Jan Knippers Black: Latin America Leading The Learning Curve

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Chapter 1
I N T RO D U C T I O N
Latin America Leading the Learning Curve
jan knippers black
Latin Americans and Latin Americanists have become accustomed over many
decades to hearing that “when the United States sneezes, Latin America catches
pneumonia.” But in the fall of 2008, the United States came down with a bad case
of pneumonia—and Latin America sneezed.
This is a good time to be a Latin Americanist. Never more than now in the near
half century since, as a founding generation Peace Corps volunteer, I first began to
focus on Western Hemisphere affairs, have I sensed among Latin Americans—
leaders and publics alike—a greater inclination to optimism and activism, self-
confidence and social and regional solidarity. At the close of the first decade of the
twenty-first century, most of the Latin American countries are moving in the di-
rection of expanded popular participation in creditable elections and of public as-
sertiveness with respect both to foreign policy and to domestic considerations in
economic decision making. Trade patterns and partnerships are increasingly diver-
Copyright © 2010. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
sified, and a report released by the UN Economic Commission for Latin America
and the Caribbean (UNECLAC) in 2009 indicated that between 2006 and 2008,
except for Mexico, poverty had diminished across the region. The region did in-
deed sneeze in 2009 after exposure to the US crisis, but even the hardest hit, close-
in neighbors approached 2010 with recovery prospects stronger than those of the
United States.
The waves of hope and anticipation of change that were sweeping the region
when I arrived in Chile in the early 1960s were soon to give way to tyranny and
terror, in South America first in the 1960s and 1970s, and in Mesoamerica in the
1980s. The first edition of this book, appearing in 1984, had to report on ongoing
struggles to emerge from a political and economic abyss and a pattern in Central
America of insurgency and counterinsurgency without promise of resolution.
Shaky “democratic transitions” and sporadic “market emergence” in the 1990s
brought relief for some, but upbeat major media storylines obscured the rum-
blings of discontent or desperation that lacked a forum and remained beneath the
radar screen. Thus, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it may have ap-
peared from a distance that Latin America was emerging from a deep sleep, as
1
Knippers, B. J. (2010). Latin america : Its problems and its promise: a multidisciplinary introduction. ProQuest Ebook Central
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2 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK
silent suffering acquired voice and became demand, and anomic protest became
coherent, mobilized, focused pursuit of change, expressed in some cases in elec-
toral outcomes and policy.
In the early 1960s the overriding concern in hemispheric affairs was whether or
not a young and charismatic US president would be able to pressure each of the
other Latin American governments to sever relations with Cuba. When Western
Hemisphere presidents met in early 2009, the overriding issue was whether the
Latin American governments, acting as one, would be able to pressure a young and
charismatic US president to renew relations with Cuba.
This turn of events, accompanied by new expressions and manifestations of na-
tionalism and regionalism, has been for the most vociferous of US pundits cause
for alarm. Any metaphoric move toward the exit of the US backyard is by defini-
tion a move to the left, which in the absence of an all-defining cold war, has been
relabeled terrorism. Cooler heads are inclined to see national self-assertion or op-
position to US policy as evidence that the United States has not been paying
enough attention to Latin America.
As US attention to Latin America has meant everything from stripping out
the resources to sending in the marines, I’d be inclined to say that enough of the
usual kind of attention is already too much. But there is indeed a sense in which
we are paying far too little attention. US institutions have become accustomed
over the past century to thinking in terms of what we should be teaching Latin
Americans (on the basis, one presumes, of our vast experience in doing things
right). In fact, we should be paying attention because we have so much to learn
from Latin America—because, to misquote Pogo, “we have met the suckers, and
they are us.”
Some of the lessons we should be learning from Latin America (elaborated in
the conclusion to this book) include humility and lessons in development as seen
from the bottom up (Latin Americans turned to self-help because it was the only
help available); lessons in electoral democracy from those who have understood
that defending the right to vote without defending the right to creditable electoral
processes and credible outcomes amounts to complicity in fraud; lessons in demo-
cratic transition, in the importance particularly of prosecuting rights abuse and
corruption in order to reconstruct the rule of law and recover national self-respect;
and lessons in security for the unarmed and unaffluent—on finding security, for
example, in truth, in numbers, and in rejection of control by fear.
Lessons from the Front Lines

Latin America, as the first region of what is now called the Third World to be thor-
oughly subjugated by European colonialism and the first to throw off that subju-
gation, has long been the Third World’s pacesetter and harbinger. It was first to
adopt the trappings of a republic and first, in varying degrees and by varying
means, to bring some reality to the rhetoric of popular participation.
Latin America was first to elaborate legal, institutional, and political bases in
support of national economic sovereignty, and first to see those bases obliterated
and constitutions shredded by military dictatorship. It was first then, particularly
under the dictatorships of the Southern Cone, to be forced open for “free trade”—
Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 3
in fact, very costly debt, deregulation and dependence—and first, along with
Africa in the 1980s, to experience shock therapy and economic meltdown.
A trend to limited redemocratization and sporadic economic growth that raised
hopes in the 1990s gave way early in the new millennium to widespread cynicism,
anger, and desperation, as prices rose, wages fell, and income gaps widened. In the
short term, new manifestations of social discontent kept governments enfeebled
and economies off-balance. Ahead of the curve at that time was not a very com-
fortable place to be. By the end of the decade, however, such conditions had gen-
erated in response new parties and new categories of social movements that have
since led to more meaningful participation.
Meanwhile, the hope for change that was palpable in the South began to rever-
berate in the North as well. The United States, while lagging, found itself in 2009
on the same trajectory as Latin America, riding a new wave of optimism and ac-
tivism. It must be noted, though, that from pole to pole in the Western Hemi-
sphere, increased political participation had failed to bring about acceptable levels
of government accountability. The label of “violin governments” that many
Chileans had assigned to their coalition governments of the 1930s and 1940s—so
labeled as they were said to be held by the Left and played by the Right—seemed
an apt characterization for many Hemisphere governments in the twenty-first cen-
tury. Those governments were more or less elected and more or less civilian, but
public sectors in most countries were still largely overwhelmed by private sectors—
by the global concentration and mobility of money.
Moreover, while some governments had done a commendable job of resurrect-
ing economies and raising employment and wages, income gaps almost everywhere
had continued to grow. And gaps in the Western Hemisphere continued to exceed
those in most other world regions. By mid-2009, the US economic meltdown of
2008 had led to contractions in most Latin American economies as well, but in
most the long-term damage was not expected to be so far-reaching as in the United
States; according to UNECLAC, recovery in Latin America was anticipated to be
stronger and sooner than in the United States. From the booming Brazilian econ-
omy to the badly damaged Mexican one, quite respectable growth rates were ex-
pected for 2010. It should be noted, however, that as in the United States, the first
markets to make a robust comeback were the financial markets.
Scholars in Context
The same pressures and perceptions faced by US and Latin American policymak-
ers set the agenda and the parameters that govern academic discourse. Thus to the
student who must launch his or her exploration of Latin America through the eyes
and ears, the assumptions and perspectives, and the theoretical and ideological fil-
ters of others, it would be useful to know something of the intellectual paths that
have been traveled by the specialists in the field. Those paths have circled, dead-
ended, and U-turned, merged and diverged; they are now, as always, subject to
turns in new directions. The attempt to understand social relations, especially in
an area so diverse and complex as Latin America, can never be a simple matter of
learning “the facts.” There will always be many facts in dispute; answers depend on
the nature of available data, on the interests of the sources consulted, and on how
questions are asked. Confronted, as one must be in a multiauthored text with dif-
fering points of view and thus differing interpretations of the same historical and
social data, the student may find it worthwhile to begin the study of Latin Amer-
ica with a study of Latin Americanists.
It is to be expected that interests and interpretations of social phenomena will
vary from one discipline to another. The geographer may find, for example, that
soil quality, climate, and topography determine settlement patterns and socioeco-
nomic relations, which in turn configure political systems. The anthropologist may
find explanation for social harmony or social conflict in ethnic and cultural pat-
terns. The economist may find that political trends derive from economic ones,
while the political scientist may see power relationships as overriding. In the study
of Latin America, however, there has always been a unifying theme.
From the perspectives of US- and European-based scholars, as well as from those
of Latin America’s own creative and scholarly writers, the study of Latin America
has been approached as the study of a problem, or set of problems. The problems
might be capsulized as underdevelopment and political instability or, more simply,
as poverty or inequality and the failure of democratic systems to take hold. The
search for the roots, causes, and progenitors of these problems has generally led in
one of three directions: to the Iberians—the conquistadores and the institutions,
attitudes, and cultural traits they brought with them to the New World; to the
Latin Americans themselves—the alleged greed of the elites, absence of entrepre-
neurship in the middle classes, or passivity of the masses; or to the United States
and the international capitalist system it promotes and defends.
Long before US scholars began to direct their attention to Latin America’s prob-
lems, the area’s own intellectuals were absorbed by the question of where to place
the blame. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century intellec-
tual and political leaders of cosmopolitan Buenos Aires blamed the cycles of anar-
chy and tyranny their newly independent country was suffering on Hispanic
influences.1 Sarmiento in later life directed his scorn toward Latin America’s own
“melting pot.” Influenced by social Darwinism, he diagnosed “the decadent state”

of Argentine society as deriving from its racial components of Spanish, mestizo, In-
dian, and Negro.
Turning the tables at the turn of the twentieth century, José Enrique Rodó,
Uruguay’s foremost literary figure, urged the youth of his country—in his master-
piece, Ariel—to shun the materialism of the United States and to cling to the spir-
itual and intellectual values of their Spanish heritage. A strong current of Latin
American social thought, reflected in art and music as well as literature, that gained
momentum a few decades into the twentieth century has touted the strengths of
native American cultures and blamed both Hispanic and North American influ-
ences for the prevailing instability and social injustice. Likewise, in the Caribbean,
the black power movements of the 1960s and 1970s called Europe and Anglo-
America to task for the region’s underdevelopment.
US Latin American studies as an interdisciplinary field in the United States and,
by extension, the coming of age of analysis of Latin American social and political
systems are clearly the illegitimate offspring of Fidel Castro. Prior to the Cuban rev-
olution, historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars had generally pursued
their studies of Latin American subjects in disciplinary isolation. Political analysis
had been largely limited to formal legal studies, highlighting the fact that Latin
American regimes rarely lived up to the standards, borrowed from France and the
United States, embodied in their constitutions. Such studies generally drew their ex-
planatory theses from the distinctive historical and cultural traditions of the United
States of North America and the disunited states of Latin America and, in so doing,
contributed to the mystification of the political process in both areas.2 The Iberian
heritage of feudalism, authoritarianism, and Catholicism was seen as the major ob-
stacle to democratic and socioeconomic reforms.
The surge of interest in Latin America on the part of US politicians and academ-
ics (encouraged by newly available government-funded fellowships and contracts)
that accompanied the Cuban revolution coincided with the acceleration of decol-
onization elsewhere and the expansion of attention to the Third World generally
by the previously parochial disciplines of economics and political science. Thus,
development and modernization theory, formulated to address change processes in
other parts of the Third World, came to dominate the study of Latin America as
well. Studies falling under these rubrics generally posited that either the economic
and political systems of Latin America would increasingly approximate those of
the United States and Western Europe or the area would be engulfed in violent
revolution.
The invalidation of many of the assumptions of development and moderniza-
tion theorists by the onrush of events—particularly by the fall of democratic
regimes and their replacement by military dictatorships—resulted in a theoretical
backlash as well as in long overdue attention to the work of Latin American theo-
rists. The backlash was expressed in a reassertion of the tenacity of tradition, of the
fundamentally conservative character of Latin American society. This perspective
has been endowed with greater theoretical and conceptual sophistication in studies
using the corporatist model. Corporatism stresses the hierarchical organization of
modern institutions and the persistence of control from the top.
A large body of Latin American literature, dating back to “the black legend” of
the cruelty and intolerance of Spanish colonial rule, supports the historical and
cultural explanations for the failure of democracy. But the trends that had domi-
nated the social sciences in the major Latin American countries were variations on
the Marxist themes of class conflict and imperialism. One such body of thought,
known as dependency theory, came to rival development and modernization the-
ory for predominance among US and European specialists in Latin American stud-
ies. Dependency theory held that Latin American underdevelopment should be
understood as a by-product of the international capitalist system.
With the end of the Cold War, that international capitalist system struck back
with a force that suppressed all previously contending paradigms. Some Latin
American theorists continued to urge attention to national and local markets, to
social and economic democracy, and to a new kind of nationalism. But a tri-
umphalist neoliberalism that stressed open markets, privatization, and elections-as-
democracy and gave no quarter to social concerns came to dominate elite
institutions throughout the hemisphere through the end of the century.
These theoretical trends and approaches have permeated all aspects of Latin
American studies, because—to a far greater extent than in Europe or the United
States—philosophy, literature, the arts, and other pursuits of the intelligentsia in
Latin America tend to reflect national or regional concerns. It could hardly be oth-
erwise; the cataclysmic episodes of insurgency and repression, revolution and
counterrevolution, leave no one untouched.
Blaming the Iberians: Corporatism and Culture

The historical-cultural approach to the study of Latin America and its problems
draws attention to the persistence in contemporary Latin America of attitudes,
institutions, and social relations that are said to have been characteristic of the
Iberian Peninsula in medieval times.3 According to this view, the Spanish con-
quistadores, crown officials, and Roman Catholic missionaries transplanted in
the New World a social system firmly based on elitism, authoritarianism, and
militarism.
The Portuguese legacy differed from that of Spain in its greater tolerance of
racial and cultural diversity, but, like the Spanish, the Portuguese inculcated in
their New World offspring a rigid sense of social, political, and cultural hierarchy.
Public morality was an integral part of the political culture, and the Catholic
Church, also hierarchical in structure, absolutist in doctrine, and authoritarian in
practice, shared with the institutions of government the responsibility for the
maintenance of the political and moral order.
During the early colonial period, a great debate raged among intellectuals and
governmental and spiritual leaders in Spain and its colonies as to whether native
Americans were fully human. It was finally concluded that the Church’s Christian-
izing mission implied recognition of the fundamental human attributes of the In-
dians. But in much of the empire, the slaughter or enslavement of the Indians
proceeded nevertheless, and it is clear that many contemporary Latin Americans
continue to see the Indians as belonging to a lesser order of humanity.
Corporatism
The corporatist model, drawn primarily from medieval Catholic thought and ob-
served, to some degree, in Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar, was
found to “fit” midcentury Latin American politics to a greater degree than some of
the models derived from development and modernization theory. The model,
elaborated in works by Wiarda, Schmitter, Malloy, Erickson, and others, has called
attention to the tendency to vertical, as opposed to horizontal, organization among
politically active groups in Latin America.4 Such groups, in corporatist systems, are
controlled and manipulated by authoritarian governments so that communica-
tions and power flow from the top down rather than from the bottom up.
Few Latin Americanists would dispute the observation that vestiges of medieval
Iberia are still to be found in Latin America. Nor is the existence of corporatist ten-
dencies a subject of great controversy. The point at which many Latin American-
ists depart from the findings of some scholars pursuing historical-cultural or
corporatist approaches is the supposition that modern manifestations of elitism
and authoritarianism are due primarily to colonization by Spain and Portugal.
Critics note, for example, that some countries that experienced fiercely authori-
tarian, military rule in the 1970s and 1980s (Chile and Uruguay, for example) had
enjoyed constitutional and more or less democratic rule throughout most of the
twentieth century. Furthermore, the Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay, and

Chile) was among the areas least influenced by colonial Spain. In Argentina, de-
scendants of Italian immigrants, who arrived in great waves around the turn of the
twentieth century, now outnumber the descendants of Spanish settlers. Surely
some common denominators of vintage more recent than the colonial period are
needed to explain the resurgence of authoritarianism in Latin America in the late
twentieth century. Moreover, the qualitative difference between traditional corpo-
ratism and the modern bureaucratic-technocratic variety has often been under-
stated. By the end of the 1980s, the popularity of the corporatist paradigm
appeared to be waning, and some of its former proponents, including Howard
Wiarda, had turned to an emphasis on cultural causation.
Cultural Causation
The late 1980s saw a revival of interest in the explanatory power of culture as an
independent variable. Samuel Huntington began to suggest that development and
modernization may be distinctively Western goals. He alleged that aspirations to
wealth, equity, democracy, stability, and autonomy emerge from Western, particu-
larly Nordic, experience, and that other cultures may prefer simplicity, austerity,
hierarchy, authoritarianism, discipline, and militarism.5 This view represents a
considerable retreat for a theorist who once believed Western-style modernization
to be irresistible. Huntington had retreated even further by the turn of the century.
In single-authored works and in Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human
Progress, which he co-edited with Lawrence Harrison, one finds echoes of the late-
occurring social Darwinism of Sarmiento.6
Blaming the Latin Americans:

Development and Modernization Theory
Whereas analyses of contemporary Latin America based on the traditional, or
historical-cultural, approach tended to have a static quality, development and

modernization theory introduced a new dynamism into the field. The new ap-
proach highlighted the facts that for better or worse, social change was indeed un-
der way and that to a great extent, that change was in response or in reaction to the
spread of the ideas and technologies of the more industrialized world, primarily
the United States and Western Europe, to the Third World.
The body of thought that came to be known as development and/or modern-
ization theory—terms often used interchangeably—was pioneered primarily by
US scholars in the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. In economics, devel-
opment theory presumed that with the infusion of capital and the acquisition of
business skills, and with the advantage of not having to reinvent the wheel, the na-
tions that had yet to experience their industrial revolutions would pass at an accel-
erated pace along paths already broken by Western Europe and the United States.
Walt W. Rostow further assumed that economic development, at least beyond a
stage he called “take-off,” was irreversible.7
From the perspective of anthropologists and sociologists, “modernization” gener-
ally meant the ingestion of the supposedly Western attitudinal traits of rationalism,
instrumentalism, achievement orientation, and the like. This approach stressed the
felicitous consequences of the spread of modern communications media, of edu-

cation in science and the liberal arts, and of technology transfer, and it implied
that Third World societies could (and should) become developed through the ac-
celerated absorption of individuals into the middle class or the modern industrial
sector.
Political scientists borrowed liberally from the other social sciences, often with-
out seeming to notice that in their extreme formulations these theories amounted
to a virtual denial of the stuff of their own discipline: power relationships. Political
scientists did, however, offer their own set of indices of development and/or mod-
ernization. Gabriel Almond, for example, stressed structural differentiation (the
elaboration of economic and political roles), whereas Samuel Huntington stressed
political institutions.8 Other scholars focused on participation, egalitarianism, and
governmental capability, assuming such attributes to be mutually reinforcing.
Huntington, however, seeing expanding participation in the absence of institu-
tionalization as destabilizing, prioritized stability. Martin C. Needler, perceiving
the same contradiction, prioritized participation but noted that in the absence of
steady economic growth it would have a destabilizing effect on systems of limited
democracy, threatening the imposition of authoritarianism.9
These trends in the social sciences coincided with the Cuban revolution and
thus with the Alliance for Progress and the emergence of interdisciplinary pro-
grams in Latin American studies. Development came to be one of the major goals
of the Alliance for Progress; the other was security—the prevention of “another
Cuba.” The few critical voices, such as that of Albert O. Hirschman, who argued
that such goals might be contradictory, were generally ignored.10 The prevailing
view, that “unrest” was an impediment to progress and had to be contained by
strengthened security forces, won out in academic as well as in governmental cir-
cles until a wave of military takeovers forced a reevaluation.
Critics of development and modernization theory have pointed out that its ad-
herents were inclined either to see what they wanted to see or to label whatever
they saw as progress. Economists, for example, measured development by using ag-
gregate data on the growth of gross national product or per capita income, data
that were blind to the skewed distribution of income. While US economists lav-
ished praise on Brazil’s “economic miracle,” Brazil’s own dictator, General Emilio
Garrastazú Médici, commented in 1970 that “the economy is doing fine, but the
people aren’t.”11
A tendency common to much of the work based on development and modern-
ization theory was a peculiar sort of ethnocentricity based on an idealized and
class-delimited national or North Atlantic self-image. If Latin Americans and other
peoples of the Third World had failed to achieve development or modernization,
it was assumed to be because they lacked our industriousness and had failed to see
their own problems as clearly as we saw them. In effect, the blame for poverty and
powerlessness was placed squarely on the poor and powerless.
Scholars of the period were not necessarily in accord as to which of the indices
of development and modernization were most relevant and useful. Nevertheless,
distinctions between value-free and value-laden concepts were rarely well drawn.
The behavioralist tendency in the social sciences, which was also coming into its
own in the 1960s, sharpened the inclination of social scientists, attempting to be
“scientific,” to hold acknowledged bias in disdain. Thus, those scholars who argued
that economic growth and stability were the most important indices of develop-
ment and those who challenged that redistribution of wealth and the expansion of
political participation were more important tended to maintain the pretense that
they were arguing over facts rather than over values.
As military regimes swept the hemisphere in the 1960s and 1970s, replacing dem-
ocratic ones, the development approach was discredited and superseded by newer
theoretical trends, particularly dependency. Some of the theorists once attracted to
the development paradigm became persuaded by the arguments of dependency
theory. Others came to stress the interdependence of First and Third Worlds or to
look for cultural causation in differing levels of development. Many of the atti-
tudes and assumptions associated with development theory were revived in the
1990s through the currency of neoliberalism, but the latter also displayed striking
differences.
Blaming the United States:

Dependency and Related Theories
In his earlier ideological incarnation as one of the originators of dependency the-
ory, Brazilian social scientist Fernando Henrique Cardoso responded to the ques-
tion, “What is dependency?” by saying, “It’s what you call imperialism if you don’t
want to lose your Ford Foundation grant.” (Elected president of Brazil in 1994,
Cardoso then began to call dependency theory his Frankenstein.) More precisely,
as Susanne Bodenheimer Jonas has noted, dependency refers to the perspective
from “below,” whereas the Marxist theory of imperialism provides the perspective
from “above.”12 As the Marxist theory of imperialism seeks to explain why and
how the dominant classes of the dominant capitalist powers expand their spheres
of exploitation and political control, dependency theory examines what this rela-
tionship of unequal bargaining and multilayered exploitation means to the domi-
nated classes in the dominated countries.

The dependency approach, unabashedly normative, derived its impulse largely
from the attempts of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin
America (ECLA) in the early 1960s, under the leadership of Argentine econo-
mist Raúl Prebisch, to understand and counteract such problems as the deterio-
ration in the terms of trade for producers of primary (nonindustrial) products. A
renewed awareness of economic exploitation and dependency followed upon dis-
illusionment with industrialization through import substitution, Latin American
economic integration, and other solutions proposed by ECLA. Thus, a number
of Latin American political scientists and sociologists, including Brazilians Car-
doso and Teotonio dos Santos and Chilean Osvaldo Sunkel, renewed their ef-
forts to explain patterns of social class structure and predict the structural
changes that are inherent in the process of capitalist development in a dependent
state.
Among the assumptions that underpin dependency theory are the following.
First, the distribution of power and status in national and international arenas is
ultimately determined by economic relationships. Second, the causes of underde-
velopment are not to be found in national systems alone but must be sought in the
pattern of economic relations between hegemonic, or dominant, powers and their

client states. The perpetuation of the pattern of inequality within client states is
managed by a clientele class, which might be seen as the modern functional equiv-
alent of a formal colonial apparatus. Third, both within and among states, the un-
fettered forces of the marketplace tend to exacerbate rather than to mitigate
existing inequalities. That is, the dominant foreign power benefits at the expense
of its client states, and the clientele class benefits at the expense of other classes.
Dependency theorists further held that development would not take place
through the “trickle-down” of wealth nor through the gradual diffusion of modern
attitudes and modern technology; that the upward mobility of individuals ex-
pressed by their gradual absorption into the modern sector is no solution to the
problem of the impoverishment of the masses; and that stability is no virtue in a
system of pronounced inequality. In fact, most dependency theorists, or, in Span-
ish, dependentistas, believed that only by breaking out of the international capital-
ist system and establishing socialist regimes would Latin American nations gain
control over their own decision making and expand the options available to
them.13
Whereas modernization and development theorists had seen foreign investment
and foreign aid as critical to development in the Third World, dependentistas saw
such investment and aid as means of extracting capital from client states. Depen-
dentistas would probably agree with the observation of US congressman Dante Fas-
cell (D-Florida) that aid is a means whereby the poor of the rich countries
contribute to the rich of the poor countries. They might also add that aid is yet an-
other means whereby the poor of the rich countries contribute to the rich of the
rich countries.
Andre Gunder Frank, comparing the experiences of the Latin American states
during World War I and the Depression of the 1930s with their experiences dur-
ing periods when the links were stronger between those states and the industrial-
ized West, concluded in 1970 that satellites, or client states, experience their
greatest industrial development when their ties to the more developed states are
weakest.14 Other scholars, noting, for example, the industrial expansion of Brazil
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, maintain that rapid industrial growth may take
place under conditions of dependency. There is general agreement, however, that
to the extent that economic growth takes place under conditions of dependency, it
is a distorted pattern of growth that exacerbates existing inequalities among both
classes and regions within client states.
Like development theory, dependency theory has been limited by an excessive
reliance on aggregate data and a “black box” approach—which treats nations like
black boxes, shedding no light on internal dynamics or relationships. Such an ap-
proach deals with the outcome of unequal relations between nations but fails to
elaborate the political mechanisms whereby dependent relationships are perpetu-
ated. Furthermore, in assigning primacy to economic relationships, dependentistas
tend to give short shrift to other factors, such as the pursuit of institutional, or bu-
reaucratic, interests, which may have an important bearing upon relations between
dominant powers and client states and upon relations among political actors
within client states.
Penetration Theory and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism

Other approaches that share many of the assumptions of dependency theory and
serve to elaborate or refine our understanding of politics in dependent states in-
clude penetration theory and the model of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Penetra-
tion theory seeks to identify the means whereby a dominant foreign power
influences policy in a client state not only directly, through diplomatic pressures,
but also indirectly, through the manipulation of political competition within the
client state.15 Bureaucratic authoritarianism, according to Argentine political sci-
entist Guillermo O’Donnell, who coined the phrase, is the likely outcome of social
and economic modernization in the context of delayed, or dependent, develop-
ment. Such impersonal, institutional dictatorship is not a vestige of the feudalistic
rule imposed by Spain or Portugal but rather a response to a perceived threat to the
capitalist system. According to O’Donnell, the levels of coercion and of economic
orthodoxy that are imposed depend upon the level of perceived threat.16
The Center-Periphery Model

The relationships hypothesized or described by dependency theorists have been in-
corporated by Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung into a model of elegant simplic-
ity.17 According to the center-periphery model, elites of the center, or metropolis,
draw bounty from the periphery of their own state system (through taxes, for ex-
ample), which they devote to the nurture and support of co-opted elites of client or
“peripheral” states. In turn, elites of those client states, dependent upon elites of the
center for assistance in exploiting and suppressing their own peripheral, or nonelite,
populations, have no choice but to allow center elites to participate in, or share in
the product of, the exploitation of the peripheral peoples of the peripheral states.
World Systems Theory

World systems theory, pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein, also views the world
economy as segmented into core and periphery areas.18 Rather than focusing on
the interactions of governments, however, this approach calls attention to the
transnational interactions of nonstate actors, particularly multinational corpora-
tions and banks. The international economy is said to be driven by the initiatives
of economic elites, particularly of the developed capitalist states, whose govern-
ments normally do their bidding. The control centers of the world economy then
are financial rather than political capitals. The farther one lives from such a center,
the less the “trickle down” of its wealth will be experienced.
Wallerstein, who sees the ideas of dependentistas as falling within the world sys-
tem perspective, takes issue with more traditional Marxists and liberals alike for
what he calls a rigidly developmentalist approach. That is, both schools assume
that each nation-state must pass through the same set of stages, or modes of ex-
tracting surplus, in the same order. As he sees it, the nation-state system, which
came into being in part as a convenience to economic elites of an earlier era, has
ceased to be the essential institutional base of the global economy. The contempo-
rary struggle, then, is not between rich and poor states, but rather between rich
and poor classes in a global society.
Interests at the Core of Theoretical Difference

The basic differences among the preceding approaches relate more to interest than
to analysis and, in that regard, might best be posed as a dichotomy. For example,
some might see a division of interests between the First World and the Third; but
that fails to account for the fact that Third World elites, pursuing class as well as
individual interests, often adopt First World perspectives. First World scholars and
humanitarians often identify with the disadvantaged of the Third World. An elit-
ist versus egalitarian, or concentrational versus redistributive bifurcation might
avoid territorial and cultural implications and be more readily comprehensible; but
it imputes values that are not generally acknowledged.
There is, however a more clear-cut means of dealing with dichotomy while
avoiding unwelcome imputation; it is a dichotomy expressed as preference, and as
perception of efficacy, of means. That is, the two approaches claim a common goal
of progress or development for all in the long run, but differ in means seen as ap-
propriate to achieving the goal. One approach sees the material interests of rich
and poor nations and peoples as being in harmony and thus amenable to a single
strategy. The other sees those interests as being directly in conflict—as in a zero-
sum game.
Not surprisingly, the one size fits all strategy tends to be employed by the states
or classes who own the pattern—those in a position to decide what that size will
be. Colonial and neocolonial powers, for example, and their elite allies in client
states might be expected to see the policies and undertakings that serve their inter-
ests as serving those also of the conquered and colonized. Such an assumption of
harmonic interests is not likely to be shared, however, by the conquered and the
colonized. The latter are more likely to see the interests of conquerors and con-
quered as discordant. This dichotomy will be seen more clearly in the theoretical
monopolization, followed by theoretical polarization, that followed the decon-
struction of the Cold War ideational framework.
Seeking Common Ground

Dichotomies and unacknowledged interests notwithstanding, none of the ap-
proaches, models, and theories applied to the study of Latin America wholly ex-
cludes the others. The differences among them are largely differences of
perspective, emphasis, and value judgment. Adherents of development and mod-
ernization theory, like those of the historical-cultural approach, tend to focus on
the attitudes of individuals and the behavior of institutions, though the former are
more attuned to the indices of change whereas the latter more often stress conti-
nuity. Both pay tribute to the achievements of the modern West and deplore the
antidemocratic influences of the Iberian tradition, but development and modern-
ization theorists, more readily than historical-cultural analysts, see approximation
to the Western model as a plausible solution.
Drawing explicitly on Marxist concepts, dependency theory looks to material
interests and class conflict as well as to international patterns of trade, aid, and po-
litical control for explanations of political process at the national level. Thus, even
when scholars of differing schools can agree as to what happened, they are likely to
disagree as to why it happened. Whereas development and modernization theo-

rists, for example, have generally viewed the public and private vehicles of US in-
fluence as forces for democratic and social reform, dependency theorists have
viewed them as antidemocratic and antiegalitarian forces.
In the late 1980s, a number of scholars sought to resolve the debate between de-
velopment and dependency theorists by seeking common ground or to supersede
the debate by asking a different set of questions. One consequence was a new em-
phasis on “interdependence.” Another was a wide-angle focus, reaching across dis-
ciplines and deep into the history of industrialization to explore, in particular,
relationships between the state and the private sector, domestic and foreign. That
approach was labeled the new international political economy.
Interdependence
Whereas scholars dealing with relations between developed states and the Third
World tended to focus in the 1960s on the benefits of such relations for the Third
World and, in the 1970s, on the detriment of such relations to the Third World,
many scholars in the 1980s began to focus instead on complementary needs and
common problems. Some noted, for example, an increasing vulnerability on the
part of the industrialized states to economic problems in the Third World. The
high interest rates of the early 1980s in the First World, particularly the United
States, were devastating to Latin American economies. The consequent debt crisis
in Latin America then threatened the solvency of US banks and closed markets for
US manufactured goods.
International Political Economy

The international political economy (IPE) agenda recaptured the scope of nineteenth-
century social concerns for the purpose of addressing contemporary policy issues.
Thus, the assumptions and findings of IPE theorists tend to cut across, and per-
haps defuse, the development-dependency debates. In addressing Third World is-
sues, IPE theorists, like dependency theorists, seek explanation for means and
levels of development in class conflict rather than in assumptions about attitudes.
Like modernization and development theorists, however, they generally find a pos-
itive relationship between development and democracy. They accept, to a point,
the dependentista assertion that Third World countries have been disadvantaged by
their participation in the global economy, but hold that positive results have on oc-
casion been achieved where Third World governments had the capacity to negoti-
ate the conditions of their participation.
Like the world system school, the IPE school finds no preordained sequence of
stages in development. IPE, however, faults the world system approach for underes-
timation of the role of the state in determining economic outcomes. Rejecting both
the liberal preference for an unfettered market and the Marxist choice of state dom-
inance of economic decision making, international political economy theorists con-
tend that both state and market have important roles to play and that on occasion
they are mutually reinforcing. Effective operation of the market may in fact be de-
pendent upon the vigilance of a strong state, prepared to intervene where necessary.
Like dependency theorists, adherents of the IPE approach concern themselves
with the contradiction between the territorial character of state power and the
transnational character of economic power, but IPE theorists argue that the pene-
tration of foreign capital does not necessarily shrink the economic role of the state.
Studies of petrochemical and iron industries in Brazil by Peter Evans, of the oil in-
dustry in Venezuela by Franklin Tugwell, and of the copper industry in Chile by
Theodore Moran have shown that foreign-owned extractive sectors may stimulate
state entrepreneurial activity; that in itself, however, does not necessarily advance
living standards or other indices of development.19
The Post–Cold War Paradigmatic Shift

Though the Cold War ended with a whimper rather than a bang, the postwar pe-
riod has had much in common with the aftermath of other wars—shifting bound-
aries and trade patterns, new categories of the displaced and the deprived. The
winner in this case, however, was not a country or set of countries but an economic
system. That system was not just capitalism; it was a socially premodern version of
capitalism bulwarked by postmodern technology.
Spencerian capitalism, emerging triumphant, demanded unconditional surren-
der not just of socialism in its extreme forms but also of many experiments in state
planning and regulation, state-run enterprise and protected domestic industry, and
welfare provision—experiments that in Latin America, and particularly in the
most developed Latin American states, were survivals of several decades of political
development and economic nationalism. Such globalization of economic power
and planning meant also a level of hegemony in the realm of ideas unprecedented
perhaps since the era of scholasticism. That is not to say that there was no dissi-
dence or heresy. So long as there have been spokesmen of the haves proclaiming
that trends and policies in their interest were in the interest also of the have-nots,
there have been defenders of the have-nots having the nerve to say “not so.” But
one thing the have-nots have not in such times is a forum.
The kind of economic devastation that followed the final cataclysms of the Cold
War in the region of its epicenter got a long head start in Latin America. The debt
crisis of the early 1980s left Latin American leaders at the mercy of creditors and
currency speculators. The state itself, as a representative of a sovereign people, was
so weakened that any line of policy, or even rhetoric, that smacked of economic
nationalism threatened to set off a stampede of fleeing capital.
The surrender of economic policymaking seemed not to be a matter of choice,
but domestic constituencies nonetheless demanded explanation and justification,
which was scripted in neoliberal terms. Dependency theorists might claim that
this turn of events had validated their analysis of the problem; but in a globalized
economy—that is, without an alternative market or credit source—they were left
without politically feasible solutions.
Liberalism and Neoliberalism

Like persons and places and religions, theories that acquire celebrity status—and
thus usefulness to the powerful—become caricatures of themselves or their origi-
nal versions; and liberalism was no exception. As elaborated in 1776 by Adam
Smith, it was a progressive proposition, designed to redistribute wealth and op-
portunity from opulent courts and colonizers monopolizing trade under a system
known as mercantilism to a new class of merchants and entrepreneurs whose in-

terests and power were to be limited by competition. Smith, however, recognized
the danger of the evolution of monopolies and advocated strict governmental reg-
ulation to prevent such a development.
As liberalism came to be championed by an expansive Great Britain in the nine-
teenth century and the United States in the twentieth century, its qualifiers faded
and its progressive features were transformed. The surviving core of the theory held
that states had a common interest in the free flow of goods, services, and capital
across national borders. Smith’s laissez-faire principle was reinforced by David Ri-
cardo’s theory of comparative advantage. That theory posited that states should
take advantage of their raw materials, low labor costs, technologies, or other
strengths in order to specialize in those goods they could produce most efficiently,
while trading for goods in which other states had the advantage. In colonial and
neocolonial systems, the advantage accrued, of course, to mother countries, not
colonies.
Development and modernization theory was a legitimate offspring of liberalism,
and like its sire it served to explain and legitimate the seemingly limitless opportu-
nities and responsibilities of an imperial power at its peak. Like liberalism also it
sought to promote social and political change in adversary or client states, within
limits dictated by elite and hegemonic economic interest.
Though its power center does not reside in a state, neoliberalism shares those
circumstances and attributes of its forebears; but whereas development theory
sought to strengthen state institutions, neoliberalism as expressed in policy tends
to eviscerate them. Governments in general are seen as wasteful and corrupt, their
deficits inflationary, their budgets a drain on resources that might otherwise be di-
rected to servicing debt and attracting investment. And privatization of govern-
ment enterprises or services that might bring in a profit has commonly been a
condition for the extension of credit. These and other measures that have come to
be known collectively as “structural adjustment” are in the context of neoliberalism
both policy prescriptions and factors in explanation and prediction of economic

growth and stability or its absence. It is also assumed that an economy restructured
along the lines prescribed is a prerequisite for a smoothly functioning electoral
democracy. It has been conveniently forgotten that in general the “opening” of
Latin American economies coincided with the shut-down of democratic systems in
the 1970s rather than with their return.
What Was Left? Critics and Heretics

With the end of the Cold War, the right had lost its cover story, but the left had
lost something harder to come by; it had lost its dream.
Criticism of neoliberalism as theory and as policy has exhibited little in the way
of romanticism or radicalism. It was not in spite of the enormity of Latin Amer-
ica’s problems and the pressures that private interests were able to bring to bear
against the public interest but because of them that political strategies and policy
alternatives from the left in the 1990s were measured and modest.
The dependentista school had not vanished, though some might argue—since
Cardoso was elected president of Brazil as a born-again neoliberal—that it had
gone under deep cover. Osvaldo Sunkel, in his influential book Development from
Within,20 argued that while a strategy of export promotion may be unavoidable, a

healthy economy, resistant to the effects of global market volatility, demands pri-
ority attention to the development of the domestic market. The late Andre Gun-
der Frank, who joined world systems scholars in the study of long cycles of history,
found Latin America in the early 1990s to be increasingly marginalized from world
trading systems. More important, he saw commerce centering once again in the
twenty-first century in the Orient, and particularly China.
Mexican scholar and political columnist Jorge Castañeda, in Utopia Unarmed,21
observed that the entire political spectrum shifted sharply to the right in the
1990s. In that context, he found the left alive and well and living in the center—
or what used to be the center. He did not interpret such repositioning, however, as
surrender or battle fatigue; rather, he saw it as the outcome of learning through
painful experience to see politics as the art of the possible. Castañeda called for a
revival of nationalism, but reformulated so as to promote transnational coalition
building and to accommodate regional economic integration.
A Message from the Street

While the left in the ivory towers of academia, politics, and punditry may have
been, at the turn of the twenty-first century, alive and well and living in the center,
the disadvantaged people for whom they purported to speak had taken to the
streets; and momentum with respect to the articulation and projection of their mes-
sage had shifted to the street-level world of social activists and social movements.
Throughout the hemisphere, from Mexico to Argentina, those whose resources
and livelihoods and safety nets had been usurped by the faceless corporate and in-
stitutional predators who came to be identified with neoliberal globalization found
new means of organizing and making themselves heard. The Zapatistas of the Mex-
ican state of Chiapas garnered support from around the world as the virtual version
of their revolution was played out in poetry on the Internet. In Colombia, “peace
communities” put up unarmed resistance to guerrillas and government-supported

paramilitaries alike. In Ecuador and Bolivia, indigenous communities coalesced to
bring down elite-based governments. In Argentina, barter clubs, co-op factories,
and neighborhood support groups overcame anarchy when government collapsed.
And in Brazil, landless workers, more than a million strong, helped to propel the
leader of a genuine workers’ party into the presidency.
All of this newly effective commotion in the streets and fields and forests pro-
vided a new focus for Latin Americanists. Sonia Alvarez was among the first to call
attention to the potential of popular, grassroots movements in Latin America.22
Such movements, in Latin America and elsewhere, have benefited greatly from the
work of a multifaceted thicket of non-governmental organizations, operating at all
levels from local to global. Henry Veltmeyer, James Petras, and Cristobal Kay are
among the Latin Americanists who have dealt with this important development.23
Activists’ Alternative Perspectives

The last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first
saw, in fact, the amassing of a great body of scholarly and popular literature in-
spired by addressing needs and interests that run counter to those advanced by ne-
oliberalism. This intellectual flourishing, however, particularly on the part of envi-

ronmentalists, feminists, and advocates of grassroots community development, was
slow to generate a great debate, mainly because until recently economists, who en-
joyed unchallenged disciplinary primacy in the business of theoretical legitimation,
generally ignored it.
Between these concerns and neoliberalism as now advanced there is little com-
mon ground. From the perspective of environmentalism, the global village is being
stripped of resources by a feeding frenzy set off by deregulation and the new open-
ness of markets and fueled by hard-currency debt-service requirements. Globe-
hopping investors deplete, despoil, and depart, leaving communities and
ecosystems devastated.
Likewise, scholars engaging in gender analysis along with chroniclers and sup-
porters of the international women’s movement, have noted that the front-line vic-
tims of the economic restructuring now sweeping the global village are women.
Shrinkage of the public sector has cost women their best professional jobs at the
same time that loss of family services, pensions, and benefits has expanded their re-
sponsibilities. Even as women were scoring great advances in political roles, they
were being squeezed out of the better-paying formal economy and drawn in ever
greater numbers into exploitative informal-sector work. Jane Jaquette has done
seminal work on the mobilization of women to confront social and political
crises.24 Mala Htun represents a new generation of women focusing not only on
women in politics but on the politics of gender issues.25
As governments, bound first to distant creditors, defaulted on their obligations
to their own citizens, the newly displaced and deprived were discovering what the
long-suffering have always known—that the last bastion of security is a commu-
nity organized and aware of the need for general commitment and mutual sup-
port. Theorists of grassroots development note that such awareness and
commitment runs counter to the dog-eat-dog or all-eat-dog options suggested by
neoliberal individualism. Moreover, globalization—the alienation or distancing of
decision making about priorities and livelihoods—presents a dire threat to the

ideal of individual and collective self-sufficiency, or “empowerment,” that is the
philosophical foundation of community development.
Globalizing Justice?
With increasing success, since the first major street demonstrations against the
World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999, opponents of neoliberal
globalization have broadened their constituencies, united diverse groups and
causes, and made their voices heard. Since the Seattle meeting, massive demon-
strations have regularly dogged the deliberations of international financial institu-
tions and other global money movers, and after several years of covering the action,
media analysts finally began to ask why. A new threshold was crossed at the WTO
forum in Cancún in 2003, when for the first time NGOs had moved up from the
street to work directly with delegations of Third World governments. Under
Brazilian leadership, a coalition including China and India as well as Argentina
and several other Latin American countries blocked the next round of the WTO’s
proposed reforms and derailed, at least temporarily, the proposed Free Trade
Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).
Thus, the surge of events, prompted by bottom-up initiatives, seems finally to

have broken the paradigmatic monopoly of neoliberalism. Though advocates and
critics rarely engage each other in straightforward debate or in pursuit of theoreti-
cal synthesis, perspectives alternative to or critical of neoliberal globalization are
gaining increasing attention in the media and in academia—even among Nobel
laureates in economics—and laying the groundwork for a vibrant new dialogue on
the fundamentals of democracy and development.26
Many of those concerned about the dark side of globalization point out that
the issue is not globalization itself—global interaction or togetherness—but
rather what is being globalized. They say that, in contrast to their intellectual de-
tractors and political adversaries, they would advance the globalization of social
justice, biological and cultural diversity, and respect for human rights. In fact, as
anti-terrorism replaces anti-communism as the new all-purpose trump card of the
powerful, Latin Americanists are once again edging into the forefront of social crit-
icism. It could hardly be otherwise; the New American century declared by the
Bush administration sounded to Latin Americans and Latin Americanists like a
century with which we were already all too familiar.27 Perhaps the second decade
of this new century will imbue us with a new vision and give us a fresh start in a
different direction.
Academic Integration on a New Basis

It may well be that the effects of neoliberal globalization on living standards for
most in the Western Hemisphere, from Canada to the Southern Cone, have been
negative. But globalization has also been expressed and felt in ways other than theft
on a grander scale. And in terms of academic pursuits, it has promoted or enabled
increasing collaboration and integration, or reintegration, of efforts among schol-
ars from pole to pole. Gender, environmental, and human rights concentrations
remain strong, and Latin and Anglo Americans alike are giving increasing atten-
tion to rural poverty and the indigenous, to issues of immigration and healthcare,
to challenges facing youth, including the militarization of policing and control of
street gangs, to the problem of jobless economic growth and, once again, to South
American rather than North American approaches to economic integration.28
Much of this has been led or inspired by the diaspora communities. Canadian
and European universities and social activist communities that welcomed exiles
from Latin America in the 1970 and 1980s have been well positioned to help bud-
ding scholars and academic systems in reconstruction in Latin America to get be-
yond official histories and to learn and teach from their own experience. The
United States has lagged in this regard, but US-based scholars are benefiting from
the support and learning experiences of our colleagues elsewhere in the hemisphere
to bring pressure to bear on our own government and academic institutions. Frus-
trated by seeing our invited colleagues from Cuba turned away at the border year af-
ter year, the Latin American Studies Association, born in the 1960s in the United
States but now an international organization with some six thousand members, has
resolved not to meet again in the United States until the US government sees fit to
welcome our members regardless of states of origin or residence. There is still much
good that might come from relearning the meaning of being a good neighbor.
Notes
1. Sarmiento’s best-known work is Facundo. English translation: Civilization and Bar-
barism: The Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga (New York: Collier, 1961).
2. This author submits that one of the reasons that Latin American politics has been
so poorly understood by North Americans is that North American politics is also poorly
understood by them.
3. Among the Latin Americanists whose works have tended to be in this vein are
Fredrick Pike, John Mander, Charles Wagley, Claudio Veliz, Ronald Newton, William S.
Stokes, and William Lyle Schurz.
4. Works highlighting corporatism or employing corporatist models include Howard
J. Wiarda, Corporatism and Development: The Portuguese Experience (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1977); Howard J. Wiarda, ed., Politics and Social Change in Latin
America: The Distinct Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974);
Philippe C. Schmitter, Interest Conflict and Political Change in Brazil (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1971); James M. Malloy, ed., Authoritarianism and Corpo-
ratism in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977); and Kenneth
Paul Erickson, The Brazilian Corporative State: Working Class Politics (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1977).
5. Samuel Huntington and Myron Weiner, eds., Understanding Political Development
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), pp. 21–28.
6. Basic Books, 2000.
7. Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1960).
8. Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental
Approach (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); and Samuel Huntington, Political Order in
Changing Societies (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1968)
9. Martin C. Needler, Political Development in Latin America: Instability, Violence, and
Evolutionary Change (New York: Random House, 1968). Other applications of develop-
ment theory to the study of Latin America have included Charles W. Anderson, Politics
and Economic Change in Latin America (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1967); and Edward J.
Williams and Freeman Wright, Latin American Politics: A Developmenetal Approach (Palo
Alto, Calif.: Mayfield, 1975).
10. Albert O. Hirschman, Journeys Toward Progress: Studies of Economic Policymaking
in Latin America (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1963).
11. Cited in Dan Griffin, “The Boom in Brazil: An Awful Lot of Everything,” Wash-
ington Post, May 27, 1973.
12. Susanne Bodenheimer Jonas, “Dependency and Imperialism: The Roots of Latin
American Development,” Politics and Society, May 1977, pp. 327–357.
13. Richard Fagen, “Studying Latin American Politics: Some Implications of a De-
pendency Approach,” Latin American Research Review 12, no. 2 (1977): 3–26.
14. Andre Gunder Frank, Development and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1968).
15. For an elaboration and application of penetration theory, see Jan Knippers Black,
United States Penetration of Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977),
forthcoming in Portuguese edition from Fundacao Joaquim Nabuco, Editora Massan-
gana, Recife.
16. Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies
in South American Politics, Politics of Modernization Series, no. 9 (Berkeley: Institute of
International Studies, University of California, 1973).
17. Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research 8,

no. 2 (1972), pp. 81–117.
18. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the
Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic
Press, 1974).
19. See Peter Evans, Dependent Development: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and
Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Franklin Tugwell,
The Politics of Oil in Venezuela (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975); and
Theodore H. Moran, Multinational Corporations and the Politics of Dependence: Copper in
Chile (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
20. Osvaldo Sunkel, ed., Development from Within: Toward a Neostructuralist Approach
for Latin America (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1993).
21. Jorge B. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War
(New York: Knopf, 1993).
22. See Alvarez and Arturo Escobar, eds., The Making of Social Movements in Latin
America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy (Boulder: Westview, 1992).
23. Henry Veltmeyer, On the Move: The Politics of Social Change in Latin America (New
York: Broadway Press, 2007); James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer, What’s Left in Latin
America? Regime Change in New Times (UK: Ashgate, 2009); Cristobal Kay and A. Haroon
Akram-Lodhi, Peasants and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2008).
24. Jane S. Jaquette, The Women’s Movement in Latin America (Boston: Unwin Hy-
man, 1989).
25. Mala Htun, Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family Under Latin
American Dictatorships and Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
26. See, for example, René Armand Dreifuss, A Epoca Das Perplexidades (Petropolis:
Editora Voces, 1996); William Robinson, Transnational Conflicts:Central America, Social
Change, and Globalization (London: Verso, 2003); and Jan Black, Inequity in the Global
Village: Recycled Rhetoric and Disposable People (Westport, Conn.: Kumarian, 1999).
27. See Virginia Bouvier, ed., The Globalization of US-Latin American Relations:
Democracy, Intervention, and Human Rights (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).
28. See William Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 2008); Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper (New York: Routledge,
2002); and Jan Knippers Black, The Politics of Human Rights Protection (Boulder: Row-
man & Littlefield, 2009).

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jan knippers black

2 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

Lessons from the Front Lines

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 3

4 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

“melting pot.” Influenced by social Darwinism, he diagnosed “the decadent state”

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 5

6 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

Blaming the Iberians: Corporatism and Culture

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 7

twentieth century. Furthermore, the Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay, and

Blaming the Latin Americans:

historical-cultural, approach tended to have a static quality, development and

8 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

felicitous consequences of the spread of modern communications media, of edu-

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 9

Blaming the United States:

nated classes in the dominated countries.

10 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

pattern of economic relations between hegemonic, or dominant, powers and their

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 11

Penetration Theory and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism

The Center-Periphery Model

World Systems Theory

12 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

Interests at the Core of Theoretical Difference

Seeking Common Ground

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 13

disagree as to why it happened. Whereas development and modernization theo-

International Political Economy

14 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

The Post–Cold War Paradigmatic Shift

Liberalism and Neoliberalism

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 15

known as mercantilism to a new class of merchants and entrepreneurs whose in-

both policy prescriptions and factors in explanation and prediction of economic

What Was Left? Critics and Heretics

16 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

Within,20 argued that while a strategy of export promotion may be unavoidable, a

A Message from the Street

communities” put up unarmed resistance to guerrillas and government-supported

Activists’ Alternative Perspectives

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 17

oliberalism. This intellectual flourishing, however, particularly on the part of envi-

decision making about priorities and livelihoods—presents a dire threat to the

18 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

Thus, the surge of events, prompted by bottom-up initiatives, seems finally to

Academic Integration on a New Basis

Introduction: Latin America Leading the Learning Curve 19

20 JAN KNIPPERS BLACK

17. Johan Galtung, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research 8,

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