5.6: Hispanic America 1970-2010

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The last decades of the 20th century marked a progressive integration of Latin America into the “global era,” and at the same time, a growing diversity in the history and cultural production of each country and region. From an era of dictatorships in the 1970s, we gradually passed to a period of democratic governments that favored foreign investment, in what was called the “neo-liberal era” or economic openness in the 1990s. Primarily, urban societies continue to face the challenge of providing the majority of their population with access to employment, education, healthcare, and basic necessities of consumption. Cinema has been one of the fields of cultural production with the greatest international diffusion since the end of the 20th century, and is a good indicator of sociocultural changes, especially since the 1960s. The film Señora de Nadie (1982), for example, portrays Leonor, the main character, as representing the growing participation of women in personal and social destinies, as well as the will and difficulty of the inhabitants of Latin America in building autonomous societies. At the same time, it symbolizes Fernando's difficulty in believing in governments that, like unfaithful husbands, often betray the interests of their own countries for the benefit of foreign investors.

Señora de Nadie (1982), directed by María Luisa Bemberg (Argentina 1922-1995).

The 1970s

Poverty did not consist in reforming capitalist institutions, but in replacing them with a socialist system of production that would lead to communism, in which all citizens would own the means of production. For many rightists, the only way to preserve institutions and companies was to stifle left-wing movements through military repression. Both received support from the respective opposing world powers (the United States and the Soviet Union).

After Latin Americanism and the revolutionary enthusiasm of the 1960s, the Latin American ruling classes favored anti-socialist regimes, often through military dictatorships. By 1976, the army was in command of almost all Latin American countries, including some populist ones (such as Peru) and others with extreme right-wing governments (like Chile). The only exceptions in Spanish America in the 1970s were Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela, with poorly participatory democracies that satisfied the expectations of Washington and the elite, controlling — often with strong military repression — the activism of the popular sectors under the “National Security Doctrine”. In those years, thousands of raids, threats, torture, disappearances and massacres were reported against dissidents, many of whom went into exile (Argentinian Adolfo Pérez Esquivel received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for his activism against this type of abuse). On the other side of the spectrum, Cuba lost credibility as a “free territory of America” because it was unable to eliminate its economic dependence on the Soviet Union. The Castro government also took a harder line against internal dissent, increasing the number of political prisoners and becoming increasingly dictatorial. Press censorship and anti-democratic measures were thus widespread in the region. In the most aggressive and best-financed dictatorships, such as in Chile and Argentina, the political left was practically dismantled. In the case of Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, which did not have the industrial or urban development of other regions, left-wing rural guerrillas continued to gain strength in the face of the deplorable conditions of the peasants.

In the economic field, the governments of the 1970s sought to control inflation—with the consequent and anti-popular effective reduction in wages—and to favor the expansion of multinational corporations (IBM, Philips, Volkswagen, Bayer, ITT). In response to the lending of North American and European entities such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the economic growth of these years was largely dependent on external indebtedness. International banking relied on the million-dollar deposits made by Middle Eastern tycoons, who were able to afford such large sums due to high oil prices, and sought out reliable customers in need of capital to lend at lucrative interest rates. Additionally, during the Cold War, it was crucial for Latin American governments to finance their social control efforts to prevent them from falling under the Soviet sphere of influence. Thus, Latin America increased its external debt in the 1970s from $ 27 billion to $ 231 billion.

 

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The 1980s

At the beginning of the 1980s, international banks raised interest rates to limit the amount of loans to Latin America, as agricultural and mining exports from this region had fallen in price. The largest debtors (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico) declared themselves unable to pay, and the region's total economy declined cumulatively by 10%. Lenders, especially the IMF, prescribed strict economic reform measures, including liquidating domestic protectionism, reducing the size of the State (through privatization of public services, for example), promoting new exports, and, above all, facilitating free markets and foreign investment. These reforms are known as Neoliberalism or “the Washington Consensus” (headquarters of the international financial organizations that championed these policies).

The political and economic strategies of the previous decade exacerbated the living conditions of a significant portion of the population. This was the breeding ground for desperate activities such as organized crime and terrorism. Drug trafficking, for example, a transnational and multi-million dollar business (about 110 billion dollars a year in the nineties) that began to offer alternatives for prosperity in the late seventies, has had a tremendous corrosive impact on societies such as Colombia and Mexico, to mention just two. Partly financed by this business, illegal armed groups from the extreme left or right emerged or gained new strength in Colombia (FARC, self-defense groups) and Peru (Sendero Luminoso, MRTA).

The event that popular activism most enthusiastically received in the 1980s was the Nicaraguan Revolution. The Sandinista guerrilla group (MSLN) won victory over the dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, and the new government began a series of socialist-type projects (agrarian reform, medical and literacy campaigns) with economic and technical support from the United States, Cuba, Germany, France and Spain. But the Cold War still counted, and the Ronald Reagan administration began a campaign in 1981 against “the Marxist-Sandinist takeover of Nicaragua” (commercial embargo, military and financial support for counterrevolutionaries). For the next eight years, the Sandinista government had to allocate more resources to defending itself than to improving the conditions of the impoverished majority. The economy was in crisis (inflation in 1988 reached 33,000 percent) and the Sandinistas lost the elections in 1990. Initially encouraged by the Nicaraguan victory, revolutionaries in El Salvador and Guatemala had strengthened their struggle during the 1980s (although Washington, for its part, was now giving more support to right-wing governments). However, the Sandinista defeat in the elections made it clear that a victory for the left in Central America was impossible. By the mid-nineties, Salvadoran and Guatemalan guerrillas had demobilized and signed peace agreements with their respective governments, an effort that had begun in the 1980s and for which the president of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987.

Nearly 80% of the Spanish-American population lives in cities, several of which are among the most populated in the world.
User:Sking, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons"> Buenos Aires, Argentina User:SKING, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons	, via Wikimedia Commons"> Mexico City Alejandro Islas Photograph AC, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons	, via Wikimedia Commons"> Santiago, Chile Deensel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

, via Wikimedia Commons"> Lima, Peru Juanpis16, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

, via Wikimedia Commons"> Bogota, Colombia Avenger1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The 1990s and 2000s

As world communism lost credibility and the Soviet Union dissolved, dictatorships were left without their main justification (“National Security”) and without the support of Washington. In addition, one of the neo-liberal premises (and a condition of the IMF) was to attract foreign investment, which tends to prefer constitutional stability. Civilian protests by the middle sectors in favor of human rights also put internal and external pressure on democracy. Thus, almost all Latin American countries, except socialist Cuba, had presidents elected by direct vote in 1991, including governments as accustomed to dictatorship as Haiti and Paraguay.

In the following years, almost all of these democracies were strengthened and expanded, with fluctuations depending on the circumstances of each country. Three general categories can be identified. (1) On the one hand, there are the most open governments, with generally fair free elections and acceptable respect for the rights of expression and civil organization, as in Costa Rica, Uruguay and Chile. (2) At the other extreme, there are very restricted and unstable democracies, as in Suriname and Guatemala. (3) Between these two poles, in most countries, there are partial democracies with more or less limited civil rights. Notorious cases of presidents elected by popular vote who later acted as dictators include Fujimori's regime in Peru in the 1990s and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in the 2000s. However, the trend of many democratically elected governments has been toward free and fairer elections in which well-prepared civilian candidates, many from the middle class, are running. Political reforms have been carried out towards more participatory democracies, as in the constituent assemblies of Colombia and Ecuador in the nineties, or in the electoral opening of Mexico, which for the first time “dethroned” the PRI in 2000, after seventy years of political monopoly.

Another factor in this democratic expansion has been the resurgence of social activism, which has altered the power dynamics within parties. Organizations of women, people of African descent, homosexuals, human rights defenders, among many others, have highlighted the socio-cultural heterogeneity of the region, disputing the idea that there is only one answer to popular needs (revolution, socialism). The most notable is the indigenous movement, which, already separated from the political framework of the Marxist left and with the support of international organizations, in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia is a pressure group impossible for the State to ignore. Key moments of this strength were the fall of President Jamil Mahuad in Quito in 1999 and the rise of President Evo Morales in La Paz in 2006. A comparable demonstration, although employing different strategies, is the Zapatista Movement in Chiapas, Mexico, which has had a significant influence on the country's power dynamics since 1994. The Nobel organization recognized the global impact of indigenous activism by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchú-Tum, a Guatemalan Maya-Quiché woman, in 1992. This greater visibility, national and international, of indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples has led many intellectuals and activists to question the adjective “Latino” to refer to this part of America.

A thermometer of the dynamism of popular movements has been the electoral strength of left-wing coalitions in almost all countries, which have come to the presidency in many of them, something that Washington would not have allowed in previous decades. This trend of the first decade of the 21st century has been known as “the Pink Tide”, because it represents a more moderate ideology than the “red” communism of the 20th century. The political tone is different in each case, but between 2000 and 2009, two lines can be identified: one similar to the populism of the 20th century with nationalist initiatives, authoritarian tactics and acts of accelerated constitutional transformation (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua), and another more centrist with policies that seek to maintain economic growth, favor private investment and gradually improve the distribution of wealth (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Jamaica, Haiti). Both trends favor trade integration between regions with comparable economies (Caricom, Mercosur), but they distrust free trade agreements between economies that are too unequal (NAFTA, CAFTA).

This shift to the left is related to the mixed results of the neo-liberal reforms imposed by international banking. On the one hand, inflation was controlled, and trade openness, which included the strengthening of free trade agreements and an increase in foreign investment (Spain alone invested more than $100 billion), produced respectable rates of economic growth: 3.5% on average for Latin America in the 1990s. On the other hand, unemployment did not fall; social investment declined, leading to cuts in government spending (resulting in less public access to health services, education, and housing, for example). The overall number of indigent people increased, and the gap between the rich and the poor deepened. Latin America has continued to be the region with the worst distribution of wealth in the world: in the nineties, 10% of the richest households received 40% of their income. That's why it stands to reason that many voters supported platforms that promised greater social equity. Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano summarized this sentiment as follows:

For us, capitalism is not a dream to be realized, but a nightmare that has been realized. Our challenge is not to privatize the State, but to deprivatize it. [...] And the market is, for us, nothing more than a pirate ship: the freer, the worse. [...] We live in a region of European prices and African salaries, where [...] capitalism is undemocratic, with or without elections: most people are gripped by necessity and are condemned to violence” (Notes for the End of the Millennium. Ecuador: The Rabbit, 1979. 71). Para nosotros, el capitalismo no es un sueño a realizar, sino una pesadilla realizada. Nuestro desafío no consiste en privatizar al Estado, sino en desprivatizarlo. [...] Y el mercado no es, para nosotros, más que una nave de piratas: cuanto más libre, peor. [...] Vivimos en una región de precios europeos y salarios africanos, donde [...] el capitalismo es antidemocrático, con o sin elecciones: la mayoría de la gente está presa de la necesidad y está condenada a la violencia”  (Apuntes para el fin del milenio. Ecuador: El Conejo, 1979. 71).

Unemployment and the increase in poverty have also contributed to the increase in drug trafficking and emigration. Paradoxically, one of the axes of Washington's policy towards the Americas after the Cold War has been to respond to these two phenomena, which were unintentionally aggravated by the measures recommended by the “Washington Consensus” itself. The “war on drugs” of the eighties and nineties gave the Pentagon a reason to keep part of the military investment in Latin America (which had been in the millions during the Cold War). The invasion of Panama in 1989 was justified in these terms. In the 2000s, however, the “war on terror (ism)” sustained the military argument, so that trafficking in illegal substances stopped being treated as a war issue. However, its increase on the Mexican border led to the issue being reanalyzed from the perspective of U.S. security.

Adding another dimension to the concept of “globalization”, the high number of Latin Americans who have emigrated —with or without a visa— to the United States since the 1970s, and to Europe and Asia since the 1990s, is also changing the very concept of Latin America. The 2000 census revealed the surprising fact that the United States had nearly 40 million Spanish speakers, surpassed only by Mexico, Colombia and (possibly) Argentina. [1] To illustrate their economic impact, the Inter-American Development Bank calculated that in 2006, these emigrants sent nearly US$62.3 billion from the United States to their countries, a figure higher than that year's foreign investment in the region (López-Córdova & Olmedo, p. 1). For some nations, this income is nearly as significant as their export earnings. Politically and culturally, this presence, which in the U.S. The US is associated with the term “Latinos”, it is equally transformative, since it alters the American electoral game and promotes a continental consciousness, no longer through treaties between governments, but through daily coexistence, which is not always harmonious.

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[1] A part of these 40 million did not immigrate, but are descended from those who lived in the Mexican territories that the United States annexed in the mid-19th century (Texas, California, New Mexico, etc.).

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Fuentes

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• Chang-Rodriguez, Raquel and Malva Filer. Voices from Latin America. Boston: Thomson & Heinle, 2004.
• Craven, David. Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
• Davies, Catherine, ed. The Companion to Hispanic Studies. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Galeano, Eduardo. Notes for the end of the millennium. Ecuador: The Rabbit, 1979.
• Lopez-Cordova, J. Ernesto and Alexandra Olmedo. “International Migration, Remittances and Development: An Overview”. Integration & Trade 27 (2007).
• Miller, Francesca. Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice. University Press of New England, 1991.
• Oviedo, Jose Miguel. History of Spanish-American literature. Madrid: Alliance, 2001.
• Skidmore, Thomas E. and Peter H. Smith. Modern Latin America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Winn, Peter. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean. 4th ^ed. Berkeley: U of California, 2005.