conquered the Aztec Empire in Central America. Cortes was able to capture the Aztec capital city with only a couple hundred soldiers because the Spanish had superior weapons and other Native American groups, who were enemies of the Aztecs, supported Cortes. In 1532, Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire of South America by using trickery and violence to capture Inca leader and held him hostage in return for gold, silver and control over the Inca Empire. After taking the empire, Pizarro killed the Inca leader.

By 1550, the Spanish Empire in the Americas stretched from California and Kansas in North America to Chile in South America. The only part of South America that did not belong to Spain was Brazil, which was a Portuguese colony. The wealth of this new empire in the Americas – sugar from the Caribbean and gold and silver from South America – poured into Spain. This influx of precious metals made Spain the wealthiest and most powerful country in Europe and this period represented a “golden age” for Spain. However, Spain spend much of this wealth on fighting wars in Europe and in the long run it fell into a period long decline during which England and France became the dominant world powers. European exploration of the Americas destroyed the Native American cultures and societies because Europeans were carriers of infectious disease – smallpox, typhus, influenza, and yellow fever. The Native American populations had never been exposed to these diseases and had no immunity to them. These diseases tore like a wild fire through the Americas wiping out entire cultures even before these cultures had direct contact with the European explorers. It is estimated that 90% of the Native American population died of disease or disease related problems within a hundred years of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas – approximately 80 to 90 million people! The main reason the Europeans brought African slaves to the Americas was because these epidemic diseases destroyed the Native American population. The Spanish and the Portuguese realized that if they wanted to use the resources of the Americas to enrich themselves, they would have to use African slave labor to build their American empires. In the early 1500’s, both the Portuguese and Spanish began transporting slaves to their American colonies. It is estimated that from 1500 to 1870 there were about 10 million African slaves transported from Africa to the Americas. Roughly 70% of the African slaves brought to the Americas were used to grow sugar in either the Caribbean or Brazil. By comparison, only 4% of African slaves were brought to North America. Sugar was one of the most profitable exports from the Americas back to Europe. African slaves worked from dawn to dusk in brutal conditions to grow sugar. Many of the slaves were literally worked to death – roughly 10% of the slaves working on sugar plantations died every year. Brazil was the last American nations to outlaw slavery in 1888. In the more interior parts of Latin America, the Spanish virtually enslaved the local Native Americans to work on plantation farms (haciendas) or in mining.

The trade connection between Europe and the Americas led to an exchange of foods that have transformed societies around the world in an event that historians have called the “Columbian Exchange”. Corn and potatoes were the most important of the foods that moved from the Americas to Europe and Africa. The potato became the staple food for large groups of poor people across Europe, while Corn, which grows well in drier climates, became a staple food in Africa, southern Europe and parts of Asia. The most important foods that moved from Europe to the Americas were sugar cane and coffee. European settlers grew these crops on large plantations that were worked by slaves. These crops continue to this day to be the main cash crops for the countries Latin America and are one reason the population of these countries is still divided between wealthy landowners and poor farm workers. While European conquest of the Americas was disastrous for the Native Americas, the introduction of the horse to from Europe to the Americas resulted in a flowering of the Plains Indian culture in North America.

By the 1550’s, the Spanish Empire in the Americas stretched from Mississippi River and Northern California down to the southern tip of South America. The Portuguese controlled the region of Brazil. These lands in Americas were the wealthiest part of a global empire. The Spanish divided their American empire into regions that have largely become the borders of the modern countries of Latin America, and built large sophisticated cities that were used to govern the region. Half a century before the first British colonies were established in North America, both Mexico City and Lima (in Peru) were large cities with universities. However, the wealth of these colonies was concentrated in the cities, leaving the large populations in the countryside living in poverty.

The society in Spanish Colonial Latin America was very similar to the Southern Colonies in British North America (Virginia and the Carolinas). In both places, the wealthy land owning white population grew rich off the forced labor on large plantations. The white population in Latin America was divided between the peninsulares, born in Spain and held the governing power in the Spanish Empire, and the creoles, born in the Americas and were generally the landowners and merchants. The Native Americas and African slaves were at the bottom of the society and were forced to work on plantations growing crops, like sugar, or mining for silver. Unlike British North America which had clear dividing lines between the races, in Latin America racial intermixing was common and this created large racially mixed populations of mulattos and mestizos. The mulattos and mestizos occupied a space in society between the whites and the Native Americans and African slaves and could rise to positions of wealth and power. Spanish government tried to directly run the empire and send governing officials and administrators from Spain enforce the rule of the crown. However, due to the large size of the empire and poor communication, many parts of the empire had freedom in making their own decisions and the reality was that the creole population held a significant amount of power. This created friction between the peninsulares and the creoles because the creoles resented that the peninsulares looked down on them and held all of the positions of authority. The power and authority of the royal government was reinforced by the Catholic Church which directly ran most social institutions throughout Latin America where almost the entire population was Catholic.

Independence and Building Nations in Latin America

Control of land was the issue that sparked the ten year Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 against the dictatorial rule of Porfirio Diaz. It is estimated at the time that 97% of the population of Mexico was landless peasants. The revolutionaries used the slogan “Tierra y libertad” or “land and liberty”, and demanded the government take the land of large landowners and foreign companies and give it to the poor. The Mexican Revolution was a complex multi-sided conflict in which wealthy conservatives fought to hold onto power against radial peasant armies that wanted to seize land for the poor and liberal middle-class cities that wanted to make a modern Mexican state. It is estimated that as many as 1.5 million people died in this war before the forces of the liberal middle class took power. The liberal middle class government enacted land reform, worker rights and established a democratic system that continues to the current day. The “nationalism” the region in the early twentieth century conflicted with the growing influence of the United States in the affairs of Latin American countries. It was during this time that American businesses became the largest investors in the region and they often turned to the government of the United States to support their interests. American president Theodore Roosevelt said that the United States had the right to intervene in the internal politics of these nations. The United States engaged in “dollar diplomacy” where it sent American soldiers into the countries of the region to protect American business property. The world-wide Great Depression that began in 1929 had a profound impact on Latin America because it disrupted the flow of trade that dominated the economies of the region. In the Depression, the countries of Latin America found that their exports fell sharply as consumers in the United States and Europe could no longer buy very much. Without the income from exporting natural resources and cash crops to the rest of the world, these countries could no longer afford to import finished goods. This forced these countries to develop their own industries to make consumer goods. Ironically, the Great Depression was economically beneficial to the economic development of the region. In many countries, governments took a leading role in funding the development of industry. For example, in Brazil, the leader Vargas carried out plans to modernize the country in a program called the “Estado Novo” or “New State”. Vargas used his dictatorial powers to build industry and also gave workers minimum wages and pension plans. The dictator Juan Peron in Argentina was another example of this type of leadership. He enacted policies to help the working poor and they supported his holding of power. These leaders sought to help the masses of poor people who had not benefited from the earlier period of liberal economic growth. These leaders did not think of their policies as capitalistic or socialistic, but instead as a “third position”. In many ways, these leaders represented modern caudillos in how they used populist support to justify their authoritarian rule.

While World War Two had little effect on Latin America, the Cold War had a profound effect because the United States saw the region as being part of its sphere of influence. As a result, the United States viewed the long standing regional conflict between the rich and poor populations through the lens of the global Cold War conflict between capitalism and communism. At the same time, many people in Latin America viewed the United States’ Cold War policies as being "neo-imperialist” because they seemed to help American companies dominate the regional economies and put local companies out of business. These people argued that the United States’ policies kept the region poor because the United States was enriching itself by exploiting their economies. In their view, the governments of the region should nationalize or take over foreign owned factories and farms and give them to the poor. The United States government saw these arguments as a form of “creeping communism” that had to be stopped.

The small Central American country of Guatemala was the first country to become a Cold War flash point in the Americas. Guatemala is a country with a history of gruesome dictators and a large landless peasant class. In 1954, the Guatemalan government decided to take the unused lands from the American owned United Fruit Company and redistribute them to the largely poor Maya people of Guatemala. In response, the United State government worked with the Guatemalan army to overthrow the government. Shortly after this, Guatemala fell into a civil war that lasted until 1996. It is estimated that 200,000 people died in this war – most of who were civilians.

The Cold War entered Latin America in earnest with the Cuban Revolution in 1958 when Fidel Castro overthrew the American supported dictator Fulgencio Batista. After taking power, Castro adopted communism and formed an alliance with the Soviet Union. He took over American property in Cuba and made himself into a dictator. In response, two million Cubans fled the island and began to organize a movement to overthrow Castro. In 1961, the United States supported these Cubans in an armed attack on Cuba called the Bay of Pigs. After the attack failed, the Soviet Union moved to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. The United States saw this as an intolerable threat and the American government blockaded Cuba to prevent the Soviet ships carrying the missiles from delivering them to Cuba. For thirteen days the United States and the Soviet Union were involved in a showdown over Cuba called the "Cuban missile crisis" – it was the closest the two countries ever came to nuclear war. The showdown ended with the Soviets agreeing to not put missiles in Cuba in return for a promise that the United States would not invade Cuba. Cuba would remain a communist island in the American sphere of influence for the duration of the Cold War. The United States viewed communist Cuba as a foothold from which Soviet’s would spread communism to the rest of Latin America. As a result, the United States treated any leader or group in Latin America that expressed admiration of Castro to be a communist and a threat. In doing this, the United States largely misunderstood the situation and overreacted. The main reason people Latin America admired Castro was because he successfully stood up to the United States. Beyond that, support for communism in Latin America not driven by admiration of the Soviet Union, but by the political, economic and social inequality at the core of Latin American society.

The United States responded to the threat of communism spreading in Latin America by supporting anti-communist governments in the region, which were often military dictators. Beginning in the mid 1960’s, American backed military governments took over most of the countries of Latin America. The United States supported these governments with military aid and training. These governments violently acted to crush any group that tried to oppose them. In the countries of Central America, such as Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, governments fought civil wars against guerrilla armies that controlled large parts of the countries. In 1979, the Sandinistas, a communist guerrilla army, overthrew the American backed government in Nicaragua – this was the only Latin American country to follow Cuba in becoming communist. In South America, the military governments brutally suppressed any opposition to their rule by engaging in a “dirty war” where they used “death squads” to silence any opposition – even moderates who were simply advocating for democracy and individual rights. Many of the victims of these military governments simply vanished after they were taken away by government soldiers and death squads. People began to speak of these victims as “los desaparecidos” or “the disappeared”. It is estimated that these military governments killed at least 90,000 people. The attitude of these military governments could be summed up by Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military government in Chile, when he said, “We’re not against ideas; we’re against people spreading them.”

Surprisingly, the most successful opposition to these military governments was not armed insurrection, but the traditional bedrocks of society. First, the Catholic Church, which had historically backed conservative authoritarian governments, adopted the ideas of Liberation Theology that said that the proper role of government was to care for the poor. Second, the mothers of people “disappeared” in the dirty war began to protest to learn the truth about what happened to their children. Both the Church and the mothers represented groups in society that the military governments could not attack without discrediting themselves. For example, the assassination of the Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of El Salvador, while he was leading a church service brought international condemnation on the government of the country.

The military governments across Latin America lost power due to changes in the global economy that drove the economies of the region into deep recessions. The collapse of the economies of Latin America were driven by the combination of high oil prices which forced the countries to borrow large amounts of money from American banks and then a steep rise in interest rates that made it impossible for these countries to repay their debts. The military government could not manage the economic crisis and many of these countries were plunged into deep recessions with terrible hyper-inflation that impoverished large parts of the population - including the middle class. Inflation in Brazil reached 229%, 1000% in Argentina, and 50,000% in Bolivia. The economic crisis forced the populations to demand a return to democracy. Throughout the early 1980's, the military leaders stepped down from government and were replaced by democratically elected governments. In many of the countries, the leaders of the military governments were put on trial, and sometimes imprisoned.

The newly elected democratic governments faced the problem of how to solve the economic problems that faced the region. Many of these governments turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to help with their debt crisis. The IMF agreed to assist these countries in return for government enacting policies to cut spending on social programs and sell off government owned industries to foreign investors. Many of these actions were very unpopular, but in the long run they helped these countries grow their economies. This can be seen in the fact that people in Latin America call the 1980's as the "lost decade", but see the 1990’s as a period of economic growth. In 1994, the United States negotiated the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada. NAFTA has been economically beneficial to all three countries; however it also created a good deal of economic disruption, especially causing job losses in American manufacturing and Mexican agriculture.

Since the end of the Cold War, many Latin American countries have been troubled with drug problems that are created by the combination of the poverty in rural areas across Latin America and the large demand for illegal drugs in the United States. Beginning in the 1980's, organized drug groups, called cartels, used their financial wealth to undermine the governments of these countries with a combination of bribing government officials and assassinating government officials. The term narco-terrorism was developed to explain how these drug cartels were not just criminal organization, but had become powerful organizations that were essentially at war with the governments of the region. In Columbia, drug cartels worked closely with guerrilla armies that were fighting against the government. The guerrilla armies allowed the drug cartels to operate in their region in return for money and weapons. Some parts of the region became ungovernable that had murder rates that made them some of the most violent places on earth. For example, more than 100,000 people have been killed in the drug violence along the border region of Mexico - making it as violent as Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States government directly supports the governments of the region in these on-going “drug wars”.

Despite these problems, almost all of the countries of Latin America seem to have become stable democracies. In 2000, the only country in the region that was not democratic (did not have regular contested elections) was Cuba. Even though the region has mostly settled into democracy, the countries are still troubled with some of the highest rates of economic inequality in the world. Democracy has done little to resolve the issues of inequality. Across the whole region, the wealthiest twenty percent of the population owns 15 to 20 times as much as the poorest twenty percent. To put this in contrast, in the United States, wealthiest twenty percent owns 8 times as much as the poorest twenty percent. This inequality is one of the main reasons that 50% of the population in Latin America still lives in poverty. It is important to note that most of the poverty is in the rural areas. Many poor people across in the region have moved to the cities seeking better economic opportunities. It is estimated that 75 % of the population in the region now lives in urban areas – Mexico City and Sao Paulo (Brazil) are among the largest cities in the world. The country of Venezuela appears to be the only country in Latin America that is failing to build a successful democracy, and may even be on the verge of becoming a failed state. Venezuela should be a very wealthy country. It has large reserves of oil (maybe more oil than Saudi Arabia) and a well-educated population. However, it has suffered for over a decade under a bad government that squandered the country’s oil wealth on programs appeared to help the poor, but actually enriched members and supporters of the government. When oil prices fell in 2008, the government could no longer support these programs. Instead of changing its policies, the government became more authoritarian – directly controlling the economy and using violence to suppress any opposition. This has resulted in the economy shrinking by 20 %, inflation hitting 800% and shortages of everything from food and medicine to diapers. The country also has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Venezuelans have taken to the street to violently protest against the government to no effect and at this point it is far from clear how the Venezuelan crisis will end.