Latin America at the end of the 20th century
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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