Wiarda, Howard J. y Kline, Harvey F.
Latin American Politics and Development
Ed. Westview Press. 3ra edición
EE.UU, 1990; pp 44-54

The Contemporary Revolution
in Latin America

Although the preceding discussion has of necessity focused on the political elites of Latin America, on the efforts of various regimes to control and manage the development process, and on what is (with perhaps three or four major revolutionary exceptions) still a predominantly conservative to middle-of-the-road political order, attention must now be given to the newer revolutionary currents sweeping over the area.

These often operate below the surface and do not get the headlines that major events occurring at the top do, but their importance is real and is certain to increase. The changes under way are so immense and far-reaching that they add up to a situation of genuine social revolution.

When we speak of the contemporary revolution in Latin America, we are not referring to the usual palace revolts and military pronunciamientos ("pronouncements against the government") but of deep-rooted social changes whose cumulative effects add up to full-scale, long-term social transformation. We discuss these basic changes under six broad headings: changes in values and political culture, the economic transformation of the area, changes in social structure, the emergence of new political forces and movements, the new policies and institutional arrangements fashioned by governments in response to new demands, and changes in the international context. These measures provide not only a working definition of development in Latin America but also a list of key indicators to watch for in measuring the relative strength of the forces of change in the country chapters.

Changes in Values and Political Culture

Latin America was founded upon a value system that stressed authority, hierarchy, and elitism. Although these values are still often strongly present throughout the area, in many countries the traditional beliefs that undergirded the social and political system for so long are undergoing transformation or are being fused with new values: social justice, democracy, participation, development, socialism, and the like.

It is no longer so easy as in the past to convince a peasant that one must be poor because poverty is good for the soul or that one must accept a low station in life as part of the natural order. The old myths simply do not wash anymore. Instead of the fatalistic rural worker who is resigned to his or her lot because Saint Thomas or the church said this is the way things must be, the countryside is now full of increasingly restless people who are questioning traditional values for the first time and who are impatient for change. Challenging new ideas are filtering in.

The agents of these changes are modern transportation and communications, particularly the transistor radio and now television as well. Whereas before, the rural peasant lived with almost no contact with the outside world, today it is practically impossible to go anywhere in Latin America where the transistor radio is not heard broadcasting news, sports, and a wider conception of the outside world. New roads have also brought the rural elements into contact with urban markets. Party organizers, U.S. officials, government agencies, and young revolutionaries have fanned out into the countryside, carrying with them new concepts of how to order one's life. The historic isolation of the patria chica is breaking down.

But even though the old values are being undermined and new ideas are being introduced, one cannot be sure of what the long-term meaning of these changes will be, for the new valuesdemocracy, socialism, communism, capitalismare also frequently in competition with each other. Not only do Radio Havana and the Voice of America come in loud and clear, but other competitors for the listener's ear are the government station, the church station, the voice of the armed forces, and various political parties. Hence, while the old assumptions are challenged, the new values are still inchoate and at best incompletely digested. There are too many ideas to be absorbed all at once. The value and belief systems of most transitional persons represent a mixture of old and new. There is no clear-cut or unilinear progression from traditional beliefs to modern ones.

A good number of efforts are also under way on the part of conservative interests and governments to control these changes or to manipulate the educational system so as to preserve the historical institutions. Education and social mobilization can be manipulated to produce conservative results as well as revolutionary ones. At this point, it is not clear whether one should expect increasingly sharp breaks with the past, whether the traditional elites will succeed in their quest to control the process of change, or whether, as seems most likely, Latin America will continue to represent a mixture of old and newalthough always in a dynamic and changing relationship.

Economic Transformations

Latin America is also being transformed economically, but here, too, the outcome of the process remains in doubt. Along with the acceleration of the industrialization process, which began in the 1930s and continued in most countries through the 1970s, has come a steady rise in per capita income and standards of living. Two-thirds of the Latin American countries have now passed the threshold, arbitrarily put at US$1,000 of income per person per year, that separates the underdeveloped nations from the more developed. Although the standards of living are still not comparable to those of the United States, the countries of Western Europe, or Japan, neither are the Latin American nations basket cases. By most indices, the Latin American nations are intermediate systems, neither fully developed nor wholly underdeveloped.

A comparison of present-day per capita income in Latin America with the situation in 1960 or 1950 shows significant change. In most cases, per capita income has doubled and in some it has trebled or quadrupled in the preceding forty years. These figures are impressive, but they do not tell the whole story since they fail to indicate how income is distributed. Most of the income is still concentrated in upperand middle-class pockets while the standard of living of the urban and rural poor remains abysmally low. In many areas, the standard of living of the poor, especially for the rural peasants and the subsistence farmers, has actually declined. But the general picture, obviously varying from country to country, is one of gradual improvement, although as shown in Figure 3.2, which uses data from Brazil, the rates of improvement for the distinct social strata are highly uneven.

The Brazilian case, which was fairly typical for the countries of Latin America through the 1970s, shows some interesting patterns. Most obvious is the steep rise in the income of the upper classes. The middle sectors also profited significantly from the recent economic growth, and skilled workers similarly improved their lot. The so-called marginals managed to achieve some improvement (though in many Latin American countries that was not the case), but for many lower-class Brazilians, living standards went down even under conditions of "miracle growth" on the national level.

Three points bear emphasizing in Figure 3.2. First, the income levels of the major organized groups showed improvement over the years. Second, it is clear that middle- and upper-class income and living standards improved far faster and more disproportionately than those of the working class (and, hence, the gaps between the classes widened, not narrowed) Third, the marginal elements, rural and urban, were left behind. Hence, although the general pattern in most countries has been economic growth, the distribution of income in Latin America is among the worst in the world and is actually getting worse.

At issue in Latin America, except for the poorest, unorganized, and marginal elements, was not so much sheer povertyas in Ethiopia or Bangladesh, for exampleas the relative deprivation of some classes vis-à-vis others. Most of the class groups improved their station in life, but some more than others. Most Latin American governments sought to channel sufficient benefits to their lower classes, at least to those organized elements that constituted a potential threat, to head off revolution. In this effort, most succeeded. Thus, while organized workingclass elements often gained salary increases, the very poor, who were not seen as a threat, continued to have a difficult, hand-to-mouth existence. However, since the distribution of income is so uneven and these lowerclass elements are now being organized and mobilized for the first time, there may be future revolutionary troubles looming for some of the Latin American systems.

This system of growth and some political stability have been severely threatened by the economic crisis that began in Latin America in 1979 and deepened thereafter. The crisis was first felt by the oil-importing countries of Latin America because of the two shocking oil-price increases of the 1970s. Next, the changed nature of the post-OPEC world negatively affected the Latin American countries because of changes in the importing capacities of the industrialized countries of the world (inflation also affected imports needed by Latin American countries) and because the world economic recession diminished demand in the industrialized countries and also resulted in lower prices for other primary-goods products. Both the inflation and the recession were caused in large part by the OPEC price increases. Finally, the "oil glut" of 1982, and the decline of petroleum prices, negatively affected the Latin American members of OPEC (Venezuela and Ecuador) and the other oil exporters (especially Mexico) because they had planned their economies on the assumption of both rising petroleum prices and constant, or even increasing, production levels.

By 1982, in the midst of a global recession, many Latin American countries were recording zero or negative growth. Their economies had turned stagnant or even shrunk. Throughout the region, a major economic crisis set in, and it was made worse by the stupendous debts at high interest rates that almost all the Latin American countries had earlier contracted. In large part these increased debts were the result of loans, to both public and private sectors in Latin America, from private banks in the industrialized countries, which were recycling the petrodollars invested in them by the oil-exporting nations. As the threat of default on these debts was faced by various Latin American governments, they increasingly turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for standby loans. The IMF's formula was clear: Loans would be made available if the governments froze wages; cut employment in the public sector; cut down on deficit spending and inflation; ended subsidies, which were designed to especially benefit the lower- and middle-income sectors; devaluated the national currency; and cut down on foreign imports while encouraging additional exports.

The economic crisis not only made many Latin American lower- and some middle-class elements worse off but also threatened political stability. At a time of rising expectations, there were fewer pieces of the pie to hand out, and discontent spread. Not only were many governments throughout the area faced with threats of destabilization but the whole Latin American system of gradualist, accommodative, evolutionary politics (described in Chapter 7) was undermined as well.

The continuing debt crisis has further compounded Latin America's persistent economic troubles and is a very complicated problem. Some Latin American countries plainly cannot pay all their outstanding international debts (approaching US$500 billion for the region as a whole at the end of the 1980s); on the other hand, the private foreign banks cannot admit that the loans are uncollectable (or their balance sheets will be in bad trouble and their stockholders very angry); and the U.S. government (meaning U.S. taxpayers) is unwilling to bail out the banks or the Latin American governments. What to do? The answer so far has been to "manage" the crisis: Play for time, hope the world economy remains solid so Latin America can grow out of the crisis; provide some financial shots in the arm from the U.S. Treasury in genuine crisis situations but on an ad hoc and individual country basis; and meanwhile provide a menu of approaches so the banks can reduce their exposure and the Latin American countries can avoid bankruptcy. But the problem has not been solved so far, and meanwhile quite a number of Latin American countries are sliding further toward financial ruin. A few are still doing relatively well economically, but for the rest it seems likely that some form of U.S. relief will be necessary.

There are other changes in the area's economic structure to be aware of when reading the country chapters. One involves the role of the government in the economy. Through the 1970s there was a growth of increasingly state-directed economies throughout Latin America, whether socialist economies or capitalist ones. The debt crisis, however, led to a movement toward a larger role for the private sector, and through "privatization," economic entities owned by many Latin American governments were sold to the private sector. The second change concerns the spread of the big multinational corporations (MNCs) throughout Latin America and their capacity to shape internal markets and governmentsalthough with the deepening of Latin America's economic troubles, many MNCs have withdrawn their capital from the area. Although the countries endeavored to control the MNCs during the 1960s and 1970s, these constraints were loosened during the crisis of the 1980s. The third change relates to the growing interrelationships between the Latin American economies and outside market prices (such as the price of oil) and forces. More than ever, the Latin American economies are dependent on worldwide economic pressures over which they have little control.

Changes in Social Structure

With long-term economic development have come changes in the social structure. The Latin American societies are no longer the simple lord-and-peasant societies of the past. Rather, they are now much more complex systems with a far greater differentiation among social groups. Many aspects of the two-class system have been retained, but that should not blind one to the changes.

Industrialization helped give rise to new social forces. A new larger middle class has emerged, but it is split into upper, middle, and lower substrata and is additionally divided along vertical lines: clerics, army officers, university students, government workers, shop owners, small farmers, small-business people. The middle sector is also divided politically, so that if we say the army officer corps or the political party executive committees are dominated by middle-sector representatives, that may be insufficient to tell us their political ideologies. Indeed, it could be said that since 1930 virtually all institutions in Latin America armed forces, church, political parties, universities, bureaucracy have come to be dominated by the middle sectors and that, hence, politics in much of Latin America is essentially middle-class politics. But given the divisions within the middle sectors, a great variety of developmental solutionsranging from far left to far right and all positions in between are possible.

The trade unions have also shown themselves to be a significant new social force that must be discussed in any consideration of Latin American politics. Peasants and Indians have similarly been mobilized and partially organized, however unevenly, in most countries of the area. Urban marginals, the recent peasant arrivals in the major cities, who are generally underemployed and as yet not organized, have also emerged as a new social force.

Change has occurred not just within the newer social groups but within the more traditional sectors as well. Members of the military and the church hierarchies are not recruited from upper-class ranks anymore but from the middle sectors, and this change has had some important implications in terms of the political behavior of these institutions. Neither the church nor the army can any longer be depended on as automatic defenders of the status quo. Rather, both of these institutions are severely divided internally, and particularly within the army, nationalist and developmentalist ideologies are strong and cut across the traditional ideological divisions. Within the church, the large number of foreign-born clergy (French, Spanish, North American) has also acted as a stimulus to new ways of thinking about society and participation and so have changes in the church's theology, which has been dramatically altered as a result of Vatican II and liberation theology (see Chapter 4). Similarly, the oligarchy no longer consists of just a landed aristocratic class tracing its origins to colonial times but of a business-commercial elite, of old-rich and new-rich elements, and frequently now of powerful foreign communities. To understand the dynamics of contemporary Latin American politics, one must come to grips with these new complexities.

New Political Groups

Along with accelerated social change has come a host of new political associations and movements, and the old Liberal and Conservative elite factions have lost their monopoly on power. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s and continuing into the post-World War II period, a variety of new middle-class and worker movements emerged to challenge the historical dominance of the old elites. Often led by charismatic, populist political leaders, these movements were able to break the monopoly of power that the upper class had long maintained, and they helped make the political situation much more fluidand unstablethan it had been.

The first Communist and socialist parties were organized during this period, led usually by middle-class intellectuals and with a strong base in the emerging trade unions. Parties that called themselves Radical, patterned after the French Radicals but ultimately not very radical, had grown up earlier in Argentina and Chile, based on middle-class support. A variety of social-democratic or Aprista-like parties (named after the Peruvian APRAAmerican Popular Revolutionary Alliance) began to challenge the established order starting in the 1930s and in some cases came to power. New Christian-Democratic movements were organized, and a variety of agrarian, worker, peasant, anarchist, and other organizations added to the party potpourri.

But not just parties were organized; indeed, an entire associational vacuum began to be filled. Many of the new associations called themselves nonpartisan, but they frequently acted like partisan groups. The new trade-union movementssplit into Communist, socialist, Christian-Democratic, and anarcho-syndicalist groupsoften favored direct political action over collective bargaining. There were new associations of students, businesspeople, peasants, and women; military lodges, sometimes secret were formed; landowners began to band together to protect their interests. The organizational void that had always plagued Latin America began to be filled, either through free association or by government fiat. The state frequently created its own official associations, trade unions, and the like as a way of heading off possible revolutionary change that a genuinely independent and pluralist associational life posed.

New Policies and Institutional Arrangements

A fifth area of major change involves the greater complexity of governmental institutions and the policies flowing from them. With the "revolution of rising expectations," government was called upon to provide a host of new services and carry out a variety of new programs. Government (almost always at the national level and not at the state and local levels as in the United States) was expected to deliver social security programs, health care, housing, rural electrification, roads, dams, water supplies, and a great number of other services. Moreover, with the Great Depression, World War II, and growth of the economy, the government's regulatory role was vastly expanded.

The result, in all the countries of the area, was the creation of many new ministries, agencies, and institutes to carry out the new programs. New ministries of labor, commerce, industry, planning, and social security were set up, and hundreds of other agencies to administer agrarian reform, community development, water resources, and the like came into existence. Moreover, to administer the new programs, bureaucratic behavior had to change. No longer could the line between the public and the private domains be so easily blurred. New norms of honesty, rationality, and effectiveness in public administration were called for. The patrimonialist conception remained strong, but it was no longer the only method of operating. Graft, family favoritism, political payoffs, and special privileges still provided the grease that helped turn the wheels of government, but real programs and not just paper ones had to be carried outor else! Although traditional bureaucratic behavior remained strongly in evidence and was widely tolerated up to a point, the success of any government came to be judged on its capacity to effectively implement programs for social and economic development.

One result of this new thrust was the enormous growth of the public sector. The Latin American state assumed the roles of national patron, industrialist, and chief capitalist, and the government became the largest employer in the country. Even greater power than before was concentrated at the central state level, but local and regional authority and that of the local caudillos were undermined. The historical tendency to look to the central government to solve all of society's ills was greatly strengthened. These changes in the structure and the increasingly central role of the state resulted in some major transformations, probably equal in importance to the other social and political changes discussed earlier. The enormous power and funds concentrated at the central state level made the competition to capture these higher stakes that much more intense. Some blame this government control for the debt crisis. The privatization movement, of course, has had the effect of lessening the role of the government in the economy, but it has not ended its role completely.

Changes at the International Level

Latin America's traditional isolation, not only internally in terms of its separate patrias chicas but also externally in terms of its relations with the outside world, is breaking down. Latin America is no longer an isolated backwater but is being increasingly integrated into world trade patterns, communications networks, alliances, and the like. There has also been a major change in the way Latin America sees itself and relates to the rest of the world.

Modern communications and transportation networks are making all nations interdependent in ways they never were before, and markets and trade patterns have also become increasingly international. Latin America must sell its coffee, sugar, minerals, tobacco, and bananas, as well as its manufactured goods, abroad at favorable prices, or its entire economic (and political) structure will be threatened with collapse. At the same time, most of Latin America is absolutely dependent on the importation of oil at reasonable prices.

The web of dependent and interdependent relations is complex and difficult to sort out. The Latin American economies are heavily dependent on international markets, and they are particularly dependent on their trade with the United States. Economic dependence has often been translated into political dependence, i.e., the capacity of the United States to use its control over markets and international lending agencies to manipulate the internal politics of Latin American nations. Many nations are now trying to break out of this historical dependence by diversifying their economies and increasing their trade and contacts with Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, and other areas, but these strategies have not been altogether successful, and dependency upon the United States is still the situation for many countries.

Latin America is also tied into a web of international political and defense arrangements similarly dominated by the United States. The cold war altered the face of Latin America's internal politics and made several countries (such as Cuba, Chile, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic) pawns in the worldwide rivalry between the superpowers. Latin America's communications media are also closely tied to U.S. news agencies. The big multinationals gained immense power throughout the area, often with the ability to manipulate Latin American governments and their policies, and some people argue that even Latin American culture is becoming heavily Americanized as the "Coca-Cola-ization" and the consumer culture of the continent go forward. But in more recent years many of the big companies, fearing instability and tired of extensive regulation by the governments of the area, have begun pulling out of Latin America and investing elsewhere, and because of the debt crisis, private banks have stopped giving new loans to most Latin American countries.

Latin America is thus breaking out of its historical isolation, but in some areas that change has had decidedly mixed results. Latin America has become more a part of a modern and interdependent world, but that fact has frequently also meant accepting increased dependence.

Conclusions And Implications

The pace of change has accelerated throughout Latin America. In the past four decades new and revolutionary transformations have begun to sweep across the continent, and these changes, taken together and cumulatively, add up to a profound social transformation in Latin American society and polity. The changes have generally been gradual but nonetheless profound. Since the 1930s new social and political forces have fundamentally altered all areas of Latin American life.

Still, the power of traditional forces has also remained strong, and the question must be raised as to whether the changes have been rapid and thorough enough. Has Latin America experienced fundamental change, or is it still engaged in a holding action? Have the changes noted affected basic power relationships, or is the essentially elitist, hierarchical, and authoritarian structure still in place? To what extent have the new groups gained genuinely independent bargaining power? Conversely, have the benefits channeled to them served to co-opt them into the older pattern of elitist rule and to prevent more fundamental changes? Is the democracy present in most Latin American countries in the late 1980s a sign of a lasting change, or is it just another cycle that will be replaced with military governments in the 1990s? These are critical issues; they lie at the heart of the Latin American political processand of the analyses presented in this book.