by Norman Lowe
Hall, A. J., Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capital (McGill University Press, 2010).
Harris, D., Civil War and Democracy in West Africa: Sierra Leone and Liberia (I. B. Tauris, 2011).
Harvey, R., The Fall of Apartheid: The Inside Story from Smuts to Mbeki (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Kisangani, E. F., Civil Wars in the Democratic Republic 1960–2010 (Lynne Rienner, 2012).
Maier, K., This House Has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis (Penguin, 2002).
Mamdani, M., Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (Pantheon, 2009).
Mamdani, M., ‘The Invention of the Indigene’, London Review of Books (20 January 2011).
Marcus, M. G., A History of Ethiopia (University of California Press, 2002).
Melvern, L., A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (Zed Books, 2000).
Meredith, M., Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe’s Future (Public Affairs, 2007).
Osagae, E. E., Crippled Giant: Nigeria since Independence (Indiana University Press, 1998).
Prunier, G., Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford University Press, 2009).
Sampson, A., Nelson Mandela: The Authorised Biography (HarperCollins, 2000).
Turner, T., The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth, Reality (Zed Books, 2007).
Weigert, S. L., Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961–2002 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
QUESTIONS
Explain why the newly independent states in Africa suffered so many problems and assess to what extent the problems were of their own making.
How accurate do you think it is to describe Angola as ‘a victim of the Cold War’ during the years 1975 to 2002?
Explain why Robert Mugabe was regarded as a hero in Zimbabwe in the years 1980 to 1990, but had to face increasing opposition after 1990.
Assess the reasons why J. J. Rawlings was more successful as president of Ghana than Kwame Nkrumah.
How far would you agree that the Belgians should bear most of the responsibility for the outbreak of civil war in the Congo in 1960 and its continuation until 1965?
Why was apartheid in South Africa brought to an end, and how successfully did the ANC govern the country up until 2009?
There is a document question about Nelson Mandela and the anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa on the website.
Chapter 26
Latin America
SUMMARY OF EVENTS
The area known as Latin America consists of the countries of South America, Central America including Mexico, and islands in the Caribbean Sea such as Cuba, Jamaica and Hispaniola (see Map 26.1). The latter is divided into two states – Haiti and the Dominican Republic. These states gained their independence from Spain – in the case of Brazil, from Portugal – in the early nineteenth century, and they had much in common. Spanish is spoken in most of these countries, though in Brazil Portuguese is the main language. They all shared similar difficulties: they were underdeveloped both industrially and agriculturally, and they had massive problems of poverty and illiteracy and unstable political systems. Revolutions, coups and assassinations were commonplace, and progress occurred only very slowly and unevenly. The USA provided economic aid for some of the states of Latin America, but its motives were not entirely selfless. In return the Americans expected to be able to exert political influence in order to prevent socialist or communist governments from gaining power. They had no hesitation in intervening in any Latin American country whose government was deemed unacceptable to them.
Consequently, following the end of the Second World War the USA was able to exercise a huge amount of economic, political and military influence, and Latin America found itself dragged into the Cold War. Republican presidents in particular were constantly suspicious that the USSR was trying to forge a Soviet–Latin American Axis, which would give the communists a clear advantage and pose a threat right on the USA’s doorstep. US interventions to remove ‘suspect’ governments took place in Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1962), Brazil (1964), the Dominican Republic (1965), Chile (1970–3), Nicaragua (from 1979 onwards), Panama (1989) and Haiti (1994). However, the attempt to remove Fidel Castro from Cuba in 1962 failed miserably, and in 2012 his brother Raul was still in power (see Sections 7.4(b) and 8.2).
The international situation changed towards the end of the twentieth century with the ending of the Cold War. The demise of the communist ‘enemy’ – the Soviet Empire – removed the Americans’ justification for their constant interventions. After half a century of US domination, Latin American states had more freedom to take control of their own affairs; no longer could the USA accuse them of aiming to become part of a communist power bloc. Venezuela was the first country to throw off US influence when, in 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected president on a programme of greater spending on social services to help alleviate poverty, and of making trading agreements with Cuba – absolute anathema to the USA! In 2002 right-wing forces backed by US finance tried to overthrow Chávez, but he survived. By this time he had become an inspiration to other Latin American voters: Brazil (2002), Argentina (2003), Chile (2005), Bolivia (2005) and Ecuador (2006) all elected presidents who, if not exactly left-wing, were determined to introduce changes that would give them greater freedom from control by Washington. Chávez was re-elected in 2000 and 2006 and again in 2012. These developments had serious consequences for the USA which, for one thing, was losing its economic, diplomatic and military advantages in South America. Some Latin American states began to look towards China as an important trading partner. This seemed bound to affect the US economy adversely. Conversely, some of the Latin American states began to enjoy greater prosperity. By 2011, for example, Brazil was viewed, along with India, as one of the world’s great emerging economies, destined soon to rival the USA and China.
Map 26.1 Latin America
26.1 THE ERA OF US DOMINATION
(a) Problems facing the countries of Latin America
They were economically underdeveloped both industrially and agriculturally. Factory industries did exist (the Second World War had acted as a stimulus because manufactured goods from Europe and the USA were impossible to come by), but for all sorts of reasons, Latin American industry was still well below the level of industry in the developed countries of Europe, the USA and Japan. There was a shortage of capital, equipment and technical knowledge. Home markets were unpredictable because the vast majority of people were too poverty-stricken to provide enough purchasing power, and it was difficult to export because of competition from the advanced industrial nations. Many countries found themselves heavily dependent for exports on a limited range of products, sometimes even a single commodity. A fall in the world price of that commodity would be a major disaster. Chile relied on copper, Cuba on sugar and tobacco, and Bolivia on tin; during the 1950s, in fact, 80 per cent of all Bolivia’s revenue came from tin exports. Agriculture remained backward because peasant labour was so plentiful and cheap that wealthy estate owners had no need to go to the trouble of modernizing. Peru, for example, was dominated by huge estates whose owners were all-powerful, and who ruled their peasants like feudal monarchs.
There was a massive rise in population mainly because of advances in medicine and hygiene and the refusal of the Roman Catholic Church to promote birth control. Peasants found their holdings were too small to support large families, but when they moved to the cities they found that jobs were scarce. Almost all the major cities were surrounded by improvised shanty towns (known as favelas in Brazil) that were without water, sewage disposal or electricity. The gap between rich and poor grew wider and little progress was made in eliminating poverty and illiteracy.
Latin American political systems were, for the most part, inadequate for dealing with such enormous problems. There was no tradition of democracy, except in Chile, and states were dominated by groups of wealthy landowners and run by military dictators (caudillos)
. After the Second World War democratic systems were introduced in some of the states. But when the newly elected governments tried to introduce reforms, they faced strong opposition from the landowners who were determined to protect their privileged positions. They were able to use the army either to block the reforms or to overthrow the reforming government. This happened in Guatemala (1950), Bolivia (1964), Brazil (1964), Argentina (1966) and Chile (1973).
Heavy investment by foreigners in industry and agriculture caused problems because much of the profit was taken out of the countries. Most of the oil in Bolivia and Venezuela, both potentially rich countries, was extracted by American-owned companies. The US Fruit Company was the biggest landowner in Guatemala, while Chilean copper mines and Cuban sugar plantations were also under US control.
(b) Solutions to the problems?
Several international organizations were set up to help: the Organization of American States (OAS), founded in 1948, included most of the Latin American countries and the USA. It aimed to foster inter-American co-operation and to settle disputes. The Central American Common Market (1960) had some success in reducing tariffs.
The United Nations helped by providing technical experts and holding conferences to discuss how underdeveloped nations might go about increasing exports.
The USA provided massive economic aid. President Kennedy started the ‘Alliance for Progress’ which aimed to pump billions of dollars into Latin America to enable economic and social reform to be carried out. However, this kind of aid did not always work out for the best, and sometimes it created extra problems. American motives were mixed: they hoped, by solving basic economic and social problems, to encourage the election of moderate reforming governments which would be popular enough to prevent communists from coming to power. Sometimes the aid was in the form of loans made on condition that a large proportion of the loan should be spent on buying US products. This did nothing to help the development of local industry and involved governments in large interest payments. Often, as with Castro’s Cuba and Allende’s Chile, aid would be cut short if a government unacceptable to the USA came to power. Only if the government changed would the aid be resumed. In this way the USA was able to exert political influence via economic control; on occasion, they supplied rebels with weapons to overthrow a reforming government (Guatemala, 1954), and even used 20,000 American troops to crush an attempted comeback by a reforming president (the Dominican Republic, 1965).
(c) The crisis of the 1980s
By the early 1980s it was clear that the problems of Latin America had not been solved. Two problems in particular – those of debt and finance – had reached crisis proportions. The trouble was that, under US domination, the countries of Latin America had been obliged to follow economic policies known as ‘neo-liberalism’. This involved privatization, deregulation of finance, cuts in social spending and other austerity measures. Basically this was designed to make use of a country’s resources in order to benefit a wealthy elite at home, foreign investors, big business and bankers, particularly those in the USA. This had forced Latin American governments to borrow massively from foreign banks, in order to develop their amenities and industries. Many of these banks were in the USA, and the borrowing was at its height from 1973 until 1982. In 1982 the seven largest US banks made 60 per cent of their profits from the interest on loans to Third World countries, as against only 2 per cent in 1970. With the doubling of American interest rates in the period 1979–81, many of the debtor nations could not even pay the interest, let alone repay the debts, and the amount of interest they failed to pay each year was added on to the existing debt. They were forced to borrow from new sources merely to keep up the interest payments on the original loans. If a country stepped out of line, the USA did not hesitate to intervene; for example in 1991 the democratically elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was removed in a military coup backed by the CIA after only eight months in office. Aristide was a committed Roman Catholic, a former priest, who was strongly influenced by the ideals of the Church’s liberation theology. This was a style of theology which accepted many of Marx’s theories (though not his atheism!). It stressed the church’s mission to the poor and oppressed, based on the fact that Jesus was considered as a sympathizer with, and a liberator of the poor and downtrodden. In 2004 Aristide was removed for the second time in a similar coup. Throughout Latin America there were large numbers of priests with left-wing views and some were even supporters of revolution. Inevitably this brought them into conflict with the authorities; many were arrested and some were killed. In 1980 Bishop Oscar Romera of El Salvador was murdered by US-backed paramilitaries.
By 1985 Latin America owed some $368 billion, and there was a constant drain of capital to the USA, leaving Latin America increasingly impoverished. By 1987, as export earnings steadily declined, the situation was approaching catastrophe. Brazil, one of the most prosperous states with its huge natural resources, had debts of over $100 million, and in February the government announced that it was suspending interest payments. Mexico, which owed almost as much, was considering the possibility of repudiating its debts. Fortunately it didn’t quite come to that: the IMF and the World Bank, desperate to avoid an economic catastrophe, arranged credits amounting to several billion dollars for Brazil. The Mexican government secured an annual loan for the next 30 years from the IMF and was able to reschedule its debts. Similar arrangements helped other debtor countries to survive.
There is insufficient space to consider all the countries of Latin America, but a closer look at five of them – Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua – will demonstrate the varied Latin American experience during this period of US domination.
26.2 SOUTH AMERICA: BRAZIL AND VENEZUELA
(a) Brazil
Brazil had gained its independence from Portugal in 1825. It was a monarchy until 1889, when it became a republic. Until 1930 the country was ruled mainly by military dictatorships, but none of them succeeded in establishing a stable system. There were economic, social and political problems which caused several revolutions and attempted coups. The country began to make genuine economic progress after 1930 when the army replaced the ultra-conservative government of wealthy landowners with the more progressive and liberal President Getulio Vargas. For the first time the government took over economic planning, and Vargas was especially keen to encourage industry. Thousands of extra jobs were created, especially in electrical and steel manufacture. He soon became popular and was able to stay in power right through the Second World War. However, by this time the army was turning against him. They were worried by his popularity with the working classes and felt that he had become too powerful. In fact, he had been acting as a dictator since 1937, and no elections had taken place. The army wanted a president whom they could control, and so in 1945 Vargas was forced to step down. The army faced a dilemma when he was re-elected in 1950 for a five-year term: should they prevent him from taking office or not? Fortunately the younger army officers favoured Vargas and in the end, he was allowed to return. He stayed in power until 1954. He tried to continue acting as a dictator and once again the army grew tired of him. They accused him of corruption and incompetence and asked him to resign. Instead, he committed suicide, claiming that his death was ‘a sacrifice on behalf of the Brazilian workers’.
The election of 1955 was won by Juscelino Kubitschek, whose first major action was to increase the army’s pay, thereby, he hoped, guaranteeing their support. He completed his term in office in 1961, but his presidency was a disappointment. His only memorable achievement was the building of a new capital, Brasilia, and that was arguably an extravagance the country could ill afford. The winner in the 1961 presidential election was Janio Quadros, but he resigned after only seven months and the vice-president, Julio Goulart, took over. He wanted to move Brazil gradually towards democracy and proposed to give more people the right to vote. He also planned to limit the amount of profit that large multinational companies could take ou
t of the country; the government could then use the extra revenue to help improve social conditions for the masses. Worse still – as far as the USA was concerned – he opened diplomatic relations with the USSR, promised to nationalize Brazil’s oil refineries, and opposed economic sanctions against Cuba.
All this was much too radical for the army and for the right, and tension between them and Goulart’s supporters looked like developing into civil war. US president Lyndon Johnson told the American ambassador in Brazil that the USA must do everything possible to help overthrow ‘this left-wing government’. Goulart was accused of being a communist, though by no stretch of the imagination could this be taken seriously; in fact he was a millionaire landowner and a devout Roman Catholic. However, in April 1964 he was removed in a military coup. Fortunately there was no civil war, but it emerged later that President Johnson had ordered US naval vessels, including an aircraft carrier and two destroyers, together with ammunition and fuel, to be made ready in case the Brazilian military needed assistance. Although well-intentioned, Goulart’s policies left the country in economic difficulties. He had failed to attract sufficient foreign investment which had been discouraged by the USA; inflation increased rapidly, and economic growth was minimal.
For the next 20 years Brazil was ruled by the military. For the first few years their policy was one of harsh repression: the old political parties were banned, there was a strict press censorship, opponents were arrested and the jails soon filled with political prisoners; trade unionists and left-wing students were a favourite target and there were reports of widespread torture and violent treatment of prisoners. After 1974, when General Ernesto Geisel became president, repression was gradually relaxed and it was announced that the army would return the country to full democracy, albeit slowly. During the years of military dictatorship the government had great success with its economic policies, achieving what many described as an ‘economic miracle’. Faced with massive inflation and a stagnating economy, they tackled the problems by borrowing extensively from abroad. Countries that had been unwilling to lend to the Goulart government were quite happy to do business with a strong right-wing regime which had eliminated communist influence. This stimulated economic growth so that the years 1968–74 were a boom period; the annual growth rate was 10 per cent and exports quadrupled. After 1974 the growth rate fell to around 5 per cent, mainly because Brazil was having to import more of its oil supplies, much of it from Iraq. By 1980 it seemed that the good times were over: Brazil had incurred huge foreign debts, there was a slump in export markets, there was a yawning gap between rich and poor and there was widespread unrest among the rural poor in the north east of the country. In an attempt to find substitute fuels, the government, which had its own supplies of uranium, turned to nuclear power and bought reactors from West Germany. But there was no immediate improvement and in provincial elections in 1982, the government suffered significant defeats.