This book is a study in continuity and change. It poses the questions: How much, and in what ways, has Latin America changed over the last two hundred years? Conversely, what traits from the colonial period still persist? The sections titled “Reflections on the Colonial Legacies” that follow Parts II–VI of the book analyze these questions for each of the five chronological periods that Latin America has experienced since independence. Here, we offer some final thoughts about change and continuity in independent Latin America by focusing on the colonial legacies over the past two centuries.
On one level, Latin America has changed as the world has changed. Latin America communicates instantaneously by Internet, conquering at last a very challenging geography. Latin American poverty today involves material possessions and comforts—such as television, electric or gas appliances, and motor scooters—that Carolina Maria de Jesus could only dream of having. Latin Americans today are more literate and live longer than ever before. But our focus is on the question: How different from or similar to pre-independence Latin America is the same region today? Let us examine the colonial legacies one by one.
Authoritarian governance existed in much of what would become Latin America before the Europeans arrived; it was particularly evident in the Inca and Aztec empires. The Spanish and Portuguese recast authoritarianism in their own fashion, imposing hereditary monarchies theoretically wielding absolute power. In the decades following independence, liberals’ efforts to restrain authoritarianism through constitutions, legislatures, and courts had little effect on this colonial legacy. During the era of the export economies (1870s–1930), the dictatorships embodied authoritarianism while the elected oligarchic governments were able to exercise elite power less heavy-handedly.
Authoritarianism waxed and waned throughout the twentieth century. Early working- and middle-class struggles targeted top-down rule, emphatically in the Mexican Revolution, but the Great Depression brought a resurgence of military rule. As populism took root in the 1930s and 1940s, many among the working and middle classes embraced authoritarianism, as exercised by Getúlio Vargas and Juan Domingo Perón, as the path to material welfare. Posing an existential threat to the Latin American elites, the Cuban Revolution had the unintended consequence of fostering a new wave of military authoritarianism in the 1970s and 1980s that delivered unprecedented levels of repression, including state terrorism in some countries. In reaction to this dark period, Latin America embraced democracy beginning in the 1980s. While authoritarian tendencies still surface, Latin America at present appears to be evolving beyond the legacy of authoritarian governance as institutionalized during the colonial period.
A rigid social hierarchy is another legacy of Latin America’s long colonial period. During the half-century following independence, society changed as native-born men of European stock ascended to the top of the hierarchy. At the base, the abolition of slavery and termination of the Indian tribute in most countries offered degrees of freedom that neither group had known; yet, most men of color and women of all social ranks were denied citizenship. The era of the export economies complicated the social order, enriching portions of the elites, creating new working and middle classes, and definitively ending African slavery. Education and the job market opened to women in the more advanced countries. Indians living on the peripheries who had resisted Iberian domination were conquered and stripped of their lands while natives holding traditional communal land lost much of it, becoming in many cases a rural proletariat.
Following the Great Depression, industrialization fostered growth and empowerment of workers and industrialists in the larger countries, reducing the influence of traditional rural landowners. Revolution in Mexico and Bolivia gave the downtrodden peasantry land and the vote. The Cuban Revolution destroyed the inherited rigid social hierarchy in favor of an egalitarian model, and revolutionary governments in Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua sought to modify or end that legacy, with mixed results. After 1980, neoliberalism and economic downturns eroded working- and middle-class living standards, and since 1990 poverty levels have fluctuated. Latin America exhibited the world’s highest income inequality, resulting in great distances between haves and have-nots. Although today’s society is more complex and fluid than the inherited rigid social hierarchy, race, color, and gender are still the most important determinants of one’s social standing.
The powerful Roman Catholic Church was ubiquitous and monopolistic in colonial Latin America. The status of the church was the first colonial legacy to become a prominent political issue following independence, as conservatives viewed the church as a bulwark of the colonial order they sought to preserve and liberals considered it an impediment to the progress they desired. Thus, the church was the focal point of liberal–conservative conflict well into the nineteenth century; as they alternated in power, liberals took steps to weaken church power and conservatives adopted measures to restore the church to its colonial status. From La Reforma to the French Intervention to the 1917 constitution to the Cristero Rebellion, Mexico’s struggles over the church were epic.
By the twentieth century, the status of the Catholic Church had been settled in most of Latin America. The church was no longer an important political issue, but it still spoke with a powerful and compelling voice. But fealty to the church began to erode late in the century and declined precipitously in the new millennium in competition with Protestantism and secularism. Hope rose for a Catholic revival with the lifting of restrictions on the church in Mexico in the 1990s and Cuba after 2000, and with the election of Pope Francis, Latin America’s first pontiff. Nonetheless, the degree of power that the Catholic Church exercised in colonial Latin America is but a faint memory today.
Economic dependency resulted from the mercantilist economic systems that the Iberian monarchs imposed to benefit the home countries, not the colonies. By the late 1700s, Spain’s and Portugal’s monopolies of trade with their colonies had virtually broken down, and with independence they ended. This did not signify that the basic economic decisions were made in Latin America, however, as Britain quickly dominated the struggling new countries and set the terms of trade and investment. Participation in the first global economy from the 1870s to 1930 not only brought economic development, modernization, and political stability to most of the region, but it also brought negative consequences. Prices of raw material exports were set by market forces beyond Latin American’s control, investment decisions were made in European and North American corporate board rooms, and foreigners appropriated many of Latin America’s resources, deepening the existing dependency.
The Great Depression and collapse of the world economy elicited a nationalist reaction. The larger countries adopted import-substituting industrialization as a means of lessening reliance on raw material exports; but still lacking capital and technology, they were unable to escape dependency altogether. The 1980s and 1990s dealt heavy blows to the quest for economic independence. The debt crisis and economic recession of the 1980s resulted in the international lenders’ imposition of neoliberal policies, forcing the Latin American countries to surrender national control of economic policy by the 1990s. The Pink Tide arose in reaction to neoliberalism, and leaders such as Hugo Chávez, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula), and Evo Morales challenged but did not escape the grip of the latest incarnation of economic dependency. The end of the commodities boom in 2011 and its negative impact on the region’s economies confirmed the economic dependency that has been a constant in Latin America’s history.
The large landed estate dominated the Latin American countryside at the time of independence, sharing it in some areas with native communal landholding villages and small farmers. The ensuing years further entrenched this pattern as cash-strapped governments sold state-owned and church holdings in large units to raise revenue. The large landed estates expanded further during the era of the export economies, as land occupied by previously unconquered Indians fell under government control and was sold, and Indian communal lands from Bolivia to Mexico were appropriated for market-oriented production.
The large landed estate was first challenged in Mexico, where Emiliano Zapata doggedly pursued the breakup of haciendas and article 27 of the revolutionary 1917 constitution enshrined long-term agrarian reform. Destruction of haciendas and distribution of their land were at the core of the 1952 Bolivian Revolution. The Cuban Revolution made agrarian reform a burning issue in much of Latin America, and millions of landless peasants mobilized to demand land. After disappearing in Cuba, the large landed estate faced serious challenges in Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua, but the rise of reactionary regimes in the 1970s and 1980s halted or reversed agrarian reform. While Venezuela and Bolivia carried out land distribution after 1990, agribusiness appropriated large tracts of land to produce primarily for export. Thus modified in some areas, large landholdings continued to dominate rural Latin America in the early twenty-first century, and the shift of political power to the cities made any resumption of large-scale agrarian reform unlikely.
This review of the colonial legacies over time points to a mixed verdict on how and to what degree Latin America has changed since independence. The power of the Catholic Church has dissipated. Authoritarian governance has been tamed, although one would want to see more democratic consolidation before pronouncing it dead. While considerably altered over time, economic dependency and the large landed estate have withstood challenges and remain salient features of today’s Latin America. The legacy of a rigid social hierarchy has been significantly modified, starting in the early postindependence years and continuing to the present. Although less rigid by far, today’s society continues to display essential features of its colonial roots. Overall, then, we can conclude that while Latin America today is quite different from the Latin America of two centuries ago, continuity with the colonial past remains strong.