In Latin America, as throughout the world, the pace of change has accelerated in the period since 1990. There are many interesting and important developments that we could examine, such as the Panama Canal’s 2000 reversion to Panamanian ownership and its widening to accommodate large container ships; the creation of common markets and political entities including the Union of South American Nations and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States; mass migration of Latin Americans to the United States; and the major problem of trafficking in illegal drugs. But in keeping with the book’s purpose and format, we focus primarily on matters that affect the five colonial legacies that we have been following from Chapter 1 while also exploring Cuba since 1990.
NEOLIBERALISM
Half a century after the Great Depression sent the Latin American economies in a new direction, history repeated itself: Another economic crisis led the Latin American economies to change course again. The crisis began in the 1980s but the outcomes materialized primarily in the 1990s and continued into the new millennium.
The majority of Latin American countries, those that relied on imported petroleum, were deeply affected by the “oil shock” of 1973, when the newly formed Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) restricted production to drive prices sharply up. OPEC member countries, mostly in the Middle East, were flooded with cash, much of which they deposited in foreign banks. These banks, including U.S. giants Bank of America and Chase Manhattan, sought customers for the billions they now had available for lending, and Latin American governments and private firms, struggling with the OPEC effect, readily accepted the proffered loans. As a result, the total Latin American external debt rose dramatically from around $30 billion in 1970 to some $230 billion in 1980.
Then came the worldwide recession of the 1980s, which depressed the prices of Latin America’s exports and stopped the region’s economic growth. A crisis of debt repayment loomed, along with serious discussion of defaulting. When the Mexican government announced in 1982 that it could not meet its payment obligations, the international banking establishment stepped forward. To prevent potential widespread defaults, lenders led by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank offered to renegotiate loans to reduce interest rates and payments, and thereby prevent a major catastrophe for the international banks and world economy. They also offered new bridge loans, doubling Latin America’s external debt by 1990.
As the condition for offering emergency loans and refinancing billions of dollars of debt, the international lenders prescribed, indeed demanded, implementation of radical policy changes. The “Washington Consensus,” known in Latin America as “neoliberalism,” involved several elements, including fiscal austerity to balance budgets, opening closed or protected economies to international trade and foreign investment, and privatization of state-owned assets. Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship pioneered neoliberalism (Chapter 11); in the 1990s, Mexico’s President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–1994) and Argentina’s Carlos Saul Menem (1989–1999) set the pace of compliance with the new norms, while in almost every country budgets, government services, and subsidies to the poor were slashed; protective tariffs fell; and transnational corporations and national conglomerates bought up the public sector. Government-owned airlines, railroads, utilities, natural resources, telephone companies, and manufacturing plants passed into private hands, usually at bargain prices. In Mexico, the number of state-owned firms fell from 1,155 in 1982 to 158 in 1993; among those acquiring these assets was Mexican Carlos Slim, who has been off-and-on the world’s richest person.
The imposition of neoliberalism marked a critical turning point. The state-directed development adopted in response to the Great Depression (Chapter 8) had reduced but not eliminated the economic dependency of the era of the export economies, 1870s–1930 (Chapter 4). In the 1980s and 1990s, facing a crisis of debt repayment or the grave consequences of defaulting, the Latin American countries were forced to surrender national control over economic policy to the international lenders. Thus, a new form of economic dependency gripped Latin America and, although contested in several countries, has continued to this day.
Latin America’s economic contraction in the “lost decade” of the 1980s had severe human consequences, exacerbated by the implementation of neoliberal policies. Many jobs were lost due to the reduction in government employment, privatization of government enterprises, and the new competition of imported consumer goods that negatively impacted the manufacturing sectors. Labor’s bargaining power, already weakened by most of the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, was further eroded by the contraction of manufacturing and public sector employment, leaving workers vulnerable to unemployment and reductions in wages and benefits. Many who lost their jobs or suffered wage cuts joined the masses living in burgeoning slums and surviving in the informal economy, selling pencils on buses, guarding parked cars, or performing tricks for motorists stopped at traffic signals. In this period of heightened need, the mandated reductions in government spending on health, education, and subsidies for transportation and food (such as the tortilla subsidy in Mexico), were particularly onerous, as illustrated by sporadic but often violent protests against austerity measures and price increases.
The oil shock and debt crisis combined with the imposition of neoliberalism jeopardized or erased the gains made by the middle and working classes over the previous decades in several countries; the accrued benefits of the “Mexican Miracle” (Chapter 7) evaporated as real wages fell by half, propelling millions northward to the United States in search of survival. Economic growth resumed in the 1990s, but in most countries it was erratic and punctuated by the 1995 Mexican financial collapse, the 1999 Brazilian crisis, and financial and economic problems in distant lands. Healthy gross domestic product (GDP) growth occurred during the 2004–2011 “commodities boom” when China’s rapid development fueled demand for exports of metals and agricultural products, particularly soybeans. But the boom’s end slowed or ended growth and served as a sobering reminder of the region’s continuing dependence on raw material exports whose volume and price are determined externally.
The negative effects of neoliberalism were not limited to the urban population. The Cuban Revolution had made agrarian reform a major political issue in much of Latin America, and revolutionary governments in Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua carried out extensive land redistribution programs. Agrarian reform was reversed in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship, and as neoliberal policies took hold in the 1990s, austerity and the emphasis on economic rather than social development kept the issue off of political agendas in most countries. Moreover, as Latin America’s urban population mushroomed from under 50 percent in 1960 to around 80 percent in 2010, political power shifted to the cities and urban priorities took precedence over those of the rural poor and landless. Thus only Bolivia and Venezuela, whose governments challenged the neoliberal trend, carried out significant agrarian reform after 1990.
Mexico illustrates the waning of agrarian reform. A 1992 amendment to article 27 of the 1917 constitution (Chapter 7) ended land distribution after seventy-five years, reversing a core element of the Mexican Revolution. The amendment privatized the ejido, allowing communal owners to create individual holdings that could be rented to outsiders, sold, or mortgaged, opening a path to the expansion of large landholdings. In several countries, particularly Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and the eastern Bolivian lowlands, large landholdings increased as agribusiness interests, both domestic and transnational, bought or otherwise acquired land to produce crops, especially soybeans, for export. Featuring heavy capital investment and modern technology, these agribusiness operations are a far cry from the colonial hacienda, but like the traditional large estate, they control large tracts of land, to the virtual exclusion of small holdings.
The economic problems of the 1980s, compounded by neoliberal policies, increased the number and percentage of Latin Americans living in poverty and redistributed income and wealth in favor of the elites. Around 40 percent of the region’s population was estimated to live in poverty in 1980, a figure that rose to 50 percent by 1990. The World Bank found that in 1993, 110 million Latin Americans, or a quarter of the region’s population, lived in extreme poverty on one dollar per day or less, an increase of 20 percent since 1987. Poverty declined in the late 1990s and early 2000s, driven down by the 2004–2011 commodities boom and by antipoverty programs adopted in Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere, but millions of people still perched precariously just above the poverty line. The end of the commodities boom raised the specter of a new cycle of impoverishment. Meanwhile, income inequality in Latin America was the world’s highest: In 2010, the top 10 percent received 37 percent of all income, while the lowest 10 percent got only 1.5 percent.
AN UNPRECEDENTED ERA OF DEMOCRACY
The period since 1990 has been unique in Latin American political history. Apart from Cuba and Haiti, elected civilian governments held sway throughout the region. With very few exceptions, these governments passed the most basic test of democracy: They took power through free, fair, and open elections.
Latin America’s transition to democracy occurred in the face of serious obstacles. One of these was the rise of neoliberalism, with the attendant growth of poverty and income inequality. Another was the lack of democratic culture in most countries. Uruguay, Chile, and Costa Rica were the main exceptions, and the first two experienced the eclipse but not the total extinction of their democratic cultures and values under state terrorist governments. Some countries had almost no experience with democracy, having been under caudillo, military, or oligarchic rule during much or most of their independent histories. Argentina’s first democratic president following the end of the Dirty War, Raúl Alfonsín, explained the problem facing his country, which had had more experience with democracy than many: “It was not a matter of reconstructing a system that was functioning well until it was interrupted by authoritarianism, but of establishing new foundations for an authentic democratic system.”1 That challenge was more acute in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, or Mexico, where a second fundamental test of democracy had rarely or never been met: the peaceful transfer of power to the opposition following an election.
Yet another challenge in some countries was the legacy of state terrorism. The civilian governments installed following the end of highly repressive regimes faced profoundly divided societies. On one side were the armed forces and the civilians who had supported their policy of exterminating the left, while on the other were victims of repression and the human rights movements formed during the dictatorships. The main issue dividing these societies was justice versus impunity. Would the amnesty laws left in place by exiting military regimes protect repressors from prosecution? Would victims, their families, and the human rights movements be satisfied with the reports of truth commissions, or would they demand investigations and trials? Would the militaries submit to prosecution after, in their view, heroically saving their countries from Marxism and subversion? These were some of the dilemmas facing the new civilian governments intent on shoring up their fragile democracies. Two countries have had some success in meeting this challenge: In Argentina and Chile, hundreds of former repressors have been tried and convicted since 2000, while the poisonous legacy of state terrorism is largely unresolved elsewhere.
Latin America’s trend toward democratic governance was part of a global “wave” of democratization, as identified by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.2 The wave began with the fall of dictatorships in Portugal and Greece in 1974 and Spain the following year. It accelerated in the 1990s following the end of the Eastern European Communist regimes and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The spread of democracy was in large measure a reaction against authoritarianism. In Latin America, where only Mexico, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Colombia remained free of military domination between the 1960s and 1990s, the reaction was particularly strong, manifested both in support for democracy and for the human rights so severely abused in many countries.
As of mid-2016, Latin America had experienced only four successful military coups, two of them in Haiti, since the Paraguayan armed forces ended the thirty-five-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner in 1989. The military regimes instituted in response to the threat of Cuban-style revolution gave way to civilian governments, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. In South America, the Argentine state terrorist regime ended in 1983, followed by the Uruguayan in 1984, the Brazilian in 1985, and the Chilean in 1990. The military-dominated governments of El Salvador and Guatemala ended in 1992 and 1996, respectively. Since that time, rule by democratic governments has prevailed, and military influence in politics has diminished. The post-1990 period compares favorably with the previous high tide of democracy in the 1950s, which ended under the destabilizing impact of the Cuban Revolution.
Proclamations about democracy and human rights have not been empty words: Several countries enacted laws or amended constitutions to translate the rhetoric of democracy and human rights into reality. Democracy was strengthened by making elections more transparent and politics more inclusive by expanding participation through lowering the voting age, making the vote obligatory, and mandating quotas for women candidates for office (see below). Numerous countries have strengthened their commitment to human rights by legislation and by ratifying international human rights treaties. Argentina went the furthest in guaranteeing human rights: In 1994, it incorporated the nine international human rights treaties that the country had ratified directly into its constitution and declared them superior to domestic law.
Meanwhile, the Organization of American States (OAS) began promoting democracy. In 2001, it adopted the Inter-American Democratic Charter, whose article 21 calls for the suspension of a member state, by a two-thirds vote, in the case of an “unconstitutional interruption of the democratic order.”3 That rule was tested in 2009 when the Honduran armed forces arrested President José Manuel Zelaya and sent him into exile. This was not a standard or clear-cut military coup, however, as the Honduran Supreme Court had ordered Zelaya’s arrest for defying its orders and, the day after the military acted, Congress voted overwhelmingly to remove Zelaya from office and install his constitutionally designated successor as president. Nonetheless, proving that the Democratic Charter was more than rhetoric, the OAS suspended Honduras, an action it had not taken since suspending Cuba in 1962. The issue was resolved and Honduras’s good standing was restored in 2011.
There have been other tests of Latin America’s commitment to democracy. In earlier periods, political instability frequently triggered military coups designed to restore order or, in the era of the Cuban Revolution, to cleanse their countries of Marxism and “subversion.” However, despite this history of intervention, the armed forces generally refrained from staging coups when political instability or other irregular situations, such as interruptions of presidential terms, arose.
Interruptions of the constitutional order have tested the military’s restraint in several countries since 1990. Bolivian presidents resigned or were impeached and removed from office before finishing their terms on two occasions. Paraguay experienced the same situation twice and Peru once—all without military coups. In Argentina, a severe 2001 economic crisis in which the national currency lost two-thirds of its value overnight triggered deadly riots and led to the president’s resignation, followed by four interim presidencies within twelve days. This multidimensional crisis offered an open invitation to military intervention in a country with a lengthy history of coups, but the armed forces stood aside. In 2016, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was impeached, removed from office, and replaced by her constitutionally designated successor while the armed forces remained in the background. In Ecuador, where five presidencies ended prematurely between 1997 and 2005, the military carried out a coup in 2000. But after removing the president, the officers restored constitutional government after only eighteen hours by turning over power to the elected vice president. Thus in the new era of democracy, interrupted presidencies have normally been resolved by constitutional prescription, not military intervention.
Despite notable advances, democracy and the protection of human rights in Latin America are works in progress. Voter apathy is a problem, and there is still distrust of election results in some countries. Nor has authoritarianism been vanquished, as illustrated by Peru’s elected President Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000), who in 1992 shut down Congress, suspended the constitution, and assumed dictatorial powers; Argentina’s President Carlos Menem (1989-1999), who packed the Supreme Court with unqualified cronies in order to push his agenda; and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez (1999–2013), who created a cult of personality that underpinned his great personal power. Large-scale corruption tarnished several Latin American governments and was instrumental in the 2016 impeachment of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff. Human rights are more respected than ever, and both private organizations and governmental agencies constantly monitor compliance; but one need only read Human Rights Watch’s Annual Report to be reminded that the human rights situation still needs improvement.
DEMOCRATIZATION IN MEXICO
Mexico presents a special case of democratization. While Mexico avoided military governance during the period of reaction in Latin America, it was not a functioning democracy despite holding regular elections at the local, state, and federal levels. Since 1929, it had been under the complete control of a single party, known since 1946 as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), which used any and all means to maintain its monopoly of power. Commenting in 1990, Peruvian novelist and Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa called this system “the perfect dictatorship.”4
During its first decades in power, the PRI carried out revolutionary change and engineered the Mexican miracle (Chapter 7). The 1968 Tlatelolco massacre, in which troops killed hundreds of striking students, revealed the regime’s brutal side and began to undermine the PRI’s legitimacy. Recurring economic problems, heightened and open corruption, and the blatantly fraudulent 1988 presidential election led to the PRI’s first-ever loss of a state governorship in 1989. The 1990s brought another financial crisis, drug wars, political assassinations, and the largest popular insurrection since the 1920s—the 1994 uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army, EZLN—note the name) in the poor, largely Indian state of Chiapas (see below).
In response to these internal developments and to the region-wide tide of democratization, Mexico’s political landscape underwent a profound change. Public pressure forced the government to reform the corrupt electoral system, and the PRI lost its majority in the federal Chamber of Deputies in 1997. After losing a third of the country’s governorships and thousands of state legislative and municipal offices, it gave up the presidency to conservative Vicente Fox in 2000. By that year, a three-party system had emerged: The PRI represented the center, the Partido de Acción Nacional (National Action Party) the right, and the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution) the left. The PRI recovered the presidency in 2012 but not its congressional majority. With its competitive three-party system and more transparent elections, Mexico joined the ranks of Latin America’s democracies.
THE PINK TIDE
The precarious situation of Latin America’s middle classes, workers, peasants, and marginalized slum dwellers did not go unnoticed. A number of voices arose in the 1990s to condemn neoliberalism, including those of populist politicians, Fidel Castro, and even conservative Pope John Paul II. The Latin American Council of Bishops condemned “economism,” or “the absolutizing of market forces and the power of money, forgetting that the economy is to be at the service of the people and not the other way around.”5 Having discovered the extent of poverty in the developing world, the World Bank by the turn of the century began recommending strong measures to reverse the damage done by the very neoliberal policies of which it had been a primary architect.
One of the salient political developments of the early twenty-first century has been the emergence of what is known as the “Pink Tide”—a number of leftist governments that came to power largely through their opposition to neoliberalism. Hugo Chávez, elected president of Venezuela in 1998, pioneered the Pink Tide. He was followed in 2003 by Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known simply as Lula) and Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner, by Uruguay’s Tabaré Vásquez in 2005, Bolivia’s Evo Morales in 2006, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega in 2007, and El Salvador’s Mauricio Funes in 2009. Several of these men were succeeded by presidents of similar views.
These governments were more moderate than the three revolutionary regimes that took power in the era of the Cuban Revolution. Although they were often described, and some self-identified, as “socialist” or proponents of “twenty-first-century socialism,” most did not nationalize the basic components of their countries’ economies as occurred in Cuba, and to a lesser extent under the revolutionary governments of Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua. Rather, most of the new left leaders attempted to humanize neoliberalism, rather than vanquish it altogether, by initiating antipoverty, nutrition, housing, education, and other programs to establish a social safety net for as many of their citizens as possible. Yet, there is a direct connection between the era of the Cuban Revolution and the revival of the left. Four sitting presidents in 2015 were former guerrilla fighters: Uruguay’s José Mujica was a Tupamaro, El Salvador’s Salvador Sánchez Cerén a commander in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), Nicaragua’s Ortega a Sandinista guerrilla and president during the Sandinista revolution, and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff a guerrilla fighter during the Brazilian military dictatorship.
Hugo Chávez, a colonel in the Venezuelan army, first achieved prominence as leader of a failed 1992 coup. Following a long tradition of dictatorship (Chapter 5), Venezuela’s promising experiment in democracy, begun in 1958, had spiraled into a corrupt, elitist regime that had squandered much of the country’s oil income and adopted the neoliberal formula in the late 1980s. Chávez’s attempted coup aimed to replace that discredited regime with new principles vaguely called “Bolivarian,” after the great liberator of South America and founder of Venezuela. Despite its failure, the military uprising made Chávez popular among the country’s poor majority and, following his 1994 release from prison, positioned him for a future in electoral politics.
That future came in 1998, when Chávez was elected president with 56 percent of the vote on a promise to clean house and adopt a new constitution. The following year, he got his constitution, which named the country the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” and called for broad popular participation in governance. In 2000, he was elected to a six-year term under the new constitution and began a sustained attack on Venezuela’s widespread poverty by enlisting the army to build housing, clinics, schools, and subsidized markets in the slums and in rural areas.
Four year later, Chávez formed the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, ALBA), a trade and solidarity agreement initially with Cuba that later spread to other left-governed countries including Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and several small Caribbean islands. ALBA allowed him to intensify his social “missions,” as he named them, by trading oil for Cuban human capital—some twenty thousand medical personnel and teachers who were deployed to Venezuela’s poorest areas. He also raised government oil royalties and invested heavily in education, nutrition, health, and literacy programs while agrarian reform benefited some 180,000 families, around half of the rural population. These programs reduced poverty up to 50 percent, by some estimates.
Chávez’s authoritarian style was controversial, particularly to the business and conservative political groups that opposed his agenda. With its Bolivarian majority, the Congress in 2001 granted Chávez decree powers, which he used liberally. As opposition to his programs and powers grew and the privately owned media openly called for his replacement, a military coup briefly overthrew him in April 2002, but loyal army units and massive protests by his supporters turned the tide, and he was back in office forty-eight hours later. Washington denied backing the coup.
The opposition then turned to the new constitution’s referendum provision to force a recall, but the president prevailed with 59 percent of the vote. Chávez continued to build his personal power, winning reelection in 2006 with 63 percent of the vote, forming his Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) the following year, and in 2009 winning a referendum to allow unlimited presidential reelections. The opposition and U.S. media began calling Chávez a dictator, despite international observers’ validation of all the elections and referenda. The U.S. government was also spending some forty million dollars annually to shore up the opposition to a regime it considered increasingly hostile, even dangerous to U.S. interests. For his part, Chávez assailed “American imperialism” and called U.S. president George W. Bush “the devil.”
Chávez was diagnosed with cancer in 2011, went to Cuba several times for treatment, and died in March 2013 after winning another presidential term in 2012. His preserved body lies in an impressive mausoleum with an eternal flame and a military guard. His vice president, Nicolás Maduro, succeeded him and won a six-year term in a narrow victory over opposition leader Henrique Capriles a month after Chávez’s death. The outlook for Maduro was not rosy. Chávez was enormously popular with his base of poor Venezuelans; he had governed as a charismatic leader who developed a cult of personality and established relationships with his followers through his social programs and his Sunday television and radio show, “Aló Presidente” (Hello President). Thus, he had not needed to build institutions to translate his vision of participatory democracy and twenty-first-century socialism into concrete forms. Nor could he transfer his charismatic leadership to the new president, although Maduro constantly invoked Chávez’s name and even claimed to sleep occasionally in the mausoleum in order to communicate with the late president. With falling oil prices beginning in 2014 and resulting shortages of consumer goods and increased unrest eroding his popularity, Maduro turned to heightened repression of the opposition. That opposition won two-thirds control of Congress in December 2015 and set about trying to terminate Maduro’s presidency through a recall election. The future of Chávez’s Bolivarian dreams hung in the balance.
Along with Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Chávez represented the more radical, populist version of the Pink Tide. Brazil’s Lula followed a more moderate, less flamboyant approach to humanizing neoliberalism. As the lengthy Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985) prepared to return governance to civilians and began to allow political activity, one of those taking advantage of the opening was Lula, who formed an independent labor union and, in 1980, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party). In 1990, Lula ran for president and lost. The victor, Fernando Collor de Mello, followed the Latin American trend by introducing neoliberal policies of austerity, lowered tariffs, and privatization of government-owned enterprises, which included the Volta Redonda steel plant built during the Vargas regime. The persistent Lula lost in the two subsequent elections and finally prevailed on his fourth try in 2002.
During his two presidential terms, Lula focused on dual goals: gaining Brazil an international status commensurate with the world’s eighth largest economy and alleviating the country’s endemic and widespread poverty. Internationally, he promoted Brazil’s traditional exports as well as its new products, including ethanol and airplanes. He pushed unsuccessfully for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council but gave Brazil a prominent role in the new Group of Twenty (G-20), an international forum for major economies. Lula was instrumental in forming the Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) group to give greater voice to large but underrepresented countries on the international stage. He boosted Brazil’s prestige by paying off all its foreign debt in 2006. Finally, he lured the world’s greatest sporting events to Brazil: the World Cup soccer tournament in 2014 and, for only the second time in Latin America, the Olympic Games in 2016.
Lula’s war on poverty was a multipronged endeavor that included expanding social security and raising the minimum wage, but the centerpiece and most widely recognized element was the policy of making cash payments to families living below the poverty line. He launched the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program first to combat the malnutrition that accompanied poverty. Then he combined that program with one started earlier by his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, that paid cash to families for keeping their children in school and getting them vaccinated. The hybrid Bolsa Familia (Family Stipend) eventually reached some fourteen million families, accounting for nearly a quarter of Brazil’s population. The combined approaches reduced poverty dramatically; government figures indicate that “extreme poverty” fell from 9 to 4 percent by 2012. Concurrently, graduation rates increased significantly owing to the powerful financial incentive for parents to school their children. Critics of the cash subsidy approach claim that it created attitudes of dependency and pointed out the potentially dangerous consequences of the program ending and returning millions to poverty. Nonetheless, the Familia Bolsa program was emulated in other Latin American countries.
Lula’s former chief of staff and successor in 2010, Dilma Rousseff, the daughter of Bulgarian immigrants, continued most of Lula’s international and domestic initiatives. She faced major popular protests in 2013 that, as is commonplace in Latin America, were initially aimed at price increases for public transportation. They escalated into a mobilization against poor public education and health services, corruption, and what many saw as excessive spending on new facilities for the World Cup and Olympic Games. Against this background, Rousseff barely won reelection in 2014 and continued to face the challenge of a faltering economy, growing corruption scandals, and hence popular opposition and low approval ratings. She was impeached and removed from office in 2016 and replaced by a conservative acting president. This development, along with the victory of conservative Mauricio Macri in Argentina’s 2016 presidential election and the difficult challenges facing Venezuela’s Maduro, suggested that the Pink Tide was becoming an ebb tide.
INDIGENOUS ACTIVISM
Among the notable developments since 1990 are the heightened awareness and activism among Latin America’s, indeed the hemisphere’s, native peoples. The 1992 quincentennial of Columbus’s voyage of “discovery” was a catalyst for Indians to protest European imperialism and their continued marginalization under republican governments. Aided by the new forms of instantaneous communications, native groups from Chile to Alaska organized around the quincentennial theme. Much of the impetus came from Ecuadorian Indians, who had organized as the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE) in 1986. CONAIE held the First Continental Conference on 500 Years of Indian Resistance in 1990, attended by delegates from throughout the Americas.
In 1992, Spain celebrated Columbus’s feat by hosting a universal exposition in Seville, newly linked to Madrid by high-speed rail, while in the Dominican Republic, Pope John Paul II commemorated the arrival of Christianity in the Americas. The same year, Guatemalan Indian Rigoberta Menchú received the Nobel Peace Prize for her indigenous activism (Chapter 11). In the United States, several traditional Columbus Day parades were cancelled under threat of disruption, alternative parades featuring native themes were held, and Berkeley, California, renamed Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day. Native peoples marched, protested, and carried out hunger strikes in many Latin American countries. In Chile, native Mapuches accelerated the reoccupation of lands taken from them following their defeat by the national government in the 1880s, while the Ecuadorian natives became a militant force in national politics.
After years of frustration with their marginalization and poverty, Mayan Indians in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas organized as the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and rose in rebellion on January 1, 1994. Not coincidentally, that was the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which links Mexico with the United States and Canada in a free trade zone, took effect, threatening to further impoverish the Maya farmers facing competition from more efficient U.S. agricultural producers. Led by a non-Indian, Subcomandante Marcos, the rebels captured the state capital, San Cristóbal de las Casas; skirmished briefly with government forces; then settled into a protracted war that relied more on websites than bullets.
The EZLN’s program soon expanded from economic grievances to include broad claims of rights and identity for all of Mexico’s indigenous groups, some 10 percent of the country’s population. Rejecting the historic approach that promoted assimilation of native peoples, not only in Mexico but throughout Latin America, and reflecting the new consciousness of native identity manifest in the 1992 quincentenary, the EZLN demanded autonomy and self-determination along with land rights for Indians. The 1996 San Andrés Accords negotiated with government representatives reflected the Zapatistas’ key demands: “A judicial framework that establishes a new relationship between indigenous peoples and the State, based on their right to selfdetermination and the judicial, political, social, economic and cultural rights that obtain from it.”6 However, President Ernesto Zedillo failed to submit the accords to Congress for ratification and the conflict in Chiapas simmers to this day.
The rise of Indian consciousness and militancy led to a different outcome in Bolivia, Latin America’s only majority-Indian country. In 2005, Bolivians elected an Aymara Indian, Evo Morales, as president. Morales had been leader of the federation of coca growers’ organizations that strongly opposed U.S. efforts to suppress cultivation of the coca leaf that yields cocaine but is also a traditional Andean product with important cultural significance. He was sworn in as president in two ceremonies: the traditional inauguration in La Paz and an indigenous ceremony at a native religious site.
Morales, one of the more militant Pink Tide leaders, took office determined to institutionalize Bolivia’s native heritage. Thus, while nationalizing important sectors of the economy and restarting the agrarian reform that had originated in the 1952 revolution (Chapter 8), he also pushed for a new constitution. Enacted in 2009, it created the “Plurinational State of Bolivia.” The constitution defines indigenous peoples as “every human collective that shares a cultural identity, language, historic tradition, institutions, territory and world view, whose existence predates the Spanish colonial invasion” (italics added). Among defined indigenous rights are selfdetermination, collective ownership of land (the ayllu), cultural identity, religious beliefs, and practices and customs.7 The constitution also allowed for presidential reelection, and Morales was easily reelected in 2009 and 2014.
The Columbus quincentennial, the rise of Indian militancy, and other developments in the Americas contributed significantly to the adoption in 2007 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
WOMEN ADVANCE
In recent decades, women have made their greatest strides in politics since achieving suffrage. Two women had served as presidents prior to 1990: Isabel Perón (1974–1976), Juan Perón’s vice president, succeeded him upon his death (Chapter 8); and Lidia Gueiler Tejada served eight months as Bolivia’s interim president (1979–1980). Latin America’s first elected woman president was Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua (1990–1997), followed by Mireya Moscoso of Panama (1999–2004), Michelle Bachelet of Chile (2006–2010 and 2014–2018), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina (2007–2015), Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica (2010–2014), and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil (2010–2016). There seems to be no pattern of political orientation among the women presidents, as they have come from their countries’ right, center, and left parties and coalitions. Notably, three of these presidents were elected to second terms. Women have also made inroads in serving as cabinet members, holding roughly one-fourth of Latin America’s total in 2015.
In 1991, Argentina became the world’s first country to enact a gender quota law requiring that a fixed percentage of all political parties’ candidates for the national Congress be women. In the following quarter century, the Argentine innovation has spread, making Latin America the world’s region with the greatest concentration of such laws. Quotas range from 50 percent in Bolivia to a low of 20 percent in Paraguay; in 2015, only Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba had not enacted gender quotas. Women’s officeholding at the congressional level has strongly benefited from the quotas: In 1979, women held less than 1 percent of national legislative seats; in 2012, they held 19 percent, ranging from a high of 45 percent in Cuba (among freely elected congresses, 40 percent in Nicaragua) to a low of 4 percent in Haiti. In 2015, women held one quarter of all congressional seats, making Latin America the region with the highest percentage of women in national legislatures, narrowly edging Europe. For comparison, women held 19 percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress in 2015. A majority of Latin American countries have also adopted quotas for women in provincial and local elections, and numerous political parties have enacted voluntary quotas for their nominations.
Observers attribute this dramatic change in women’s representation in national legislatures to both domestic and external forces. The United Nations’ World Conferences on Women were influential; the fourth, held in Beijing in 1995, explicitly called for gender quotas in its “Platform for Action.” Within Latin America, the adoption of quotas was part of the move to consolidate democracy following the period of heightened repression and state terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s. Article 28 of the Inter-American Democratic Charter of 2001 requires member states to “promote the full and equal participation of women in the political structures of their countries as a fundamental element in the promotion and exercise of a democratic culture.”8 Ensuring that women were well represented, it was believed, would help to legitimize the democracies emerging from the turbulent period, to make them more inclusive, and to incorporate women’s qualities of compassion, nurturing, and honesty for the common good.
While advancing politically, Latin American women still shouldered the traditional burdens of their gender, some of which appear to be universal while others are peculiar to Latin America. They still trailed men in income and job security and were rarely found in the upper echelons of corporations or large companies—women held only 3 percent of such positions in Chile in 2014, for example. Violence against women continues to be a major issue. The still-unsolved murders of hundreds of women since 1993 in and around Ciudad Juárez, Mexico—most of them young women working in assembly plants or maquiladoras—is a bitter reminder that to some, women’s lives have little value. Latin America is the world’s region with the highest rate of murders of women. Between 2007 and 2015, sixteen Latin American countries enacted “femicide” laws making the murder of women a legally defined crime. But enforcement has been spotty owing to the difficulty of establishing motive and to many women’s ignorance of their rights to protection from abuses that may culminate in murder.
Another severe burden on women is the prohibition of abortion, which is absolute in five countries: Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Chile. In El Salvador, where abortion is banned without exceptions, the law is strictly enforced; even miscarriages are sometimes considered murder. At least seventeen women were serving prison sentences of over thirty years in 2014 for violating the abortion law, which human rights organizations and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights strongly oppose.
At the same time, new opportunities have opened to women. As a result of urbanization, better access to health care, and women’s empowerment, Latin America’s birthrate has declined dramatically. In 1960, Latin American women bore 6 children on average; in 2010, they produced only 2.2 children. With smaller families to raise, women have more chance than before to pursue education, develop their talents, and work in a greater variety of occupations—all of which can open avenues of social mobility. Yet, several of the occupations that can lead to upward mobility are still largely male domains: sports, military service, and the illegal drug business.
GAYS AND LESBIANS EMERGE
As in most of the world, homosexuals in Latin America were historically closeted. During the colonial period, gay sex was illegal, and violators were subject to trial by the Inquisition. Little changed before the mid-twentieth century, by which time most large cities had bars or night clubs where gays and lesbians could meet discreetly but still encountered police harassment. In revolutionary Cuba, gays were stigmatized as “counterrevolutionaries” and, until the late 1960s, were often sent to forced labor camps as punishment.
The first known Latin American gay organization, El Grupo Nuestro Mundo (Our World Group), was formed in Buenos Aires in 1969 and changed its name two years later to the Argentine Homosexual Liberation Front. Just as gay and lesbian organizing began in the United States and Europe, however, the Latin American political climate turned reactionary (Chapter 11), making public displays dangerous. The pioneering Argentine organization succumbed to that climate, disbanding in 1975. The first gay pride parade occurred in Mexico City in 1979; with the resurgence of democracy in South America in the 1980s, organizing resumed and pride parades spread. The movement for gay rights was boosted by the International Lesbian and Gay Association, which held its first non-European conference in Mexico City in 1991 and its second in Rio de Janeiro in 1995. Today, gay rights are on the political agenda throughout Latin America.
Substantial progress has been made on issues important to lesbians and gays in the twenty-first century as activists have successfully linked gay rights to the widespread effort to strengthen human rights, in reaction to the state terrorism and general repression of the 1970s and 1980s. Numerous cities, states, and countries have adopted antidiscrimination laws. The city of Buenos Aires enacted Latin America’s first civil union law in 2002. Colombia followed in 2007, Ecuador in 2009, and Chile in 2015. In December 2009, Mexico City became Latin America’s first jurisdiction to legalize gay marriage; Argentina enacted marriage equality in 2010, followed by Uruguay and Brazil in 2013. In June 2015, a Mexican court ruled state bans of same-sex marriage unconstitutional, in effect legalizing it throughout the republic. Colombia enacted a same-s ex marriage law in 2016. Pride parades have become common; the annual event in São Paulo is one of the world’s largest. There is still much resistance to granting homosexual rights, and little has changed in Central America to date. But the international trend of recognizing homosexuals as equal citizens has had a significant impact in Latin America.
DECLINE OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
The colonial legacy of a powerful, monopolistic Roman Catholic Church has eroded significantly in the last few decades. The church lost its formal monopoly of formal religion in the nineteenth century all across Latin America, but remained the declared religion of almost all people of the region. Even in Mexico, where the church’s power and wealth were vigorously attacked during La Reforma in the 1850s and again during the 1910 revolution, most people remained true to the church. By 1970, according to the Pew Trust, which conducted over thirty thousand face-to-face interviews across the region, the number of professed Catholics had slipped to 92 percent. However, the greatest decline in Catholicism has occurred in the past forty-five years: In 2014, while the region as a whole was home to around 450 million Catholics, nearly 40 percent of the world’s total, Pew found that only 69 percent of Latin Americans professed Catholicism.9
The rise of Protestantism and secularism are primarily responsible for the precipitous decline of Roman Catholicism. Protestantism has made major inroads: In 1970, only 4 percent of Latin Americans identified as Protestant, a number that rose to 19 percent in 2014. Less than half of the populations of Honduras and Uruguay reported being Catholic. Protestants accounted for only 7 percent of Paraguayans, but 40 percent or more in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, with El Salvador trailing at 36 percent. Most of the new Protestants are evangelical.
Asked why they had converted to Protestantism, the greatest number responded that they sought a more personal connection with God, followed by those who enjoyed the style of worship. Protestants are also aggressive in recruiting, with several sects dispatching missionaries from the United States. The greatest successes in conversion have been among the poor, who find that their coreligionists form a community that helps to provide a social safety net lacking outside the churches. Rejection of alcohol by many of the evangelical groups appeals especially to women, whose husbands—if they are faithful to the doctrine—do not blow their paychecks on a night of drinking rather than contributing to the family budget.
Secularism, or the “detestable pest of indifferentism” as Pope Pius IX described it in condemning the 1857 Mexican constitution (Chapter 3), poses another threat to the Catholic Church. In a scientific age when there are alternate explanations for natural disasters and debilitating diseases besides the will of God, the church has a weaker hold on the better-educated populace. Secular pursuits such as sports, movies and television, and long working hours compete with mass and confession for people’s time. Thus, it is likely that a substantial percentage of those who declare themselves Catholic are only nominally so.
Despite these challenges, the Catholic Church remains powerful. When bishops and archbishops articulate their views, many people are influenced. One of the most salient examples of continuing church power involves the matters of abortion and divorce. Where it exists, the strict prohibition of abortion has church backing, and church opposition slowed the legalization of divorce in most Latin American countries.
Developments in Mexico and Cuba have been positive for the Catholic Church. In a dramatic reversal of course, Mexico’s 1917 constitution was amended in 1992 to strike most of its anticlerical provisions whose enforcement roiled the country in the 1920s (Chapter 7). Those amendments allow churches to own property, legalize church schools and monastic orders, end the ban on foreign clergy, and permit religious celebrations outside of church buildings. Mexico also ratified a concordat with the Vatican, restoring relations that had been broken since the time of Benito Juárez and La Reforma. In Cuba, where the church had been repressed under the Castro government, relations thawed as three successive popes visited the island between 1998 and 2015. Church and state began holding regular dialogues, Christmas and Easter were restored as national holidays, and permission was granted for the construction of new churches.
Some believe the Catholic Church may benefit from the papacy of the first Latin American pope, former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, a Jesuit who took the highly symbolic name Francis when consecrated as pope in March 2013. On visits to Brazil in 2013, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Cuba in 2015, and Mexico in 2016, he delivered his message of humility and service to the poor before huge and enthusiastic crowds.
CUBA IN TRANSITION
Developments clustering between 1989 and 1991 signaled the end of Cuba’s longstanding, outsized influence in Latin America. The fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived Cuba of its primary allies and crucial economic support. The West’s victory in the Cold War pressured Castro to conform to Western norms of democracy and human rights. Having placed the United States and Latin America’s elites and armed forces on the defensive in the early years of his revolution, Castro found himself in that same position thirty years later. The issue now was the very survival of his increasingly anachronistic regime.
After three decades of limited success at diversification, Cuba still relied heavily on sugar, which beginning in the early 1990s had to compete in the world market without the Soviet subsidy. The economy contracted by a third between 1989 and 1993, and Castro responded to this severe blow to an already austere economy by proclaiming a “special period in peacetime” and evoking the familiar calls to sacrifice for the revolution. He also instituted economic reforms, including modest openings for private small businesses and legalization of the use of dollars. Bypassed earlier by the spectacular growth of Caribbean tourism, Cuba opened up in the 1990s to controlled foreign investment in beach resorts: From two thousand hotel rooms and three airlines serving the island in 1989, Cuba boasted thirty thousand rooms and forty-seven airlines a decade later—and the expansion has continued, fueled by tourists from Europe and Canada. Hard currency also flowed in from the by-products of Cuba’s excellent health care system, including medical tourism, and from remittances from family members in the United States.
Castro successfully met the challenge of establishing international legitimacy for his Communist state in the post-Soviet world. By the end of the 1990s, almost all Latin American countries had reestablished diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba despite the country’s continued suspension from the OAS. Rather than calling for the overthrow of their governments, Castro hobnobbed with presidents and prime ministers at international conferences. Beginning in the early 1990s, the United Nations annually condemned the United States for continuing the trade embargo formalized in 1962. But while relations with the rest of the world normalized, the chill between Havana and Washington grew deeper. The 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms–Burton Act sought to slow the influx of Western capital that had begun to undermine U.S. sanctions. These laws also codified the embargo, heretofore based on presidential discretion, as law, and prohibited lifting it until a certifiably democratic, post-Castro government was in place.
In declining health, Castro surprised the world by stepping down from the presidency in 2008 at age 81. He was succeeded by his younger brother, Raúl Castro, a veteran of the Sierra Maestra and Castro’s second in command over the decades. More pragmatic than Fidel Castro, Raúl began instituting a series of market-oriented reforms designed to improve living standards and stanch the flow of thousands of Cubans who abandoned the island in search of better lives abroad. To create a mixed state-private economy, the government announced its intention to reduce government employment, which still amounted to nearly 100 percent of Cubans, by 20 percent. Areas for legal private business expanded, and Cubans opened thousands of small shops, restaurants, and services, including renting rooms to tourists in private homes. A real estate market opened, allowing individuals to buy and sell houses and apartments. And in partnership with foreign capital, important infrastructural improvements were undertaken, including a deepwater port at Mariel. Personal freedoms are still restricted, but Cubans with the means to do so can now travel abroad without permission, and several Cuban baseball players have joined the U.S. major leagues with Raúl’s blessing.
Salvation through economic innovation has carried a high and growing price since it began in the early 1990s. The basic tenet of the revolution, egalitarianism, has given way to a glaring division in Cuban society between those with access to dollars or euros—and thus to consumer goods—and those without, who still depend on low-paying state jobs and the ration card. Medical doctors and university professors are drawn to taxi driving and food serving in order to enter the hard-currency economy. Reports indicate that the vices associated with Cuba’s prerevolutionary tourist economy, such as prostitution and street crime, have returned. While most Cubans appear to support the recent changes, there is a deep fear that exiles may return some day and, supported by capitalist law, reclaim their properties and businesses and reestablish the old order.
Under Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro, relations have thawed in ways that were unthinkable just a few years earlier. Following eighteen months of talks brokered by Pope Francis, in December 2014, the two announced the resumption of full diplomatic ties severed in 1961. Despite vehement objections from Republicans in the U.S. Congress, Obama and Castro pushed forward and reopened the shuttered embassies in July 2015. President Obama made a state visit to the island in March 2016, where he stated: “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.”10 Following the easing of restrictions on U.S. tourism to Cuba, commercial flights linking the two countries resumed in August 2016.
According to polling, this rapprochement is strongly supported by Cubans and by the U.S. public, including Cuban Americans, whose U.S.-born younger generations support good relations with the island rather than the adamant anti-Castro position of their elders. It was also well received in Latin America. The next step in normalizing relations—lifting the embargo—faced the likely obstacle of opposition in the U.S. Congress which, thanks to the two laws of the 1990s, must approve the measure if the current Cuban political system remains in place—as Raúl has emphatically vowed that it will.
The icon of the Cuban Revolution and hero of the Latin American left, Fidel Castro, died on November 25, 2016, at the age of ninety. Time will be needed to determine the impact of his passing on Cuba and on U.S.-Cuban relations.
Latin America since 1990 has continued to experience both change and continuity. The advent of neoliberalism reversed the state-driven economic model adopted during the Great Depression. The Pink Tide, a resurgence of the left based on opposition to neoliberalism, gained power in several countries but by mid-2016 had lost momentum. Democratic governments replaced the repressive regimes of the era of the Cuban Revolution, and military influence in politics declined. Indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere mobilized for change; under Aymara president Evo Morales, Bolivia became a “Plurinational State.” Women made strides in politics, winning the presidencies of six countries by 2010 and holding a growing number of cabinet positions and seats in national legislatures. Lesbians and gays gained visibility and rights in several venues. The percentage of Latin Americans claiming fealty to Catholic Church reached a new low. Finally, Cuba struggled to adapt to the post-Soviet world and, in 2014, reestablished diplomatic relations with the United States after sixty-three years.
FURTHER READING
Brenner, Philip, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, and William M. LeoGrande. A Contemporary Cuba Reader: The Revolution under Raúl Castro. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Camp, Roderic Ai. Politics in Mexico: The Democratic Consolidation. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
De Castro, Fabio, Kees Koonings, and Marianne Wiesebron, eds. Brazil under the Workers’ Party: Continuity and Change from Lula to Dilma. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
de la Torre, Carlos and Cynthia J. Arnson, eds. Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2013.
Eisenstadt, Todd. Politics, Identity, and Mexico’s Indigenous Rights Movements. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Ellner, Steve, ed. Latin America’s Radical Left: Challenges and Complexities of Political Power in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
Encarnación, Omar G. Out in the Periphery: Latin America’s Gay Rights Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Farthing, Linda C. and Benjamin H. Kohl. Evo’s Bolivia: Continuity and Change. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.
Goodale, Mark and Nancy Postero. Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Harten, Sven. The Rise of Evo Morales and the MAS. London: Zed Books, 2011.
Hershberg, Eric and William M. LeoGrande, eds. A New Chapter in US-Cuba Relations: Social, Political, and Economic Implications. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Piatti-Crocker, Adriana. Diffusion of Gender Quotas in Latin America and Beyond: Advances and Setbacks in the Last Two Decades. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
Smilde, David and Daniel C. Hellinger, eds. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Democracy: Participation, Politics, and Culture under Chávez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Smith, Peter H. Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Vanden, Harry E. and Gary Prevost. Politics of Latin America: The Power Game. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Yashar, Deborah J. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Post-Liberal Challenge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
NOTES
1. Rebecca Bill Chávez, The Rule of Law in Nascent Democracies: Judicial Politics in Argentina (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 29.
2. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
3. www.oas.org/charter/docs/resolution1_en_p4.htm.
4. Jonathan Schlefer, Palace Politics: How the Ruling Party Brought Crisis to Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 1.
5. Thomas W. Walker, Nicaragua without Illusions: Regime Transition and Structural Adjustment in the 1990s (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 300.
6. For an English translation of the San Andrés Accords, see flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/san_andres.html.
7. Article 30, 2009, Bolivian Constitution, at https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Bolivia_2009.pdf.
8. www.oas.org/charter/docs/resolution1_en_p4.htm.
9. Pew Charitable Trusts, “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region,” Pew Research Center: Religion and Public Life, November 13, 2014, www.pewforum.org/2014/11/13/religion-in-latin-america/.
10. New York Times, March 22, 2016.
Latin America has experienced a dramatic reversal of the near-universal, often extreme authoritarianism of the era of the Cuban Revolution. Since 2000, all of Latin America except Cuba and Haiti has experienced democratic governance. The rise of democracy was in large measure a reaction to the prevalence of repressive dictatorships, including those that governed by state terrorism. The legacy of authoritarian governance has not disappeared altogether, as strong presidents have dominated governments in several countries. But with the armed forces refraining from overthrowing elected governments, with very few exceptions, Latin America appears to be evolving beyond the colonial legacy of authoritarian governance. Time will tell whether this era of democratic governance will become permanent.
The recent period has seen change in the legacy of a rigid social hierarchy. Mobilized by the Columbus quincentenary, Indians throughout the Americas challenged vestiges of European imperialism that continued to afflict them, demanding respect, rights, and autonomy. The only substantive change, however, occurred in Bolivia where Aymara president Evo Morales took both concrete and symbolic measures to benefit the country’s Indian majority. Women progressed in politics, moving beyond the stage of participation to that of holding important elected offices, including presidencies in six countries and a quarter of all seats in national legislatures. Yet, exploitation of and violence against women continue. Historically repressed gays and lesbians emerged from the shadows and gained legal protections in some countries, including marriage equality in a few. While widespread poverty and income equality persist, reinforcing the inherited social hierarchy, some new avenues of individual mobility have opened.
After struggling in the aftermath of the Great Depression to overcome economic dependency, with limited success, Latin America has fallen back into the grip of this colonial legacy. As a result of the world recession of the 1980s and the accumulation of excessive external debt, the Latin American countries were forced to relinquish control of their economic policies to the international lending agencies. The imposition of neoliberal policies gave rise to the “Pink Tide” of leftist governments that challenged the new economic order, with mixed results.
The colonial legacy of the large landed estate has continued into the new millennium. Agrarian reform resumed in Venezuela and Bolivia; but in Mexico, where agrarian reform was a central tenet of the revolution, land distribution stopped and the collective landholding entity, the ejido, was privatized. The accelerating urbanization of Latin America continued the shift of political power to the cities and reduced the prospects of meaningful agrarian reform as urban priorities outweighed the rural poor’s desire for land. Meanwhile, foreign and domestic agribusiness companies appropriated large holdings in several countries to produce commodities for export, further entrenching the large landed estate in a new form.
The Catholic Church experienced declining influence as its hold over Latin Americans has slipped since 1990. Beset by secularism and competition from Protestants, the Catholic Church claimed the allegiance of only two-thirds of Latin Americans by 2014. But the lifting of restrictions on the church in Mexico and Cuba and the selection of a Latin American pope in 2013 brought some optimism about the church’s future.