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POLITICAL HANDBOOK
OF THE AMERICAS
2008
REGIONAL POLITICAL
HANDBOOKS OF THE
WORLD

Political Handbook of the Americas 2008

Political Handbook of the Middle East 2008

Political Handbook of Africa 2007

Political Handbook of Asia 2007

Political Handbook of Europe 2007

Political Handbook of the Americas 2008
Editors: Arthur S. Banks, Thomas C. Muller, William R. Overstreet
Associate Editors: Judith Isacoff, Thomas Lansford
Assistant Editor: Tony Davies
Production Assistants: Thomas Scalese, Erin Stanley, Kathleen Stanley

CQ Press
Sponsoring Editor: Anna S. Baker
Development Editor: Anastazia Skolnitsky
Chief, Editorial Acquisitions, Reference Publishing: Andrea Pedolsky
Managing Editor, Reference: Joan A. Gossett
Production Editors: Belinda Josey, Emily Bakely
Copy Editors: Elaine Dunn, Shannon Kelly, Jon Preimesberger
Manager, Electronic Production: Paul P. Pressau
Manager, Print and Art Production: Margot W. Ziperman
Senior Vice President and Publisher: John A. Jenkins
Director, Reference Publishing: Alix B. Vance
President and Publisher, Congressional Quarterly Inc.: Robert W. Merry
POLITICAL HANDBOOK
OF THE AMERICAS
2008

A DIVISION OF CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY INC.

WASHINGTON, D.C.
CQ Press
2300 N Street, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20037
Phone: 202-729-1900; toll-free, 1-866-4CQ-PRESS (1-866-427-7737)
Web: www.cqpress.com
Copyright 
C 2008 by CQ Press, a division of Congressional Quarterly Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher.
Cover design: TGD Communications
Composition: Production staff at Aptara Corp. Inc., New Delhi
Maps by International Mapping Associates

∞ The paper used in this publication exceeds the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Printed and bound in the United States of America
12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN 978-0-87289-903-2
CONTENTS

Intergovernmental Organization Abbreviations ix St. Vincent and the Grenadines 425

Suriname 431
Trinidad and Tobago 444
I INTRODUCTION 1 United Kingdom Territories 455
Introduction to the Americas 3 United States and Related Territories 467
Uruguay 501
Venezuela 514
II GOVERNMENTS 31
Antigua and Barbuda 33
III INTERGOVERNMENTAL
Argentina 40
ORGANIZATIONS 533
Aruba 61
Bahamas 65 Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in
Barbados 71 Latin America and the Caribbean
Belize 78 (OPANAL) 535
Bolivia 85 Andean Community of Nations (CAN) 539
Brazil 103 Association of Caribbean States (ACS) 544
Canada 118 Caribbean Community and Common Market
Chile 137 (Caricom) 548
Colombia 148 Central American Common Market
Costa Rica 167 (CACM/MCCA) 554
Cuba 177 Central American Integration System (SICA) 558
Dominica 187 The Commonwealth (CWTH) 562
Dominican Republic 194 Latin American and Caribbean Economic System
Ecuador 204 (LAES/SELA) 568
El Salvador 225 Latin American Integration Association
French Territories 239 (LAIA/ALADI) 571
Grenada 247 Organization of American States (OAS/OEA) 574
Guatemala 256 Organization of Eastern Caribbean States
Guyana 273 (OECS) 582
Haiti 284 Regional and Subregional Development
Honduras 302 Banks 586
Jamaica 314 Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) 586
Mexico 322 Central American Bank for Economic Integration
Netherlands Antilles 342 (BCIE) 587
Nicaragua 349 Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) 589
Panama 366 Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR/
Paraguay 381 MERCOSUL) 594
Peru 393 United Nations 599
St. Kitts and Nevis 413 Security Council: Peacekeeping Forces and
St. Lucia 419 Missions 602
viii CONTENTS

United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti IV APPENDIXES 605

(MINUSTAH) 602
Appendix A: Chronology of Major Events in the
Economic and Social Council: Regional
Americas, 2007 607
Commissions 602
Appendix B: Serials List 615
Economic Commission for Latin America and
the Caribbean (ECLAC) 603 Index 617
I N T E R G OV E R N M E N TA L
O R G A N I Z AT I O N
A B B R E V I AT I O N S

Memberships in non-UN intergovernmental organizations are listed at the end of each country’s section under
Intergovernmental Representation. An asterisk indicates a nonofficial abbreviation. In the individual country
sections, associate memberships are indicated by italics.

ACS Association of Caribbean States LAES Latin American and Caribbean

ALADI Latin American Integration Economic System
Association Mercosur Southern Cone Common Market
BCIE Central American Bank for OAS Organization of American States
Economic Integration OECS Organization of Eastern Caribbean
CACM Central American Common States
Market OPANAL Agency for the Prohibition of
CAN Andean Community of Nations Nuclear Weapons in Latin
Caricom Caribbean Community and America and the Caribbean
Common Market SELA Latin American Economic System
*CWTH The Commonwealth SICA Central American Integration
*IADB Inter-American Development Bank System
PART ONE

INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION TO THE
AMERICAS

Natural and Historical Setting that even so-called savages were full-fledged humans marks
the beginning of the human rights movement in the Americas.
The Americas present two faces to the humans who have On a practical level, Montesinos made a convert of Bartolomé
been settling there for millennia. Most of the region, which de las Casas, who joined the Dominicans and campaigned for
stretches out over two continents and a sea full of islands, boasts equal rights for Indians for the rest of his life.
conditions inviting to human settlement. In the area on which When Montesinos unleashed his wrath on his fellow
this volume focuses, running south from the United States’ colonists, the European presence consisted of settlements on
land border, and from the tip of the Florida peninsula on the Hispaniola and Cuba. The conquest of the mainland wouldn’t
Atlantic seaboard, temperature zones range from temperate to begin in earnest until 1519 (although Portuguese had landed
subtropical to tropical. Some of the highest mountain regions, on Brazil’s coast, without realizing the magnitude of the con-
or the deserts, or swamplands, challenge endurance, but they tinent beyond). Within a few decades of those early entries,
compensate with beauty what they lack in comfort. Spain and Portugal had established full-fledged colonies on
Counterbalancing these advantages, much of the region lies both continents of the New World.
atop seismically active ground. An earthquake zone runs from The independence wars that expelled the colonial pow-
Mexico down to Chile, and into the Caribbean. Tens of thou- ers didn’t flare up until the early 19th century—first in Haiti,
sands of people have died in earthquakes in the 20th century against France. Hence, as of the early 21st century, all of the
alone. Americas save the United States and Canada had spent more
By way of compensation, the same unsteady soil holds, time as colonies than as independent nations. In the Caribbean,
in several areas, silver, gold, and petroleum. The riches don’t where the conquest began, European powers still have at least
end there. Among the other bounties: the 2.3 million-square- formal ties to some nations. And Cuba, one of the earliest
mile Amazon, the world’s biggest rain forest; the vast plains of colonies, didn’t free itself of Spanish rule until the very end of
Argentina and Brazil that provide some of the world’s richest the 19th century.
farmland; and an extraordinary agricultural heritage. Europe’s legacy to the New World begins with language.
Maize, tomatoes, potatoes, chili peppers, chocolate, to- Spanish, Portuguese, and French—the languages of the vast
bacco, and coca (the raw material of cocaine)—all these are majority of the 533 million people of Latin America and the
native to the Western Hemisphere. They are known and sa- Caribbean—all come from Europe (as does English, for that
vored everywhere else as a result of the arrival of the European matter). And all of the region’s legal and political institutions
powers—the historical event that joined the Americas to the owe an enormous debt to European models, whose political
rest of the world. doctrines and parliamentary systems traveled to the former
The Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British all moved colonies. But the copies were not exact. Mexico, for exam-
into the region with one major goal: to exploit the New World’s ple, made a point of adopting a version of the U.S. constitu-
mineral and agricultural riches to the utmost. For the Iberi- tional model, with a strong president elected independently of
ans, transforming the Americas into a bastion of Christianity congress.
counted as nearly as an important a mission. Even so, the stability and prosperity that Europe achieved
Clearly, those two objectives collided, as one prelate saw in the second half of the 20th century still elude the former
when the Spanish conquest had barely begun. In 1511, An- colonies of Latin America and the Caribbean. The foundation
tonio de Montesinos, a Dominican friar from Hispaniola (an of those achievements, the establishment of at least a minimum
English corruption of la isla Española, an island now shared standard of socioeconomic equality, remains only a vision al-
by the Dominican Republic and Haiti), condemned as sinners most everywhere in the region. Costa Rica, in Central America,
those who enslaved Indians. His sermon resonated as far as is the exception.
the mother country, shocking even the conscience of King The World Bank in 2003 ranked the region among the
Ferdinand. world’s most unequal, with the richest 10 percent of indi-
Montesinos’s sermon certainly didn’t transform the con- viduals receiving 40 to 47 percent of total income, and the
quest into a purely spiritual undertaking. But his insistence poorest 20 percent receiving 2 to 4 percent (in the United
4 INTRODUCTION

States, the wealthiest 10 percent earn 31 percent of total Colombia (1979), Mexico (1985), and El Salvador (2001).2
income).1 Like disasters everywhere, those in the Americas have revealed
Governments, international organizations such as the World enormous shortcomings by governments that left citizens de-
Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as well as the fenseless in the face of predictable events. Some governments
United States, have deployed numerous strategies designed to have paid the price.
spur economic growth and lessen inequality in Latin America In Nicaragua, chaos and corruption followed a major earth-
and the Caribbean. And citizens of the region have developed quake in 1972. Simmering discontent expanded into all-out
their own strategy to better their conditions: migration to the opposition to a long-reigning dictatorial dynasty that was top-
United States, Canada, and Europe. Mexicans living along the pled seven years later. In Mexico, government helplessness in
border have been working in the United States for the better the wake of a 1986 earthquake that leveled parts of the capital
part of a century. In the 1940s and 1950s migration took a altered the country’s political dynamic. The PRI lost much of
more organized form, when citizens of the British West Indies its credibility, setting the stage for the later loss of its political
flocked to Britain and then to the United States. monopoly.
The poverty and inequality that fostered migration devel- Another form of disaster grows out of poverty. Rainstorms
oped under a long series of dictatorships and authoritarian that lead to disastrous mudslides plague Central America and
regimes that characterized the entire region, with brief excep- the Caribbean region, where torrential rains are an annual event.
tions, for most of its postindependence life. Political systems There and throughout the region, landless poor people build
began opening up toward the end of the 20th century (except in communities on unstable terrain, sometimes in ravines or on
Cuba). Citizens of the Americas have come to see free and fair hillsides. Haiti, most of Central America, and Venezuela have
elections as a fundamental right. With that standard in place, experienced thousands of deaths due to major rains.
the regional political class has lost its exclusive hold on the Some of the rainstorms are brought by hurricanes, an an-
political process. nual danger in the Caribbean Basin and along the Eastern
To be sure, mass political involvement long existed in Seaboard of the United States. The word itself originated in
the Americas, but in appearance only. In some countries, po- the Caribbean: The Spaniards appropriated huracan from the
litical parties could put hundreds of thousands of members Carib people, who also gave their name to the area where they
in the streets. However, these parties were machines to de- flourished.
liver enormous blocs of votes, thereby providing the illusion As the hurricane zone crosses continental boundaries, so
of democratic process. Mexico provided the classic model. does the region itself. North America ends at the Mexico-
Its Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Guatemala border, where Central America begins. That nar-
Instituctional—PRI) enjoyed one of the longest-running po- row strip of countries, which bridge North and South America,
litical monopolies in the world thanks largely to its efficient leads across the Darien jungle to Colombia. East of the con-
stage-managing of national and local elections. tinents, the Caribbean Basin is dotted with 13 nation-states.
As the new century began, essentially fictitious elections Two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, share the
gave way to the real thing. In 2000 Mexican voters ended the island of Hispaniola. And Trinidad and Tobago and St. Kitts
PRI’s extraordinary 71-year-run as a state-owned party. Twelve and Nevis have formed two-island states.
years before that, Chileans had voted to end a military regime. In South America, the equator cuts through the continent
One year after Chile’s electorally generated transformation, and lends its name to the Republic of Ecuador. That nation and
Nicaraguan voters in 1989 turned out of office a government nearly all of its South American counterparts are also divided
that had seized power with most of the country’s support and internally by the Andes mountain range, the world’s longest.
then had its power ratified by voters. And in 1998, Venezuelan Only Brazil, Uruguay, Guyana, and Suriname are untouched by
voters elected a charismatic ex-army officer who had tried and the Andes, which run north-south for nearly the entire length
failed to stage a coup aimed at destroying a two-party system of the continent.
that had fallen into corruption and sloth. As a result, divisions between highlanders and lowlanders
Elections channeled political turbulence but didn’t end it. pervade most of the region’s continental countries. Rural in-
No mechanism exists to calm the geological instability that un- digenous cultures, from Canada’s far north to the southern An-
derlies much of the region. During the 20th century alone, the des, are persisting against a massive and irreversible trend of
Americas suffered 176 earthquakes at a cost of 190,000 lives. In urbanization. To some extent, these distinctions reflect histori-
recent decades, tens of thousands of people died in earthquakes cal and cultural identities. Most Latin Americans who identify
in Peru (1970 and 2007), Nicaragua (1972), Guatemala (1976), themselves as members of indigenous peoples are clustered in
the Andes. Amazon tribes and the Guaranı́ people of Paraguay
are among the exceptions.
1 See David de Ferranti et al., “Inequality in Latin America and

the Caribbean: Breaking with History?” The World Bank, 2003, 2 See Matt Pritchard, “Natural Hazards: Keeping Them

2, http://lnweb18.worldbank.org/LAC/LAC.nsf/ECADocByUnid/ from Becoming Natural Disasters in Latin America,” ReVista

4112F1114F594B4B85256DB3005DB262?Opendocument (ac- (Winter 2007): 30–33, http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/files/
cessed December 2, 2007). 4613c6a1bb9b7/revista winter07 web.pdf.
 INTRODUCTION 5

Latin American societies became predominantly urban dur- Americans would never be ready for democracy. He might have
ing the second half of the 20th century, with 75 percent of the been unhappy to learn that the reasoning he used served as a
region’s 500 million people living in cities by the year 2000, rationale for any number of 20th-century rulers who insisted
according to a United Nations study. Three Latin American ur- that their countries weren’t prepared for truly representative
ban centers—Mexico City, population approximately 19 mil- government.
lion; São Paulo, 18 million; and Buenos Aires, 13 million—are More recently, Mexico’s Lázaro Cárdenas (1895–1970), in
among the world’s 20 “mega-cities.”3 many respects a reformer who played something of the same
Rapidly expanding cities, inadequate job creation, and role in his country’s political culture as Franklin D. Roosevelt
frayed social safety nets have created a huge urban underclass in the United States, nevertheless helped consolidate the PRI,
throughout the region. Often residents of sprawling shanty- with its deeply undemocratic system of presidents choosing
towns, these so-called marginal citizens account for most crime their successors.
victims and for the robbers, kidnappers, and drug dealers who Most caudillos have shown few of the benign instincts that
have created a permanent crime wave in most of the region’s Cárdenas displayed. Among the many 20th-century strong-
big cities. Journalists who have reported on organized crime in men known more for repression and corruption are Augusto
countries including Mexico and Colombia have paid with their Pinochet (1915–2006), who headed Chile’s military junta from
lives. 1973 to 1988; Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua (1925–1980),
In the age of dictatorships, critical journalists were hunted who inherited his father’s dictatorship; and Rafael Trujillo
by government agents, not gangsters, and crime waves were (1891–1961) of the Dominican Republic. The latter’s rule
unknown. The price for freedom from nonpolitical crime was ended with his assassination; Somoza was assassinated in ex-
paid in massacres and death squad killings of alleged political ile following his overthrow; and Pinochet spent his last years
opponents. Not surprisingly, the crime upsurge has led some fighting indictments for corruption and human rights abuse.
to call for the old mano dura—the strong hand. The fates of these once all-powerful rulers make clear why the
life of a strongman doesn’t beckon as brightly today as it did
Twilight of the Caudillos only a few decades ago.
President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela began his career
The strongman, or caudillo, is a recurring figure throughout as leader of the failed Venezuelan coup of 1992, and then
Latin America and the Caribbean. Spanish political culture’s moved into electoral politics. A declared disciple of both Simón
emphasis on personal leadership and disdain for democratic Bolı́var and Fidel Castro, Chávez has broken with Castro’s
mechanics helped set the stage. Indeed, Spain itself didn’t grow precedent by insisting on adherence to democratic procedures.
out of the caudillo era until the death of dictator Francisco He paid the price in December 2007, when voters rejected his
Franco in 1975. In the Americas, a constant pattern of polit- proposal to amend the Venezuelan constitution to allow unlim-
ical and social disorder that seemed to call for a strongman ited presidential terms.
in charge kept the region for most of its independent life in a Other chief executives also have used democratic mecha-
cycle of turbulence followed by the emergence of yet another nisms to allow them to stay in office longer. As recently as
caudillo. the 1990s, the originally elected President Alberto Fujimori of
As that history implies, some caudillos are fondly remem- Peru won voter approval of a constitutional term-succession
bered. Simón Bolı́var (1783–1830), who led the war for inde- provision, and then maneuvered parliamentary approval of a
pendence of northern South America (José de San Martı́n and third successive term. This was before his corrupt regime col-
Bernardo O’Higgins commanded independence forces in the lapsed; he is now on trial for human rights abuses, having fled
southern part of the continent), had an upper-class distrust for to and been extradited from Chile.
direct democracy. “Institutions which are wholly representative But in Colombia, the enormously popular President Álvaro
are not suited to our character, customs, and present knowl- Uribe won parliamentary approval for a constitutional change
edge,” he wrote in his long “Reply of a South American to a that enabled him to run for a second successive term, which
Gentleman of This Island [Jamaica]” in 1815. “As long as our he did. Uribe’s supporters are considering allowing him a third
countrymen do not acquire the abilities and political virtues that successive term, which he may try. Uribe’s temperament verges
distinguish our brothers of the north, wholly popular systems, on autocratic; he recently accused of corruption a Supreme
far from working to our advantage, will, I greatly fear, bring Court justice who had ordered an investigation of Uribe’s
about our downfall.”4 Still, Bolı́var was not writing that Latin cousin. But whatever authoritarian tendencies he may possess
have been curbed by a still-powerful system of checks and
3 “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision—Fact balances.
Sheet 7,” United Nations, Department of Economic and So- Further south, the forms of electoral democracy coexist
cial Affairs, Population Division, 2006, http://www.un.org/esa/ with a tradition of spousally enabled continuity in office. The
population/publications/WUP2005/2005WUP FS7. pdf. politically popular Argentine President Néstor Kirchner and
4 “Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of This Island

[Jamaica],” September, 6, 1815, in Selected Writings of Bolivar, faculty.smu.edu/bakewell/BAKEWELL/texts/jamaica-letter.html

trans. Lewis Bertrand (New York: Colonial Press, 1951), http:// (accessed December 9, 2007).
6 INTRODUCTION

his wife, Cristina, a former senator, traded places when she in the late 15th century, Pope Alexander VI decreed that Spain
won election in 2007. The expectation is that Néstor Kirchner and its Iberian Peninsula neighbor, Portugal, had to divide the
will run for office again after Cristina Kirchner’s four-year term unexplored globe between them. A territorial division that the
ends. Members of a party founded by populist caudillo Juan two powers agreed to in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 effec-
Perón, the Kirchners were using a method he employed under tively gave Portugal dominion over the then-unknown region
different circumstances. In 1974, when Perón took ill, his third that became Brazil.
wife, Isabel, was sworn in as interim president, a post she kept Portuguese and Spanish aren’t entirely alone on the South
until 1976. American continent. Tens of thousands of people throughout
In Bolivia, the election of a charismatic one-time leader of Latin America speak indigenous languages, such as Guaranı́
coca-growing farmers—the first member of an Indian commu- in Paraguay and Quechua in Bolivia, and may speak Spanish
nity to be elected as head of state in Bolivia’s history—has in- as well. The Linguistic Society of America lists more than
tensified the country’s bitter ethnic-tinged socioeconomic con- 158 Indian languages in Brazil alone.6 English is spoken in
flict. Street violence that erupted during a political battle over Belize, a tiny former British possession. Further south, Guyana,
a new constitution led President Evo Morales to call in early formerly known as British Guiana, is also Anglophone.
December 2007 for a national vote on whether he and nine re- Purely local languages persist in some corners of the Amer-
gional governors should remain in office. Six of the nine oppose icas that remain isolated despite the overall expansion of ur-
him. “If the people say ‘Evo’s going,’ I’ve got no problem— ban territories. The New York Times has reported the case of
I’m democratic,” Morales said in a televised speech. In earlier a tongue, Palenquero, created centuries ago by rebel ex-slaves
decades, the events might well have served to justify a military along Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Some of their descendants
coup. Morales’s declaration made clear that that old method is in a small, hard-to-reach inland village still speak the lan-
no longer considered acceptable, at least for the moment. guage. One of Palenquero’s contributing strains is the Kikongo
Equally noteworthy, in Guatemala’s November 2007 presi- language of Congo and Angola; another is Portuguese, a re-
dential elections, voters rejected an ex-military man—a classic flection of the predominant nationality of 17th-century slave
would-be caudillo—who had vowed to call in the army to fight traders.7
criminals who have made the country one of the most danger- Portuguese forms a strand of another language born of
ous in the region. Instead, Guatemalans elected Álvaro Colom, African slavery. Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, self-governing
a center-left president who explicitly rejected a military crack- Caribbean islands still part of the Kingdom of the Nether-
down as a strategy out of the country’s past. lands, are home to Papiamentu. That tongue grew out of Por-
A spirit of self-critical reflection has taken hold in the region tuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and West African and native Indian
casting the old traditions of strongman rule in a poor light. “We languages.
in Latin America are not trying to look for a leader,” President English is the mother tongue in Jamaica and the other 14
Luiz Inácio (“Lula”) da Silva of Brazil, a former union activist nation-states that make up the “British West Indies,” as they
from a poor family, told the New York Times in September 2007. are still called; 5 of them remain British possessions. In their
“We don’t need a leader. What we need to do is build political day-to-day business most Jamaicans, and residents of some of
harmony because South America and Latin America need to the other Anglophone islands, speak a creole English often
learn the lesson of the 20th century. We had the opportunity to impossible for English speakers from elsewhere to understand.
grow, we had the opportunity to develop ourselves, and we lost English is also an official language in Belize (formerly British
that opportunity. So we still continue to be poor countries.”5 Honduras) and Guyana (formerly British Guiana).
In Haiti and Martinique (the latter still part of France), a
Languages similar language regime prevails. French is an official language,
though in Haiti the dominant tongue is Creole (Kreyòl ), which
To outsiders, major divergences in political culture from is rooted in French and African tongues. Fluency in French is
country to country tend to be masked by the prevalence of one an unmistakable sign of education.
language, Spanish. In the continental region that runs south- Across the border from Haiti, Spanish reigns in the Do-
ward from Mexico’s border with the United States, Spanish minican Republic. Cuba is also Spanish-speaking (as is Puerto
enjoys a near-monopoly. That linguistic presence would be Rico, a U.S. possession).
a real monopoly but for the presence of another language in Throughout the southern zone of the hemisphere, English
the region’s biggest and richest country, Brazil. Its version of is widely spoken among top businesspeople and, increasingly,
Portuguese bears roughly the same relationship to Spanish as among politicians. Maintaining business connections with the
French does to Italian. United States, earning a degree from one of its universities, and
Portuguese owes its presence in the Americas to the stroke
of a pen. As the age of European exploration was beginning 6 See The Linguist List, Linguistic Society of America,

2008, http://www.linguistlist.org/forms/langs/find-a-language-or-
5 Quoted in Alexei Barrionuevo, “A Resilient Leader Trumpets family.html.
Brazil’s Potential in Agriculture and Biofuels,” New York Times, 7 See Simon Romero, “A Language, Not Quite Spanish, with

September 23, 3007, A12. African Echoes,” New York Times, October 18, 2007, A4.
 INTRODUCTION 7

having the ability to send one’s children to its schools all mark century conflict in Brazil’s desperately poor northeast led by
privileged status elsewhere in the Americas. Brazil again stands a messianic prophet was more of a peasant uprising than a
out as an exception. The relative unimportance of English for church-state war). In the 1920s, Mexican Catholic guerrillas,
Brazilians reflects their country’s sense of self-sufficiency. the cristeros, waged an insurgency against the central govern-
ment. With the victory of the state, the Mexican Church defini-
Religion tively lost the political power that it had enjoyed in colonial
times and the early postcolonial period.
All Europeans arrived in the New World with at least some Elsewhere in the region, the Church and indigenous peoples
notion of converting indigenous peoples to Christianity. Of the made accommodations of belief and practice along the same
colonizers, the Spanish took that mission most seriously, be- lines as in Mexico. In Brazil, Cuba, and the French colony,
cause the church-state link formed a crucial element of their Saint Domingue, that became Haiti, the religions of Africa that
political culture. When the Spanish explorations began, the slaves brought with them also melded with Catholicism, but
Christian monarchs of Spain had just won a religious war, not completely. Slaves’ descendants kept more of the mother
reestablishing themselves throughout Spain at the end of the continent’s beliefs and practices. As a result, throughout the
15th century, after vanquishing the last of the Muslim rulers Afro-Americas, the African religions and Catholicism exist
who had governed a good part of the Iberian Peninsula for 700 side-by-side, often drawing on the same pool of worshipers
years. rather than having achieved a complete synthesis.
Those circumstances lent the Spanish conquests from the In the 1960s, one wing of the Church emerged as a major
start a more religious character than those of the other European political force. As challenges to governments and ruling classes
powers, especially the British, whose ranks were filled with re- gathered strength throughout the region, some priests and bish-
ligious dissenters. For the Spanish, observed one of Mexico’s ops aligned themselves explicitly with those demanding radical
great 20th-century writers, Octavio Paz, “The conversion le- change. Colombia’s Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army
gitimized the conquest. This politico-religious philosophy was (Ejército de Liberación Nacional—ELN) included two priests
diametrically opposed to that of English colonizing; the idea of in its ranks in the 1960s, one of whom rose to command the
evangelization occupied a secondary place in England’s colo- organization until his death in 1998. Both guerrilla priests drew
nial expansion.”8 their initial sympathy for armed conflict from the “Liberation
Although Spain and the other Old World empires eventually Theology” movement.
were forced out of the Americas, the religion they brought But most adherents of this influential school of Catholicism
with them remained. Roman Catholicism sank deep roots in rejected violence and Marxism-Leninism. At its simplest, Lib-
the culture of Spanish America. Above all, this development eration Theology holds that the Church must side with the
reflected the willingness of both missionaries and indigenous impoverished masses to the point of fighting for social justice.
peoples to adapt and blend their beliefs. “Certain Indian ideas— This means discarding charity alone as a way to help poor peo-
gods sacrificing themselves for men, the need to do penance, ple. Charity, the liberationists hold, effectively maintains injus-
the stoic acceptance of suffering, the evanescence and futility of tice because it seeks to alleviate immediate problems without
earthly pleasures—resembled those of the new faith,” historian attacking deeper conditions. Liberation theologians distilled
Enrique Krauze wrote about the Mexican experience, which and summarized their conclusions at a bishops’ conference
other nations shared.9 in Medellı́n, Colombia, in 1968. The “institutionalized vio-
Mexican Indians’ collective acceptance of Catholicism was lence” of the class hierarchy, they declared, grew out of a con-
consecrated by an event in 1531. The Virgin of Guadalupe, a temporary colonial system that, “seeking unbounded profits,
Spanish incarnation of the Virgin Mary, was recorded as having foment[s] an economic dictatorship and the international im-
appeared to Juan Diego, an Indian peasant, at the very place perialism of money.”10 Post–World War II France had seen a
where a pre-Columbian mother-goddess, Tonantzin, had been similar movement. There, “worker priests” doffed their clerical
worshipped. Over time, the Virgin became the supreme icon of garb, took jobs in factories, and joined unions, all in an effort
Mexican popular culture, both the mother figure of Christian to show workers that the Church was on their side. The Vatican
belief and a completely Mexican saint. That is, she represented shut the movement down in 1954, though it was later allowed
the dual heritage at the core of Mexican identity, even though to start again.
the church as an institution arrayed itself as the major opponent Liberation Theology too soon found itself in trouble with
to construction of a secular state. the hierarchy, especially in the Vatican. Before ascending to
That long conflict reached the point of open warfare, the the papacy, Pope John Paul II had shown some sympathy for
only such event in the history of the Americas (a late 19th- the “worker priests.” But with the Latin American political en-
vironment of the 1980s polarized between left and right, there
8 Octavio Paz, “Mexico and the United States,” The New Yorker, was no question which side of the divide the Liberationists
September 17, 1979, in The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove
Press, 1985), 361. 10 Quoted in Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People The Struggle for
9 See Enrique Krauze, Mexico Biography of Power (New York: Human Rights in Latin America—the Catholic Church in Conflict
Harper Perennial, 1997), 70. with U.S. Policy (New York: Penguin, 1991), 38.
8 INTRODUCTION

occupied. The Polish pope, a survivor of a totalitarian system 50 years ago, the Protestant Pentecostal surge draws on a power-
that cloaked oppression with some of the same vocabulary the ful social current. Along with Guatemala, the countries where
Liberationists employed, disciplined some of its leading expo- the trend has registered with greatest force are Brazil, Chile,
nents, forcing at least one of them from the Church. Sympathies Argentina, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. All are nations that have
for Cuba by some Liberation Theology priests was also a red suffered grievously from civil conflict and class divisions. Yet
line for the pope, given Castro’s alliance with the Soviet Union, other countries about which the same could be said—Bolivia,
oppressor of the Pope’s native Poland and the rest of Eastern and for example, or Honduras—have seen Pentecostalism gain far
Central Europe. (Fr. Alberto Libânio Christo, “Frei Betto,” con- less ground. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life notes
ducted long, sympathetic interviews with Castro that became a that Pentecostalism is also growing in Mexico, Colombia, and
book in which the Cuban comandante expressed sympathy for Peru. In most of these countries, members of Indian commu-
Liberation Theology.) nities have made up major portions of the Protestant churches’
Some Latin American churchmen with sympathies for the flocks.11
movement came into conflict with their fellows over allegiance Questions over national receptivity aside, there is little ques-
to the Cuban-inspired revolutionary model. During the San- tion of Pentecostalism’s appeal on a personal level. Much credit
dinista period in Nicaragua, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, goes to its insistence on personal discipline, a message that re-
archbishop of Managua, made a transition from supporter of sounds among many poor and lower-middle-class households.
the Sandinista insurrection to prominent opponent of the revo- Giving up drinking and smoking, remaining faithful to one’s
lutionary government, a government that included four Liber- partner—these are among the basic requirements of Pentecostal
ation Theology–identified priests in senior positions, three of churches.
them cabinet ministers. Catholicism, perhaps because of its history of adapting it-
Elsewhere in Central America, priests and nuns played ma- self to local custom, is seen as demanding less of its believers in
jor roles as human rights defenders against military counterin- their daily lives. But how many nominal Roman Catholics can
surgency campaigns. In fact, much of the peasant organizing in be counted as believers? Notwithstanding the Church’s histori-
El Salvador that large landowners and the military viewed as a cal position and Catholicism’s cultural roots, millions of Latin
gestating communist revolution began in “base communities,” Americans have little connection to the institutional Church.
prayer and study groups led by Liberation Theology priests or Edward L. Cleary, O.P., a political scientist and a Dominican
lay workers with liberationist training. priest with missionary experience in Latin America, writes that
Archbishop Oscar Romero (1917–1980) of San Salvador “the major sector of Catholicism affected by this shift has been
was assassinated as a result of his human rights advocacy; other that of nominal, indifferent Catholics, who have supplied most
priests in El Salvador and Guatemala met the same fate. Yet in of the converts to Pentecostalism.”12 Cleary may not be an en-
the most dramatic illustration possible that the Church was not tirely disinterested observer. Nevertheless, the erosion of the
of one mind on sociopolitical issues, an Argentine ex-priest institutional Catholic Church is plain to see in Latin America.
was convicted in 2007 of participation in seven murders, 42 To the extent that millions of people feel the need for an or-
kidnappings, and 31 cases of torture while serving as police ganized spiritual presence in their lives, the Pentecostals have
chaplain during the military dictatorship of the late 1970s and been knocking on an open door.
early 1980s.
In Haiti, a Liberation Theology priest, Jean-Bertrand Aris- Politics, Intellectuals, and the Media
tide, reached his nation’s highest office. But he resigned from
the priesthood in 1994, under what he called pressure from the Spanish has no word for “accountability.” That facet of
church hierarchy. the major language of the Americas has become a truism of
Liberation Theology may have divided the Church against Latin American politics. But long before anyone commented
itself. But in the years since the insurgencies and counterinsur- on the monarchist strain still running through Spanish political
gencies of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s wound down (except in vocabulary, Latin Americans knew that the inner workings of
Colombia), another challenge has come to face the Church as a their governments, in nearly all countries, were closed to them.
whole. Protestantism, specifically Pentecostalism, has made a Throughout the region, newspaper reporting was a low-
place for itself in the Latin American religious landscape. The prestige, low-paid occupation. Reporters, often corrupt by
challenge to Catholicism arose rapidly. Despite that dramatic
entrance, after more than four centuries of Catholic dominance, 11 Figures cited from Overview Pentacostalism in Latin

the chances of converting an entire country verge on nil. Since America, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, October 2006,
the Reformation era in Europe, times have changed sufficiently http://pewforum.org/surveys/pentecostal/latinamerica (accessed
that, in the only country in which a head of government openly December 1, 2007).
espoused Pentecostalism (Guatemala), his religious affiliation 12 See Edward L. Cleary O.P., “Shopping Around: Questions

did not force a national religious conversion. about Latin American Conversion,” International Bulletin of Mis-
Even so, Pentecostals now account for 75 million people in sionary Research, University of Texas, Religion in Latin America,
the region, about 13 percent of the total population. In a region http://www.providence.edu/las/Brookings.html (accessed Decem-
that was close to 100 percent Roman Catholic as recently as ber 1, 2007).
 INTRODUCTION 9

sheer necessity, covered daily events, while intellectuals—who claim by President Uribe that one of the journalists had helped
often had more freedom of maneuver—wrote analyses and the ex-mistress of a slain druglord write a book that accused
commentaries. Traditionally, members of the educated classes the president of ties to the late gangster. The journalist denied
tried to fill the vacuum with political journalism, essays, novels, the allegation.
and other works of art. One example among many: Mario Var- Elsewhere, reporters have paid for their work with their
gas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral (1969) reveals more lives. In 2007 alone, the committee records reporters (or, in
about the operation of Peru’s authoritarian military regime of one case, news employees) gunned down in Guatemala, Haiti,
the 1950s than newspapers of the time could publish, or than Honduras, Mexico, and Paraguay—a total of eight murders,
politicians could say publicly. in addition to the shooting and wounding of a Brazilian jour-
Colombian Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez’s nalist and two nonfatal grenade attacks against a newspaper
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) has become a common in the border state of Sonora, a drug syndicate center. Four of
point of reference throughout the Americas for surrealism in all those killed were radio reporters, the backbone of journalism
dimensions of life, including politics. Arguably, the book tells in smaller towns throughout Latin America.
more about the interplay of personal honor, family ties, and Independent journalists in Cuba face a different set of prob-
the remoteness of central government than Garcı́a Márquez’s lems. Nongovernmental media don’t exist on the island, so in-
own political journalism, the field in which he began in the dependent journalists by definition file their reports abroad.
late 1940s as an editorial writer and reporter in Colombia’s With that practice, they have opened themselves to charges
Caribbean coastal region. by the government that they are betraying their country. As
Today’s journalists operate largely free of the state control, of mid-2007, 24 Cuban journalists were imprisoned; 22 have
spoken or unspoken, that stunted the careers of so many of their been behind bars since a March 2003 crackdown. They were
professional ancestors. The legacy of journalism as instrument convicted of charges including acting against “the indepen-
of big political and economic interests runs strong. Still, readers dence or territorial integrity of the state” and “the security of
in nearly all the big cities of the region can find newspapers and the state.”15
magazines that have managed to carve out a space for indepen- Though the written word hasn’t lost its power to provoke,
dent and critical journalism. (Brazil, an exceptional case, has a the advent of private television stations throughout the region in
stronger tradition of powerful but hard-hitting newspapers and the 1990s has shaken up the media industry. Tabloid-style news
magazines.) shows have proved especially popular. And secretly recorded
Disturbingly, censorship by government has been replaced videotape has emerged as a political weapon. The final collapse
in many countries by censorship by gangsters, especially in of the regime of Peruvian strongman Alberto Fujimori in 2000
small towns and cities. In Colombia, traditionally one of the began after a television station broadcasted tapes taken by his
most perilous countries for journalists, the New York–based intelligence chief, showing him bribing politicians and two TV
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that most jour- station owners on the regime’s behalf. In Mexico, two close
nalists in the provinces had abandoned reporting on topics such associates of the populist Mexico City mayor were shown, re-
as drug trafficking, paramilitary activities, and corruption. The spectively, gambling big money in Las Vegas and taking a bribe
dangers of pursuing such themes had become clear: The CPJ from a businessman.
recorded 54 journalists killed in the period from 1986 to 2006, Another indicator of the decline of writing is that artists
making it one of the four most dangerous countries in the world who want to shine a light on their societies are turning to film
for reporters since the mid-1980s (the others are Iraq, Algeria, and video rather than the novel. Mexican filmmaker Daniel
and the Balkans).13 Sarinana takes up that very theme in a popular 1999 movie,
In 2007, one Colombian journalist was killed, though the Todo el Poder (All the Power), that shows a moviemaker turning
CPJ called the circumstances unclear. The government cred- his camera on crime bosses, at a time when rampant lawlessness
ited the virtual absence of assassinations to an official policy had Mexicans terrified.
of providing armored cars, bulletproof vests, and bodyguards More recently, a Brazilian filmmaker lit a firestorm of con-
to threatened journalists. The CPJ countered that journalists’ troversy in 2007 with a film, Elite Squad, on the activities of an
self-censorship is another reason for the somewhat improved antigang police unit that runs rampant through slum areas, tor-
security climate.14 turing and killing. The film has opened a debate on the morality
In any event, death threats against Colombian journalists and efficacy of these tactics. Though the film, strictly speak-
continue. In 2007, three reporters were forced to flee Colombia ing, is fictional, the unit exists; the co-screenwriter is a former
because of death threats. In one case, the threats followed a member of the squad.
A pioneer of the new wave of film and video social re-
13 See “Special Report 2006” and “A New Front in Mexico,” alism, Venezuelan novelist and newspaper columnist Ibsen
November 7, 2007, Committee to Protect Journalists, http://cpj. Martı́nez used a classic Latin American melodramatic vehicle,
org (accessed December 5, 2007). See also “Attacks on the Press
in 2007—Americas,” 2008, http://cpj.org/attacks07/americas07/ 15 See “Cuban Journalist Released after 15 Months in Prison,”

col07.html (accessed March 8, 2008). August 21, 2007; “Cuba’s Draconian Laws,” Committee to Protect
14 See “Attacks on the Press.” Journalists, http://cpj.org (accessed December 5, 2007).
10 INTRODUCTION

the telenovela (soap opera), to attack the corruption and dishon- member, Neruda also provided diplomatic protection for the
esty of the political and economic system in the 1990s, which painter David Alfaro Siqueiros following his participation in
came to a head under President Carlos Andrés Pérez. Por estas the first, failed, assassination attempt against dissident Soviet
calles (On These Streets) became a big hit and helped rouse the exile Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), an operation mounted by the
civic consciousness that gave the former golpista Hugo Chávez Soviet NKVD, predecessor to the KGB.18
his first electoral victory in 1998. In the Caribbean islands, whose smaller populations make
“In that telenovela all the politicians were cynical, all multiple careers even more common, the leading figure of
the businessmen were for the ‘small state’ and for that reason Trinidad and Tobago’s independence movement and its leading
kept corrupt officials on the payroll, and all violations of law postindependence leader was Eric Williams (1911–1981), an
by the down-and-out poor were justified,” Martı́nez wrote in a Oxford-educated historian whose books include From Colum-
recent semiconfessional essay that also shows how small the bus to Castro The History of the Caribbean. In the Americas
world is for Latin American intellectuals. “During the week, today, a professional historian such as Williams likely would
as scriptwriter for Por estas calles I played the part of street not rise to the very top of a political system. Lower-ranking
agitator. On Sundays, in my Sunday column in El Nacional, members of government may have backgrounds as intellec-
I quoted Alain Touraine or Pierre Bourdieu* while obnox- tuals, but only full-time politicians become presidents. And
iously attacking the performance of Pérez’ economic cabi- full-time politicians don’t have the time, apparently, for schol-
net members, many of them friends of mine. Being a ‘pub- arship.
lic intellectual’ in Venezuela was never as easy as it was in
the ’90s.”16
Martinez, who more recently has become an ardent critic of Relations with the United States
Chávez, has never traded pen for government position. And in
turning a critical eye on himself and his brethren, he is break- Part I
ing with the custom of political intellectuals worldwide. (“The
belief in the independence of intellectuals, as so much of the Since the 19th century, no single nation has loomed larger
twentieth century proves, is nothing but a fairy tale,” writes for Western Hemisphere countries than the United States. Like
Charles Simic, poet laureate of the United States.17 ) neighbors of all large countries, the nations of Latin America
Latin American intellectuals, more than their counterparts and the Caribbean have developed complicated relationships
elsewhere, enjoy a long tradition of serving in senior govern- with the presence they can’t ignore. A sometimes brutal his-
ment positions. Francisco Santos, former editor of El Tiempo, tory, the long reach of U.S. economic power, and the magnetic
Colombia’s major daily, and an ex-journalist for the leading quality of U.S. popular culture form contributing elements.
Spanish newspaper, El Paıs, is vice president of Colombia. Another influence has taken hold in recent years, as millions
Jorge G. Castañeda, who was Mexico’s foreign minister in of people from the region have moved to or visited the United
2000–2003, has been otherwise engaged, more or less simul- States. In the past, most Latin Americans depended on what
taneously, as a university professor, political activist, jour- they heard about the United States. Today, residents or visitors
nalist, and author. Mario Vargas Llosa, one of a handful of forming their own impressions of the United States come from
Latin American novelists who has reached global literary star- every class, with ordinary working folk the majority, outnum-
dom, ran for president of Peru in 1990 but lost. Teodoro bering the privileged who have long traveled back and forth
Petkoff, a Venezuelan economics student-turned-guerrilla in between home and the United States.
the 1960s, then planning minister in the mid-1990s, edits But even without the benefit of travel or modern mass me-
Tal Cual, a newspaper that is a major voice of opposition to dia, politically aware Latin Americans realized by the time the
Chávez. 20th century dawned that the United States was the power with
History offers even more examples. Octavio Paz (1914– which they had to reckon.
1988), a poet and essayist who was one of the region’s No- In 1900, José Enrique Rodó, a Uruguayan writer, authored
bel laureates, was a career Mexican diplomat (he resigned in an impassioned essay that served for decades as a manifesto
protest of a massacre of students in 1968). Mexican novelist of Latin American values to be defended from the encroaching
Carlos Fuentes, an ambassador’s son, entered the diplomatic giant to the north. Rodó warned Latin American youth against
corps for a time in the 1970s. Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), an- a United States he defined as boorish, purely utilitarian, and
other Nobel Prize–winning poet, was a member of the Chilean profit-driven. Latin American civilization, by contrast, embod-
foreign service in the 1930s and 1940s. As a Communist Party ied a respect for art and culture inherited from Greece and
Rome. “The North American has managed to acquire . . . the
∗ French sociologists and social activists. satisfaction and vanity of sumptuary magnificence, but has not
16 Ibsen Martı́nez, “Una Conversación con Moisés Naı́m,” Le- succeeded in acquiring the chosen mark of good taste,” Rodó
tras Libres (November 2007), http://www.letraslibres. com/index.
php?art = 12459. 18 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona Decoding So-
17 Charles Simic, “The Renegade,” New York Review of Books, viet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
December 20, 2007, 70. 2000), 277.
 INTRODUCTION 11

wrote in Ariel (1900). “The ideal of beauty doesn’t strike pas- Mercader, a Spaniard partly of Cuban descent, spent his final
sion in the heart of the descendant of the austere puritans. Nor years on the island as an honored retiree.20
does the ideal of truth.” The essay struck a chord throughout the
entire Spanish-speaking world. But beginning in the 1930s, and Part II
in far greater numbers in the 1960s and 1970s, Latin Ameri-
cans preoccupied with U.S. power turned from esthetics to class After World War II, with the United States and the Soviet
struggle. Marxism, with its hardheaded focus on material con- Union locked in confrontation, Roosevelt’s successors mixed
ditions and social justice, came closer, paradoxically, to the his kid-glove approach with a strong dose of raw power.
“North American” spirit that Rodó found so crass. Throughout the Cold War, with some exceptions, U.S. ad-
U.S. activities in a nearby area of the hemisphere during the ministrations of both parties supported military or military-
first three decades of the 20th century did their part to inspire a backed strongmen. They were virtually the only brand of
tough-minded view of regional geopolitics. Panama, site of the politician whom Washington trusted to maintain a consistently
United States-built-and-owned Atlantic-Pacific canal, became pro-American and anti-Soviet stance.
a de facto U.S. possession. Military occupations of Haiti and That strategy was first deployed in Guatemala. There, in
the Dominican Republic followed, as well as repeated military 1954, the CIA overthrew an elected government on the grounds
interventions in Nicaragua. The latter saw U.S. creation of a that its left-wing orientation posed a political threat to the region
military force which, in 1934, murdered a popular left-wing and an economic threat to U.S. business interests. Most impor-
nationalist guerrilla, Augusto Sandino. tant among the latter was the United Fruit Co., whose board
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) opened a new chapter had included CIA chief Allen Dulles. The former law firm of
in hemispheric relations in 1934 with his “good neighbor” pol- his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, also had rep-
icy. Its accomplishments included a refusal to retaliate against resented the company in Guatemala. In place of the elected
Mexico for a 1938 nationalization of the oil industry that shut government, the CIA installed a military regime. Guatemala
down operations of U.S. oil companies. For all of the benign wouldn’t see another freely elected government until 1986.
aura with which Roosevelt surrounded his moves, he was a The Guatemala coup inflated U.S. confidence to the point
highly practical politician who was building goodwill among that officials believed in their ability to shape events in Latin
U.S. neighbors in anticipation of a war against distant powers. America at will. But the coup was followed only five years
His strategic vision is summed up in a remark he is said to have later by the Cuban revolution. The triumph of Fidel Castro and
made about the U.S.-sponsored dictator of Nicaragua, Anas- his guerrilla army in 1959 set off a chain of events that tested
tasio Somoza: “He’s a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.” American officials’ belief in their omnipotence. The series of
The line, a version of which was first reported in 1939, most defeats that the Cuban revolutionary regime and its Soviet ally
likely is apocryphal. However, some historians view it as an inflicted on the United States proved decisive for American
accurate summation of the American foreign policy establish- policy in the region until the Cold War ended.
ment’s unsentimental view of foreign relations in general and The outcome of the Cuban revolution fulfilled Ameri-
Latin American affairs in particular.19 can leaders’ worst expectations for political movements that
Whoever coined the remark, it anticipated Cold War atti- promised social and economic equality. As Cuban dictator Fi-
tudes. An event that occurred during the same period helped del Castro consolidated his rule, he took on the role of world-
set the stage for the long United States–Soviet Union standoff: class challenger to the United States. He supplied training and
the assassination in Mexico of Trotsky, the exiled revolutionary other aid to Marxist guerrilla armies in the region, while de-
who had become Stalin’s major enemy on the left. Trotsky had nouncing the United States as the imperialist power behind
been welcomed to Mexico by President Cárdenas, but Mexi- oligarchic regimes. Castro’s defiance of the United States ac-
can sanctuary couldn’t protect Trotsky from Stalin’s campaign counted for much of his appeal. Only 33 years old at his moment
to exterminate his left-wing opponents. Those who did survive of victory, and surrounded by even younger comrades, he and
were among the leading opponents of Stalin’s eventual takeover his fellow revolucionarios—above all the Argentine Ernesto
of Eastern and Central Europe, so Stalin’s strategy reflected a “Che” Guevara—captured the hearts and minds of young peo-
long-range strategy that anticipated the Cold War. ple across the region. All of that would have been dangerous
Cuba became a major front in that conflict. The Cuban enough, from the U.S. point of view. But Castro also brought
writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929–2005), who defected to life the nightmare vision of the U.S. foreign policy establish-
from the Cuban foreign service in 1965, told this writer in 1994 ment: Soviet expansion on America’s doorstep.
that the earliest visible sign of the Soviet hand in the Cuban Initially, the Cuban revolution prompted the John F.
government was the sudden disappearance of books by and Kennedy administration to reexamine the U.S. role in a re-
about Trotsky from Cuban bookstores. Another Cuban tie to gion characterized by social and economic injustice. In 1961
the Trotsky assassination led to the assassin himself. Ramón Kennedy launched the “Alliance for Progress” with the aim of

19 William Safire traced the first reporting of the alleged remark 20 Mercader’s story is told in great detail in Asaltar los Cielos, a

to Time Magazine. See William Safire, “On Language: Realism,” 1996 Spanish documentary. See IMDb, Internet Movie Database,
New York Times, Sunday Magazine, December 24, 2006, 20. www.imdb. com/title/tt0115575.
12 INTRODUCTION

promoting non-Communist reform governments. The initiative tance to Nicaraguan guerrillas, known as the contras, who were
could claim modest success in its early years, but old ways soon trying to topple the Sandinista government. Both the Salvado-
returned. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, sent U.S. ran and Nicaraguan wars grew out of longstanding internal
troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965 to prevent restora- conflicts and tensions. At the same time, the conflicts were
tion of an illegally deposed left-of-center president. By the end proxy confrontations between the United States and the Soviet
of the 1960s, a wave of military governments had seized power Union.
in Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, with U.S. backing or implicit Reagan and his CIA chief, William Casey, saw it as their
approval. mission to help America’s friends fight America’s enemies. In-
Seemingly paradoxically, in 1961 the CIA had plotted the deed, while the United States was sending arms and advis-
assassination of the brutish right-wing dictator, Rafael Trujillo, ers to Central America, the CIA was aiding Afghan rebels
who then ruled the Dominican Republic (and who was, in fight Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. The Afghan aid cam-
fact, assassinated). During the same period, writes New York paign enjoyed widespread political support in the United States.
Times correspondent Tim Weiner in a history of the CIA, the Not so for the U.S. role in Central America, especially the
spy agency and the White House discussed sponsoring the Contra war.
overthrow and killing of the equally malign dictator François Aid to the Nicaraguan rebels defied an explicit congres-
(“Papa Doc”) Duvalier of Haiti.21 sional prohibition. Top administration officials’ contempt for
For the most part, though, the United States during the Cold that law led to the “Iran-Contra” scandal, which involved selling
War used its clout on behalf of right-wing political forces. Most arms to Iran—also prohibited—and using the profit to buy sup-
notoriously, the Nixon administration put the CIA to work to plies for the Nicaraguan rebels. After the scheme came to light,
block the election of socialist Salvador Allende as president of the spectacle of senior administration officials being hauled be-
Chile. After he won, the CIA promoted the idea of a military fore judges and congressional committees electrified spectators
overthrow. Ironically, U.S. intelligence and Allende’s many ene- in Latin America. Critics of the United States had viewed its
mies in the military and business establishment got unintended government as monolithic.
help from the Castro-allied Chilean left, who urged Allende The Reagan administration’s invasion of Grenada, and the
to intensify the class struggle and to arm the masses to fight invasion of Panama by Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush,
off any attempted seizure of power. But the right-wing mili- demonstrated, however, that the era of U.S. military interven-
tary brass deposed Allende in a bloody coup on September 11, tion in the region had not ended. Yet, the 1989 Panama in-
1973. Whether the United States directly participated, those tervention, aimed at toppling strongman Manuel Noriega and
who mounted the coup knew that the United States would wel- arresting him for drug trafficking, came as the Soviet empire
come their move, which proved to be the case. Gen. Augusto was in the process of disintegrating. With its dissolution, the
Pinochet, who headed the military junta, ruled Chile until 1988. Cold War came to an end.
In that year, he lost a plebiscite that he had called.
The 1977–1981 Jimmy Carter administration, with its new Part III
insistence on human rights observance, made a modest differ-
ence in U.S. policy toward a brutal military regime in Argentina, Once the USSR collapsed, the classic justification for sup-
then in the midst of a “dirty war” against the left. Carter had porting autocrats in the Americas disappeared. Indeed, at
a stronger effect in Guatemala, working with Congress to de- roughly the same time as the Soviet Union was fading away,
clare an arms embargo against a government whose counterin- military rule in Chile ended as the result of a national plebiscite.
surgency war against leftist guerrillas was turning its country Brazilian military rulers had anticipated the Chileans by relin-
into a slaughterhouse. quishing power in 1985. And voters in Nicaragua stunned the
President Ronald Reagan, upon taking office in 1981, re- Sandinista government—and its leftist supporters worldwide—
versed Carter’s course in Guatemala, among other countries. by voting in 1989 for a U.S.-supported politician as president.
Nonetheless, Carter’s administration left a lasting impression Peace accords in El Salvador and Guatemala followed.
in Latin America, persuading many that American power could Echoing these political developments, governments almost
be redirected from automatic support for military rulers. everywhere in the region made a break from the statist eco-
Reagan poured American aid into El Salvador, where an nomic policies that had marked virtually their entire histories,
elected civilian government fought a well-organized Marxist both in colonial and postcolonial times. Several trends con-
guerrilla army. The guerrillas enjoyed close coordination be- verged to swing the biggest countries in the region toward U.S.-
tween their military and political wings. But on the govern- style capitalism, the system that outlasted the Soviet Union.
ment side, civilians had little control over the U.S.-backed mil- The Latin American dictatorships and authoritarian regimes,
itary, which was closely linked to death squads that murdered whether of rightist (Argentina, for example) or of rhetorically
thousands of alleged guerrilla sympathizers. During 1980s, the leftist (Mexico) stripe, looked increasingly incapable of man-
Reagan administration also funneled weapons and other assis- aging national economies. That reality was clear to ordinary
citizens of the Americas who had to cope, for instance, with
21 Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes The History of the CIA (New state-owned telephone companies that took months to install
York: Doubleday, 2007), 190. phone lines.
 INTRODUCTION 13

Under presidents such as Carlos Saúl Menem of Argentina banks for $12 billion to businesspeople who included cronies
and Gonzalo (“Goni”) Sánchez de Lozada of Bolivia, Latin of high-level politicians helped fuel a financial crisis in 1994.
America in the 1990s became the world leader in privatization, In its wake, the government renationalized 12 banks—part of
accounting for 55 percent of developing countries’ revenues a bailout that came with a price tag of $62 billion. “Mexicans,
from sales of government-owned businesses worldwide during does it seem right to you that the profits go, once again, to
that decade.22 the few,” Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then president of the
Meanwhile, protectionism, another longstanding feature of leftwing Partido de la Revolucion Democratica, said in 1998,
Latin American statism, was colliding with growing consumer “while the losses go, once again to the majority?”24
demand for higher-quality products made abroad—demand López Obrador was part of a wave of Latin Ameri-
that couldn’t be satisfied by the region’s smugglers, ranging can politicians and activists who condemned the onset of
from airline crews bringing in items for friends or acquain- “neoliberalism”— “liberal” in the European sense of open mar-
tances to gangs of professional contrabandistas. kets. In the Americas and Europe, critics of the process tended
Mexico, which had begun privatizing hundreds of notori- to use that term, while advocates of privatization and related
ously inefficient state enterprises in the 1980s, took the most measures typically favored the term “free markets.”
dramatic step toward opening its economy by approving the Beneath these terminology differences lay a reality in which
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), a treaty be- countries characterized by deeply rooted socioeconomic in-
tween the three countries of North America. NAFTA took ef- equality arguably proved a poor environment for economic
fect in 1994 following U.S. ratification. The trade deal threw shock treatment. “Neoliberal reform takes no prisoners,” Jerry
open Mexico’s long-closed economy to a wave of U.S. imports. Haar, director of the Inter-American Business and Labor pro-
The Mexican “party-state,” the PRI, had thrown its weight be- gram at the University of Miami, told the New York Times in
hind NAFTA. But the sudden influx of U.S. companies, ac- 1999, “and a lot of these governments have failed to provide a
companied by a wave of privatizations of Mexican companies, safety net or focus on the tax and regulatory policies necessary
eroded the party’s control of Mexico’s economy. Those eco- to make free market development work and target allocations
nomic developments hastened the collapse in 2000 of the po- to those in need.”25
litical monopoly the PRI had enjoyed since 1929 as a result By then, the political ripple effects were already evident
of its uninterrupted control of the presidency. The entire chain with the election of Chávez in Venezuela. In 2002, the Latino-
of events illustrated a paradoxical quality of relations with the barometro annual survey of 17 Latin American countries re-
United States. The PRI’s critics on the left tended to oppose ported that 68 percent of respondents found that privatization
NAFTA as a vehicle for putting Mexico at the service of Amer- hadn’t benefited their countries.26 Over the next few years, as
ican corporations, yet the trade agreement also helped topple left-populist leaders such as Chávez, or social democrats in the
the PRI. Lula da Silva mode, rose to the presidencies of their countries,
The U.S. foreign policy establishment, which had enjoyed privatizations ground to a halt. Chávez, in fact, reversed the
a long relationship with the PRI, greeted its dethroning in 2000 trend, nationalizing the country’s major electric utility as well
as part of the worldwide spread of democracy and free-market as two oil-exploration projects owned by ExxonMobil.
capitalism. But, elsewhere in the Americas, the sudden shock The United States hadn’t created the neo-capitalist trend,
of major economic policy shifts proved to be more politically but U.S. officials lost no opportunities to promote and praise
volatile than supporters of the privatization and free-trade wave it. President Bill Clinton, who pushed hard for U.S. ratification
had anticipated. of NAFTA, had described it as a template for a hemispheric
Evidence that newly privatized firms proved more efficient trade deal, the “Free Trade Area of the Americas.” He chaired
and profitable than they’d been in government hands did little a 1994 summit meeting in Miami of political and business
to comfort thousands of workers who lost jobs in the process. leaders from the Americas intended to launch a campaign for
The median privatized firm in the region fired 24 percent of its the proposed pact. “Future generations will look back on the
employees.23
In addition, the privatization process in some countries
showed little sign of the “transparency” that officials of the 24 Quoted in Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, Opening Mexico

United States and international organizations were preaching The Making of a Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
as a democratic free-market virtue. In Mexico, under the PRI 2004), 366–367.
(whose U.S.-trained technocratic wing began the privatiza- 25 Quoted in Larry Rohter, “After a Hard Year, Latin America

tion process in the 1980s) the sale in the early 1990s of 18 Looks for Better Times,” New York Times, December 20, 1999,
C26.
22 Alberto Chong and Florencio López de Silanes, “The Truth 26 Cited in Jorge Carrera et al., “Privatization Discontent and

about Privatization in Latin America,” Inter-American Devel- Its Determinants: Evidence from Latin America,” University
opment Bank, October 2003, 8, http://idbdocs.iadb.org/wsdocs/ of La Plata (Argentina) and University of Milan (Italy), March
getdocument.aspx?docnum=771361 (accessed February 24, 2005, 38, www.iadb.org/res/includes/pub hits.cfm?pub id=S-
2008). 500&pub file name=pubS-500.pdf (accessed February 24,
23 Chong and López de Silanes, 15. 2008).
14 INTRODUCTION

Miami summit as a moment when the course of history in the form of Drug Enforcement Administration agents and military
Americas changed for the better,” Clinton said.27 trainers, include Peru, Bolivia, Haiti, and Mexico. Many com-
More than a decade later, prospects for the hemispheric mentators have likened the antidrug offensive to the Cold War.
pact are dim. And the disenchantment with, at least, the most But differences outnumber similarities. Communism was seen
extreme or corrupt versions of the free-market package revived as a threat largely because it could win the hearts and minds of
skepticism and animosity toward the United States. people on America’s doorstep.
Yet attempts to establish a radical alternative to the neolib- To be sure, drug consumption has grown steadily in Latin
eral model have been foundering. In Venezuela, milk and other America as well, one reason that Colombians aren’t alone in
basic foods have become unavailable while whiskey and other supporting some form of antidrug aid. Mexico, which is see-
luxury goods abound. These results of price controls on sta- ing horrific violence by narcotraficantes in its northern bor-
ples help explain the defeat of Chávez’s proposed constitutional der region, has been more concerned to avoid the presence of
changes in 2007. “Official statistics show no signs of a substan- armed Americans on Mexico soil. Some Mexicans also fear
tial improvement in the well-being of ordinary Venezuelans, that a built-up anti–drug force could ride roughshod over hu-
and in many cases there have been worrying deteriorations,” man rights. Human rights activists have concluded, however,
Francisco Rodrı́guez, chief economist of the Venezuelan Na- that their concerns aren’t shared by President Felipe Calderón’s
tional Assembly (the country’s congress) in 2000–2004, wrote administration.
in an article published in early 2008. “The percentage of un-
derweight babies, for example, increased from 8.4 percent to
9.1 percent between 1999 and 2006. During the same period,
the percentage of households without access to running water
Migration
rose from 7.2 percent to 9.4 percent, and the percentage of fam- Immigration has drawn the Americas closer together so-
ilies living in dwellings with earthen floors multiplied almost cially and economically more than any policy, trend, or event
threefold, from 2.5 percent to 6.8 percent.”28 ever did. The United States is home to more than 19 million
Politically, Chávez’s anti-Americanism remains undimmed. people born in Latin America and the Caribbean (according to
But its use as a mobilizing doctrine, given the failing results of 2005 data, the most recent available).29 People born in Mexico
the president’s economic moves, may have its limits. Never in- make up the single biggest group of immigrants to the United
vaded by the United States, Venezuela has never been a hotbed States from the Americas, and of the entire U.S. foreign-born
of opposition to the nearby superpower. population. Natives of Latin America and the Caribbean region
Colombia provides another example of the variances in U.S. working in the United States sent a total of $45 billion to their
relations in the region. Most people in the region view Ameri- families back home in 2006, the Inter-American Development
can military might through the prism of colonial histories that Bank estimates (counting the contributions of those working
inspire distrust for imperial armies. Yet a majority of Colom- elsewhere, remittances to Latin America and the Caribbean
bians support a president, Álvaro Uribe, who makes his mil- reached an estimated $62 billion).30 This spontaneous family-
itary relationship with the United States a cornerstone of his assistance program exceeds what the region receives in foreign
administration, as did Uribe’s predecessor. The United States is direct investment and foreign aid combined. Naturally, Mexico
helping Colombia wage a counterinsurgency war against guer- is by far the biggest beneficiary ($23 billion in 2006), but ev-
rilla armies who have been trying to topple the Colombian state ery single country in Latin America and the Caribbean receives
since the 1960s. The guerrillas’ deep involvement in the drug remittances that are counted in the millions of dollars.
trade, and their reliance on kidnapping as a fund-raising and The enormity of the migration flow to the United States
terrorism tool, have earned them the revulsion of most Colom- and, increasingly, to Canada marks a widely shared failure to
bians. (So much so that Uribe has even been able to make a provide jobs and possibilities for social advancement for those
disarmament deal with antiguerrilla paramilitaries on favorable born in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. In
terms to them, without paying a high political cost. Mexico, that failure, and the role that NAFTA may have played
U.S. law enforcement and military aid to Colombia pre- in encouraging Mexican workers to migrate, became major
dates Uribe by decades. The assistance grows out of the “war issues in the 2005 presidential campaign. As the candidates
on drugs” (a phrase first used by President Richard M. Nixon in fought for power, 14 percent of the Mexican workforce was
1971). Other countries that have received aid, sometimes in the employed in the United States, according to calculations by the

27 Quoted in Tracy Wilkinson and William R. Long, “Ameri-

cas Summit Ends; Clinton Hails ‘Watershed,’” Los Angeles Times, 29 “Foreign Born by Region of Birth: 2000 and 2005,” Pew

December 12, 1994, A1. Hispanic Center, http://pewhispanic.org/files/other/foreignborn/

28 Francisco Rodrı́guez, “An Empty Revolution: The Unful- Table-2.pdf (accessed December 3, 2007).
filled Promises of Hugo Chávez,” Foreign Affairs (March–April 30 See “The Largest Remittances Market,” Inter-American De-

2008), http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080301faessay87205-p0/ velopment Bank, March 28, 2007, http://www.iadb.org/research/

francisco-rodriguez/an-empty-revolution.html (accessed March 9, homepageDetails.cfm?language=English&conid=61&page=1&
2008). frame=1 (accessed December 6, 2007).
 INTRODUCTION 15

nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think- Class distinctions that take racial form appear even in coun-
tank.31 tries that might seem, to outsiders, not to present an opportunity
American candidates in the primary elections for the 2008 for color prejudice to arise. In Haiti, where the Creole word
U.S. presidential race have followed the example of their Mex- blan, which literally means “white,” signifies “foreigner,” be-
ican counterparts by making immigration a major issue. No- cause virtually the entire nation is black, gradations of skin tone
tably, politicians campaigning for the Republican presidential have played a key role. The so-called mulatto elite dominated
nomination decried the presence of millions of Latin Ameri- the country for much of its post-1804 independent existence
cans with no authorization to be in the country. (a division explicitly reinforced in the early 20th century by
The sound and fury marked a change in treatment of immi- U.S. military occupiers). Language also works to some ex-
gration, specifically Latin American immigration, by national tent as a class signifier: All Haitians speak Kreyòl but the
politicians, including the patron saint of modern Republican- poorest speak nothing else. People with at least some education
ism, Ronald W. Reagan. In 1986, Reagan signed an immigra- also speak French.
tion law overhaul that granted an opportunity for legal status The culture of the neighboring Dominican Republic, whose
to millions of immigrants who were in the country illegally. majority population would qualify as black by U.S. standards,
When that law was found to have made no provision for people also shows a preference for lighter skin and a disdain for
from El Salvador who had fled civil war to settle in the United Haitians. Dictator Rafael Trujillo actively promoted hatred of
States, Reagan issued an order that these migrants not be de- Haitians. Even worse, he ordered a 1937 massacre of an es-
ported. He acted on a plea by President José Napoleón Duarte timated 20,000 Haitians in the Dominican border region. His
(1926–1990) of El Salvador to grant temporary legal status to protegé and eventual successor, Joaquı́n Balaguer, dealt with
his countrymen. Duarte pointed out that El Salvador couldn’t one rival’s ambitions to unseat him by spreading the word that
accommodate an influx of citizens newly deported from the the candidate, who was dark black, was really Haitian. Mis-
United States. Reagan formally rejected Duarte’s petition, but treatment of Haitian migrant workers and refugees is a constant
the U.S. president added, “There will be no large-scale depor- feature of Dominican political life.
tations.”32 Some of today’s Republican politicians might call In one Caribbean country, Cuba, the reigning ideology is
that presidential vow an amnesty. explicitly egalitarian. Nearly a half-century of Communist rule
Duarte had told Reagan that 400,000 to 600,000 refugees, hasn’t sufficed, however, to dissolve a social system of racial
about 10 percent of El Salvador’s population, sent family mem- preferences growing out of the colonial plantation economy.
bers back home as much as $600 million a year. By 2005, the Even diehard loyalists concede that the shortage of Afro-
number of Salvadoran nationals in the United States had grown Cubans at the upper levels of the system is not coinciden-
to nearly 1 million. Thanks in part to Reagan’s refusal to deport tal. The imbalance has become more striking as Cuba’s black
Salvadorans, total remittances to El Salvador from immigrants and mixed-race share of the population has grown, because
abroad reached $3.3 billion in 2006. those who leave Cuba legally or illegally are disproportion-
Meanwhile, two decades of booming migration to the ately white.
United States have forced a consensus throughout the region Another twist on the race/class dynamic comes in the
that no country would be capable of taking back all those who eastern Caribbean region. There, the major social, political,
have left. A related observation that became commonplace and economic divide lies between African-descended and
throughout the region is that migration serves as a safety valve East Indian–descended populations. The twin-island country
for social and political discontent, as well as a relief mechanism of Trinidad and Tobago and the nearby mainland nations of
for economic stress. Guyana have all experienced political conflicts that reflect
the ethnic split in populations. Racial expression of class
differences is less pronounced elsewhere in the Caribbean,
Race and Class where the population tends to be homogeneously of African
descent.
The interplay between race and class that marks U.S. society In the continental Americas, the black-white dynamic so
has counterparts throughout the hemisphere. Broadly speak- familiar in the United States plays out most notably in Brazil,
ing, “whiter” or “European” features tend to be more favored whose large black and mixed-race population—estimates vary
over those that show “Indian” or “African” descent. The rise of from 40 percent to half the population—enjoys little representa-
populist movements in much of the region represents a rebel- tion at the upper levels of politics, business, and the professions
lion against social barriers usually expressed in racial or ethnic but are disproportionately found among Brazil’s poorest. Easy-
terms. going personal relations between Brazilians of all colors long
camouflaged a connection between class and race, one that in
31 See “What Kind of Work Do Immigrants Do?” Migration recent years has become an open topic.
Policy Institute, January 2004, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/ In Colombia, Afro-Colombians concentrated in communi-
pubs/five industry occupation foreign born.pdf. ties along the Pacific coast have long complained of discrimina-
32 Quoted in Robert Pear, “Reagan Rejects Salvadoran Plea on tion, but at about 4 percent of the population lack the numbers
Illegal Aliens,” New York Times, May 15, 1987, A1. to make their grievances a national political issue.
16 INTRODUCTION

In the rest of the continental Americas, the major race/class Indeed throughout the region, the persistence of links be-
gulf lies between Indian- and European-descended popula- tween race or ethnicity and class serves to illustrate the gulf
tions. The nuances of these divides can be confusing. Given between dreams of just social orders and the day-to-day reali-
centuries of mixed relations—mestizaje—millions of citizens ties that the vast majority of the region’s citizens face.
who identify with their larger societies are physically indistin-
guishable from members of indigenous communities, making
cultural self-identification the criterion. This mixed-heritage Introduction to South America
legacy serves to increase the social premium for “European”
appearance. Historical Background
That is even more the case in Paraguay, the landlocked
country bordering Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina. There, in National revolutions throughout the South American con-
a country where an estimated 90 percent of the population tinent had by 1830 created all of the countries that exist today.
speaks the indigenous language, Guaranı, the vast majority of Not all of them were full-fledged countries, however, and some
the population is of mixed ancestry. Some 75 to 80 percent of borders have changed considerably.
Guaranı́-speaking Paraguayans also speak Spanish. Despite the Over the course of the 19th century, South America en-
homogeneity, communities that identified completely with the tered the world economy. But it did so as an exporter of
indigenous culture suffered brutal repression during the 1970s, commodities—Argentina’s wheat, for example, and Bolivia’s
when right-wing ideology permeated the ruling classes of the tin. As a result, the continent became dependent on up-and-
entire region, especially southern South America. down market cycles. Above all, South America was late to
Argentina paid the heaviest price for the rightist orientation develop industries that matched those of Europe, depending
of its rulers during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and instead on the Old World for imports of manufactured goods.
early 1980s. Perversely fitting for a country so self-consciously Indeed, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, South Amer-
“European” in its culture, Argentina is the only nation to suffer ica maintained closer economic and cultural links to Europe
from Europe’s most noxious export, anti-Semitism. Hatred of than to the United States.
Jews played a role in the “dirty war” of the 1970s and early Edwin Williamson of the University of Edinburgh ques-
1980s, reflecting the Argentine security establishment’s em- tions whether the continent’s countries could have taken any
brace of the Old World notion that Communism and Judaism other path of development, given their relative lack of capital
amounted to the same thing. and the state of their educational systems. In any event, South
In three Andean countries, the late 20th and early 21st cen- America imported more than products. By the end of the 19th
turies have been marked by assertions of political power by century, the old Catholic Church–dominated ideas were fading.
Indian majorities. In two of those countries, Peru and Bolivia, “The educated classes were absorbing a truly secular, materi-
presidents who claimed their Indian roots as a point of pride alist culture,” Williamson writes in The Penguin History of
were inaugurated in 2001 and 2006, respectively, for the first Latin America (1992). Some of these imported ideas were wel-
time since independence. And in Ecuador, the newly mobilized comed because they validated the high opinion of themselves
Indian population has become the key actor in the country’s po- that the upper levels of society already possessed. “White”
litical life. peoples were superior to all others, according to the Social
Social discrimination continues in those countries, how- Darwinist doctrine, which was running strong in Europe (as
ever. That is the case in Guatemala as well, where the wounds well as the United States). And, Williamson says, “Strong gov-
of a civil war marked by guerrillas’ attempted mobilization ernment, even dictatorship, was necessary to contain the forces
of indigenous communities, who were then massacred by the of regression while material conditions could be transformed
military, still run deep. to pave the way for genuine liberal democracy.”33
Mexico’s upper-level political and business class tends to- The notion that naturally disordered societies need the firm
ward more European features than the country at large. Yet hand of the State resonated on both the left and the right
Mexico’s race-class dynamic varies from that of other countries throughout the 20th century, playing naturally into the cul-
where large Indian populations survived the conquest. Mexico’s tural affinity for caudillos. Right-wing parties and politicians
independence war against the Spanish was fought largely by were more frank in their allegiance to the doctrine of authoritar-
Indians under the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. And while ian leadership. Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006), one-time
Peru and Bolivia didn’t elect Indian-identified presidents until military dictator of Chile, was the last—at least for now—of
the early 21st century, one of Mexico’s most revered presidents, the South American rightist advocates of the doctrine.
Benito Juárez, a Zapotec Indian from the state of Oaxaca, first As export-oriented development expanded from the late
took office in 1858. Mexico’s 1910 revolution led to a new so- 19th century and into the early 20th, this economic activity
cial code in which the nation’s mestizo heritage became part of took a form that did little to encourage indigenous capitalism.
official political culture. In recent years, still-unresolved politi- To a great extent, the resources being exported were in the
cal tensions in the heavily Indian states of Chiapas and Oaxaca
evidence the Mexican system’s failure to fully carry out the 33 Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America

revolution’s promises. (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 283.

 INTRODUCTION 17

hands of foreign companies. Argentina provided a dramatic tion to workers’ conditions gave him lasting influence. (Eva,
example. British companies owned essentially the entire mod- despite her enormous charisma, was never president, though
ern sector of the Argentine economy, including the railways she and her husband were contemplating running for president
and the meat-packing plants that supplied the export market. and vice president, respectively, when she died in 1952 at the
There and elsewhere, a near-absence of Argentine-owned in- age of 33). But, like Vargas, his regime wasn’t as successful as
dustry gave potential businesses little in the way of economic Mussolini’s, or that of Spain’s Francisco Franco, in establish-
environment in which they could pursue their goals. The native ing full control over all institutions, notably, in Perón’s case,
upper classes, meanwhile, saw no reason to do anything with the Roman Catholic Church. Perón did, however, sympathize
their wealth but use it for pleasure rather than for investment at openly with the Axis powers during World War II. Resisting
home. The resentment that this frivolousness created evolved U.S. pressure to side with the Allies, Argentina stayed officially
into a steadily building social pressure for social justice. neutral during the war. Brazil’s Vargas proved much more flexi-
Doctrines that laid the intellectual foundations for alter- ble, going so far as to declare war on Germany and dispatching
native social orders began to develop, partly with the help of troops to fight on the Italian front in 1944.
ideologies from Europe. As early as the 1920s, efforts began
to adapt left-wing ideologies to the far different conditions of From Coups to Courtrooms
South America. Peruvian political activist and writer Vı́ctor
Raúl Haya de la Torre founded the Alianza Popular Revolu- Golpes de estado—Spanish for coups d’etat—found a wel-
cionaria Americana (APRA), which melded European social- coming climate in South America. The continent didn’t invent
democratic doctrine about state ownership of the economy with them, but coups proved to be an efficient way of resolving
Latin American ideas about the need to end the oppression of power disputes in countries with poorly developed systems of
the Indian masses. APRA, which explicitly refused to subordi- political representation, when these existed at all. For a region
nate itself to Soviet Communism, made deep inroads in Peru- that welcomed caudillos, coups replaced elections as a means
vian politics. The party remains a force; President Alán Garcı́a of political succession.
is an aprista. One of the world’s most coup-prone countries, in fact, lies
At the same time as Haya de la Torre was formulating in South America. Bolivia has suffered nearly 200 coups and
his ideas, another left-wing writer and activist, José Carlos countercoups, by the CIA’s count, since it gained independence
Mariátegui, was developing a harder-line version, which drew in 1982. That number stands out, but the penchant for coups has
a direct link between socialism and Indian liberation. The latter plagued every single country on the continent, in most cases
goal would be accomplished largely by restoring Indian com- well into the final decades of the 20th century.
munal ownership of their ancestral lands. “Socialism preaches In the 21st century’s first decade, the collective body politic
solidarity with and the redemption of the working classes,” he may finally have built up resistance to coups. The strongest
wrote in an essay cited by Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. evidence is national courts’ willingness to hold ex-dictators
Smith in Modern Latin America (1989). “Four-fifths of Peru’s accountable for their crimes. Gen. Pinochet, the Chilean dic-
working classes consist of Andean Indians. Therefore, social- tator who had taken power in a 1973 coup, spent his last years
ism means the redemption of these Indians.”34 Mariátegui’s fighting off prosecution (his surviving relatives were indicted
linkage can be seen, in debased form, in the doctrines of in 2007 for looting state assets). Former Peruvian President
Sendero Luminoso, the guerrilla army behind an insurgency Alberto Fujimori, who had carried out a constitutional coup to
in Peru in the 1980s and early 1990s, which made a practice remain in office, went on trial in Lima in late 2007 on charges of
of assassinating opponents on the left and terrorizing Indian human rights abuse. Argentina has been trying officers—and
communities into cooperation. a priest—accused of participating in the “dirty war” against
European fascism also appeared in early 20th-century alleged leftists.
South America. The ideology’s appeal was largely confined Nevertheless, the absence of coups doesn’t guarantee sta-
to two countries, but they were two of the most influential bility. Bolivia, again, stands as the clearest example. Specifi-
countries on the continent. In Brazil, the Estado Nôvo regime cally, the country traded coups for popular uprisings—at best
of Getúlio Vargas, which lasted from 1930 to 1945, embodied a form of direct, if rough, democracy; at worst, mob rule. In
many of the doctrines put into practice by Benito Mussolini, 2003, mass demonstrations and street violence forced Presi-
including state control of the economy and a virtual absence of dent Gonzalo (“Goni”) Sánchez de Lozada to flee the country.
civil liberties. These features were moderated, at least in prin- His vice president and successor, Carlos Mesa, resigned under
ciple, by benefits for workers. A similar model was adopted in popular pressure. Neighboring Ecuador has seen a similar suc-
Argentina under Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974), an Army cession of sudden presidential departures. The three presidents
colonel whose regime ran from 1943 to 1955 and again in who preceded the present chief executive, Fernando Correa,
1973–1974. Perón’s personal magnetism—not to mention that who began his term in 2007, were forced from office.
of his second wife and political partner, Eva—and his atten- As for old-fashioned golpes, the most recent one attempted
as of this writing came in 2002, when oppositionists allied
34 Quoted in Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern
with a military unit toppled President Chávez of Venezuela.
Latin America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 202. The coup collapsed in less than two days, as those who had
18 INTRODUCTION

mounted it fought among themselves. A loyalist army faction other countries’ prosecutions of past leaders and followers of
freed Chávez to return to the presidential palace. The golpistas regimes born in coups. Born in barracks, golpes are being put
had accused the president of harboring dictatorial ambitions, to rest in courtrooms.
so they did their own cause little good by adopting the standard
tactic of military strongmen. To be sure, Chávez himself had
led a failed coup attempt in 1992 before embracing electoral Introduction to Central America
democracy.
Countries with little experience of coups would seem to Historical Background
be favored by fortune. But seizures of power don’t represent
the only danger. Colombia has suffered only three golpes in its The leaders of newly independent Central America saw the
history, the most recent one as far back as 1953, yet it leads isthmus as an ideal environment for a federation of all its coun-
the region in the frequency, durability, and savagery of its civil tries. That vision was realized relatively briefly in the years
conflicts. From independence in 1819 until the end of the 19th following independence from Spain. Since that interlude, how-
century, Colombia underwent no fewer than 55 internal wars, ever, each country has followed separate paths. The political
some of them regional in scope, though no less violent. Un- cultures that grew out of Central American countries’ histories
fortunately, the tendency to armed conflict only grew stronger share some elements, but otherwise diverge sharply.
in the 20th century. Equally unfortunately for those who see Early plans for a united Central America sprang from a
political parties as a countervailing force to war, virtually all of colonial heritage they all shared. The countries had all belonged
these wars were fought under the banners of the Conservative to the Kingdom of Guatemala, itself part of New Spain, whose
(large landowners) and Liberal (workers and small-business capital was Mexico City. Nevertheless, during the period of
people) parties, though some of the conflicts were intraparty Spanish colonialism, today’s Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras,
affairs. El Salvador, and Guatemala had already established individual
A stunningly brutal period that dates from 1948 roughly identities. However, today’s Mexican state of Chiapas was then
to 1958 left marks on Colombia that endure to this day. The part of Guatemala, as was today’s nation of Belize, and Panama
period known simply as La Violencia lay the groundwork for was part of Colombia.
an insurgency by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de After independence in 1821, some leaders of the former
Colombia (FARC). That nominally Marxist guerrilla organiza- kingdom accepted a postcolonial version of their former ar-
tion, founded in the mid-1960s, controls parts of several rural rangement, as a part of newly independent Mexico. But the
regions. The FARC enjoys a big enough revenue from the co- latter, hearing rumbles of discontent from nationalist Central
caine industry and kidnapping for ransom to endure widespread Americans, declared the isthmus countries free to establish an
hatred in the society at large—a response that would doom autonomous existence. Yet the “Federal Republic of Central
any ordinary civilian. (The smaller, Cuban-influenced Ejercito America” disintegrated amid civil war in 1838. Later attempts
de Liberacion Nacional has been more open than the FARC throughout the 19th century to reunite the old kingdom also
to disarmament talks with the government.) President Uribe’s provoked armed conflicts and also failed.
strategic decision to eliminate the FARC once and for all as a Central America’s early history of union and division helps
military threat is showing results. In early March 2008, the explain the paradox of small, neighboring countries whose po-
Colombian military killed the guerrillas’ number-two com- litical traditions show marked differences. Resemblances do
mander. Less than one week later, the Colombian govern- exist. Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua suffered horrific
ment announced that another senior FARC commander had armed conflict in the 1980s and into the 1990s and are expe-
been killed by one of his own men, who then surrendered to riencing alarming levels of criminal violence today. Political
authorities. violence hasn’t entirely disappeared either. Honduras, which
Links to the drug trade characterize not only the FARC but avoided most of the warfare that gripped its neighbors, has not
their opposite number, the “self-defense” (paramilitary) forces, escaped the criminal violence plague.
originally formed at the behest of big landowners. The paramil- One Central American country, however, evaded both civil
itaries, now partly disarmed, worked for years in cooperation war and its sequel. In this and in most other respects, Costa
with some elements of the army. A political scandal, still under Rica stands as an exception in its region, and in the entire hemi-
way, has produced evidence that paramilitaries exerted influ- sphere. Costa Rica’s good fortune began in its early colonial
ence in Colombia’s congress, by way of close relations with life. Geographically more oriented toward the Pacific than the
some lawmakers. The “parapolitical” affair demonstrates the Atlantic, Costa Rica was for that reason out of Spain’s eye, and
extent to which Colombian politics have been subverted by distant from the early postindependence conflicts. The caudil-
what Colombians call “armed actors.” In effect, the paramili- los who ran Costa Rica during its first century also differed
taries tried covertly to penetrate government institutions rather from their counterparts. They favored practical measures such
than openly take them over. as establishing sound school systems and diversifying agricul-
At the same time, the scandal demonstrates the vigor of ture from coffee into bananas. “They turned out to be ‘pro-
Colombia’s press and judiciary, which have maintained pres- gressive’ in the nineteenth-century sense, which meant that
sure on the government and political class. That effort parallels they were more than ready to use the authority of the state to
 INTRODUCTION 19

promote economic development,” writes a longtime historian that late 20th-century conflict. Paradoxically, the titular head
of the Americas, Lester D. Langley, then of the University of of government for much of that time was a centrist Christian
Georgia.35 Democrat politician who represented a strain of reformism in
By mid-20th century, Costa Rica, peaceful and democratic, Salvadoran politics that developed in the wake of the 1932
had abolished its military, making it a worldwide model. In the massacre, but couldn’t overcome the repressive impulse of the
1980s, then-President Oscar Arias used his nation’s peaceful, military and the business elite.
democratic tradition as political capital in his efforts to encour- Leading the insurgency was a coalition of Marxist par-
age peace negotiations in El Salvador and Nicaragua, efforts ties who fought as allies in the Farabundo Martı́ National
that won him the Nobel Prize in 1987. His peace brokering was Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martı́ para la Liberación
credited with playing an important role in persuading warring Nacional—FMLN). The FMLN took its name from a young
sides to quit fighting. Communist militant who helped spark the failed insur-
The contrast with Costa Rica’s neighbors could hardly have gency of 1932 and was captured and executed. The FMLN
been starker. Guatemala’s Spanish conqueror, Pedro de Al- did assassinate some enemies, including unarmed Ameri-
varado, made himself notorious even in the 15th century for can State Department officials and U.S. military personnel
the violence he unleashed on the country’s original inhabitants. on two occasions, showing greater ruthlessness and logisti-
Hugh Thomas, a leading historian of Spain and Spanish Amer- cal capability than the hapless young leftists of 1932 had
ica, writes that Alvarado’s career was characterized by “brutal displayed.
. . . unconcern for human life.”36 Whether Alvarado can be In the 1980s, however, assassinations were primarily a tac-
blamed for Guatemala’s subsequent horrors, the least that can tic of the political right. Killings of alleged leftists often were
be said is that he got the postconquest history off to a bad start. carried out by technically anonymous “death squads,” which
Indeed, relations between the country’s Indian majority and had close ties to elements of the military. Though that connec-
its mixed-race (known in Guatemala as ladino) and European- tion was known to all concerned, the military wasn’t in a po-
descended rulers have been defined, for a longer period of time sition to conduct formal executions. That step was presumed
than anywhere else in the hemisphere, by the rulers’ emphasis unacceptable to the U.S. public, hence impossible, given the
on repression. indispensable military aid that the United States provided to
In modern times, Guatemala’s civil conflict lasted longer government forces.
than that of any other Central American country, and as long as The Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana
that of any in the entire hemisphere, Colombia excepted. The Nacionalista—ARENA) a hard-right party (which has since
toll was enormous. An estimated 200,000 people, mostly high- moved toward the center) led by a former army major, Roberto
lands Indians, died during the counterinsurgency campaigns of d’Aubuisson, was at the center of death-squad activities. A
1960–1996, the country’s Commission for Historical Clarifi- “Commission on the Truth” established as part of the peace ac-
cation concluded in 1999. A peace agreement negotiated with cord concluded that d’Aubuisson formed the death squad that
the help of the United Nations created the commission. Despite committed one of the most notorious of the war’s killings of in-
the formal end of hostilities, political and criminal violence dividuals, the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero.
still wracks the country. And Guatemala’s tormented history The churchman had denounced the military and its repression
bears another distinction: The 1954 CIA-managed coup that of leftists and liberals.
overthrew an elected left-leaning government marked a key Shortly after Romero’s killing, a sometimes violent political
moment in early Cold War history. conflict devolved into full-fledged warfare. The war ground on
Like Guatemala, El Salvador spent its formative first cen- through the entire decade of the 1980s, with guerrillas even-
tury under the dominion of large landowners. Until civil con- tually controlling a swath of territory in the eastern zone of
flict burst into civil war in 1979, the signature event that marked the Massachusetts-sized country. But a 1989 offensive in San
the country’s political landscape was an aborted Communist- Salvador that the FMLN hoped would topple the government
led military revolt and peasant uprising in 1932, followed by failed to do so. The defeat pressured the guerrillas to agree to
a massacre of suspected communists and their sympathizers. peace negotiations.
The Salvadoran army, which had taken power in a coup, killed United Nations–sponsored peace talks led to the signing of
at least 10,000 people; the country’s total population was then a peace accord in 1992. The FMLN now competes for votes as
1.5 million. Salvadorans dubbed the event La Matanza (the a legal political party, an outcome that seemed inconceivable
Massacre). during the civil war. The party’s candidates have won elections
The massacre both prepared the ground for and foretold the for mayor of the capital, San Salvador, and other cities, and for
savagery of the war that tore apart the country in the 1980s. At congress, but never the presidency.
least 70,000 people, civilians, soldiers, and guerrillas, died in At street level, the war prompted developments that under-
lay the creation of a multinational street gang culture. Hundreds
35 Lester Langley, Central America The Real Stakes (New of thousands of Salvadorans who fled the war for the United
York: Crown, 1985), 112. States settled in the Los Angeles area. There, many refugees
36 Hugh Thomas, Conquest Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall or their children found their way into a subculture of Mexican-
of Old Mexico (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 595. American gangs that had developed over decades. When some
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