Latin America in world history

JULIE A. CHARLIP

The very creation of Latin America, a product of the Iberian conquest of the Americas, is testament to the region as part of the world. Both as colonies and as independent nations, the region has been engaged in constant negotiation between foreign interests and domestic concerns.

The death of the colonies

Within just a few generations after the conquests, colonists in the so-called New World came to resent more recent arrivals from the Iberian peninsula. This resentment initially was about competition between newcomers and veterans, but over time it came to be characterized by nativism on the part of Latin Americans, or Americanos, as they called themselves. They exalted the beauty of their landscape, the grandeur of the original indigenous empires, the creations of the colonists. By the eighteenth century, Americanos felt little link with their Spanish and Portuguese overlords, and a greater sense that Iberians were far more dependent on American wealth than Americanos were on Iberian largesse.

These tensions were fueled by both material and ideological issues. Economically, the once powerful Iberian empires were now clearly inferior to the growing strength of Great Britain and France. Spain never recovered militarily from British defeat of the Armada in 1588, and Spain's Habsburg

monarchs squandered colonial silver on fruitless European conflicts.

The Americanos further resented being tied in mercantilist relationships with Spain and Portugal in an era when the potential of free trade and Great Britain's first industrial revolution beckoned. The colonies frequently served as the battleground on which European struggles were fought. During the Seven Years' War, Cuba was occupied by the British, and in 1762, the port of Havana was opened to free trade. The result was dazzling - in ten months, 1,000 ships docked in Havana harbor, compared to a mere 1,500 ships during the previous ten years.

The eighteenth century was also a time of intellectual ferment. The divine right of kings was questioned, and the rights of men were debated. There was no printing press in Brazil, and Spanish officials tried to censor colonial publications. Nonetheless, Spanish colonists published the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Locke. Colonial elites took grand tours of Europe, where they encountered the new and freeing ideas about reason, the common good, and the ability of people to rule themselves and control their property.

The heady new ideas led to two impressive experiments - the war of independence launched by the British colonies in North America in 1776, and the French Revolution in 1789. Spanish colonists read Thomas Paine and watched with admiration as North Americans freed themselves from the British mercantilist yoke. The French Revolution, though initially exciting, soon frightened Latin American elites, as the guillotine fell and the revolu­tionary explosion rippled to the French colony of Saint-Domingue, where the

Map 20.i Latin America in 1800

Haitian revolution was launched. Stories of slaves overthrowing their mas­ters were carried by elites who fled, many of them to Spanish America, particularly Cuba. Practicality won over ideals. Elites had no desire to launch revolts that might open the door to their own dispossession by the castas, the dark majority population of the indigenous, Africans, their descendants, and the many and growing new groups of mixed race (Map 20.1).^[551]

Foreign events, however, would push the colonists to the independence many had been considering for decades. The French Revolution ended in the rule of Napoleon in 1799, and his attempts to conquer Europe began in 1803. Spain was pulled into the conflict: its navy defeated by the British at Trafalgar in 1805, and its economy destroyed by French blockade in 1806. In 1807, Spain acceded to Napoleon's request to march through Spanish territory to con­quer Portugal. Portugal's rulers, the Braganzas, boarded British ships along with a royal court of thousands and sailed for Brazil. French forces took Lisbon, then marched back to conquer Spain. In 1808, Charles IV abdicated in favor of his son, Ferdinand VII, and both were exiled to French prison; the new king of Spain would be Napoleon's brother, Joseph.

The French conquest gave the Americanos in Spanish America the oppor­tunity to act on their long-simmering resentments.

The birth of new nations

Independence brought more questions than answers for the former colonists. How would they go from four viceroyalties - New Spain, Peru, New Granada, Rio de la Plata - to new nations? Everything was in question: the boundaries and names of new nations; the inclusiveness and rights of citizen­ship; the forms of government; the cultural norms and identity of new nations. The quest for independence had united disparate forces in a singular goal - independence from the Spanish monarchy. What would come next was open to debate, more frequently settled by arms than words.

Initial unity quickly resulted in fragmentation. In 1824, the four viceroyal­ties became six countries: Mexico, the United Provinces of Central America (which broke away from Mexico in 1823), Great Colombia, Peru, Chile, and the United Provinces of Rio de la Plata. The next twenty years were

Map 20.2 Latin America in 1830

characterized by national dissolution. In 1825-1826, Bolivia split from Peru; in 1828, Uruguay splintered from Rio de la Plata; in 1830-1831, Ecuador and Venezuela left Colombia; in 1836, Texas became independent from Mexico, and in 1838-1839, Central America divided into Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

The splintering of the new republics was indicative of the intense region­alism throughout Latin America. The wars of independence had in many ways been civil wars as well. When the first movement for independence in the La Plata region erupted in 1810, it was centered in Buenos Aires, and was strictly a local matter for the unconcerned residents of the Banda Oriental (Uruguay), Upper Peru (Bolivia), and Paraguay. While elites in Buenos Aires longed for free trade, the provinces around the port city offered the unfet­tered open pampas and freedom of the gaucho. The interior provinces of Salta, Tucuman, Jujuy, and Catamarca were oriented not to the port but to mines in Upper Peru. These differences were not resolved by independence; a variety of polities competed in the region after 1819, narrowing to two - the Argentine Confederation and the Free State of Buenos Aires in 1853 - and finally joining in the republic of Argentina in 1862. It was another decade before Argentina, a name that originally referred only to residents of Buenos Aires and the La Plata area, was accepted throughout the nation.

The leaders of the newly independent countries were eager to create new identities. They were culturally Spanish, but having thrown off the Spanish yoke, they no longer wanted to affiliate with Iberian tradition. But what alternatives were there, given that the ancient heritage of their lands was indigenous? As independence leader Simon Bolivar explained, “We are... neither Indian nor European but a species midway between the legitimate proprietors of this country and the Spanish usurpers.” The “legitimate proprietors,” the elites were quick to note, were the original indigenous conquered by the Spanish, and certainly not the contemporary indigenous, who the Americanos saw as inferior, degraded into idiocy by centuries of Spanish rule. But the ancient empires would be lauded as the American version of ancient Greece and Rome.

The actual treatment of the indigenous, the Afro-Latin American, and the mixed race mestizos and mulattoes, did not mirror the regard for their ancient ancestors. Despite Lima's theater curtain adorned with indigenous images, the stage was reserved for European culture, particularly from northern Europe. The elites admired the culture of France, the economic prosperity of Great Britain, and the industriousness of northern European cultures, compared to what they saw as a backward Spain that had hindered the development of its colonies. Furthermore, though slavery was outlawed by all the new nations except Brazil, the castas were still to serve as low-wage laborers. Initially voting rights were widely given even to indigenous men, but as the elites rewrote their constitutions with stunning regularity, they soon restricted the vote to propertied white men. Promises of freedom had been made to the lower classes to recruit them to the independence cause, but the elites had not fought for independence to share their gains with the dark majority.

The most pressing question was how to govern the former colonies. It was by no means a given that the countries would become republics, and indeed, Mexico and Brazil became monarchies. For Brazil, the transition from colony to independent nation was a relatively tranquil affair. The Brazilians had enjoyed the presence of the Braganza court in Rio de Janeiro beginning in 1808, and in 1815 Brazil was elevated to the status of kingdom as part of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves. After Napoleon's defeat, King Joao stayed on in Brazil until 1821, when the representative Cortes in Portugal demanded that he return. The 23-year-old Prince Pedro became regent of Brazil, but he also was soon confronted by the Cortes, which tried to return Brazil to its colonial status and demanded that Pedro, like his father, return to the peninsula. On the advice of his Brazilian counselors, Pedro decided to stay in Brazil, and in 1822, he declared Brazil's independence. He, of course, continued as monarch, crowned Constitutional Emperor and Perpetual Defender of Brazil.

Mexico's initial flirtation with monarchy ended quickly. Emperor Agustin I - the former Spanish loyalist turned independence leader Agustin de Iturbide - ruled from September 1821 to March 1823. But his overthrow had less to do with the question of monarchy than with the problems faced by all the new nations. Iturbide was the leader of a deeply divided nation, and he could not satisfy all the demands with the limited resources available. Much of Mexico's infrastructure was damaged by the independence wars; many of the mines, the prime source of income, had been flooded. Crops had rotted in the fields, and businesses were abandoned.

Iturbide's solutions were the same ones that many rulers of the new Latin American countries would try. To retain the support of wealthy elites, he cut taxes. But without the taxes, his government lacked the funds to pay the army, which was crucial to the support of a new, weak government. To pay the military, he turned to the issuance of paper money, which in turn caused inflation. Desperate for funding, Iturbide took on foreign loans, which Mexico could not repay, and forced loans from the elites and the Catholic Church, angering his main support base. Discontent led to political turmoil, and the frustrated monarch responded by closing congress, a dictatorial move that alienated his political supporters. The final challenge came from a combination of foreign and national interests. Although Mexico essentially gained its independence in 1821, when Iturbide switched sides, the Spanish still held the fort at Veracruz. The Mexican forces challenging them were headed by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Santa Anna demanded adequate funds to fight the Spanish. Iturbide refused and fired Santa Anna, who responded by launching a coup that unseated the Mexican monarch.

The foreign loans that Iturbide contracted came primarily from the British, who hoped to dominate the economies of the new nations. The weak new nations needed loans, and the British were ready to supply them: fourteen loans were floated to the new nations between 1822 and 1824. The loans resulted in defaults, not in small part because of the chronic instability in the new countries.

The economic instability was in part due to the physical destruction caused by the wars of independence and the loss of Spanish capital and investments. In addition, Spain was reluctant to admit its losses and attempted to regain territory, while other European countries launched invasions to collect indemnities, and the United States eyed Latin America as the key to US expansion. Mexico, for example, was invaded by the Spanish in 1829, the French in 1838, and the United States in 1846. While still recovering from the independence wars, the new nations were at war again, further diminishing resources and stability.

The new nations were further weakened by domestic divisions, which led to chronic warfare. One problem was regional, as the feeble central govern­ments tried to exert control over large territories. The concept of the nation state was new and abstract. Local populations identified with their villages and nearby towns, the patria chica, or small country. Divided by mountains and forests, these populations were physically separated. The reach of the new governments was limited by inadequate communications technology, geographic barriers, and local orientation, exemplified by the splintering of the first new nations and by further divisions, such as the Mexican secession attempts by Texas and Yucatan.

The regional disputes reflect one of the key political divisions: centralism versus federalism. Federalists believed in regional autonomy and advocated a weak central government; they considered centralism akin to the domination they had endured under the Spanish crown. Centralists, on the other hand, argued that only strong central control could shape the regions into coherent nations. Centralists tended to form the new Conservative parties, which advocated fostering Latin American traditions: a strong ruler - either a president or constitutional monarch, large haciendas controlled by patri­archs, a docile and servile majority, all backed by the authority of the Catholic Church. The federalists joined the new Liberal parties, which urged republican institutions, formal equality before the law, an expanding national government, and secularization of society. While these political debates occurred among the small population of elite, educated, and proper­tied white men, the debates frequently led to wars, which the masses were coerced into fighting.

The Catholic Church would end up as the central institution debated over by the Liberals and Conservatives. The Church was the only Spanish institu­tion to survive independence. The majority of Latin Americans did not understand the concept of the nation state and certainly did not see them­selves as Mexicans or Bolivians. But they understood that they were Catholics, an identity that transcended nation. The most important events in people's lives - marriage, birth, death - were marked by religious rituals, and people had more contact with priests than with royal or national officials. New weak governments would covet the power - and the wealth - of the Church. Conservatives, eager to maintain the status quo, supported the traditional Church. Liberals were eager to expand the state by taking over the Church's wealth, responsibility for education, and record-keeping of marriages, births, and deaths.

In the midst of these decades of chaos, control could only by wielded by the caudillo, a strong leader who commanded respect because of military prowess and charisma. His power was personal, and though he might be elected, it was not the formal mechanisms of government that gave him authority. The caudillos' initial power bases were local or regional, but with loyal backing and a central power vacuum, they were able to take national control. Santa Anna in Mexico would rule repeatedly from 1824 to 1855. Among the caudillos of the early nineteenth century were Juan Manuel de Rosas of Argentina, 1829-1852, and Rafael Carrera in Guatemala, 1839-1865, both of whom would advocate measures that supported traditional groups: Argentina's gauchos and Guatemala's indigenous majority.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, it was clear to Latin American elites that they and their countries could not prosper in the midst of such chaos. Chronic warfare disrupted economic activity, and the revol­ving door of government discouraged foreign investors, who feared new governments could not protect their investments. In no country were these problems more evident than in Mexico. Decades of Liberal-Conservative conflict culminated in the War of the Reform (1858-1861), leaving the country weak, indebted, and so vulnerable that it was again invaded by the French in 1861, who established the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor of Mexico (1863-1867).

By the 1870s to 1880s, most elites throughout Latin America had come to the conclusion that the seemingly endless and bloody civil wars had done more harm than good. While Conservatives did not necessarily support particular Liberal leaders, they acquiesced to the Liberal agenda of a secular state and a federal, constitutional government as the guarantor of the stability needed to encourage foreign investment. If there was one thing that the elites could agree on, it was the desire to achieve personal and national wealth. Stability would foster economic prosperity, which would be realized by focusing on free trade and the exercise of the region's comparative advan­tage, selling primary products to Europe and the United States in exchange for the manufactured goods emanating from the factories of the nineteenth­century industrial revolution.

With new nations and free trade in place of colonies and mercantilism, wealth would be attained directly by Latin America's elites. But the new countries were as intertwined with this international economic system as they had been as colonies, and the control of their economic fates was just as limited.

The rise of export economies

Progress was the watchword for the late nineteenth century, and it was represented in Latin America by the adoption of European ideologies: the positivism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), the comparative advantage of David Ricardo (1772-1823), and the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). These ideas, adapted to the Latin American reality, would shape Latin America from the 1880s to 1914.

Auguste Comte's positivism was an extreme form of empiricism that rejected philosophical arguments based on abstract ideas. He argued that all knowledge should be based on observable phenomena, using scientific methodology. By doing so, human society could progress based on adoption of the latest technologies. Though not the first philosopher to champion empiricism, he made a novel contribution by creating a theory of history in which human society developed through stages. First was the theological, in which people explained the phenomena they did not understand by relying on supernatural explanations. This stage was followed by the metaphysical, in which people moved beyond supernatural explanations but still considered abstract theoretical ideas about phenomena. Finally, in the positive state, people understood scientific laws and chose to achieve social progress by using technology.

The positivist view helped fuel elite obsession with the latest technology of the time, especially railroads and telegraph. The technologies facilitated the strengthening of both the state and the economy. The telegraph enabled the central government to be in touch with officials throughout the country, and the railroad facilitated moving government representatives around the coun­try. Local officials could quickly alert central authorities to local uprisings, and troops could be dispatched via railroads. The “theoretical republics,” as Cuban independence leader Jose Marti called them, became quite real in the late nineteenth century.

Economically, the railroad opened up regions of the country to become part of national and international markets. Crops that would never make it to the coast by mule could be sent via railroad. The railroad raised the value of land throughout Latin America, and linked areas within many countries in new national markets - albeit limited ones, given the poverty of the majority of the population.

Latin American elites' approach to economic development followed the ideas of David Ricardo, which argued that each country should produce the goods for which it was best suited. His classic example was that perhaps both Spain and England could produce wine and textiles, but Spain was a more efficient producer of wine than England, and England a more efficient producer of textiles than Spain. If each country followed its comparative advantage and then traded those products, both would prosper. Latin America's comparative advantage, then, was in the production of primary products: grain, coffee, sugar, cotton, cacao, bananas, livestock, copper, silver, tin, lead, zinc, nitrates, palm oils, nuts, woods, and rubber.

To expand export production, the elites needed two elements: land and labor. By controlling the national government, the elites could use the power of the state to facilitate the acquisition of both inputs. Laws were passed requiring that corporate landholdings - that of the Catholic Church and indigenous village lands, or ejidos - be surveyed, titled, and auctioned to the highest bidder. Some of these measures had been attempted in earlier decades - such laws provoked Mexico's War of the Reform - but it was not until stable, strong governments were in power that such laws could be enforced.

As campesinos lost their lands, they had no choice but to toil on the haciendas and plantations of the elites. The rural people's fate was sealed by a lack of any land, or adequate land, for subsistence, and by new vagrancy laws that required them to acquire employment. Their need for jobs was further fostered by the assigning of taxes that could only be paid in money, rather than goods. Employers tried to hold workers by instituting debt peonage, extending loans to the workers and forcing them to stay on the hacienda until the debt was paid. Frequently the workers were paid in scrip, only usable at the hacienda store, where overpriced goods were sold to the workers, with the cost deducted from their pay. When the workers died, those debts could be passed to their children. However, the efficacy of debt peonage has frequently been overstated. Debt peonage only worked where it was difficult for workers to leave and police or army forces were adequate to catch them. In Mexico's Yucatan, workers on the henequen plantations were practically slaves. In contrast, in Carazo, Nicaragua, coffee workers would take loans from several coffee haciendas, then leave; the weak Nicaraguan police forces were hard pressed to find and return the workers.

Work conditions for Latin America's majority were miserable, but Herbert Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism was used by the elites to justify such treatment. In a corruption of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory, Spencer argued for the “survival of the fittest" - and those at the bottom of society clearly had not evolved to the higher levels attained by the elites. Such views contributed to new ideas of scientific racism and eugenics, in which it was believed that non-white populations were inherently inferior.

Disdain for the indigenous, black, and mixed-race populations had been expressed as early as the 1840s, particularly in the writing of Argentina's Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. In Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism, Sarmiento wrote: “The American aborigines live in idleness, and show them­selves incapable, even under compulsion, of hard and protracted labor. This suggested the idea of introducing negroes into America, which has produced such fatal results. But the Spanish race has not shown itself more energetic than the aborigines, when it has been left to its own instincts in the wilds of America.”^[552] He went on to condemn the barbarism of the gaucho and promote the civilization of the cities and the industriousness of northern Europeans. His views were echoed throughout Latin America.

As part of modernization, the elites expanded education in the hope of encouraging the lower classes to assimilate to elite ideas. However, even expanded education did not reach the majority of people, especially since children were needed as labor to help support families.

Latin American governments lacked the substantial sums needed to build railroads, telegraph lines, and port facilities, and so they turned to foreign investors, particularly British, and in Mexico and Central America, US corporations began the investments that would come to dominate the area by the early twentieth century. Foreigners frequently came to own the infrastructure, or at least collected on loans used to build it. These foreign investors also bought land and mines, and owned other productive sectors. While coffee farms were mostly owned by Latin Americans, the banana industry was a US enclave. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company would come to own the railroad, port facilities, and 40 percent of Guatemala’s land.

Although Latin America’s economies were centered on exports of primary products, elites also pursued modest industrialization in the late nineteenth century. Initially, the focus was on processing natural products: flour mills, sugar refineries, meat-packaging plants, tanning factories, lumber mills, wine­ries, and breweries. Eventually, industries produced such products as textiles and processed food for the domestic market. Campesinos who lost their land headed to the cities to work, but their labor did not suffice in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, where industry expanded more rapidly. Both coun­tries encouraged foreign immigration, in part with hopes that industrious northern Europeans would “whiten” their populations. Much to their cha­grin, most immigrants came from Italy, Spain, and Eastern Europe, and they brought with them ideas about anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, socialism, and communism.

The rapid economic changes of the late nineteenth century were possible in no small part because of the stability provided by the newly consolidated liberal state. Its motto was “Order and Progress,” a slogan that even adorned the flag of Brazil. These leaders could be viewed as modernizing caudillos, who were generally elected, but frequently in fraudulent elections. The consummate modernizing caudillo was Porfirio Diaz, who was popularly elected in Mexico in 1876. He stepped down in 1880 at the end ofhis first term, but ran for re-election in 1884 and “won” all subsequent elections until he was overthrown in 1911 by the Mexican Revolution. Similar modernizing dictators ruled throughout Latin America: Justo Rufino Barrios (1873-1885) and Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898-1920) in Guatemala; Jose Santos Zelaya (1893-1909) in Nicaragua; Antonio Guzman Blanco in Venezuela (1870-1888). The political system was still dominated by land-owning elites, and the vote still restricted to literate, propertied men. The majority were excluded from all decision­making.

These governments relied on the revenues produced by export booms, but booms tended to be followed by busts. The success of exports depended on foreign markets, and economic downturns abroad could have devastating effects at home. Furthermore, foreign tastes were changeable. Peru was one of the first Latin American countries to experience the export boom, with its export of guano, bird dung that accumulated on adjacent islands. The guano boom was fueled by the demand for fertilizer for expanding US and European agriculture. From 1840 to 1880, more than 20 million tons of guano was exported, earning US$2 billion in profits. But by the 1880s, guano lost its appeal, replaced by nitrates from the Atacama Desert - a territory that Peru had lost to Chile in the War of the Pacific (1879-1884).

Dazzled by export profits, Latin American elites focused their economies on one or two products, neglected domestic agriculture, and profited at the expense of the majority. The chaos of the early nineteenth century may have left the masses with more freedom - certainly government control was more limited. However, state stability and economic prosperity translated to greater control over an immiserated lower class.

Neo-colonialism in the nineteenth century

Even before the wars of independence had ended, the British eyed the region's wealth while the United States coveted its territory. The first inter­vention was merely rhetorical: the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. In the twentieth century the doctrine would come to be seen as the emblem of US domination. At the time, however, the statement was seen as benign. The policy was prompted by the British request that the United States join in a statement warning other European powers that the western hemi­sphere was no longer open for colonization. But in 1823 - barely a decade since the British burned Washington, DC, during the war of 1812- the Monroe administration had no interest in joining the British in a diplomatic venture. Instead, Monroe issued his own statement, which asserted that an attack on any republic in the Americas would be viewed as an attack on the United States. Latin American independence leaders were delighted to have US support, but they soon found that it was an empty promise, as the United States was far from being a world power in the 1820s.

Great Britain was much more important, and the British could see Latin America's potential. The view was expressed by Britain's foreign minister, George Canning, in 1824: “Spanish America is free, and if we do not misman­age our affairs sadly, she is English.” Canning advocated a neo-colonialism that would be carried out through economic means, without the problems of a formal political colony.

Britain's first investments, loans to the fledgling governments, ended in default. Initially, British trade fared little better. From 1820 to 1850, many British goods piled up unsold, the victims of misunderstood markets, high tariffs, and Latin American instability. By the 1860s to 1880s, however, Britain found larger markets, particularly for textiles, which made up 70 percent of its exports. Britain exported cloth and clothing, including the frock coats that Sarmiento so admired: “Elegance of style, articles of luxury, dress-coats and frock-coats, with other European garments, occupy their appropriate place in these towns.”^[553] But the British, eager to meet consumer demand, also supplied ponchos, famously worn by Sarmiento's despised gauchos.

Great Britain also exported machinery, which was used to create Latin America's nascent industry of the late nineteenth century. Britain also nego­tiated preferential trade agreements, and invested directly in railways and public utilities and provided banking and insurance services.

Despite its primary focus on trade, Britain was not above territorial interests. The British dominated the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua and seized the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands from Argentina in 1833.

The United States eyed Latin American territory from an early date. In 1809, President Thomas Jefferson tried to purchase Cuba from Spain, an effort that would be made again in the 1850s. The efforts to add to US territory in the mid-nineteenth century were described by journalist John L. O'Sullivan as the country's “manifest destiny.” The destiny was linked to the institution of slavery and desire to add slave states to the nation. In 1845, PresidentJohn Tyler announced the annexation of Texas, earning the ire of Mexico, which had never accepted the state's independence. In 1846, PresidentJames Polk ordered Zachary Taylor's troops to cross the long-recognized border of the Nueces River, claiming the border was actually the Rio Grande, farther south. Mexico attacked the troops, which were on Mexican soil. Claiming the area was US territory, Polk declared war. Despite the opposition of such figures as Congressman Abraham Lincoln, the war was popular with most US citizens. The fragile Mexican state was in no position to win a war against US troops, and in 1848, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding half its territory to the United States. The United States referred to the conflict as the Mexican- American War; Mexicans more accurately termed it the War of North American Invasion.

The arrogance of the United States towards its southern neighbors was again demonstrated in 1850, when the United States and England signed the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. In the agreement, the two powers agreed that neither would build a canal across Nicaragua without the consent of the other. No representative from Nicaragua was a party to the discussions and agreement.

By the turn of the century, two events demonstrated that the United States was clearly the dominant power in Central America and the Caribbean. First was the so-called Spanish-American War in 1898, when the United States sent troops to prevent Cuba from winning its independence on its own terms. Cuba was on the verge of winning its Independence War, which began in 1895, when the United States intervened. US troops occupied Cuba until 1903, when the new nation finally agreed to add the hated Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution, giving the United States the right to intervene whenever its interests were threatened.

It was also in 1903 that the United States, whose canal proposal was rejected by the Colombian congress, supported an independence effort by the northern province of Panama. US warships prevented Colombia from landing troops in the region. Two weeks later, the new congress of Panama gave the United States rights to build a canal.

As the interest in a canal demonstrates, US concerns in the region were primarily geopolitical. With the canal, the United States could quickly defend the nation and control Central America and the Caribbean. But, like Great Britain, the United States also wanted access to Latin America's raw materials in exchange for the goods manufactured in US factories.

The first twentieth-century revolution

The liberal export economy further enmeshed Latin America in international trade and politics. Domestically, the export economy gave rise to new sectors of society - an urban, industrial workforce in the larger countries, such as Mexico and Argentina, and a middle class of teachers, clerks, bureaucrats, businessmen, authors, intellectuals, and professionals. Both groups had demands: workers wanted better wages and working conditions, as well as a voice in the government; the middle class wanted good public schools and services, and a voice in the government. The elites were determined to maximize their profits by keeping wages low, and to keep both groups out of the systems of power. Those decisions would spark the Mexican Revolution.

In 1900, critiques of the regime of Porfirio Diaz began to appear in Regeneration, a newspaper published by the anarchists Jesus, Enrique, and Ricardo Flores Magon. Strikes ended in government violence and repression in 1906 at Cananea Consolidated Copper Company, owned by Col. William Greene, and in 1907 at the Rio Blanco textile mill. And in 1908, when Diaz claimed in an interview that he would not seek re-election in 1910, political rivals began to mobilize. Chief among them was Francisco I. Madero, whose wealthy family owned millions of acres of land in the border state of Coahuila, as well as iron and coal mines. Madero, like other northern elites, was not part of Diaz’s inner circle and had been shut out of government power. In addition, the northerners chafed against the privileged position that Diaz gave foreign competitors.

Madero ran against Diaz, who to no one’s surprise decided to run again and, as he always did, won the election by a landslide. Diazjailed Madero, who escaped to the United States and issued a call for revolution. His call to action was heeded by the northern elites, represented by Coahuila Governor Venustiano Carranza; northern hacienda peons, led by Pancho Villa; and southern campesinos struggling for land, led by Emiliano Zapata. The uprising began on November 14,1910, and the results came quickly: Diaz fled to exile on May 26, 1911.

The popular Madero handily won the ensuing election, but he was in a difficult position. Supporters to his right found him too radical; supporters to the left found him too moderate. Madero believed that he was leading a political revolution. Although his Plan of San Luis Potosi had a vague provision about restoring land to campesinos, when confronted by Zapata he made it clear that land reform was not his priority. In November 1911, Zapata issued his own call, the Plan of Ayala, with a rallying cry of “Land and Liberty.”

The unfortunate Madero was overthrown in February 1913 by Victoriano Huerta, once Diaz’s general, then Madero’s before turning on him. Carranza, Villa, and Zapata all led forces against Huerta, finally defeating him in July 1914. But the revolution/s were about far more than the individual political power of Diaz, Madero, and Huerta. Carranza wanted to head a new order that would be dominated by northern elites. Villa continued to defend the interests of the peons, and Zapata of the landless campesinos. Although Villa and Zapata championed the lower classes, they were unable to join forces - in no small part because their concerns and support networks were local, and they lacked a national vision.

Carranza benefited from the support of the United States, who feared the revolution would jeopardize their substantial Mexican interests. Carranza was seen as the lesser evil, one who would support moderate changes but still respect the economic order. Villa and Zapata were seen as dangerous radicals.

By 1917 much of the fighting had ended, and Carranza consolidated his position by calling a constitutional convention. To his dismay, the conven­tion produced a constitution far more radical than he had planned. The Russian Revolution had barely begun when Mexico instituted the world's most radical charter. The constitution said the government had a responsi­bility to meet the needs of its citizens. Article 123 granted broad labor rights, including the right to unionize and strike, minimum salaries, and maximum hours. Article 27 called for land reform, with the land that had been alienated from villages during the Porfiriato to be returned.

Carranza became president in 1917, Zapata was assassinated in 1919, and Villa agreed to lay down his arms in 1920. When Alvaro Obregon, Carranza's chief general, became president in 1920, the violent phase of the revolution had largely ended. Obregon championed a new cultural focus under educa­tion minister Jose Vasconcelos, who sponsored rural schools and public art, launching the Mexican mural movement by hiring the great artists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros. The artists made the lower-class Mexicans, who had risen up in the revolutions, the subject of their art.

The excitement of the Mexican Revolution attracted people from around the world. From the United States came photographers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, and journalist Carleton Beals; from Chile the poet and educator Gabriela Mistral; from Peru the intellectuals Victor Raul Haya de la Torre, who would found the APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), and Jose Carlos Mariategui, who organized the Peruvian Socialist Party. Mexico gave refuge to Salvador de la Plaza, Carlos Aponte, and the Machado brothers, Gustavo and Eduardo, who fought against Venezuelan dictator Juan Vincente Gomez (1908-1935). In the mid-1920s, a house called the Casa Simon Bolivar, named after the independence leader who once stayed there, became home to Latin American revolutionary exiles: the Venezuelan exiles were joined by Peruvian Jacobo Hurwitz, and Cuban Communist leader Julio Antonio Mella and his wife, Oliva Zandivar. After the Spanish Civil War, veterans from the Republican side fled to Mexico, escaping the fascist regime of Francisco Franco. Leon Trotsky, exiled from the Soviet Union, found refuge in Mexico, where he socialized with Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, as well as with French writer Andre Breton. It was in Mexico City that Joseph Stalin's agent found Trotsky and assassi­nated him.

The Mexican Revolution was the most extreme reaction to problems that were common through the region: the middle class wanted access to political power, campesinos wanted their land back, and the working class wanted decent wages and working conditions. In Argentina, the industrial working class had grown with the meat-packing plants and food processing industries. The government had encouraged immigration, and the primarily Italian, Spanish, and Eastern European immigrants organized unions along with anarchist and socialist movements. In 1910, the official celebration of the centennial of independence was accompanied by demonstrations. President Roque Saenz Pena targeted Argentine nationalism - by 1910 Buenos Aires was 30 percent foreign-born (compared to 13 percent of New York City's popula­tion) - and in 1912, the Saenz Pena law gave the vote to all native-born Argentine men, eliminating property and literacy requirements. The new voters helped break the grip of the old landed elites and open the political system to the new middle class by electing its candidate, Hipolito Yrigoyen, as president in 1916.

The fall of export economies

The prosperity of the export economies was not evenly distributed. In terms of international trade, the countries exporting manufactured goods earned more than the countries exporting primary products. Domestically, the wealthy acquired more land and resources, and foreign investment increased, while poor campesinos lost their lands and many of them migrated to the burgeoning cities. New European-style buildings adorned the cities, but the slums grew as well. The elites were unconcerned about the poor majority, and they were equally unconcerned about the question­able stability of their model of development, which depended on access to foreign markets. Three events in the twentieth century would compromise that access and challenge the export model and liberal political system: the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. Buffeted by international affairs, Latin America would pay a price for its economic openness.

The First World War resulted in shortages of shipping and decline in European demand. Since most Latin American governments relied on import tariffs for income, the effect was devastating: in Chile, for example, govern­ment revenues dropped by two-thirds from 1911 to 1915. Similarly, foreign loans disappeared. Brazil received US$19.1 million in loans in 1913; in 1914, the amount had dropped to US$4.2 million, and the next year, Brazil received no public loans. The war provided opportunities for Venezuelan and Mexican oil, Peruvian copper, Bolivian tin, and Chilean nitrates, but the income did not offset the rise in import prices and the trade and budget deficits. The result was inflation, erosion of real wages, and political upheav­al. Curtailment of European trade opened the door to the United States, which was little help to countries such as Argentina that produced the same products that the United States did, such as grain and beef. The loans that the United States offered tended to come with political strings attached, and the United States intervened repeatedly, especially in Central America, to guar­antee payment via customs receiverships.

European recovery in the 1920s initially did little to help Latin America. There had been a drop in the European birth rate, lowering demand. European investors turned their attention to their own continent. Further, because Europe had been cut off from imports, the war fostered develop­ment of synthetic substitutes for cotton, rubber, forest dyes, timber, and nitrates. Latin American producers responded by increasing production, which led to a decline in prices. Even the Latin American products that had done well, such as oil, copper, and tin, now competed with those from the rest of the world, which led to market gluts and price drops.

Latin America began to recover as loans poured in from the United States from 1926 to 1928. So much money came into the region that the lending became known as the “dance of the millions.” Trade resumed, primarily with the United States, Great Britain, France, and Germany. But that recovery was cut short by the US stock market crash in 1929, and the subsequent worldwide depression.

Once again, Latin Americans saw their markets shrivel. From 1928 to 1932, the value of exports dropped by 50 percent and the volume of exports dropped by 65 percent. Cuba's foreign trade in the 1930s was a mere 10 percent of what it had been in 1929, and Uruguay's only 20 percent. But the interest on foreign loans did not go down, and most countries defaulted.

Displaced workers demanded that the governments respond to economic hardships. The liberal elites who ran Latin America's governments were ill- equipped to deal with the popular uprisings that the depression sparked, and the wealthy and middle classes were willing to turn the government over to dictators who could guarantee social peace. Dictators came to power throughout the region: Gerardo Machado in Cuba, Anastasio Somoza Garcia in Nicaragua, Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez in El Salvador, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, Augusto Leguia in Peru.

The economy began a slow recovery as Latin America began to develop new trade partners in the 1930s, particularly Germany, Italy, and Japan. By 1938, the three countries were buying 55 percent of Latin American exports and supplying 45 percent of its imports. This reorientation of trade would be badly disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Countries that provided raw materials that could be used in the manufacture of war materiel - oil, copper, tin, nitrates - did well. Those that produced the non­essential crops - sugar, coffee, bananas - did not fare as well.

The worldwide crises prompted a re-examination of the role of govern­ment in moderating economic vulnerability. New Dealism, socialism, and fascism were all responses to the volatility of the unregulated free market. These ideas had their echoes in Latin America and gave rise to economic nationalism, a call for long-range planning and incentives. Latin Americans reconsidered their vulnerability as exporters of raw materials and decided to diversify and industrialize in a process that became known as import sub­stitution industrialization (ISI).

Liberalism was eclipsed by a new political philosophy - populism. Populism was largely an urban movement, as the cities and industry grew. New leaders saw that they could build a political base among the working class, labor unions, and middle classes. Charismatic leaders pledged to address popular concerns, and they did so via neighborhood improvements, low fares for public transportation, new and higher employment benefits, and expanded free education, all paid for with deficit spending. These benefits provided workers with the best conditions they had ever enjoyed. But populism was a hierarchical system directed from above, built on the char­isma of a single leader. Most famous of the populist leaders was Argentina's Juan Peron, who built his power base as head of the Secretariat of Labor and Social Security. He was elected in 1946 with the slogan “economic growth and social justice,” and governed with his equally charismatic wife, Evita, at his side.

As part of economic nationalism, some countries sought to gain greater control of their resources. Getulio Vargas in Brazil convinced the United States to help fund a national steel industry with a plant at Volta Redonda. In 1938 Lazaro Cardenas, the Mexican revolutionary leader who was adored for providing millions of hectares of land via agrarian reform, also nationalized foreign oil companies who refused to respect Mexican labor laws, forming Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX).

As the Second World War ended, Latin Americans chose to continue the ISI strategy of producing their own manufactured goods. Initially prompted by necessity, leaders after the war worked intentionally on diversifying their economies. Their strategy had the support of Raul Prebisch, an Argentine economist who headed the Economic Commission for Latin America, one of the many new international agencies formed by the new United Nations. The United Nations was part of the new international order created in the wake of the Second World War. In a meeting at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, the Allies agreed to a new international order that would include the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The new organizational structure was designed to resolve the kinds of economic problems that had led to the Second World War.

The defeat of fascism inspired Latin Americans to force their own dictators from power, and many of the Depression-era dictators began to fall. As their economies recovered, the masses, mobilized by populism and ISI, demanded democratic change. Democratic governments came to power in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Peru. But the democratic opening was closing by 1948, as US leaders made it clear that their interests would be better served by free trade than by economic nationalism in Latin America. The US government pre­ferred leaders, however dictatorial, who would support those interests.

The Cold War

The short-lived alliance of the Soviet Union and the United States gave way after the Second World War and was replaced with the international rivalry that became known as the Cold War. The United States fostered a fear of communism, claiming it was a totalitarian system. The real concern, however, was that communist countries, as non-market societies, would hurt the growth of the US economy, which needed foreign markets, and hurt US firms, which sought the global exploitation of resources and labor. The United States had no trouble supporting repressive regimes if they professed anti-communism. Authoritarian Latin American leaders quickly learned that all they had to do was claim a communist threat in order to attain US support.

Instead of being fought directly by the two superpowers, the Cold War was waged in proxy countries and by secret forces. The US Central Intelligence Agency, fresh from its successful overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, turned its attention to the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Democracy had been achieved in Guatemala with the overthrow of Jorge Ubico in 1944 and subsequent election of Juan Jose Arevalo. As his successor, Arbenz vowed to modernize Guatemala's economy, which was dominated by Guatemalan coffee growers and the United Fruit Company, the banana exporter that owned 40 percent of national territory as well as the railroad and the facilities at Puerto Barrios. Arbenz was determined to carry out an agrarian reform to benefit the landless majority. His government offered to pay for expropriated land at the value last declared by the owners for tax purposes. Guatemala's coffee growing elite would have called on the United States for help, but their concerns were conveyed by United Fruit, which had unusually close connec­tions to the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1954, a CIA coup overthrew Arbenz and installed dictator Carlos Castillo Armas, who rolled back the agrarian reform and persecuted Arbenz's supporters.

But the Guatemalan Spring was a mild reform compared to what would follow. In 1959, Fidel Castro, aided by Argentine Ernesto “Che” Guevara, led a revolutionary movement that unseated Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The revolution took both Latin America and the United States by surprise. Cuba had been considered one of the more prosperous Latin American countries, but that prosperity was unevenly distributed. The majority of Cubans depended on the sugar harvest, which provided work only a third of the year. Batista had ruled as dictator since his 1952 coup and had controlled Cuba for much of the twentieth century.

The effects of the Cuban Revolution rippled through Latin America. The revolution showed the left that a small group of guerrillas could spark a struggle that could topple an entrenched dictator supported by the United States. Cuba's new leaders were serious about sweeping changes - agrarian reform, lowering of utility costs, year-round employment, and universal free education and health care. To make these changes, the government inevi­tably came into conflict with the many businesses owned by US companies. In retaliation, the United States cut Cuba's sugar quota, established a trade embargo, and broke diplomatic relations.

US leaders were convinced that in Cuba they could replicate Operation Success, the 1954 coup that overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala. In fact, the compliant regime in Guatemala allowed the CIA to use a Guatemalan ranch to train for a secret invasion of Cuba. The invasion force was launched from the coast of Nicaragua, where President Luis Somoza Debayle himself saw them off. Cuba, however, was prepared for the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Fidel led the forces at Playa Giron, and the invasion was a disaster for the United States. Cuba became an international hero, a David defeating Goliath. But Cuban leaders knew they could not survive on their own. The nationalist revolution became a socialist one as well, and Cuba reached out to the only other power that could help - the Soviet Union. The Soviets paid above­market prices for Cuban sugar and helped bankroll social reforms.

Cuba was a heady example for nationalist groups around the world who hoped to defeat colonialism and neo-colonialism. Led by bearded revolution­aries in military fatigues, Cubans in massive numbers participated in the new government. Che Guevara, the handsome, charismatic Argentine, spread the gospel of Guerrilla Warfare in his i960 book, a manual for future revolution­aries. In 1966, Havana hosted the Tricontinental Solidarity Conference, with representatives from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Che had already left Cuba to lead revolutionary forces in the Congo and Bolivia. But his famous Message to the Tricontinental, read in his absence, called for “two, three or many Vietnams” to flourish throughout the world.

Throughout the 1960s, young Latin Americans heeded Che's call, and guerrilla movements emerged in every Latin American country, becoming the excuse for repressive military regimes throughout the region. The United States responded in two ways: one was to establish the Alliance for Progress, which funded reform in Latin America, including the encouragement of the kind of agrarian reform the United States had labeled communist in Guatemala. The Alliance for Progress also secretly provided counter­insurgency training for Latin American police and military, who unleashed a wave of repression throughout most of the region.

The United States supported reformist governments throughout Latin America in hopes of preventing more revolutions. But the reformers found that entrenched elites had no interest in agrarian reform and improved conditions for labor. The weakness of these centrist govern­ments made them vulnerable, and they were largely overthrown by military juntas, which believed civilian rule to be incapable of keeping order and preventing communism. The one exception was the government of Chile.

Chile was a showcase for the Alliance for Progress, and the United States tried to help President Eduardo Frei to carry out reforms. But the right wing found even the centrism of Frei too radical, and the left felt that Frei was too conservative. In the 1970 election, with the center weakened, Chile elected socialist Salvador Allende. Allende vowed to carry out a peaceful socialist revolution, increasing wages, distributing land, and nationalizing the copper industry. Like Cuba before it, Chile's revolution drew worldwide attention to the possibility of radical change, this time carried out within an existing political framework. But Chile's long history of democracy did not save it from a bloody coup in 1973, as the CIA teamed up with the Chilean right wing to support a violent coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, whose dictatorship would last seventeen years, with 40,000 people tortured and 4,000 disappearing. The coup signaled to other Latin Americans that peaceful change was not possible.

The only other successful revolutionary movement in the region was in Nicaragua, led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, which succeeded in 1979 in toppling Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the last of a dynasty of dictators, which had begun with Anastasio Somoza Garcia in 1936 before passing to his two sons, Luis and Anastasio. The Sandinistas carried out agrarian reform, expanded education and health care, and sponsored the first democratic elections in Nicaraguan history. Their commitment to a mixed economy and political pluralism offered yet another view of revolu­tionary change. Thousands of Americans and Europeans traveled to Nicaragua to help rebuild the country and participate in solidarity. The United States responded by using the CIA to organize the remnants of Somoza's vicious National Guard into a counter-revolutionary force, which terrorized Nicaragua for much of the 1980s. The United States also imposed an economic embargo, similar to those imposed on Cuba and Chile. In 1990, after a decade of struggle, the Sandinistas were voted out of power.

The Sandinistas had been brought down in no small part by economic difficulties. The 1980s became known as the Lost Decade in Latin America. During the 1970s, the oil producing countries of the Middle East took control of their resources and increased the price of oil. They deposited those profits in European and US banks, which in turn invested in the modernizing governments of Latin America. The debts were contracted at low interest rates, and as long as the debtor countries continued to successfully export their products, repayment was not a difficulty. But the 1979 oil crisis sparked a worldwide recession as the industrialized countries wrestled with the increased cost of fuel. The recession meant the decline of markets for Latin American goods. Meanwhile, the floating interest rates on Latin America's loans doubled. In 1982, Mexico announced that it could not repay its debts and was quickly followed by many other Latin American countries.

The economic shocks would help usher in another democratic era. The rule of the Argentine generals who waged the ruthless so-called Dirty War (1976-1983) - in which 30,000 people disappeared - ended more because of economic failure than because of their brutality. Groups began to organize against the dictators, most notably the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who, wearing their signature white kerchiefs, marched every week in front of the Casa Rosada demanding the return of their missing children. The embattled generals tried to distract the population by launching a war to reclaim the Malvinas Islands in 1982. The generals gambled that the British would not bother to defend the distant islands, populated by fewer than 2,000 English­speaking residents and 600,000 sheep. However, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was having her own problems with national discontent over the dire economy. She, too, banked on a patriotic diversion and sent troops to defend the Falklands. The ill-trained Argentine troops were easily defeated, discrediting the generals in their one legitimate role as defenders of the nation. In 1984, Argentina returned to civilian government (Map 20.3).

From neo-liberalism to neo-populism

During the 1980s debt crisis, Latin American governments turned to the International Monetary Fund for financial assistance. The aid came with strings attached - the governments had to cut state spending so that they could repay their debts. Since, obviously, the military would not be cut, the governments instead cut social programs and subsidies to such services as bus fares. To increase elite income and encourage investment, the authoritarian governments used force to repress unions and drive down wages. The elites lessened their focus on industrialization and diversification, and instead returned to the old reliable liberal model of exporting primary products.

This neo-liberalism, ushered in by the IMF, was reinforced in the 1990s by what became known as the Washington Consensus. It was characterized by privatization of public activity, deregulation of private activity, cuts in social spending, encouragement of market solutions to social problems, and promo­tion of free trade, particularly through regional agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. In all the neo-liberal “success” stories, as exemplified by Chile, there was macroeconomic growth, as high as 10 percent a year. But the success was achieved via stagnant or declining real wages, loss of social benefits, and growth in the informal economy and poverty. This in turn led to urban and rural decay, the breakdown of communities, and environ­mental degradation. The new civilian governments of the 1990s adopted the

Map 20.3 Latin America today

neo-liberal agenda. While they had favored political democracy, they had little interest in economic democracy, and by the end of the decade, those govern­ments faced popular challenges.

Neo-liberalism was shocking for many Latin Americans because it marked the end of the economic nationalism that had been the hallmark of the twentieth century. Even in Mexico, where in 1938 the people had rallied behind Lazaro Cardenas’s nationalization of the oil industry, the government reduced the number of state-owned businesses from 1,050 enterprises in 1983 to 210 in 2003 - and many of those sales were to foreigners. Wealth became more concentrated, and many people lost basic services, such as water, as governments rushed to privatize. By the end of the decade, Latin Americans were protesting throughout the region, bringing down the neo­liberal governments.

In 1998, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela, the first of a new wave of Latin American leaders - dubbed the Pink Tide - who chal­lenged neo-liberalism. Chavez, an admirer of the Cuban Revolution, had the country's vast oil resources to use for poverty programs in Venezuela and to fund change throughout the region. Candidates who vowed to eliminate neo-liberal policies were elected throughout Latin America in the first decade of the twenty-first century: former labor leader Luis Lula Inacio da Silva, “Lula,” in Brazil; Argentina's Nestor Kirchner, a Peronist, who successfully renegotiated the country's debt and defied the International Monetary Fund; Bolivia's Evo Morales, the first indigenous president; Ecuador's Rafael Correa, who ejected the United States from its military base. Even in Nicaragua, Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega returned to power. All of these governments rejected neo-liberalism in favor of a market-based economy that included a significant role for government, particularly in the manage­ment of national resources and provision of social services.

The new governments launched a new era in which radical reforms were enacted by governments that reached power through popular election and re-election. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Latin America was no longer subject to Cold War tensions. The United States became preoccupied with other areas of the world, especially after the 9/11 attacks, and its influence in Latin America diminished.

Around the world, images of Evo and Hugojoined those of Che and Fidel as inspirational leaders. But Latin America's new generation of leaders still struggle with their historic problems, trying to manage natural resources, provide for the majority, transform their economies, advance democracy, and negotiate between national and international interests.

Further reading

Acree, William G., and Juan Carlos Gonzalez Espitia, eds. Building Nineteenth-century Latin America: Re-Routed Cultures, Identities, and Nations. Nashville, tn: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009.

Barr-Melej, Patrick. Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class. Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Beezley, William H. Judas at the Jockey Club and Other Episodes of Porfirian Mexico, 2nd edn. Lincoln, ne, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Benjamin, Thomas. La Revolucion: Mexico's Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History. Austin, τx: University of Texas Press, 2000.

Bergquist, Charles. Labor in Latin America: ComparativeEssays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia. Stanford University Press, 1986.

Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman. Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994.

Bulmer-Thomas, Victor. The Economic History of Latin America since Independence, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Burke, Janet, and Ted Humphrey, eds. Nineteenth-century Nation Building and the Latin American Intellectual Tradition: A Reader. Indianapolis, in, and Cambridge, ma: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007.

Bushnell, David, and Neill Macaulay. The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Canak, William L. Lost Promises: Debt, Austerity, and Development in Latin America. Boulder, co: Westview Press, 1989.

Castro, Daniel, ed. Revolution and Revolutionaries: Guerrilla Movements in Latin America. Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1999.

Charlip, Julie A., and E. Bradford Burns. Latin America: An Interpretive History, 9th edn. Upper Saddle River, nj: Prentice Hall, 2011.

Chasteen, John Charles. Americanos: Latin America's Struggle for Independence. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Chomsky, Aviva. A History of the Cuban Revolution. Malden, ma: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Coniff, Michael L. Populism in Latin America, 2nd edn. Tuscaloosa, al: University of Alabama Press, 2012.

Drake, Paul. Money Doctors, Foreign Debts, and Economic Reforms in Latin America from the 1890s to the Present. Wilmington, de: Scholarly Resources, 1994.

Earle, Rebecca, ed. Rumours of Wars: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-century Latin America. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2000.

Gleijeses, Piero. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton University Press, 1991.

Gonzales, MichaelJ. The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940. Albuquerque, nm: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Gott, Richard. In the Shadow of the Liberator: Hugo Chdvez and the Transformation of Venezuela. London: Verso, 2000.

Lewis, PaulH. Guerrillas and Generals: The “Dirty War” in Argentina. Westport, cτ: Praeger, 2002.

Macdonald, Laura, and Arne Ruckert, eds. Post-neoliberalism in the Americas: Beyond the Washington Consensus? New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

McCartney, Paul T. Power and Progress: American National Identity, the War of 1898, and the Rise of American Imperialism. Baton Rouge, la: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Qureshi, Lubna Z. Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile. Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2009.

Rock, David, ed. Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1994.

Santoni, Pedro, ed. Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Latin America: From the Wars of Independence to the Central American Wars. Westport, ct Greenwood Press, 2008.

Thorp, Rosemary. Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the 20th Century. Washington, nc: Inter-American Development Bank, 1998.

Topik, Steven C., and Allen Wells, eds. The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil During the Export Boom, 1850-1930. Austin, τx: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Wright, Thomas C. LatinAmericaintheEraoftheCubanRevolution. Westport, cτ: Praeger, 2001.