Marifeli Perez-Stable

Published in The Miami Herald

July 8, 2004

Together, the Americas were once the New World. The links of trade, peoples and cultures that Europe forged with the New World slowly crisscrossed all continents. The United States and Latin America had similar colonial beginnings. Yet, starting in the late 18th century, the Americas parted ways: The United States went on to become a great power, and Latin America the continent that has never quite made it.

Cultural differences between England and Spain rooted in religion are often noted: Protestantism focused on individuals and the then-fledgling idea of freedom, Catholicism on higher authorities and undue obedience. More important may have been the divergent character of the monarchies: By the 17th century, parliament checked England’s while Spain’s reigned absolute. Each practiced colonialism differently: The Thirteen Colonies somewhat loosely tethered, Spanish America was bound by an imperial bureaucracy unseen since Roman times.

North and South proffered quite distinct landscapes, which also accounted for the difference in colonial rule. The North had no gold or silver. There was no rich Native American empire like the Incan or the Aztec civilization to be conquered. The English settled the Thirteen Colonies, establishing a yeoman agriculture in what later became the Union states, while the later Confederate states relied on slave labor.

Independent republics

The South, on the other hand, offered vast wealth and indigenous empires — the Aztecs and the Incas — that were submitted by force. Haciendas imposed a serfdom of sorts on the indigenous population and, in some places, slavery using black labor. Conquest, then, seared Spanish America in ways settlement never did the Thirteen Colonies.

Wars established independent republics in North and South: after seven years, the United States by 1783; after 14 years, Spanish America by 1824. A shorter war gave the young U.S. republic a more auspicious beginning. Protracted wars left the Spanish-American republics in ruins and at the mercy of the military caudillos who had fought them. For most of the 19th century, coups d’état, regional strife, and civil wars marred their republican terrain. By the time the Civil War broke out, the United States already had a solid republican foundation. The Union victory, moreover, assured U.S. territorial integrity without which the ensuing economic takeoff might not have gathered the force it did.

In the 19th century, therefore, a democratic United States industrialized, creating economic opportunities and expanding citizen rights. Until the 1870s, most Spanish-American economies stagnated, democracy was nowhere fully established, and societies were riven by exclusions that are still not resolved. A disparity of wealth and power divided the Western Hemisphere.

U.S. supported dictators

Democracy has had an erratic history in Latin America. Except for Cuba, it finally swept all countries in the 1990s. In the 1960s and 1970s, the military had felled democratic governments in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. Established in 1953, democracy in Costa Rica is the oldest in the region. In 1958, Venezuela managed a peaceful transition to democracy after a 10-year dictatorship. The United States often supported dictatorships as bulwarks against revolution, as in the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, or undermined left-leaning democratic regimes as in Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1970.

Latin America’s economic development has likewise been off-kilter. At the end of the 19th century, exports of raw materials and agricultural commodities boomed. Beginning in the 1930s, the larger countries embraced import-substitution industrialization which created employment and incorporated workers. In a sense, however, Latin America industrialized off-tempo: too late to follow the European and U.S. paths and too early to adopt the export-driven industrialization that thrived in Asia.

The first and third waves of industrialization succeeded by creating a middle class, setting the stage for democracy, and reducing inequalities.

The end of the Cold War raised great hopes for democracy and prosperity which have largely gone unrealized. Latin America must do most of what needs to be done. The United States, nonetheless, must also do its part. The Kennedy administration pledged $20 billion for the Alliance for Progress over 10 years, Latin American countries up to $80 billion. In today’s dollars, a hemispheric fund for social and economic development would need over $300 billion.

Wishful thinking or thoughtful wishing: The point is that if ”We” is to truly mean the Americas, more of the same just will not do.