Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

From the political point of view, these developments made the power relationships of Latin America much more complex and unpredictable. For one thing, the army was no longer completely dependent on the landlord groups for support, but found, on the contrary, that its urban bases were under pressure of local labor-union controls of its supplies, while its relations with the bourgeois groups were much more ambiguous than its relations with the landlord group had been previously. At the same time, the influence of the clergy was generally weakened by the influx of anticlerical ideas of European origin into both the new urban groups and, to a much smaller extent, to the peasants.

These changes have not occurred in all areas of Latin America. Indeed, many areas remain much as they were in 1880. But in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil the process has gone far enough to modify the whole social pattern, while in some lesser areas like Bolivia, Uruguay, Costa Rica and, above all, Cuba, drastic changes have been occurring.

In Mexico the revolution has continued for more than half a century. During at least half of that period, the chief problem was the control of militarism, a task that must be done in all of Latin America. In its early days, the Mexican Revolution was distracted from constructive change by a number of destructive efforts. For example, its attacks on foreign capital led to more damage than good by curtailing foreign investment and foreign technological skills. At the same time, its emphasis on agrarian reform distracted attention from the real agricultural problem to the pseudo problem of landownership; the real problem is that of increasing agricultural production, regardless of agrarian arrangements. These three early problems have been to some extent overcome. The Mexican Army is now largely professionalized and relatively nonpolitical and responsive to civilian controls. For more than a generation now, the army has not overthrown a government. At the same time, political stability has been increased by the depersonalization of political life, by circulation of leadership within one dominant party, by the establishment of some political principles, including the very significant one of no reelection of the president, and by the use of political power to encourage some progressive tendencies, such as more public funds for education than for defense, encouragement of improved communications and transport, of foreign investment, and of balanced economic development. Many acute problems remain, such as an exploding population, acute poverty, and a very low level of social welfare, but things have been moving, and in a hopeful direction. During the two decades before 1962, the gross national product rose over 6 percent a year, while industrial production rose more than 400 percent in that period. The political system itself is corrupt, with most elections jobbed by the dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, but at least the outlook for the average Mexican today is more hopeful than it was for his father a generation ago or than it is for his contemporaries in much of the rest of Latin America. The problems of life have not been solved in Mexico, but valuable time has been won.

Efforts of other countries to follow in Mexico’s footsteps have been less successful and even disastrous. In Argentina patterns of life have become less constructive during the last generation, despite the fact that Argentina has been less burdened with population and more endowed with resources than other countries in Latin America. But lack of moral principles and excess self-indulgence has betrayed all efforts to obtain better patterns of life. This was evident in the career of Juan D. Perón, an army officer who came to power by a coup d’état in 1943 and sought to base that control on an alliance of the military with the workers. He built up a strong labor movement, but his concern with maintaining his own power, his lack of any over-all plan, and his basically unprincipled outlook led to a disintegration of his movement and his overthrow by his own military forces in 1955. The waste of resources by inefficiency and corruption under Perón has left Argentina disorganized and divided, with real power increasingly in the hands of the armed forces (if they could agree on anything) and with many people looking backward with regret to the more affluent days of Perón.

The disintegration of Argentina, which lacked the basic problems that have haunted most Latin American countries, helps to demonstrate the significant role played in Latin American backwardness by unconstructive patterns, especially patterns of outlook. Argentina did not have such problems as excess population, lack of capital, poor and unbalanced resources, extreme poverty, social disorganization, or illiteracy (which is below 10 percent), but the argumentative and divisive nature of social attitudes is as prevalent in Argentina as elsewhere on the Pakistani-Peruvian axis, and is the consequence along the whole length of that axis of the egocentric and undisciplined way in which sons are brought up by their mothers. In all societies, individuals have traits in which they differ from other individuals and traits in which they share. A highly civilized people like the English, by training of the young of all classes (until very recently) have tended to produce adults who emphasize the qualities they share, and play down the qualities in which they differ, even in activities such as games, politics, or competitive business where opposition is part of the rules. In Latin America the opposite is true, as each person tries to emphasize his individuality by finding more and more features of his life (often artificial ones) that distinguish or oppose him to others.

In Argentina, as elsewhere along the Pakistani-Peruvian axis (especially in Spain), this tendency has fragmented social life and led to extremism. Even groups that seem to have the most obvious common interests in Argentina, such as the armed forces or the urban middle classes, are hopelessly split, and fluctuate from position to position. It is the splitting of these groups, especially of the middle classes, that has given such influence in Argentina to the labor unions on the Left or the landlord group on the Right. The middle classes in Argentina have been split into two political parties that refuse to cooperate. Together they could poll at least half the total vote in any election, but instead each obtains a quarter or less of the total vote and, refusing to join each other, must seek a majority by coalition with smaller, extremist parties.

The failure of Latin America to find solutions to its most urgent real problems are, thus, much more fundamental than the clichés of political controversy, the complexion of governments, or the presence or absence of “revolutionaries.” The words Left, Center, or Right mean little in terms of solutions to Latin America’s problems, since disorganization, corruption, violence, and fraud are endemic in all. Bolivia, which has had a revolutionary government of peasants and tin miners since 1952, is in a mess, and Nicaragua, which has been under control of a military-dominated oligarchy for almost thirty years, is in a similar mess. So long as any real solutions of Latin America’s problems depend upon the slow building up of constructive patterns, including ideological patterns, no solution will be found in shifting power or property from one group to another, even if the beneficent group in such transfers is much larger. This failure of social and economic revolutions to achieve more constructive patterns is evident in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Cuba.

Bolivia’s problems always seemed hopeless. In three unsuccessful wars with Chile, Brazil, and Paraguay from 1879 to 1935, it lost territory to its neighbors, including its only outlet to the sea. Its population of less than three million in 1950 (3.6 million a decade later) was crowded on its bleak western plateau, over 12,000 feet up, while its subtropical eastern lowlands were inhabited by only a few wild Indians. These lowlands and its mineral resources, source of 95 percent of its foreign exchange (mostly from tin), were Bolivia’s chief assets before the revolution of 1952, but the former were unused, while the tin earnings went chiefly to swell the foreign holdings of three greedy groups, Patiño and Aramayo (both Bolivian) and Hochschild (Argentine). Until the revolution, the Bolivians, mostly of Indian descent, who were treated as second-class persons ‘working as semislaves in the mines or as serfs on the large estates, had a per capita annual income of about $100, one-fifth that of Argentina and the lowest but two of the twenty-one Latin American countries. As might be expected, the majority were illiterate, sullen, and discouraged.