Born in blood and fire

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BORN IN BLOOD AND FIRE A

CONCISE HISTORY OF LATIN AMERICA

John Charles Chasteen

BORN

in

BLOOD

anb

FIRE

HBSmHKSi r"- 4 **

^hpppwpp^

m !

BOOKS by jo hn Charles CHi Heroes on Horseback: A Life and 7

m

teen:

the Last

Gaucho Caudillos

Translations by John Charles Chasteen: The Contemporary

History oj Latin America by Tulio Halperin

Donghi

The Lettered City by Angel Rama The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National

Identity in Brazil

by Hermar.o Vianna

Edited Volume Problems in Modern

Charles Chasteen terican History: A Reader

BORN in BLOOD and FIRE | A Concise History of Latin America

Jo^n Charles clyasteen UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA CHAPEL HILL

W.

NORTON & COMPANY New York

London

Copyright

© 2001

W. W. Norton & Company,

by

Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The

text of this

book

is

composed

in Fairfield Light

with the display set in Delphin One.

Composition by Gina Webster Manufacturing by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group

Book design by Charlotte Staub.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chasteen, John Charles, 1955— Born p.

in

blood and

fire

:

a concise history of Latin

America /John Charles Chasteen.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-393-05048-3— ISBN 0-393-97613-0 i.Latin

Amenca

—

History.

I.

(pbk.)

Title.

F1410 .C4397 2001

980

—dc2i

00-041868

W. W. Norton & Company,

Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue,

New York,

N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton

8c

Company,

4567890

Inc.,

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street,

London

WIT 3QT

To

my

children,

Ana and Erwin

Chasteen,

two among so many Latin American immigrants

who

are

making the United

States a better flace

in the

new millennium

CONTENTS List of

Maps 9

Time Line

10

Acknowledgment I.

First Stop, the Present

Countercurrents: 1.

12

A

15

Statistical Portrait

Encounter 29 Countercurrents: Friar Bartolome de

3.

25

las

Casas 58

Colonial Crucible 63 Countercurrents: Colonial Rebellions 88

4.

5.

Independence 93 Countercurrents: The Gaze Pos.tcolonial Blues

of Outsiders

114

119

|

i? v-

sr°

Countercurrents: The Power of Outsiders 144 6.

Progress 149 Countercurrents:

7.

International

Wars 175

Neocolonialism 179 Countercurrents:

8.

More

New

Immigration to Latin America 207

Nationalism 213 Countercurrents: Populist Leaders of the Twentieth Century 240

9.

Revolution 245 Countercurrents: Liberation Theology 270

10.

Reaction 275 Countercurrents: La Violencia, Pablo Escobar,

and Colombia's Long Torment 302 11.

Neoliberalism 307

Glossary 323

Further Acknowledgments 331

Index 333

MAPS Modern

Latin America 22

Christian Reconquest of Iberia 36

African and Iberian Background 36

Indigenous Groups and Iberian Invasions 45 Colonial Latin America 78

New

Nations of Latin America 130

Mexico and the U.S. Border before 1848 144 Paraguay in

Two Wars

Chilean Gains in the

175

War

of the Pacific

177

Neocolonial Exports and Immigration 188 Latin America in the Cold

War

288

Time Line Mexico Encounter

The

1492— 1600

Aztec Empire, were conquered and their

sedentary Mexicas,

fully

who

built the

empire taken over by the Spaniards, but

Mexica blood

Colonial Crucirle

Because of

1600— 1810

and

its

its

runs in Mexican veins.

dense indigenous population

rich silver mines,

became

it)

still

a core area of

Mexico

(or

much

of

Spanish colonization.

Independence

The

1810-1825

Morelos frightened Mexican Creoles into

large peasant uprisings led

by Hidalgo and a

conservative stance on independence, which

they embraced only in 1821.

POSTCOLONIAL BLUES

The

1825— 1850

thrown as

national government liberals

The

for control.

Anna

was frequently over-

and conservatives struggled

career of the caudillo Santa

represents the turmoil.

Progress

The

1850-1880

the conservatives to support a foreign prince,

great liberal

Maximilian.

The

Reform of the 1850s provoked liberals, led

emerged triumphant by the

Neocolonialism

The

1880— 1930

Porfiriato (1876-1911), in

by Juarez,

late 1860s.

dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, called the

embodied neocolonialism

Mexico. Diaz invited international investment

and used

it

to consolidate the

Mexican

state.

Nationalism

The Mexican Revolution

led Latin America's

1910-1945

nationalist trend in 1910.

The presidency

of

Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940) marked the high point of

its

accomplishments.

Revolution

Mexico's revolution became more conservative

1945-1960

and cal

institutionalized (in the PRI) even as radi-

change accelerated elsewhere.

Reaction

Overall, the

i960— 1990

to

when

it

used

massacre.

10

PRI used

its

revolutionary imagery

absorb challenges from the

left

—except

bullets, as in the 1968 Tlatelolco

Argentina

Brazil The semisedentary Tupi people forests

were destroyed and

by African slaves

whom

of the Brazilian

their labor replaced

pie

plains-dwelling

were eventually wiped

brought to grow sugar cane.

Pampas peo-

Much

out.

European immigrants took

the Portuguese

later,

their place

on the

land.

made

Profitable sugar plantations

The nonsedentary,

the northeast-

Most

of Argentina remained on the fringe of

when Buenos Aires new Spanish viceroyalty.

ern coast a core area of Portuguese colonization, Spanish colonization until 1776,

but

much

became

of Brazil remained a poorer fringe.

The Portuguese

royal family's

the capital of a

Without massive populations of oppressed

presence kept

indigenous people or slaves to

fear,

Buenos Aires

Prince Pedro declared Brazilian independence

Creoles quickly embraced the

May

Revolution

himself in 1822.

(1810).

Brazil relatively quiet as

The stormy

war raged elsewhere.

reign of Pedro

I

(1 822-1 831)

The

was

(1831-1840). But the Brazilian

Empire gained

stability in the 1840s as coffee exports rose.

Pedro

II

(1840— 1889) cautiously promoted

eral-style progress while

for

most of these

therefore,

much

of Argentina)

years, exiling the liberal opposi-

tion.

lib-

Liberals took over after the

fall

of Rosas (1852),

maintaining a strongly but not until the 1860s did they manage to unite

hierarchical system. Brazil in

conservative dictator Rosas dominated

Buenos Aires (and

followed by the even stormier Regency

ended

slavery only

all

Argentina under one national government.

il

Brazil's First

Republic

(1

889-1930) was a highly Buenos Aires and the surrounding areas under-

decentralized oligarchy built, above fee exports.

Sao Paulo,

all,

The leading coffee-growing became dominant.

on

cof-

state,

went an

agricultural

and immigration boom of

vast proportions. Various regional oligarchies

ruled until the election of 1916. Argentina's Radical Party was driven by the bal-

Getulio Vargas, president 1930-1935, defined

displaced the landowning oligarchy

Brazilian nationalism in this period. In 1937,

lot box. It

Vargas dissolved Congress and formed the

but remained mired in traditional patronage poli-

authoritarian Estado Novo.

tics.

Populism and the electoral clout of organized labor (led

first

by Vargas, then by his

energized Brazilian politics after

The

World War

II.

Brazilian military overthrew the populist

president Goulart in 1964 and ruled for twenty years in the

munism.

name

of efficiency and anticom-

Juan and Evita Peron made the working

class

(1946-1955) a leading force in Argentine politics.

heirs)

Peron's followers remained loyal long after his exile.

Taking control

won its "dirty bowed out in

in 1966, the

Argentine military

war" against Peronist guerrillas but 1983 after losing to Britain in the

Falklands war.

Acknowletyment At

least

one hundred of

my

students at the University of North

Carolina read this manuscript in progress. To them,

acknowledgment. Their enthusiasm encouraged pithy and informal. it,"

said

"I

feel like this

one of them. "And

should be."

book wants

that,"

I

me

me

thought,

"is

to

my to

grateful

keep

it

understand

exactly as

it

BORN m BLOOD

anb

FIRE

Pablo. Pablo was a I

lived there, too.

little

On

boy who

lived at a

Colombian boarding house

in 1978,

when

hot afternoons, Pablo sometimes took a bath in the back patio

of the house, the patio de ropas, where several

women washed

the boarders' clothes

by hand. He was having a wonderful time on this particular afternoon, as happy as any little boy anywhere, despite the modest character of our dollar-a-day accomodations. Snapshot taken by the author at the age of twenty- two.

FIRST STOP,

THE PRESENT

-Latin America was born in blood and

and

So that

slavery.

is

where

fire, in

conquest

to begin a brief introduction to

Latin American history, cutting straight to the heart of the matter,

identifying central conflicts,

and

precisely conquest

its

and not mincing words.

It is

sequel, colonization, that created

the central conflict of Latin American history.

Conquest and

colonization form the unified starting place of a single story, told here with illustrative

need ries

we must

dizziness. But, before beginning the

ask whether so

a single history.

We

Rapid panoramas of twenty national histo-

a single story.

would merely produce

story,

examples from many countries.

At

first

many

countries can really share

blush, one might doubt

it.

Consider

everything that story would have to encompass. Consider the contrasts and paradoxes of contemporary Latin America.

Latin America countries

—

is

young

implies.

And

and red

it is

old

all

—

the innovative

many

dynamism

a land of ancient ruins, of

that youth

whitewashed

tile-roofed hamlets continuously inhabited for a

thousand years. Some Latin Americans ioc

in the teens in

a burgeoning land with a population soon to reach

a half billion, with

walls

—an average age

on small plots hidden among banana

ly traditional rural

still

grow corn or man-

trees, carrying

on

fair-

ways of life. These days, though, most Latin

Born

16

Americans far

live in noisy, restless cities that

in

Blood and Fire

make

their societies

more urbanized than those of developing countries in Asia Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, and Mexico

or Africa. Megacities like

City have far outstripped the ten-million mark, and capitals of the region are not far behind. Latin

many other

America

is

the

developing world and also the West, a place where more than nine out of ten people speak a European language and practice a

European

Latin Americans.

nous cultures, far, live

Most

religion.

And

Catholics are

Latin America has deep roots in indige-

Most

too.

Roman

of the world's

of the world's native Americans, by

south of the Rio Grande.

Today many Latin Americans

live

and work in circumstances

not so different from those of middle-class people in the

United States. The resemblance seems years, as

government

has liberalized

its

after

to

have grown

in recent

government throughout the region

trade policies, facilitating the importation of

cars, videocassette recorders,

and

fax machines.

But the vast

majority of Latin Americans are far from being able to afford

such things.

A

family that

owns any

off than most, but the great majority

TV,

if

is

much

better

do have some access

to a

only at the house of a neighbor. So Brazilians and

Chileans and Colombians live

sort of car

who cannot have

a car nevertheless

thoroughly immersed in Western consumer culture and,

night after night, watch bright television commercials tailored to those able to It is

emulate the

for this reason,

poverty, that so

many

the U.S. middle class.

lifestyle of

and not

just

because of proximity and

Latin Americans

come

to the

United

States.

Consider next the contrasts among countries. Brazil occupies half the South

American continent,

its

population surging

toward two hundred million. Most countries are quite small, however.

The populations

Rico, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Honduras, together could

fit

in

Mexico City

or,

in Latin

America

of Panama, Puerto

and El Salvador added

for that matter, in Brazil's

First Stop, the Present

urban

giant,

17

Sao Paulo. Contrasts

in

other social indicators are

also vast. Argentina and Uruguay have adult literacy rates comparable to those in the United States and Canada, whereas 44

percent of the adult population in Guatemala cannot read.

Costa Ricans

live to a ripe,

old average age of yy, Bolivians to

only 62.

Now

ponder the incredible ethnic complexity of Latin

America. Most Mexicans are descended from indigenous people

and from the Spanish who colonized Mexico. The Mexican

celebration of the

Day

of the

inviting people to "eat their

own

Dead

—with candy —embodies mood so skulls,

its

death"

a

unfamiliar to people from the United States precisely because its

intimate inspirations are largely non-Western.

Argentina, on the other hand,

than

is

is

ethnically

The

capital of

more European

Washington, D.C. Not only does a larger percentage of

the population descend exclusively from European immi-

more European contacts, such and relatives born or still living in Italy or England. The modern cityscape of Buenos Aires is very self-consciously modeled on Paris, and French grants, but they also maintain

as dual Argentine-Spanish citizenship

movies have a popularity there unheard of in the United States.

The experience American

of racial diversity has

history. Latin

been central

to Latin

America was the main destination of

the millions of people enslaved and taken out of Africa

between 1500 and

1850.

Whereas the United

about 523,000 enslaved immigrants,

Spanish America absorbed around

by

itself at least 3.5 million.

From

Cuba

1.5

States received

alone got more. All

million slaves,

the Caribbean,

and

Brazil

down both

coasts of South America, African slaves performed a thousand tasks,

their

but most especially they cultivated sugarcane. Today

descendants form large parts of the population

half, overall

—

in the

two greatest

—about

historical centers of sugar

production: Brazil and the Caribbean region. Latin American countries are highly multiethnic, and

all

Born

18

sorts of racial

Southern

Blood and Fire

combinations occur. Costa Rica, Uruguay, and have populations of mostly

Brazil, like Argentina,

European

in

extraction.

Some

countries,

such

as

Mexico,

Paraguay, El Salvador, and Chile, have very mixed, or mestizo

populations of blended indigenous and European heritage.

Other countries, such Bolivia,

Peru,

as

Guatemala, Ecuador, and

have large populations of indigenous people

remain separate from the mestizos, speak indigenous

who lan-

guages such as Quechua or Aymara, and follow distinctive cus-

toms

in clothing

populations

and food. In many countries, black and white

live in

nous and white mix

the coastal lowlands, with a more indige-

mountainous

in the

interior regions.

Cuba,

Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela fifth largest

variations

all

follow this pattern. Brazil, the

country in the world, shows regional demographic

on a grand

scale: whiter in the south, blacker

north coast, with indigenous influence large but sparsely

populated

Amazon

still

on the

visible only in the

basin.

To repeat the question, then, does

this

startling variety,

divided into twenty countries, really have a single history? No, in the sity.

sense that a single story cannot encompass their diver-

Yes, in the sense that

all

have

much

in

common. They

experienced a similar process of European conquest and colo-

They became independent more or less at the same They have struggled with similar problems, in a series of

nization.

time.

similar ways. Since independence, other clearly defined polit-

washed over Latin America, giving its history unified ebb and flow. In 1980, most governments of the region were dictatorships

ical

a

trends have

of various descriptions.

In 2000, elected governments rule

And

the globalizing energies of the 1990s

almost evervwhere.

have helped Latin America leave behind

Decade" of debt,

inflation,

its

1980s "Lost

and stagnation. Economic recover)

has given prestige to the "neoliberal" (basically free-market)

First Stop, the Present policies

pursued by practically

But, as in to

make

19

much of the world,

all

governments

in the region.

current free market growth seems

the rich richer, the middle class

more middle

class,

and the poor comparatively poorer. In Latin America, with a poor majority, that kind of growth can produce more losers than winners.

Winners and

Rich and poor. Conquerors and con-

losers.

quered. Masters and slaves. That

is

the old, old conflict at the

American history. The conflict remained alive and weiLin__th e 1990 s. To protest the implementation of the Tsforth American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the heart of Latin

Mayan rebels began an lasted years. These Mayan rebels took the name memory of earlier rebels, many of them indige-

United States and Mexico uprising that Zapatistas in

in the 1990s,

who fought for land reform in the early

nous,

middle-class Mexicans found that

and increased the

the prices

Mexican government

NAFTA in place.

Aspects of 1492,

Meanwhile,

urban consumer goods. The

availability of

Zapatistas continued to protest, but the

kept

1900s.

NAFTA reduced

which

this confrontation

is

imposed

institutions

to

exactly the purpose of this book. Here, in a nut-

shell, is the story: In the 1500s,

nizers

can be traced straight back

Spanish and Portuguese colo-

their language, their religion,

on

Africans, people

indigenous

the

who

who served them,

labored for

too, at table

Americans

them

and

and

in

all

their social

and enslaved

mines and

fields

and

in bed. After three centuries

of this, however, things began to change (at least partly) with

the introduction of two

The

first

force

was

new

political forces.

liberalism.

arate this international

Students should carefully sep-

meaning of liberalism from narrow U.S.

uses of the word. Liberalism, in this larger sense, composes the core principles of the U.S. constitution, principles shared by

Republicans and Democrats

alike. Historically, liberalism is a

complex of values and practices that developed

in the 1600s

Born

20

and

1700s, largely in France

Blood and Fire

in

and England. Both 1776 and 1789

(marking the American and French Revolutions) are landmark dates in world liberalism. Liberalism favors progress over

tra-

and the

dition, reason over faith, universal over local values,

market over government control. Liberalism also advo-

free

cates equal citizenship over entrenched privilege and representative

democracy over

all

other forms of government.

Unfortunately, these last elements have sometimes been treat-

ed as icing on the cake, a finishing touch too often put prosperity.

The

Latin

American experience with more mixed.

off.

produced

Overall, the U.S. experience with liberalism has

liberalism,

on

the other hand, has been

Nationalism, the second

became

liberalism's

new

political

force,

ism emerged together

in the struggle for Latin

pendence. Latin American nationalism

—

American inde-

different in different

countries

but always built on similar themes

embedded

in the region s historical experience.

will

eventually

rough opposite. Liberalism and national-

emerge gradually over the course of

—

is

deeply

A portrait of

this book.

One

it

initial

observation: people in the United States often regard national-

ism (nationalism elsewhere, anyway) as negative. But Latin

American nationalism has often provided an

ideological self-

defense against imperialism, a positive force for social equality,

and an antidote

to

white supremacy

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Europeans no longer ride

on the backs of indigenous porters or

ried

by African

slaves.

in

sedan chairs car-

But everywhere, wealthier people

have lighter skin and poorer people

still

have darker skin

still

—

sweeping but sadly accurate generalization that does have exceptions, and lots of them, but only of the kind that prove the rule.

The conclusion

is

inescapable: the descendants of the

Spanish, the Portuguese, and later European immigrants to Latin America

still

hold power, and the people

from slaves and subjugated indigenous people

who descend still

work

for

First Stop, the Present

them. Haifa millennium

21

later, this is clearly

the enduring lega-

rippling across the centuries, of the fact that African,

cy,

European, and indigenous American people did not come together on neutral terms, like various pedestrians arriving

simultaneously at a bus stop. Just will

be our concern

and

fire.)

how

in the next chapter.

This quick introduction

know something about

Latin America, because examples of ular culture

and

still

it

together

who

readers

encountering Latin American history for the readers need to

come

(Get ready for the blood

U.S.

for

is

they did

time.

first

are

Such

past U.S. thinking on float freely in

our pop-

influence our ideas.

Until roughly the 1930s, the interpreters of Latin America

focused largely on race and culture, considering the Latin

American

varieties defective goods, responsible for

as poverty, political instability,

Latins" with too

and

such woes

dictatorship. "Hot-blooded

much "nonwhite blood," according to

this out-

moded idea, simply lacked the self-discipline and the brains to make stable, democratic, prosperous societies. As Catholics, they lacked a "Protestant work ethic" (to make work not just a necessity, but a virtue),

couraged economic

many sensuous fruit

—

literally,

version, Latin

and

their tropical climates further dis-

activity

satisfactions

with debilitating heat and too

—mangoes, papayas, and passion

as well as figuratively,

American

history

was

growing on

trees. In this

racially, culturally, or envi-

ronmentally "determined," and more or less inescapably

so.

Another U.S. image of Latin Americans created during these

was the image of laziness, of the indolent peasant snoozing under a large Mexican sombrero, an image totally refuted

years

by the hard-working

reality of the

Mexican farmworkers who

migrated into the southwestern United States as braceros ("hired hands") after

World War

Between 1940 and

1970, racial

II.

and environmental determin-

.;*

Guatemala E1Salrad0r

Guatemala

u««J,.,oc H ° nduraS

Haiti

Cm'kB^* '•Managua

San Salvador

7

V^°TM-& SanW/

Caracas

Nicaragua— tosta Kica

f

Panama Quito

\

Venezuela

Bogota

Guyana Suriname French Guiana

^Colombii

Ecuador

/

VPeru

Lima*

Argentlna Santiago.

Buenos Aires

V

Modern Latin America

Uruguay Montevideo

First Stop, the Present

ism went out of

23

style intellectually. U.S. historians of Latin

America replaced the former

villains of the region s history

(those pesky indigenous or African genes) with

backward mentalities and to

be 'modernized"

new bad

traditional social structures that

(basically,

made more

landowners

had

those of the

like

United States) so that Latin America could advance along the developmental

guys:

in stages

blazed by other countries. Large

trail

who monopolized

fertile

soils

unproductive estates, conservative priests

ostentatious,

in

who opposed mod-

ern social legislation such as that governing divorce, generals

who

just could not get

from

used

to

laziness, hot-bloodedness,

tions for Latin

After

and

—these took over

tropical heat as explana-

Americas problems. most students of Latin America

mid-1960s,

the

democracy

became convinced

that earlier interpretations of

were a convenient way

blame the

to

its

problems

victim. Instead, they

argued that Latin American economies stood in a dependent position relative to the worlds industrial powers, their existing advantage to forestall Latin ization.

They believed

that

opment did not follow the path of Today, the dependency model ies.

but

it

has lost

its

American

industrial-

'economic dependency," and not an

overly traditional culture, explained

insights,

which used

why Latin American devel-

its

supposed models.

still

central place in

Within the United States, interest

some useful Latin American stud-

provides

in Latin

America now

focuses on matters that also preoccupy us at home. As U.S. izens consider "multiracial" census categories

ways of thinking about learn that Latin

race, for example, they are interested to

Americans long ago began

multiracial identities. People

and

cit-

and explore new

"identity politics" in the

terms of

concerned with multiculturalism

United States find a valuable com-

parative perspective in Latin America.

By the

humanities and the social sciences gave a the study of culture and,

to think in

more

1990s, both the

new prominence

specifically, to the

to

way race, gen-

Born

24 der, class,

and national

ple, differs greatly

tural

and

"real

man"

from culture

racial complexity, the

story.

a matter of genes, of biology,

is

the Latin American experience.

Let us begin our

Blood and Fire

identities are "constructed" in people's

minds. (To be male or female

but the definition of a

in

or a "real

woman,"

for

exam-

to culture.) In matters of cul-

world has

much

to learn

from

COUNTERCURRENTS:

A Statistic^ Portrait The countries of Latin America may share they are not, by any means, pod.

A

few basic

like so

statistics will

many

a history, but

peas from the same

allow you to see

how

different

these countries really are from one another. Size: Area, In the

Population, and

first

table,

Brazil

Economy

and the eighteen countries of

Spanish America are ranked by land area

(in

thousands of

square miles). The other measures of size are population (in millions)

and gross domestic product

(a

measure of the

size of

the economy, in billions of U.S. dollars). Note the huge variations in size

and the small populations of several countries

when compared

to their land area. Latin

America

is

not, over-

a densely populated place. U.S. figures appear at the bot-

all,

tom for comparative purposes. Although roughly twice the size of the United States in area and population, Latin American economies are dwarfed by their northern neighbor's, the worlds than

all

more than six times larger in Latin American economies combined.

largest,

Living Standards and

dollar

volume

Development

In the second table, countries are ranked by

life

expectan-

an indicator of basic health conditions. But note the

cy,

ularities.

and els

Some

countries have high average

literacy rates despite

(GDP

life

irreg-

expectancy

modest average annual income

lev-

per person). Other countries have done poorly at

providing health care and education for

all,

despite relative

overall wealth.

Exercise caution in interpreting these figures, however.

Living standards and development are not nearly so easily

25

Born

26

Brazil

Argentina

in

Blood and Fire

Area

Population

GDP

3,206

168.0

268.1

1,100

36.6

no.

Mexico

764

97-4

128.8

Peru

496

25.2

18.0

Colombia

440

41.6

34-9

Bolivia

424

8.1

4.0

Venezuela

352

237

60.5

Chile

292

15.0

177

Paraguay

157

5-4

3-5

Ecuador

107

12.4

11.3

Uruguay

68

3-3

5-9

57

4-9

2.8

Nicaragua

Cuba

44 42

Guatemala Honduras

11.

NO data 7-2

11.

42

6.3

Panama

29

2.8

5.6

Costa Rica

20

3-9

4-4

Dominican Republic

'9

8.4

6.1

8

6.2

3.8

Total Latin America

7747

491-5

6 97-3

United States

3> 6l 7

276.2

4268.1

El Salvador

United Nations 1999",

Statistics Division, "Indicators

3.8

on Population

World Bank Central Data Base. "Economic

for

Indicators for

1997."

measured in the

as land area

and population. Many of the measures

second table are averages, and averages can give a

false

impression. Note, for example, that one person earning $1 million a year plus nine

homeless unemployed together have an

"average yearly income" of $100,000 each! For another example, life

expectancy and literacy commonly vary between

and women. Brazilian

women live, on an average,

years longer than Brazilian men.

Women's

men

almost eight

illiteracy is

about

15

percent higher than men's illiteracy in Bolivia and Guatemala.

COUNTERCURRENTS

27

Life

GDP per person

expectancy

Costa Rica

(in

U.S. dollars)

Literacy rate

77

3>7 10

95

Cuba

76

NO DATA

96

Chile

75

5,200

95

Uruguay

74

6,280

97

Panama

74

3,260

9i

Argentina

73

9,170

96

73

3,840

9i

73

4,250

90

7i

I,8lO

82

Venezuela

Mexico Dominican Republic Colombia Ecuador

7i

2,510

90

7°

1,520

90

Paraguay

70

1,920

92

El Salvador

7°

1,900

76

Honduras

750

Peru

7° 68

2,590

7° 88

Nicaragua

68

430

63

Brazil

67

5,020

83

Guatemala

64 62

!>59°

65

1,000

82

77

28,940

98

Bolivia

United States United Nations 1995-2000";

Statistics Division, "Indicators

Disparities also exist

between

on

literacy

World Bank Central Data Base, "Economic

cities

and

life

expectancy for

Indicators for 1997."

between regions of the same country and

and countryside across the board. Therefore,

the figures provide, at best, a rough guide that conceals huge inequalities within

each country.

Columbus and the Arawaks.

we spoke of the "Discovery" of Amerfrom the European point of view. Today, in memory of the people already here in 1492, we use a more neutral term the "Encounter." This 1594 engraving by Theodore de Bry helped Europeans imagine Columbus (with a jaunty hat) encountering the Arawaks of the Caribbean for the first time. (Yes, those are the gift-bearing Arawaks looking more like figures from European art history than ica,

like

which means

Until recently,

telling the story

indigenous Americans.) Courtesy of Corbis-Bettmann.

—

2.

ENCOUNTER

Indigenous peoples inhabited almost every inch of the Americas when the Europeans and Africans

and

forests

were

less

densely populated than

no part of the continent lacked people who

and considered themselves part of Americans and

native

it.

Europeans

arrived. Deserts

fertile valleys,

but

lived off the land

The Encounter between constitutes

a

defining

moment in world history. Neither the Europeans' "Old World" nor the "New World," as they called the Americas, would ever be the same afterward. For Latin America, conquest and colonization by the Spanish

and

and Portuguese created patterns of

domination that became eternal givens,

social

like the

deep

Iberian invaders of America were personally no

more

lasting

The

marks of an

sinful than most.

original sin.

They came

to

America seeking success

in

the terms dictated by their society: riches, the privilege of

being served by others, and a claim to religious righteousness. as

It

makes

human

little

sense for us to judge their moral quality

beings because they merely lived the logic of the

world as they understood

* In Christian belief,

of Eden,

and

all

it,

just as

we

do.

The

original sin

Adam and Eve committed the original sin in the Garden

their

descendants

later inherited that sin.

29

Born

30

in

Blood and Fire

lay in the logic, justified in religious terms, that

assumed

a

conquer and colonize. One way or another, the European logic of conquest and colonization soured the Encounter everywhere from Mexico to Argentina. The basic

right to

scenario varied according to the natural environment and the

indigenous peoples' way of

life

when

the European invaders

arrived.

Patterns of Indigenous Life The indigenous peoples of the Americas had adapted themmany ways. Some were nonsedentan an

selves to the land in

,

adaptation to difficult environments such as the northern deserts of Mexico, territory of the Chichimecas. Nonsedentary

people led a mobile existence as hunters and gatherers, and

movement kept

their groups small

relatively simple. Often, they

occupy a wide swath of the

and

their social organization

roamed open interior of

plains. Arid plains

South America, then

inhabited by tribes of hunters and gatherers. Not forests, neither were these exactly grasslands at the time of the Encounter. Instead, they bristled with various kinds of scrub that, as in the

northeastern Brazilian area called the sertao, might be thorny

and drop gave

its

their

The Pampas peoples who

leaves in the dry season.

name

the

to

Argentine

grasslands

were

also

nonsedentary.

Other indigenous Americans were

was important terizing

most

to

agriculture in a

and so

them,

forest

way

Hunting

but the abundant rainfalls charac-

environments allowed them

to

depend on

that the nonsedentary people could not,

forest peoples

tural practices

too,

forest dwellers.

were often semisedentan Their

were adapted

.

to thin tropical soils.

Yes: the exuberant vegetation of tropical forests

agricul-

Thin

soils?

produces a

misleading impression. Outsiders think of these forests as 'jungles," a

word

that suggests overpowering, unstoppable fer-

Encounter

31

tility. Thus, a 1949 geography text* speaks of "the relentless fecundity and savagery of the jungle." In fact, the breathtaking

of tropical forests resides in living things, such as

vitality

and the various tree-dwelling epiphytes that

insects, trees,

have no roots

in

the ground, and not in the soils at

Particularly in the great rain forest of the soils are of

marginal

ical forest soils

fertility.

Once

Amazon

all.

basin, the

cleared for agriculture, trop-

produce disappointing yields

after only a

few

years. Therefore, forest-dwelling indigenous peoples practiced

"shifting

cultivation,"

because

of

the

sometimes called "slash and burn"

way

they

cleared

garden

their

plots.

Semisedentary people built villages but moved them frequently,

allowing old garden plots to be reabsorbed into the forest

and opening new ones elsewhere. Shifting cultivation was thus a successful adaptation to

one of the world s most challenging

natural environments. Semisedentary societies, like that of the

forest-dwelling Tupi, the best-known indigenous people of Brazilian history, organized themselves roles,

but not by social

Nor

class.

by

tribes

some indigenous people were

Finally,

and by gender

did they build empires. fully

sedentary.

Permanent settlement, usually on high plateaus rather than

made

in

more complex, and some constructed great empires, especially the fabled Aztec and Inca empires. Not all sedentaries had empires, however. What all had in common were stationary, permanently sustainable forests,

their societies

forms of agriculture. For example, the capital of the Aztec

Empire

—more populous than Madrid

or Lisbon

quite an ingenious method. Tenochtitlan lake waters

the

city

Alluvial

on

deposits

* William Lytle

P.

all

sides,

constructed

and

in these waters the inhabitants of

garden platforms

periodically

Schurz, Latin America:

Dutton, 1949), 28.

—was fed by

was surrounded by

renewed

A

called their

chinampas.

fertility.

Descriptive Survey

(New

The

York: E.

Born

32

Empire had

builders of the Inca

their

in

own

Blood and Fire

elaborate form of

sustainable agriculture involving terraced slopes, irrigation,

and the use of nitrate-rich bird droppings, called guano, for fertilizer. A permanent agricultural base allowed the growth of larger,

denser conglomerations of people, the construction of

cities,

greater labor specialization

were good

things.

tended toward individuals fully

—

all

Whereas the non-

sorts of things.

all

or semisedentary people

fairly egalitarian societies,

became

Not

where outstanding

leaders thanks to their personal qualities,

sedentary groups were strongly stratified by class. Aztecs,

and Mayas

Incas,

all

had hereditary

nobilities that specialized

in war.

Note strictly

that the

names Aztec and Inca

refer to empires

speaking, to their inhabitants at

all.

The

Aztec Empire were a people called the Mexicas,

name

to

and

not,

rulers of the

who gave

their

Mexico. The warlike Mexicas were relative newcom-

ers to the fertile valley

where they

built their

amazing

city,

shadow of great volcanoes, but that had developed in Mexico's

Tenochtitlan, on a lake in the

they inherited a civilization

central highlands over thousands of years. For example, the

gargantuan Pyramid of the Sun, the largest pyramid on earth,

was

built long before the

Mexicas

arrived. In the early 1400s,

the Mexicas were only one among many groups who spoke

Nahuatl, the

common language of city-states in the region. much of central Mexico during the next

they conquered

hundred

years. Tenochtitlan, the imperial capital,

was

But

one

a vast

and teeming complex of towers, palaces, and pyramids

that,

according to the flabbergasted Spanish adventurer Bernal Diaz, rose like a mirage from the waters of the surrounding lake, linked to the shore level

causeways.

by

a series of perfectly straight

"We were astonished and

appeared enchantments from a book of describing the Spaniards'

From an imposing

first

and

said these things

chivalry,"

wrote Diaz,

sight of Tenochtitlan.

capital city in a high

Andean

valley far to

Encounter

33

the south, the even larger Inca Empire had grown just as rapidly

and recently

ital

was

called,

had the Aztec Empire. Cuzco, the Inca capmeaning "the navel of the universe." Today one

as

speaks of "the Incas," but the

name

Inca actually referred only

to the emperor and his empire. Ethnically, the people of Cuzco

were Quechua speakers, and

they, too,

drew on

a long history

of previous cultural evolution in the Andes. Cuzco's architec-

with —earthquake-resistant masonry among Andean locking stones —were an tural

marvels

walls

old trick

inter-

builders.

Heirs to ancient civilizations, the Aztec and Inca Empires

themselves were newer and more

The Maya Empire was arrived, so

it

plays

fragile

already in decline

little

than they appeared.

when

the Europeans

part in our story.

At the moment of the Encounter, then, most of Latin

America was inhabited by nonsedentary or semisedentary people,

such as the Pampas of Argentina or the Tupis of

Brazil.

Today, few of their descendants remain. Instead, the large

indigenous populations of Latin America descend from the sedentary farmers

who

Europeans

until the

others perished?

lived

arrived.

The answer

about Latin America.

It

under Aztec, Maya, or Inca rule

Why is

did they survive

complex, but

requires,

first,

it

when the much

explains

some background on

name Iberia.

Spain and Portugal, joined under the geographical

Origins of a Crusading Mentality In the

cramped first

1490s,

when Europeans clambered

sailing vessels to face indigenous

time, the greatest question

out of their

Americans

for the

was how each would react

to

the other. This was truly a cultural encounter, a clash of values

and

attitudes.

The Spanish and Portuguese

their crusader rhetoric,

outlook, along with

had been shaped by the history of the

Iberian Peninsula. Iberia

is

a rugged, mountainous land. Parts of

it

are as green

Born

34

very green, indeed

as Ireland

tures taken

.

in

but most of

Blood and Fire it is

On

dry.

pic-

from space, southern Spain shows up the same

color as nearby northern Africa. Historically, Iberia had

been

a

bridge between Europe and Africa, and the narrow straits of Gibraltar

separating

two continents had often been

the

crossed, in both directions, by migrants and invaders. In the

year 711, Muslims from northern Africa, called Moors, began to cross

heading north and conquered most of the peninsula

from

Christian kings (whose predecessors generations ear-

lier

its

had taken

it

from the Romans, who.

in turn,

had seized

it

from the Carthaginians, and so on). For most of the next eight

hundred

years.

Iberia contained multiethnic societies that

intermingled but also fought one another. Both activities

left

their mark.

Along with the practical skills of the Islamic world, the Moors brought with them the book learning of the Greeks and Romans, better preserved in the Middle East during Europe's Dark Ages. Christians who lived under Moorish rule or who traded with Moorish neighbors from the remaining Christian

kingdoms learned a healthy respect

for the cultural achieve-

ments of Islam. The Moors were better physicians, better engineers,

and better farmers than the Iberian Christians, whose

languages gradually

(such as

with Arabic words for

filled

basil, artichokes,

substances (such as distillation and alcohol', (such as carpeting), and chemistry'

new

new

new

furnishings

sciences 'such as algebra and

—

eventually totaling about a quarter of

modern

all

Spanish and Portuguese words. -Although speakers of the

Moors

crops

and almonds', new processes and

.Arabic.

were darker than .Arabs. Shakespeare's "black" char-

acter Othello, for example,

is

a Moor.

So the Christians of

Iberia had long exposure to a sophisticated and powerful peo-

ple

who

did not look European. In addition, on the eve of the

Encounter. Iberia had one of the largest Jewish minorities in

Europe, and Lisbon and Seville were already

home

to thou-

Encounter

35

sands of enslaved Africans. Not sympathetic to cultural and racial difference, the Iberians

ed with ple

it.

were nevertheless well acquaint-

Spanish and Portuguese attitudes toward other peo-

ranged from scorn to grudging admiration to sexual

curiosity.

(Dusky Moorish maidens

folktales.)

The

reign of Alfonso the

figure erotically in Iberian

Wise (1252-1284),

a noted

lawgiver, represents a high point in this tense, multicultural

Iberian world of the reconquest. In the end, however, the

peninsulas eight hundred years of multicultural experience dissolved in an intolerant drive for religious purity.

Christian reconquest of Iberia powerfully shaped the institutions and mentality of the Spanish

and Portuguese. Iberian

Christians believed that they had found the or Saint

James the Apostle,

in the

tomb

of Santiago,

remote northwestern corner

The Moorslaying Santiago, pictured as a sword-swinging knight, became the patron saint of reconquest, and his tomb in Santiago de Compostela became Europe's greatest shrine. Reconquest brought the repeated challenges of annexing new territory and subjugating infidel populations. As they pushed the Moors of the peninsula never conquered by the Moors.

south toward Africa over thirty generations, the reconquering

new urban

Christians founded

advancing

territorial

claims,

centers as bastions of their

and individual warlords took

responsibility for Christianizing groups of defeated

Moors,

them in return. (The same same procedures for dealing with them

receiving tribute and service from

challenges and the

would be repeated in America.) Another effect of the reconquest was to perpetuate the knightly renown and influence of the Christian nobility. For this reason, the values of the nobles (fighting prowess, leisure, display of wealth) lost

ground only

slowly to the values of the commercial middle class (money-

making, industry,

thrift).

In addition, the requirements of war-

fare led to a concentration of political

decisive, unified

command. Two

power

of the peninsula's

to facilitate

many small

Atlantic

Ocean

\ Madagascar

Encounter

37

Christian kingdoms gradually emerged as leaders of the reconquest.

The most important by far was

centrally located Castile,

whose dominions eventually engulfed much of Iberia and, when united with the kingdoms of Aragon, Leon, and Navarre, laid the political basis for modern Spain. On the Atlantic coast, the king of Portugal led a parallel advance south and managed to maintain independence from Spain. Portugal was the first to complete

its

reconquest, reaching the southern coast of Iberia

in the mid-i2oos.

On

the Spanish side, the Moorish

Granada held out for two more centuries before cumbing to Castilian military power in 1492. of

kingdom

finally suc-

When Queen Isabel of Castile decided to bankroll the explorations of Christopher

Columbus

in the 1490s,

she did so in

hopes of enriching her kingdom, true enough. By

Columbus

sailing west,

proposed to outflank a profitable Venetian-Arab

monopoly on trade routes

to Asia.

But we should not underes-

timate the religious mystique that also surrounded the Spanish

and Portuguese monarchs. Isabel was above

all

a Catholic

monarch. Centuries of reconquest had created a true crusading mentality in Iberia, and the monarchies used this fervor to justify

their increasingly absolute

accepted Christian Iberia for close to a

rule,

power. Moors

thousand years, anyone suspected of

gious infidelity found themselves objects of a purge.

Jews were forced

who had

Jews whose families had lived

in

reli-

Moors and

to convert or emigrate. In fact, in the very year

of the surrender of Granada, Isabel expelled tens of thousands of people from Spain because they refused to renounce the

Jewish

faith.

And Moors and Jews who did convert remained "New Christians." The famous

subject to discrimination as

Spanish Inquisition was established to monitor and impose religious purity.

During the bitterly in

1500s, Catholics

and Protestants began

fighting

western Europe, and the monarchs of a unified

Spain led the Catholic side, pouring prodigious resources into

Born

38

in

Blood and Fire

the war effort. (Recall the 1588 Spanish Armada, an attempted

invasion of Protestant England.) Overseas exploration also took

on

religious significance.

The

reconquest

earlier Christian

in

Portugal allowed the Portuguese to extend their crusading activities into Africa

down and

ahead of Spain. As Portuguese ships edged

the coast of Africa during the 1400s, bringing back gold

slaves, they

found

religious justification in tales of a lost

Christian kingdom that supposedly lay beyond the Sahara,

waiting to be reunited with the rest of Christendom. Isabels decision to fund the voyages of

Columbus was

Spain's bid to

catch up with Portugal. Thus, the two Iberian monarchies,

strengthened politically by the reconquest, became the

Europe

to

first in

sponsor major overseas exploration, and they arrived

Western Hemisphere neck and neck.

in the

Although the Spanish-sponsored expedition of Columbus arrived in

Let us

America

start

first,

the difference was less than a decade.

with the Portuguese,

gational skills

who had

pioneered the navi-

and naval technology needed

to get there.

The

Portuguese colonization of Brazil exemplifies what happened

when

the Europeans encountered indigenous people

not fully sedentary. ciate the

An

initial

unique qualities of the very

different,

famous, encounter of the Spanish with the ples of indigenous

who were

look at Brazil will help us appre-

fully

and

far

more

sedentary peo-

Mexico and Peru.

The Brazilian Counterexample The first Portuguese Columbus a few years

fleet arrived in Brazil in 1500. earlier,

the Portuguese

Like

commander

Pedro Alvares Cabral was bound for India, but in contrast to

Columbus, he actually did get there. Cabral had no intention of sailing around the world. Instead, he was sailing from Portugal down the west coast of Africa and around its southern tip into the Indian Ocean. To catch the best winds, he had

Encounter swung

—

far

39

out into the South Atlantic on his southward voy-

back east he Columbus, Cabral did not know exactly what he had found, but he knew that it was not India. After naming Brazil the "Island of the True Cross," a name it did not keep for very long, Cabral hurried on to his original desage

so far out, in fact, that before turning

bumped

into Brazil. Like

tination.

Brazil

Just a

seemed unimportant to the Portuguese at the time. earlier, they had succeeded in establishing a which route to the fabled riches of South Asia

few years

practical

—

Columbus had

failed to do. For the rest of the 1500s, the

Portuguese concentrated on exploiting their early advantage in the Far Eastern trade. Portuguese outposts elsewhere reached

from Africa

to Arabia, India, Indonesia,

China, and Japan.

Portuguese ships returned to Europe perilously overloaded with

silks

cloves,

and

and porcelain, precious spices (pepper, nutmeg,

and cinnamon), and Persian horses, not

silver.

Monopoly access

to these riches

to

made

mention gold Portugal, for

a time, a major player in world history. Brazil offered nothing

comparable

to India in the eyes of

Cabral or his chronicler,

Pero Vaz de Caminha. Caminha's curious description of what

he saw on Brazilian shores presented a vision of a new Garden of Eden, paying particular attention to the fact that the indige-

nous people there wore no clothes: 'They go around naked,

They worry no more about showing than their faces." The Portuguese sailors

without any covering at their private parts

plainly

found indigenous

the only thing that

was

all.

a red dye

women

seemed

made from

to

attractive

and

inviting,

but

have potential for sale in Europe

the "brazilwood" tree.

The name of this export product quickly replaced the origname of "Island of the True Cross," just as economics

inal

upstaged religion, overall, in the colonization of Brazil and

Spanish America.

Still,

ed. "Fathers, pray that

must not be discountGod make me chaste and zealous

religious ideas

Born

40

in

Blood and Fire

enough to expand our Faith throughout the world," implored the young Portuguese prince Sebastian, with unquestionable Europeans of the 1500s believed

sincerity, to his Jesuit tutors.

in the teachings of their religion as a matter of course,

some Portuguese and Spanish men,

and

especially those in holy

orders such as the Jesuits, undertook quite perilous voyages

around the world primarily vast majority of people

had

to save souls. In

a

sum, however, the

mundane mix of motivations, and

the lure of worldly success was constantly evident in their

The

actions.

idea of spreading Christianity provided, above

all,

a compelling rationale for laying claim to huge chunks of the

"undiscovered" world. Consequently, religious ideas became particularly influential at the level of formal rationalization.

Whenever

the invaders of America had to explain and justify

their actions, they invoked religious goals for reasons

than the

sinister

the best

common human

wish

no more

to present oneself in

light.

Aside from their immortal souls, forest dwellers did not have very

much

like

the Tupi

Europeans wanted, so they

that the

left more or less alone at first. Along the Brazilian coast, some mutually advantageous trade developed when Tupi men

were

were willing

to fell the brazilwood

stations

return

in

for

useful

and

items

float the logs to trading

such as

axes.

steel

Occasionally, Portuguese castaways or exiles "went native, " to live

among

the indigenous people, and found a different kind

becoming influential figures in their localimanner foreshadowed by the chronicle of Pero Vaz de Caminha, fathering dozens and dozens of children the of worldly success, ties

and, in a

—

beginnings of a process of racial mixing that has characterized the history of Brazil.

The king

of Portugal

with his Asian empire to think 1

530s,

coast

much

was too preoccupied

about Brazil until the

when the appearance of French ships along the Brazilian made him fear for his claims there. To secure them, he

finally

sent

Portuguese

settlers

to

Brazil.

Suddenly,

the

Encounter

41

Portuguese did want something that the Tupi possessed: their

Now everything would change. To the Portuguese, settling the land meant clearing the forest and planting crops, and sugarcane was the only crop with major export potential. It could be milled and boiled down into land.

concentrated, imperishable blocks packed in that

fit

wooden

chests

and

easily into the small sailing ships of the day,

it

brought a high price in Europe, where sugarcane did not grow.

These

made sugarcane

qualities

centuries

—

Brazil

in

first

and

the cash crop of choice for

later

the Caribbean and

in

throughout the lowlands of tropical America

who measured in

—

for

landowners

what they could buy

Europe. Sugar was a plantation crop, requiring plenty of cap-

ital its

their success according to

investment and a large labor force, a crop where the profof the planter were partly a function of cheap labor. But no

Portuguese settlers wanted to provide cheap agricultural

labor.

Indeed, Iberians in America were typically loathe to do any

manual work

at

all,

because

it

contradicted their model of

wordly success. As for Tupi men, they traditionally hunted and

women's work. Why should indigenous men or women hoe weeds and chop cane for meager wages under the burning sun when the forest gave them fished and regarded farming as

everything they wanted? In any event, their semisedentary of life involved periodic tations

need

movement incompatible with

way

the plan-

for a fixed labor force.

To gain the land and the labor of forest people

like the Tupi,

meant attacking few hundred, one by one,

the Portuguese resorted to force of arms. This

and enslaving each in

tribal

group of a

bloody skirmishes, an activity quite taxing to the limited

manpower

of the Portuguese.

Here were no decisive

battles

that put large defeated populations at the victors' disposal.

Other factors made the task even harder. American dwellers used the invaders' horses

bow and the blowgun with

—elsewhere something

forest

The weapon

deadly effect.

like a secret

Born

42

in

Europeans, because they did not

for the

before the Encounter fallen trunks,

Blood and Fire exist in

America

—could hardly move amid hanging

and tangled

roots.

To those who know

it,

vines,

the for-

est provides countless opportunities to hide, to escape,

and

ambush

native

would melt

Brazilians

plantations

if

extracting land

meant

Even

pursuers.

not

after

they were defeated,

into the limitless

woodland beyond the

supervised constantly.

In

and labor from semisedentary

totally destroying their society.

to

other words, forest dwellers

Most were

likely to die

in the process.

This

is

exactly

what happened

once the Portuguese began king of Portugal,

along the coast of Brazil

who viewed

The

the indigenous people as poten-

subjects, did not approve of this wholesale annihi-

tially loyal

lation,

all

to establish sugar plantations.

but his power in Brazil was surprisingly limited. In an

attempt to

settle

two thousand miles of coastline on the cheap,

the king had parceled out enormous slices to wealthy individuals, called captains,

who promised

to colonize

and

rule in his

name. Revealingly, the most successful were those who minimized conflict with the indigenous people. Pernambuco, on the very northeastern tip of Brazil,

became the model sugar

captaincy, partly because the family of

its

captain established

local chief. Most of the captainBy the mid-i54os, indigenous rebellions threatened to erupt up and down the coast. On the splendid Bay of All Saints, the Tupinamba, a subgroup of the Tupi, had demolished one of the most promising settlements. So, in 1548, the Portuguese king stepped up the colonization of Brazil by appointing a royal governor and building a capital city, Salvador

an alliance by marriage with a cies failed, however.

(also called Bahia),

Over

on that

site.

the next half century,

enslave the

between the

planters' efforts to

Tupinamba people and certain disastrous efforts to Tupinamba vanished from the area of the

protect them, the

sugar plantations. Particularly lethal were European diseases

Encounter against

43

which indigenous people had no natural resistance;

among Tupinamba plantations. Any gathering of

contagion ran rampant

slaves in the close

quarters of

native populations

facilitated this

brought the

"demographic catastrophe." The same ship that

first

royal governor also brought the first black-

robed Jesuit missionaries to Brazil.

gence and villages

them all

zeal, the Jesuits

moved

where they gathered

Christianity

Famous

for their intelli-

quickly to establish special

their indigenous flock to teach

and defend them from enslavement. Despite

good intentions, however, epidemic European diseases dec-

imated the indigenous inhabitants of the Jesuit plantations,

because

too,

of

villages.

On the

indigenous slaves were fast disappearing

disease

and

despair.

To replace

them,

the

Portuguese bought slaves in Africa and crowded them into the holds of Brazilian-bound ships. By 1600, Africans were rapidly replacing indigenous people as the enslaved workforce of Brazilian sugar plantations.

The

surviving

fled into the interior or intermarried

as a distinct group. This pattern

was

Tupinamba

either

and gradually disappeared to

be repeated throughout

Brazil as sugar cultivation spread.

Africa and the Slave Trade In several parts of Latin America, Africans totally replaced

How were so many people Why did they survive to pop-

indigenous laborers in the 1600s. enslaved and taken out of Africa? ulate Brazil

and the Caribbean while people

Now that Africans

have entered our story

like the

—never

Tupi died?

to leave

it

we should consider the part they played in the Encounter. The Encounter brought together people from three continents to create new societies, but as we have seen, the Africans and the Iberians were not to arrive in

total strangers. In fact, the first slaves

America were Africans who had already spent time

as slaves in Iberia itself.

Europeans and Africans had more

in

Born

44

common

in

Blood and Fire

with each other than with indigenous Americans.

Along with Europe and Asia, Africa formed

a part of what Europeans called the Old World. For tens of thousands of

New World had been isoand thus protected, from the diseases circulating in the

years, the indigenous people of the lated,

Old World. Hence their utter vulnerability to European dison the other hand, were not so susceptible. Old World trade routes and migrations had already exposed them to these microbes. Similarly, indigenous Americans had eases. Africans,

never seen the horses,

cattle,

sheep, pigs, chickens, and other

domestic animals brought by the Iberians, but Africans already raised the

same animals, and some Africans were

men. Although indigenous people fashioned out of gold and

silver,

skilled horse-

intricate jewelry

they did nothing with iron. Africans, on

the other hand, were experienced ironworkers and even pro-

duced high-quality agriculturists

steel.

Most Africans were

to the pattern of Iberian rural life. Finally, like the

fully

sedentary

and therefore closer than the semisedentary Tupi indigenous people

Tupi had every reason to expect the worst when cap-

among

tured and enslaved, because

the Tupi, slaves were fre-

quently sacrificed (and sometimes eaten). Africans brought a different set of expectations to the experience of slavery.

Slavery was everywhere in African societies, a social institution basic to

economic

life.

In Africa, as in Iberia

and indige-

nous America, slaves were most often war captives, but with an important difference. In Africa, captives did not necessarily

remain eternally degraded servants, and often their children

were not born allowed

slaves.

full social

some African

Eventually, African forms of slavery

integration of the slaves' descendants. In

societies, slaves

might even attain high status and

elite privileges as administrators.

Buying and

selling slaves at

markets, on the other hand, was more a European tradition.

The African

slave trade per se

began

to take

on massive pro-

portions only after the Portuguese arrived in the 1400s.

Born

46

Along the African

Blood and Fire

coast, the Portuguese established trading

centers stocked with ly

in

brass kettles, and eventual-

silks, linens,

rum, tobacco, guns, and gunpowder, but most especially

with bars of iron for metalworking. African traders brought long lines of slaves,

tion centers.

chained together

and eventually the

states,

provided a

at the

Most had been captured

new

neck, to these embarkain

wars between African

profits of the trade of

war captives

stimulus to warfare. Slaving vessels might also

stop anywhere along the coast to buy captives from local traders.

Meanwhile, the Portuguese sought ideological

justifi-

cation in the notion that buying such captives to Christianize

them was

actually

Conscience

in

doing

them

a

favor.

The Board

of

Lisbon cleared the procedure as long as the

Portuguese slavers were supposedly "rescuing" the captives of cannibals, or enslaving certified practitioners of

some form

fice,

or engaging in

tice,

however, such legal distinctions mattered

human

sacri-

of certified "just war." In praclittle

to slave

They bought whoever was for sale, willy-nilly, with a young men, and then packed them into the holds of slave ships where 15 to 20 percent on average would die on the voyage. Probably more than a million traders.

special preference for healthy

people died

in the

passage across the Atlantic alone. Early

exploration of the African coast led to about a century of

Portuguese dominance supplied

human cargo to

in the slave trade.

Portuguese slavers

Spanish American, as well as Brazilian,

buyers.

We have few firsthand accounts was

like,

turies

of

what being human cargo

although around twelve million people over four cen-

had the experience. One exception

is

the account of

Olaudah Equiano, written in the 1700s, after the trade had underway for more than two centuries. Equiano describes his confusion and despair when arriving aboard ship to encounter the claustrophobic horror of the dark, foul, and

been

narrow cargo spaces. Not

until

he found a few other people

Encounter

who spoke

47

his

language did Equiano learn that he was being

taken to work in the white man's land. Enslaved Africans to Latin

America

many

speaking

in diverse groups,

came

different

languages, originating in three widely separated areas of Africa.

The

first

Africa,

area to be affected by the slave trade was

from Senegal

to Nigeria.

Here

forest gives way, further inland, to

and eventually

to the

West

a coastal belt of tropical

savanna (the Sudanic

belt)

beginnings of the Sahara desert. This

is

a special part of Africa, traversed in a great arc by the Niger

many

River, the cradle of

about

five

cultural developments. Beginning

thousand years ago, Bantu-speaking people

from the area around the mouth of the Niger River migrations, spreading their culture east of the continent.

in

Enough

of that gold

camel caravans

and south over much

Along the course of the Niger, a thousand

years ago, arose kingdoms gold.

set out in great

famous had

in

Europe

wealth in

for their

trickled north across the Sahara

to excite the interest of medieval

Europeans, and

the Portuguese undertook their exploration of the African coast partly to find the source of the precious flow.

Communication

West Africa. Before the slave trade, the most powerful kingdoms arose inland on the upper Niger, where stood the fabulous walled city of across the Sahara also brought Islam to

Timbuktu, with

bustling markets and university. In 1324,

its

when Mansa Musa, (as

king of Mali,

devout Muslims want to do

made

at least

a pilgrimage to

once

Mecca

in their lives), his

caravan carried enough gold to cause oscillations in currency values in the areas

metals

first

it

crossed.

The

fatal attraction of

brought the Portuguese to "the Gold Coast" (mod-

ern Ghana), but the value of

human

cargoes from this region

eventually far outstripped the golden ones.

The

British, the

French, and the Dutch eventually established their ing stations, finally breaking the Portuguese

West African

Two

precious

own

trad-

monopoly on the

coast.

other areas of Africa remained more or less

monopo-

Born

48 lized

in

Blood and Fire

by the Portuguese: Angola and Mozambique, where

coastal stretches of grassy,

open land allowed the Portuguese

to

penetrate far inland and actively colonize, in contrast to their

more limited West African

trading strategy.

As

a

result,

Portuguese remains the language of government in Angola and

Mozambique

today.

These regions became chief sources

for

the slave trade only after the Portuguese were edged out of

West Africa by competition from other European But that gets ahead of our

how

For now, having observed African coast and

its

countries.

story.

Portugal's exploration of the

clash with the semisedentar}' Tupi laid the

ethnic and demographic foundations for a black-and-white Brazil, let us return to the sedentary societies of

Peru,

where Aztec and Inca

Mexico and

rulers boasted astonishing golden

treasures.

The Fall of the Aztec and Inca Empires While

Brazil

remained

Peru drew the Spaniards

a

backwater

like

in the 1500s,

Mexico and

powerful magnets, becoming the

two great poles of Spanish colonization. For three centuries,

Mexico and Peru would remain the places in the Americas, but

first

richest

and most populous

their indigenous rulers

be defeated. The Aztec and Inca emperors

commanded

had

to

tens of

thousands of warriors and vast material resources. Their precipitous defeat at the hands of a few turers

is

hundred Spanish adven-

unparalleled in world history. Several circumstances

make it possible. In 519, when they first set foot in Mexico, the Spaniards already knew a lot about America. After all, a full generation had conspired to 1

passed since they began settling the Caribbean islands where

Columbus made Haiti

landfall:

Hispaniola (today divided between

and the Dominican Republic) and Cuba. The

initial

Spanish experience there with the semisedentary Arawak peo-

Encounter pie,

49

who were

not so different from the Tupi, had begun with

trading but rapidly degenerated into slaving. similar to

what had transpired on the

The outcome was

Brazilian coast. Disease

and abuse decimated the Caribbean's indigenous people within a generation.

Soon they would cease

be replaced by African

The Spanish

to exist altogether, to

slaves.

invaders were not soldiers but undisciplined

adventurers seeking private fortunes.

The

first to arrive laid

claim to the indigenous inhabitants and, eventually, the land, leaving

little

wave of adventurers. These had

for the next

conquer somewhere

else.

to

Operating from the Caribbean bases,

Spanish newcomers began to explore the coast of Central and

South America, crossed Panama, and found the

Pacific

Ocean,

making contact with many

different indigenous groups

beginning to hear rumors of

glittering,

and

mysterious empires in

the mountains beyond the Caribbean. So

it

was

that,

by the

time he found the Aztec Empire, the Spanish leader Hernan Cortes had already been dealing with indigenous Americans for fifteen years.

In the conquest of Mexico,

no other

single Spanish advan-

tage outweighs the simple fact that Cortes more or less knew what was happening, whereas Mexica leaders like Moctezuma,

the Aztec emperor, had no earthly idea who, or what, the

Spaniards might be. In they were gods. telling,

and

this

fact,

The Mexicas believed

an element of indigenous mytholo-

Aztec prophecies foretold the coming of Quetzalcoatl, a

white-skinned dition,

tage

deity,

on those same shores. Early

in the expe-

Cortes had found a translator, an indigenous woman,

who became

companion and who gave him a further advanby enabling him to understand and play on Moctezuma s his

misconception. (She her

intensely in fortune-

time fortune smiled on the Spaniards, making

their arrival coincide with gy.

Moctezuma apparently suspected

later.)

is

known

to history as

Sailing ships, horses

Malinche. More on

and cannon,

steel blades

and

Born

50

in

Blood and Fire

body armor, ferocious attack dogs (mastiffs, when the Mexicas had seen only chihuahuas) gave the Spanish a very otherworldly look in indigenous eyes, aiding Cortes's attempts to

impersonate Quetzalcoatl. The Spaniards' mortality and their hostile intentions did not

pany had been welcomed denly took

Moctezuma

smallpox and indigenous

become

clear until Cortes

and com-

where they sudBy the middle of 1521,

into Tenochtitlan,

hostage. allies

had helped Cortes annihilate

Tenochtitlan, and the Aztec Empire then collapsed like a house of cards. It

took more fighting to overthrow the Inca Empire.

Still,

the

stunningly rapid and complete Spanish triumph in both cases

begs explanation. side.

The

Once

again, experience

was on the Spanish

leader of the Peruvian expedition, Francisco Pizarro,

was another seasoned conquistador who, tant relative),

employed

like

Cortes (his

a tried-and-true maneuver,

the Spanish had been practicing since their

encounters with indigenous people,

first

when he

dis-

something Caribbean

treacherously

took the Inca ruler Atahualpa hostage in 1532. Then, too, the

Spanish advantage

in military

technology must be recalled.

gunpowder gave the man for man. Against warriors armed only with bravery and stone-edged weapons, Spanish weaponry produced staggering death tolls. Horses,

and

steel,

(less

importantly)

invaders a devastating superiority of force,

At one point, the Spanish under Cortes massacred ten times their

number

in a

few hours

at the

Aztec tributary city of

came from their Old which included gunpowder from China and horses from Asia. Old World microbes were Spanish allies, too. Cholula. Spanish military advantages

World

heritage,

Imagine the horror of the Incas when Pizarro captured the Inca emperor, Atahualpa. Atahualpa had arrived with an army

had only 168 Spaniards. Atahualpa had reason to be overconfident, and he walked into an ambush. Pizarro s only hope was a smashing

numbering

in the tens of thousands; Pizarro

Encounter

51

psychological victory, so he drew on another tried-and-true

Spanish

tactic,

one repeatedly used

in

Mexico: the surprise

slaughter of indigenous nobles within an enclosed space. At

multitude of followers entered

Pizarro's invitation, Atahualpa's

where the Spaniards had hidden cannons. Without warning, the cannons fired metal, thunder, and smoke into the crowd, creating gruesome carnage. Then Spaniards on horses a square

charged into the mass of bodies, swinging their long steel blades in bloody arcs, sending heads and arms flying, as no

indigenous American weapon could do. Meanwhile, surprise

and armor protected day, yet they

men. Not one of them died

Pizarro's

succeeded

in taking

and maiming thousands of his

men

Atahualpa prisoner,

that

killing

in the process. Atahualpa's

people brought mountains of gold to ransom him, but Pizarro

had him executed anyway. Depriving the indigenous defenders of leadership

was part of the "divide-and-conquer"

strategy.

Neither the Incas nor the Aztecs could have been defeated without the aid of the Spaniards' indigenous

allies.

In Mexico,

Aztec taxes and tributes had weighed heavily on the shoulders

whose people

of other Nahuatl-speaking city-states

nished

sacrificial victims for the

also fur-

Aztec state religion, the ideol-

ogy that impelled Aztec imperial expansion and bathed the

pyramids of Tenochtitlan in the blood of hundreds of thousands.

As

a result, Cortes

found ready

alliances,

most notably

with the nearby indigenous city of Tlaxcala, an old

rival of

Tenochtitlan. Eager to end Aztec rule, rival cities sent thou-

sands of warriors to help Cortes. Pizarro, too,

used indigenous

allies to

topple the Inca Empire,

though of a different kind. Unlike the Aztecs, the Incas had

imposed

a centralized

power

resettled their populations.

imposed

that broke

Where

up

rival city-states

tributes, the Incas administered, building roads

storage facilities

and

and

the Aztecs had merely

garrisons. Like the Aztecs,

and

and

like the

Spanish and Portuguese, too, the Incas had a state religion that

Born

52

in

Blood and Fire

provided an ideological justification for empire. Unfortunately for the Incas, however,

both the reigning emperor and his suc-

cessor had died suddenly in the epidemic that, advancing along trade routes ahead of Pizarro, ravaged the Inca ruling family,

creating a succession crisis just before the Spanish arrival. Disasterously, an Inca civil

and

side

his brother

war had begun. Atahualpa led one

Huascar the

other.

The

wily Pizarro was

able to play the two sides against each other, achieving the

mate victory

for himself.

Each

other as the greatest threat. tiny expedition

forces

side in the Inca civil

ulti-

war saw the

How could they know that Pizarros

was only the entering wedge of

vast colonizing

beyond the Atlantic?

Aztec and Inca treasures soon attracted Spaniards by the thousands. first

The

defeat of Aztec and Inca power was only the

step in establishing Spanish dominion over the mainland.

Now

the Spanish had to colonize, to assert effective control

over large populations and sprawling territories, over the lizations that

remained

civi-

underlay the Aztec and Inca empires and that

in place after their destruction.

This was a gradual

process, requiring several generations and contrasting markedly

with the pattern of colonization on the Brazilian coast.

The Birth of Spanish America Even before the dust of imperial collapse had settled in Mexico and Peru, the Spanish began to parcel out the plunder of conquest. Some was treasure captured from indigenous royalty, but most took a form called encomienda, whereby the conquerors were rewarded with people. In this system, indigenous

people were 'entrusted" (the meaning of the word encomienda) to

each conqueror,

who had the responsibility of Christianizing

them and the privilege of making them work for him. Encomiendas of conquered Moors had been given aplenty during the Christian reconquest of Iberia, so it was a familiar sys-

Encounter

53

tern to the Spaniards.

became much

like

of serflike farmers tribute. For

Conquerors who received encomiendas

European nobles, able

who

same

from the labor

indigenous farmers accustomed to paying tribute

to imperial masters, the situation

the

to live

delivered part of their crops as regular

city-states, villages,

utes to the Aztecs or Incas

was

familiar, too.

Most

often,

and clans that had once paid

now

paid

them

to the

trib-

new Spanish

overlords instead. Calamitous, repeated epidemics during the 1

500s,

comparable

in severity to the

Black Death of medieval

Europe, reduced native populations to a fraction of their

mer

size.

But, unlike

what occurred

in the

for-

Caribbean or along

the Brazilian coast, indigenous villages did not disappear from

Mexico and Peru. Whereas Tupi society was swept away by disease and replaced by Brazilian sugar plantations, the sedentary farming societies of central intact, for the

Mexico and the Andes

Spanish

to take over.

survived, shaken but

The Spanish normally

cre-

ated encomiendas out of already existing communities with

own indigenous nobles, whom the Spanish called The Spanish conquerors cultivated relations with

their

caciques.

these nobles, sometimes marrying into their families. Gradually,

however, Spanish conquest undercut the defeated warrior nobility of Aztec

and Inca days, and indigenous people adopt-

ed Spanish-style

village

cials

with Spanish

governments. In Mexico, village

titles

conducted

written records in Nahuatl.

their business

offi-

and kept

Hundreds of Spanish words came

into Nahuatl, of course, indicating the powerful impact of con-

quest, but the basic structure of the language survived, pre-

serving a distinctly indigenous worldview.

Mexico

officially

became "New

Spain," but

societies being grafted together, mostly

indigenous women. Spanish

women,

like

it

was

really

two

men and Portuguese women in by Spanish

Brazil,

were few. In the early years of the Encounter, Spanish

men

America outnumbered Spanish

in

women

roughly nine to

Born

54

one. So, within a few years, indigenous

men became ly as

in

Blood and Fire

women and

Spanish

the parents of a legion of mestizo children, exact-

anticipated by Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter from Brazil.

Malinche had Cortes's baby soon

What an

intriguing figure

Spanish baptized

her.

is

after the fall of Tenochtitlan.

Malinche, or Marina, as the

She was one of twenty female

slaves

given to Cortes as he sailed up the Mexican coast seeking the

Aztec Empire in

1519.

She already spoke Maya and Nahuatl,

and she learned Spanish

in

months. This astoundingly quick-

witted and self-possessed sixteen-year-old

and was instrumental

rable from Cortes

Moctezuma. Understandably, her

life

girl

became

has been read as a

romantic novel, but also as a betrayal of Mexico.

As

for

romance, Cortes

summoned

his

insepa-

in the capture of

It

was

Spanish wife,

neither.

who was

waiting in Cuba, then gave Malinche a bit of property and

turned her away. As for betraying Mexico, that country did not yet exist, unless

had good reason first

one

to hate the Aztecs.

own how she

language, her

Mayas, which

is

refers to the Aztec

Empire, and Malinche

Although Nahuatl was her

family had sold her into slavery (to

learned that language) to privilege her

younger brother. Malinche was more betrayed than betrayer.

whom

she had a

died, not yet twenty-five, only a

few years

Cortes married her to one of his men, with

second

child.

She

later.

The Aztec

princess Techichpotzin, baptized Isabel, was the

daughter of Moctezuma. She became "Isabel Moctezuma," exemplifying the attract a

woman

of indigenous nobility

who

could

Spanish husband because of her wealth. As the

legit-

imate heiress of Moctezumas personal fortune and the recipient of a desirable encomienda, Isabel attracted more than her share of husbands. Before her three Spanish husbands, she

was married

to

two different leaders of the Aztec resistance

in

the last days of Tenochtitlan. She outlived four of her spouses,

bore seven mestizo children, adapted to her

new

life,

and

Encounter became

a

55

model of Catholic devotion and

a benefactor of reli-

gious charities. She lived to the then respectable age of

As the Aztec and Inca Spanish

women

nobility declined

forty.

and the number of

increased, fewer and fewer Spanish

men

mar-

women. Although Spanish men continued unnumbered mestizo children, most were illegiti-

ried indigenous

fathering

mate and inherited

or nothing from their Spanish fathers.

little

These children were "people-in-between": not Europeans or Africans or indigenous Americans. Mestizo children were second-class people in the Spanish world, poor relations,

nized at

all.

Malinche s son by Cortes, Martin, became

a servant of his half-brother, also

by

his

second Spanish wife).

plotting against the

named Martin

When

if

recog-

virtually

(Cortes's son

both Martins were caught

Crown, the mestizo Martin was tortured

but the "legitimate" Martin was spared.

Spanish

women

usually arrived after the fighting

but that was not always the case.

A woman named

Guevara helped conquer Argentina and Paraguay

and

an attempt

1 540s. Years later, in

to gain

was

over,

Isabel de

in the 1530s

an encomienda

for

her part in the conquest, she wrote a letter to the Spanish

Crown, describing how the

when famine

women

of the expedition virtually

As the men fainted from hunger, wrote Guevara, the women began took over

killed two-thirds of their party.

"standing guard, patrolling the

arousing the soldiers

fires,

who were

loading the crossbows

.

.

.

capable of fighting, shouting

the alarm through the camp, acting as sergeants, and putting the soldiers in order."

The most famous "conquistadora" of all was Ines Suarez, a woman of thirty when she came to America in 1537, alone, looking for her husband. She searched in Peru,

first in

Venezuela, then

where she found her husband already dead. Suarez

then became the mistress of the conqueror of Chile, legendary for her actions during

an indigenous attack there. Her plan was

to terrorize the attackers

by throwing them the heads of seven

Born

56

in

Blood and Fire

captured chiefs, and her most famous deed was to cut off the first

captives head herself. Despite (what was regarded as)

who had a wife in Spain, when he became governor of the new

her heroism, the conqueror of Chile,

put Ines Suarez aside territory.

Favorable marriages outweighed even extraordinary ability in the lives of

women. The marriage

Spanish social structure, crucial ty.

ty

contract was a pillar of the

to the distribution of proper-

Marriage was a religious sacrament, and religious conformiwas serious business in the Spanish Empire.

Spanish conquest had meant an earthly and a quest, the defeat of the old gods. Spanish to

spiritual con-

churchmen

arrived

teach Catholic doctrine. They searched insistently for

sacred objects that the indigenous people

den away, from

their old religions

—

still

"idols," in

preserved, hid-

Catholic eyes.

The priest and the holder of the encomienda stood in many areas, as the only two representatives authority.

side by side

of Spanish

As had occurred during the Christianization of

Europe centuries

earlier,

the

conversion of kings

in

(or,

America, caciques) brought whole communities into the

church

at once. In their haste to baptize, missionaries per-

functorily sprinkled holy water

on indigenous people

little to teach them remember the imposition

in

mass

ceremonies that did

Christianity.

baptized could

of other imperial state

religions,

was

for that

Encounter.

Among

a pattern familiar

Still,

the

from before the

sedentary peoples, the Spanish

made

a

habit of erecting churches on sites already sacred to indigenous deities.

to see

The people

of Tenochtitlan cannot have been surprised

Spanish conquerors

level the

Aztec Great Pyramid and

construct their cathedral on practically the same spot.

The

fully

sedentary people of central Mexico and Peru sur-

vived the Encounter infinitely better than did semisedentary

people such as the Tupi.

on settled agricultural

Still,

the Encounter had a dire impact

societies,

too.

The Spanish

often

Encounter

57

demanded more

tribute than

had indigenous overlords. For

example, Andean villages had provided a labor draft called the mita to their Inca rulers, but after the conquest mita laborers

were forced silver

to

do something new:

mines, sometimes locked

toil in

down

the shafts of deep

for days. In addition, epi-

demic European diseases continued to decimate the indigenous population.

By the end of the 1500s, the basic contours of Latin American ethnicities were established. American, European, and African genes and cultures had begun to mix, creating rich potential for human diversity, but the violent and exploitative nature of the Encounter would sour the mix for centuries to come. In

and the Caribbean region, Europeans and

Brazil

Africans took the place of the indigenous populations that were virtually

wiped

out. In

Mexico and Peru, by contrast, Nahuatlsocieties had survived to be gradually

and Quechua-speaking transformed.

American had done

more

One way

—the

history its

or the other, the original sin of Latin festering social injustice at the core

durable damage.

inclusive

How

would more equitable,

communities ever emerge from the smoking

ruins of conquest?

The

next step, systematic colonization, the

creation of entire social systems geared to serve the interests of distant masters in Europe, only

made

matters worse.

mm

OUNTERCURRENTS: Friar Rartolome be las Casas

Colonial Brazilian Church. Statue by Aleijadinho. Courtesy of Elizabeth Bishop, Brazil, Life

World

Library, 1967.

As our story makes abundantly to extract labor

and

tribute explains

tion of Latin America.

How could

basic level, conquest

is

it

clear, the

European

much about

the coloniza-

be different? At the most

always about exploitation.

On

other hand, conquerors and colonizers rarely admitted

even to themselves. That

is

how

drive

the other,

more

the this,

idealistic,

motives enter the picture. Most Spanish and Portuguese people

who came

to the

Americas

in the 1500s believed that

spreading the "true religion/' even by force, was a good thing. Like

all

people, they tended to give their

possible interpretation.

On

own

actions the best

the other hand, religious idealism

was the driving force for some; logically enough, these were most often church people. The Catholic Church Inquisition and all generated the most important humanitarian countercurrents in this age of raw exploitation. truly

—

5*

COUNTERCURRENTS

59

For example, some arrived in

Mexico

members

of the Franciscan order

as early as 1524

showed deep respect

who

for the

indigenous people. Several Franciscans carefully gathered and preserved information about Aztec history, religion, and daily life.

The most notable was Bernardino de Sahagun, who wrote and child care practices were Sahagun collaborated with his

that Aztec family organization

superior to those of Spain.

indigenous students to assemble a treasure trove of Aztec thought, literature, and customs in their original language,

Nahuatl. Gorgeously illustrated in authentic indigenous his book, tial

known today as

the Florentine Codex, remains essen-

any interpretation of Aztec

for

style,

civilization.

Another

Franciscan, Toribio de Motolinia, denounced Spanish

trib-

and forced labor as so many "plagues" afflicting the indigenous people. To this day, Motolinia is warmly remembered in Mexico as a defender of the conquered. utes, torture,

The

first

Jesuits in Brazil similarly

worked

defend the

to

indigenous people against the depredations of the colonists.

As a

first

measure, the Jesuits learned a number of the

ants of Tupi (which distinct

was

from one another as French, Spanish, and

They then devised a

vari-

really a family of related languages as

simplified Tupi

grammar and

Italian).

a standard

vocabulary for use in the mission villages. This Lingua Geral, or "general tongue,"

Tupi

was

easily learned

by speakers of various

dialects. It facilitated religious teaching

the indigenous people from the settlers

and separated

who wanted to enslave

them.

But by far the greatest

religious

people was Bartolome de

las

champion of the indigenous

Casas, prototype for a long line

of radical priests in Latin America. Las Casas was a universi-

all

—when he came

to

—

young gentleman no radical at America in 1502. He got an encomien-

ty-educated, fortune-seeking

da himself and for twelve years lived the

life

of an early

Caribbean conqueror, watching indigenous people die by the

Born

60

thousands from exploitation and disease.

when,

in 1514,

He was

about forty

he had a change of heart, influenced, appar-

sermons of a member of the Dominican

ently,

by the

order

who had begun

fiery

of encomiendas. self,

Blood and Fire

in

By

to

preach against Spanish exploitation Las Casas,

151 5,

now

a

Dominican him-

returned to Spain and proposed various ways to protect

indigenous Americans from the encomienda system. "The rea-

son for the death and destruction of so

many souls at Christian

hands," according to Las Casas, was simple greed: "gold, and

One

the attempt to get rich quick." tions

was

to rely

had a better

of his alternative sugges-

on the labor of enslaved Africans, but then he

idea: the recruitment in

families disposed to

that Spanish

work

Spain of entire farming

for themselves.

and indigenous

societies in

Las Casas dreamed

America might be

kept separate and the use of indigenous labor might be ly

limited

and supervised. But

strict-

his pilot colonization project (in

Venezuela) never got off the ground.

During the 1520s and

1530s,

Las Casas wrote a stream of

publications denouncing encomienda abuses, and he traveled

throughout the Caribbean and Central America defending the indigenous people. In 1537, the pope issued a proclamation, partly inspired by Las Casas, saying that the indigenous peo-

ple

were exactly

that: people, not

subhuman

beings, as

some

claimed. In 1542, largely thanks to Las Casas, the Spanish

Crown issued the famous New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, immediately limiting and eventually ending encomiendas altogether. The high-flying holders of

Casas for the

encomiendas hated and

New Laws

vilified

Las

that clipped their wings, but the old

crusader, already in his late sixties, had

no intention of

stop-

ping.

In 1550— 1551, Las Casas represented the cause of the indige-

nous people in a great debate held Valladolid to determine, once

and

for

in the all,

Spanish

city of

the moral status of

COUNTERCURRENTS Spanish conquest

6l

in

America. At Valladolid, Las Casas pas-

sionately denied the charge that the indigenous people were

naturally inferior to Europeans

and therefore deserved

to be

enslaved. Although the official result of the Valladolid debate

was inconclusive, Las Casas had made a strong impression on the imperial government. In 1552, he published the most

famous of

his

innumerable writings,

Destruction of the Indies,

full

A

Brief Account of the

of grisly descriptions of Spanish

was horrible enough in reality. Few pamphlets have ever found a wider European audience. Among the most avid readers of this tract were the Protestant enemies of Catholicism in a Europe wracked by religious wars. Over the next two centuries, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies saw three editions in cruelty, rhetorically exaggerating a slaughter that

Latin, three in Italian, four in English, six in French, eight in

German, and eighteen

in

Dutch, not to mention those in

Spanish. (The engraving on page 28 was done for a French translation of 1582.)

Bartolome de ly

long

life

las

Casas lived to be eighty-nine, a fabulous-

for the 1500s.

Although

his early error in calling for

more African slaves remains a stain on his record, he quickly and permanently repented of the idea. Overall, the spirit and struggle of Las Casas continues to inspire idealistic church-

men and churchwomen in dred years

later.

Latin America

more than four hun-

Sor Juana In£s de la Cruz. Women, vents were lively centers of colonial

honorable, upbringing for young

life.

too,

chose

to enter religious orders,

and con-

Besides providing a sheltered, and therefore

women, convents had

a key role in financing agri-

women's artisno accident that Sor Juana, the most celebrated woman of colonial Latin America, was a nun. Courtesy of Instituto Nacional de cultural production. In tic

and

some

intellectual pursuits.

Antropologia e Historia-

situations, convents offered outlets for

It is

Museo Nacional de

Historia.

3-

COLONIAL CRUCIBLE

i\ule by Spain and Portugal lasted three long centuries in Latin ly

America. Despite the Utopian dreams of the religious-

inspired and despite continual resistance to exploitation, the

bitter legacy of

conquest and slavery remained strong

in 1800,

the eve of independence. Latin Americans had wrestled with the hierarchy of race imposed by conquest and slavery and had

adapted themselves to that hierarchy. As Latin American soci-

grew around the hard edges of domination

eties

of a tree gradually embracing the rocks at

made

colonization endurable but also

habits. Indigenous, African,

its

like the roots

base, adaptation

embedded

it

in

peoples

and European people consorted

and intermingled, fought and

slept together.

They misunder-

stood and learned about, despised, and sometimes adored each other.

Over hundreds of years, most Latin Americans began

sincerely accept Catholicism

and the

to

rule of a Spanish or

Portuguese king. Thus, more than merely rule by outsiders, colonization process.

was

The

omnipresent

a social

and

cultural,

even a psychological

resulting patterns of domination

—

—

intricate

and

constitute the saddest product of the colonial

crucible.

The contours

of colonial Latin

American

the priorities of the Iberian invaders.

societies revealed

A whirlwind

tour of the

63

Born

64

in

Blood and Fire

colonies will explain the basic economic patterns and geo-

graphical layout. To begin, only precious metals and a few high-

priced items such as sugar (then a luxury) could repay the

enormous costs of transportation across the Atlantic Ocean. So mines and sugar plantations loom large in the early history of Latin America.

Colonial Economics Gold was the precious metal that

first

mesmerized the

Europeans: gold from Aztec and Inca treasures, gold that could easily

ed.

be panned

An

early

in

sandy streambeds and was quickly exhaust-

Caribbean gold rush had helped annihilate the

Arawaks during the But

my

silver,

first

not gold, eventually structured the colonial econo-

of Spanish America.

(Mexico)

generation of Spanish colonization.

and

Potosf

The major

(Peru)

silver

mines of Zacatecas

were opened

in

the

1540s.

Zacatecas, an area without sedentary inhabitants, attracted

indigenous

migrants

became miners

from central

at Potosf,

on

a

Mexico.

Migrants

also

windswept mountain plateau

at

twelve thousand feet, where Spanish smelting techniques

work and indigenous ones (channeling the Andean wind) had to be adopted instead. These were deep-shaft mines that went miles under the'earth, vast quasi(using a bellows) did not

industrial enterprises that attracted diverse assortments of people.

Mining immediately began

to

reshape Mexican and

Peruvian society.

The mining zones became ty in

the great focus of Spanish activi-

America, linking the colonies economically with Europe.

For a while in the 1600s, Potosf became the most populous city in

America.

And because

Potosf stood

more

or less

on the roof

of the world, too high for agriculture, almost everything except silver had to be brought to it by mules. Sure-footed mules, bred on the plains of Argentina, trooped up narrow Andean trails to

Colonial Crucible

65

provide transportation. Indigenous

women

elsewhere

in the

cloth to dress the miners, and farmers at lower

Andes wove

alti-

tudes sent food to feed them. (In this way, primary export pro-

duction stimulated secondary supply silver

Eventually,

activities.)

came down from the sky on mules bound

for the coast.

Because the high plateau of the central Andes

is

so remote

from the coast, the Peruvian capital was established

Lima,

at

near a good seaport. Likewise, the wealth of colonial Mexico clustered along routes connecting the northern mines with

Mexico City and the port of Veracruz. The northern mining zones became a meeting place for all sorts of people, while southern Mexico, along with Guatemala, remained more strictly

indigenous.

The main

ethnicities in this southern region

were Zapotec, Mixtec, and especially Maya

among whom Malinche grew

—the

people

up. Another of the fully seden-

empire-building societies of indigenous America, the

tary,

Mayas had arrived.

fallen

under Aztec influence before the Spanish

Now all of southern Mexico,

Central America, and the

Caribbean became part of the supply network silver

for the northern

mines.

The economic

priorities of the

Crown determined The "royal fifth/' a 20

Spanish

the political organization of the colony.

percent tax on mining, was the prime source of colonial rev-

enue the

for the

Crown

Spanish

state.

To keep an eye on the

organized colonial administrations in

(the colonial

name

and the Caribbean

for

royal fifth,

New

Spain

Mexico, embracing Central America

as well)

and Peru (which then included

much of South America), by the late

1

540s.

Each of these

areas,

called viceroyalties because of the viceroys sent from Spain to rule in the king's

name,

court. Eventually,

Mexico City and Lima each got

also

had an archbishop and

a high

a wholesale

merchants' guild that concentrated commercial power, as well as political power, in the viceregal capitals. viceroyalties, high courts,

Gradually, the

and other administrative subdivi-

Born

66

in

Blood and Fire

manner guided by the principle of profthe Crown. Modern Colombia became the center of

sions multiplied in a itability to

a third viceroyalty (called

of

its

New

Granada, 1717) partly because

gold. Eventually, another jurisdiction

was created

to stop

Potosi silver from escaping untaxed through the area of

became

ern Argentina. This

with

la Plata, 1776),

Aires. Despite the

its

the fourth viceroyalty (the Rio de

capital at the Atlantic port of

two new

mod-

Mexico remained the core areas of Spanish

Buenos

Peru and

viceroyalties, however,

colonization.

In Brazil, sugar took the place of silver,

and plantations

replaced mines as the main generators of export production.

Sugar plantations capitalized on rich red arcane cultivation, along

Brazil's

became the core Saints became

a

Sugarcane had

be milled and

in order to

to

soils,

northeastern coast, which

area of the Brazilian colony. particular

center its

superb for sug-

of

The Bay

sugar

juice boiled

of All

cultivation.

down into cakes

be exported. Planters rich enough to build a sugar

became known as de engenho. They stood at the crux

mill (an engenho, or "engine," in Portuguese)

"lords of the mill," senhores

of the colonial export economy. In each locality of the Brazilian

sugar coast, a handful of senhores de engenho held sway over

hundreds of

slaves, over

without mills, and over

dozens of slave-owning neighbors

many free

families living

on and around

the mill owner's land. Like a silver mine, a big engenho was a

complex and expensive economic undertaking, almost in itself,

with a chapel, stables, storage

facilities,

a

town

and work-

shops. Sugar merchants did business in Brazil's port cities,

where one and

also

bricklayers.

lavish

found such artisans as

The

tailors,

candle makers,

lords of the surrounding mills maintained

urban residences and lived part of the year

in

town. For

the Portuguese Crown, the taxes on sugar, and on the goods

imported by planters with sugar

profits,

were the major

moneymakers. Through the 1600s, sugar was "king"

royal

in Brazil,

Colonial Crucible and

it

67

structured the Brazilian colony

much

as silver

mining

structured colonial Spanish America.

Outside of

its

northeastern core area, most of colonial Brazil

The Amazonian northwest,

was

still

ple,

remained a vast equatorial

sparsely settled.

for

exam-

by semi-

rain forest inhabited

sedentary indigenous tribes, half a continent with a mere

handful of Portuguese towns and a sprinkling of Jesuit missions along the banks of its river highways.

The backlands behind

the

sugar coast stayed dirt-poor cattle country. Other interior regions could be reached only by canoe odysseys involving

arduous portages between season.

The Portuguese

ditions 'monsoons," a

rivers, feasible

only during the rainy

called these rainy-season canoe expe-

word they had learned

in India.

South of

more Jesuit missions in evergreen forests outside And beyond these forests, open grasslands stretched south to the Rio de la Plata. Here, cattle and horses that had escaped from the missions ran wild, multiplied, and roamed free in fast herds. Overall, colonial Brazil could not compete with colonial Spanish America. Sugar was never as precious as silver. Nor Sao Paulo

the

lay

tropics.

could tiny Portugal equal the resources of Spain. slowly did Brazil

become

seaborne empire, with

And

only

the principal focus of the Portuguese

its

rich African

the Brazilian colony remained in

all

and Asian outposts. So

ways

less: poorer,

smaller

(with a tenth the population of Spanish America), and

more

loosely governed. Brazils diffuse plantation economy, dis-

persed up and down the coast, scattered administrative power. Two viceroyalties were eventually established, but only during

wartime did Brazilian viceroys possess the authority of Spanish

American its

viceroys. Overall, Portugal simply attempted less in

colonies than did Spain. For example, there were a dozen

universities in Spanish nization, but

America

after barely a century of colo-

none was ever established

in colonial Brazil.

Born

68

in

Blood and Fire

A Power Called Hegemony Both the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns had limited resources for colonization. Neither had large military forces in the American colonies. Iberian colonizers and their American-

born descendants were a small minority even areas, so

how

hemisphere

did they maintain control over so

much

of the

for three centuries?

To answer Juana Ines de

that question, consider the la

made

a surprising

to attend the University of

life

who

Cruz, a Mexican nun

age of seven, Juana had

wanted

in the central

of Sor (Sister)

died in 1695. At the

announcement. She

Mexico (which had opened

doors in 1553, a century before Harvard). She offered to

its

dress as a boy, but

was hopeless.

it

A

university education

was

supposedly over Juana's head. Never mind that she had been reading since the age of three or that she learned Latin just for

stumped

fun. Forget that she

a jury of forty university profes-

sors at the age of seventeen, or that

Juana became famous

throughout Mexico for her poetry. Like other class,

to

life,

riage.

of her

become a nun. Juana chose conmore independence than marShe became Sor Juana, as she is known to history. She

husband and children,

vent

women

she had two alternatives: marry and devote her energies

which offered

or

a little

collected and read books by the hundred, studied mathemat-

composed and performed music, and even invented a system of musical notation. Her poetry was published in Europe. ics,

Some

of

it

criticized hypocritical

male condemnations of wom-

en's sexual morality:

"Why do you wish them

encourage them

do wrong?" asked one poem. And, con-

cerning the really

to

common

to

do

right / If

you

who for who pays Or he for pay /

scorn for prostitutes, she wondered

sinned more: "She

who

sin?" In the kitchen, she

sins

dabbled

in

experimental science.

"Aristotle would have written more." she

said, "if

he had done

Colonial Crucible any cooking." century's

69

When she published a brilliant reply to one of her

most celebrated

biblical scholars, the fathers of the

church became worried. Juana received instructions

more

woman. Her

like a

her other interests, too, except for religious

woman. This was the wisdom

unnatural in a

could not defy her

it

alone,

to act

—and devotion — were

scientific interests, they said

and

all

of her age.

ultimately, she consented.

She

She sold

instruments, everything, and devoted herself

library,

atonement

for the sin of curiosity.

being "the worst of women." Soon

to

Broken, she confessed to she died while caring

after,

for her sisters during a plague.

The

fathers of the

Sor Juana Ines de

la

church never used physical force against Cruz. They did not have

ied religious authority, or disobedience

was

and she was a

literally

They embodwoman. Revolt

to.

religious

unthinkable for her. Similarly, the

conquered indigenous people of Latin America, and the enslaved Africans, too, gradually accepted the basic premises of colonial

life

and principles of Iberian

authority. Otherwise,

Spain and Portugal could never have ruled vast expanses of

America without powerful occupying armies. Historians explain colonial control of Latin America as hege-

mony, a kind of domination that implies a measure of consent

by those

at the

violent force. rule.

Though

contrasts with control by

a steady preponderance rather than an iron

may seem

"soft," this

form of political power

and does devastating damage

resilient

When

it

Hegemony

bottom.

It is

to

they accept the principle of their

the old-fashioned phrase, in their

own

"know

people

own

at the

is

bottom.

inferiority and, in

their place," they participate

subjugation.

Religion offers one of the clearest examples of cultural hege-

mony.

When

enslaved Africans and indigenous people accept-

ed the Europeans' "true

by the same newcomers to the truth. Catholicism, had been born and developed far from indigenous

token, their after

all,

own status

as

religion," they accepted,

Born

70

Blood and Fire

in

America. The history of the "true church" was a European tory,

and

its

earthly capital

was Rome. Most

his-

and nuns,

priests

not to mention bishops and the rest of the ecclesiastical hierarchy,

were of European descent. The monarchs of Spain and

Portugal reigned by a divine right that only heretics would question, and they enjoyed "royal patronage" rights, allowing

them

to

Crown

appoint or dismiss priests and bishops as

officials.

The

royal

and collected the

es should be built

if

they were

government decided where churchtithe (an ecclesiastical tax

of 10 percent, paid especially on agricultural products). To sin against Catholic teachings was, in

many

cases, a criminal

offense. All educational institutions is

power" (and

it is),

Inquisition kept a

were

religious, so

if

"knowledge

the church monopolized that power. of

list

banned books

that people

The

were not

allowed to read. The church even controlled time: the tolling of bells set the rhythm of the day, signaling the hours of work, rest,

and

prayer. Successive

week, which was

endar

of

new

to

observances

Sundays marked the seven-day

indigenous people.

and

holidays

The Catholic

provided

cal-

milestones

through the year: a collective, public ebb and flow of emotions, at Epiphany and Carnival, for example, to the somber mood of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter. The milestones of individual lives, from baptism to marriage to death, were val-

from celebration

idated by church sacraments and registered in church records.

Place names, too, were frequently religious. Every town and city

had an

official

patron saint, often part of the

city's full

name: Sao Sebastiao do Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco de Quito, and so on.

Another hegemonic force

was

—omnipresent and inescapable

patriarchy, the general principle that fathers rule. Fathers

The Spanish and many indigenous hegemony of fathers

ruled heaven and earth, cities and families.

Portuguese were more

rigidly patriarchal

American and African

societies, so the

than

Colonial Crucible

71

must be understood,

at least in part, as a legacy of colonialism.

Patriarchy structured

colonial institutions, including the

all

exclusively male hierarchy of the church, right

Father in Rome. ples.

Husbands had

children.

Wealthy

up

to the

was based on patriarchal

legal control over their

women

from

lives, isolated

ter of

Iberian law

wives as over their

led shut-in, elaborately chaperoned

male contact outside the family

all

Holy

princi-

—

a mat-

honor in traditional Spanish and Portuguese sexual ethics.

Honor was

a

their prescribed,

and very different,

way

marital sex, in this

woman's supreme

life

—

On

specifically,

became something

like a

mission, whereas a man's sexual purity if

one woman, that heightened kept mistresses.

played

social roles. Avoiding extra-

of thinking,

held less value. In practice,

defend

men and women

measure of how well

a

man

could support more than

his social distinction, so

the other hand,

by bloodshed

many

men were supposed

—the

virginity

to

of their

daughters and the sexual exclusivity of their wives. This conception of honor led to dueling and to the violent punishment of independent-minded

women. This

cultural pattern has pre-

Christian roots in the Mediterranean world and a basic logic

(worth mentioning to show the "rhyme and reason" in this madness) that relates to property.

Women's

illegitimate children,

not men's, would be "born into the family" and inherit part of precious patrimony: the family wealth parceled out

its

heirs at the death of

each parent. Male "wild

hand, would sprout on somebody

Male philandering implied no rial

loss,

oats,"

among

on the other

else's property, so to

speak.

but rather a kind of

territo-

gain, for the family.

Women

resisted being treated like

of course. Fairly often,

it

from the folk traditions of nous America

—

means

rather than ends,

seems, they used magic Iberia, as well as Africa

—coming

and

indige-

punish men. was on the alert against them. In 1592 the Inquisition punished a poor Lima woman for reciting a

The Spanish

to attract, manipulate, escape, or

Inquisition

Born

in

Blood and Fire

men would

desire her." That

72

prayer under her breath "so that

was European

folk magic,

meant

to redirect the

powers of

Catholic liturgy (by saying a prayer backward, for example). Inquisition

files

of the 1600s also reveal native

es" like Catalina Guacayllano,

accused of

Andean

spilling the

"witch-

blood of

guinea pigs on sacred rocks while chewing coca and praying

"Oh Lord Father who has been burned, who gives us the irrigation canals and water, give me food." Her idea of God seems to

have remained strongly indigenous, giving

ple, a spiritual

independence from Spanish

why he had

ing

three

women

They

chism

class."

village to

Women

and her peo-

whipped, a Peruvian priest

reported that these witches "went neither to

whole

her,

religion. In explain-

publicly disobeyed

Mass nor

him and

to cate-

inspired their

do the same.

doubtless got less satisfaction than

men

out of the

American "honor system," which cast suspicion on any woman who did not live under male control, even widows. Still, women's protest usually took the form of demands colonial Latin

that

men

live

up

to their patriarchal responsibilities: to

be good

providers and conscientious husbands and fathers. Learning to live

women women of property could make the grade,

with these values, for there was no other choice,

absorbed them. Only

though, because people without property lacked honor almost

by

definition. Poor

homes,

after

all,

women

often had to

work outside

as cooks, laundresses, or market

their

women who

moved around by themselves in the street as no honorable lady would. Not all roles were honorable, no matter how well played. Slaves, who were themselves somebody else's property, had no hope of honor. Only the most extraordinary Henrique Dias, a born

Dutch invaders

fighter

in the 1600s,

who

slave, like

led Brazilian forces against

could achieve

indigenous communities, whose social

life

it.

The women

of

retained different

patterns of gender, lived less in the grip of this unfortunate

honor system.

Colonial Crucible Viceroys ladies

who could

73 literally "grant

honors," refined European

and gentlemen who provided models of "honorable"

—these inhabitants of

made them

the

heart of the honor system, as cities were the staging areas

and

behavior

command

colonial cities

centers of the colonizing project generally.

A Process Called Transculturation Across the varied landscape of colonial Latin America, from

Mexico

to Chile,

from the high Andes

to the

mouth

of the

Amazon, urban institutions created a framework hegemonic rather than absolutely dominant. In some respects, cities seemed like tiny, scattered islands of European life and of authority,

architecture dotting the vastness of indigenous America. Both

Spanish and Portuguese colonizers were town dwellers whenever possible. Cities were the only places in Latin America

where white people could

socialize mostly with

each other and

maintain a basically European culture. All administrative cials,

ders

offi-

bishops, judges, notaries, merchants, and moneylen-

—the people whose commands,

one another connected

cities to

reports,

Europe

and dealings with

—were urban-based.

Cities staged the great public spectacles that dramatized imperial

power: solemn processions for Holy

Easter), ceremonial

ebrations to

welcomes

commemorate

for

Week

new viceroys,

(preceding

boisterous cel-

royal marriages.

Especially in Spanish America, cities were laid out according to imperial directives mandating the

now familiar but

then

innovative checkerboard of square blocks and streets that intersect at right angles.

Around the

central square of each city

stood the governors palace, the cathedral, and mansions for the bishop and richest families, also the seat of the city council

(cabildo in Spanish,

cdmara

most important governing major

capitals.

in Portuguese),

which was the

institution outside the handful of

Urban centers were given the

legal

rank of

vil-

-_

Born

lage.

Blood and Fire

town, or city, each under the jurisdiction of higher-ranked

centers nearby like

in

reporting to the handful of major capitals

all

Lima, Mexico

.Aires.

Colonial

City. Bogota,

cities, like colonial

and (much later Buenos people, were to be just so.

according to imperial order.

But the attempt several reasons.

to

impose uniformity was an uphill

battle for

The first of these is the formation of new and dis-

tinctive Latin .American cultures

—not Spanish

or Portuguese.

not indigenous or .African, but fusions of two or more elements, varying from region to region in kaleidoscopic combinations.

These new Latin .American cultures emerged gradually from a give-and-take process called transculturation. Imagine transculturation as a thousand tiny confrontations and tacit negotiations taking place in peoples daily lives, always within the

force field of hierarchy

and domination. The people on top are

usually able to impose the broad outlines of things, as in the

case of religion, with those below contributing subtle aspects

more difficult to mood. Religion, once

police from above: style, rhythm, texture.

again,

provides an excellent illustration.

Although church practice structured the outer contours of collective life

even among indigenous people and

slaves, the inner

content resisted colonial standardization. Slaves,

spiritual

who

gathered and danced on religious feast days, preserved .African religion

speak.

by dressing

A

it

in the clothes of Catholic saints, so to

blending of indigenous.

gious attitudes often occurred.

when

indigenous

.African,

and European

The blend might be own sacred

artists integrated their

reli-

covert, as

plant and

animal motifs (and in the .Andes, symbolic rainbows into the )

mural paintings of Catholic

cloisters,

but they could be more

obvious, as in the famous case of Mexico's patron saint, the

The

Guadalupe supposedly appeared on a site already sacred to the .Aztecs. Her image sometimes had a dark face, and Xahuatl-speaking Mexicans

Virgin of Guadalupe.

Virgin of

Colonial Crucible continued to

75

her by the

call

name

of an indigenous earth god-

Thus did indigenous and African religions infiltrate Latin American Catholicism. The profusion of blood on colonial Mexican crucifixion figures, for example, was meant to evoke bloods life-giving power, a prominent element dess, Tonantzin.

of Aztec religion. In the Caribbean and Brazil, on the other

hand, Catholicism acquired a less austere, more celebratory (and African) tone. In Cuba, the singing of black

—

church choirs created a began

to

as the

1

stir

for

and against

infuse Cuban music with African 580s. In Salvador,

African religious

spirit,

rhythms, infused

many

women

—when

in

they

sensibility as early

on Brazils Bay of

All Saints, an

including dancing to very un-European

Catholic ceremonies during the 1700s.

Transculturation happened especially in

cities.

Many indige-

nous and mestizo people, as well as blacks, both free and enslaved, were city dwellers.

From

the very beginning, the

impact of colonization had shaken some indigenous people loose

from

migrate.

their

native

communities and forced them

to

Some went to the mines or Spanish estates. Some built

simple housing on the outskirts of Spanish

America s

first

tural roots,

Latin

cities:

suburban shantytowns. Torn away from

their cul-

indigenous migrants had to regrow them in

new

environments, as did those other forced migrants, enslaved Africans.

Urban

slaves enjoyed greater

freedom of association

than did plantation slaves. Urban slaves could locate and socialize

with people from the same part of Africa. Urban slaves could

also join free black people in Catholic lay brotherhoods that pro-

vided a social support group and a sense of voluntary belonging. Slaves,

and

free blacks too, often

carpenters, for instance), cities

were

sites for

and

worked

artisans

as artisans (bakers or

came

in all colors.

the creation of distinctive

new

Thus,

cultural

As mestizos, free blacks, and poor whites rubbed elbows at a shoemaker's bench or in a blacksmiths shop, they were inventing Latin American popular culture.

forms.

Born

y6

Transculturation

had

different

in

Blood and Fire

contours

in

rural

life.

Plantation slaves worked in gangs and were often locked

down

at night.

Rural indigenous people had more chance to

apart, speaking

following their

live

Quechua or Quiche or Aymara or Nahuatl and own traditions. But the white people of the

countryside were too few and far between to socialize, or marry, exclusively with each other.

Rural people of Spanish and

when

Portuguese descent, even

they maintained a house in

town, thus acquired indigenous habits and African tastes sooner than did their

pened on

urban counterparts.

If

transculturation hap-

profitable Brazilian sugar plantations (where export

earnings could pay for imported clothing, wine, and even food),

happened even more on haciendas, the more typical of Spanish America.

it

Haciendas produced al

less profitable

sort of large estate

crops for local or region-

consumption. Hacienda owners relied on indigenous and

mestizo workers,

who earned

Wageworkers often owed and they could not leave

a small salary or shared the crop.

a debt to

landowners for supplies,

until paying off the debt

— not

easy,

with their meager earnings and the hacienda's often-rigged

account books. sizes.

Finally, like plantations,

Huge haciendas took up

haciendas came

in all

a considerable portion of the

best land, with lots of smaller properties crowded on to the rest.

Rural whites on small haciendas could afford few import-

ed European goods.

On

rare visits to town, their speech, food,

and clothing seemed (from the perspective of

urban

their

cousins) rustically tinged with indigenous or African tones.

Transculturation "cut both ways'" for Latin America's subju-

gated majorities. For example, Nahuatl speakers ship

wor-

to

the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe because they

identified her with Tonantzin,

colonial masters other,

came

making her

and servants became

seemingly a positive

onizers' religion in their

result.

own

their Virgin.

a bit

more

like

Thus,

each

But by refashioning the

col-

likeness, the indigenous people

Colonial Crucible more

easily

therefore,

consented

77 to the basic ideology of colonization and,

moved more

under Spanish control. In other

firmly

words, transculturation and hegemony often went together.

The

Jesuit Antonio Vieira,

Casas of

has been called the Las

was one of the

Brazil, exemplifies the paradox. Vieira

most famous

intellectuals of the 1600s. (In fact,

cation by Vieira that Sor Juana brilliantly for

between

who

her

Brazil

ied both Tupi

own

made

it

was a

publi-

the mistake of refuting too

good.) Vieira traveled back and forth

and Portugal, preaching fiery sermons.

and the language of Angola.

He

He stud-

tried to protect

the indigenous people against the Portuguese settlers.

defended the humanity and worth of African preached that "Brazil has

its

body

in

He

slaves. Vieira

America and

its

soul in

Angola," but he also called on slaves to endure slavery with a

good heart and await Vieira

their

reward in the Christian heaven.

had some African heritage of his own, through

mother; slaves

his grand-

who heard him preach no doubt found him

more convincing

for that reason.

The Fringes of Colonization While the colonizers concentrated

their efforts

on

silver

mining and sugar cultivation, vast reaches of Spanish America

and

Brazil

remained on the fringes of colonization. The fringes

were quite different from the core areas because they had tle to export.

They could not generate

as

much

Iberian colonizers and therefore attracted fewer of them. of sugar and precious metals

from indigenous people,

meant less incentive

lit-

wealth for

Lack

to force labor

less capital to invest in African slaves,

and, overall, fewer stark contrasts between luxury and misery.

A

weaker money economy meant that people's energy went

own food. Where people are few, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy become more important. Thus, people of mixed race got into subsistence activities, especially growing their

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1970s

Latin America in the Cold War

guerrillas

1960s

Reaction

289

date was Salvador Allende

—

Che, a medical doctor and a

like

Marxist. Allende was not an advocate of armed revolution,

He was committed

however.

to

Chilean constitutional

tradi-

tions. In the 1964 election, Allende ran again and did even better,

despite

the

fact

the

that

CIA

bankrolled

his

chief

opponent. Alarmed by Allendes popularity, the U.S. State

Department made Chile a model of their Alliance for Progress but to no avail. In the 1970 presidential election, aid program Allende won. The coalition called Popular Unity now had its constitutional chance to show what it meant by "a Chilean

—

road" to socialism.

But / ambitious dreams of social transformation ization of

Chilean copper, coal, and

banks, not to mention land reform electoral strength. Allende

servative than Allende,

them, and they were to the

ally in

and continuing put

The two

Unity's

the three-way election losers,

both more con-

had garnered 63 percent' between united, more or less, in opposition

now

it,

pumped money to the candiThe CIA now adopted a "firm

the CIA, which

dates opposing Popular Unity.

State

national-

Popular Unity government. Allendes enemies found a

powerful

ly

—

along with most

—outran Popular

had won

with a plurality of 36 percent.

steel,

policy," as

"that Allende

Department used

one agency directive quite

explicit-

be overthrown by a coup." The U.S. all its

leverage to cut off international

credit to Allendes government.

As Popular Unity imposed

and wage increases

to raise the living standards

price freezes

of the Chilean poor, triple-digit inflation roared. Very prosper-

ous Chileans (industrialists, lawyers, physicians, and architects) as well as

moderately prosperous ones (shopkeepers and

various small entrepreneurs such as independent truckers)

fought the initiatives of Popular Unity, sometimes with

CIA

support.

Meanwhile, the Popular Unity government retained the strong backing of urban workers

whose hopes

for the future

Born

290

had soared. Many supporters,

moved

too timid. Workers

in

Blood and Fire

thought Popular Unity

in fact,

directly to take over factories that

the government had been slow to nationalize. strong

measures

against

reactionary

Some urged But

organizations.

Allende insisted, as always, on working within constitutional

He had some

restraints.

tion of the

and

reason for optimism.

copper industry had,

in the 1971

midterm

in fact,

The

expropria-

been widely popular,

elections, Popular Unity

won

bigger

than ever.

Then Chilean army September

tanks

rolled

the

into

streets

in

1973. Refusing safe passage out of the country,

own

Allende went to his office and died under attack by his

armed forces. Here, in the estimation of U.S. "cold warriors," was yet another victory for democracy. The Chilean coup turned out to be the bloodiest such takeover in the history of Latin America. Thousands of supporters of Popular Unity, from folksingers to peasant organizers to university professors,

were herded into the Santiago soccer

stadium,

many never to be heard from

tled

secret

to

mass

Uruguay, thousands official

graves.

fell

As

in

again, their bodies shut-

but clandestine torture and murder. Closing the

lature, the military

most of that time,

and

Argentina,

Brazil,

victim to a well-organized program of legis-

governed by decree for seventeen years. For it

had the firm support of the U.S. State

Department. The exception was the presidential term of Jimmy Carter,

who emphasized human rights as a criterion of U.S.

for-

eign policy. Although ridiculed as unrealistic by the cold warriors, Carter's

in Chile

policy definitely inhibited the military blood fest

and Argentina, and juntas

heaved a sigh of

relief

all

over Latin America

when Ronald Reagan,

a

confirmed cold

warrior, took office in 1980.

The Chilean

dictatorship

was

basically a

bureaucratic-

authoritarian regime, except that the original leader of the 1973

coup, General Augusto Pinochet, had a leading role unparal-

Reaction

291

had

leled in Brazil or Argentina. Sadly, exceptional Chile

for

once become the epitome of a Latin American trend. Peru, on the other hand, constitutes an interesting variation

on that trend, because

its

military

government was not driven

by anticommunist reaction. Peruvian officers announced revolutionary intentions that

were

also "not capitalist." Their to serve Peru's

communist" but

explicitly "not

program showed the sincere desire

poor majority, and

it

amounted mostly

to old-

fashioned nationalism: a truly ambitious agrarian reform in a

country of vast rural poverty, nationalization of industries,

and indigenista themes, such

oil

as raising

and other

Quechua

to

the formal status of conational language with Spanish. Other

employee-owned companies, Peru's military government, which

aspects, such as promotion of

were more novel. Overall, lasted from 1968 to 1980,

was hard

terms. Although a dictatorship,

human The

it

to categorize in cold

was not

guilty of

war

heinous

rights violations.

revolutionary government of Cuba,

which expressed

strong support for the Peruvian regime, could be described the

same way

and

in the 1970s

1980s.

It

remained authoritarian,

and the army, long headed by Fidel Castro's brother, Raul, constituted

worked and tic

it

one of

its

steadily to

chief pillars. But the revolutionary state

improve the

lives of

never committed the wholesale

Cuba's poor majority,

mayhem

so characteris-

of anticommunist military governments.

Mexico, on the other hand, bucked the military trend completely.

Marxism had influenced

a generation of

Mexican

stu-

dents no less than elsewhere. But revolutionary socialism was

nothing

new

in

Mexico, so

fearful, less violent.

The

lutionary party," after

on

all

its

anticommunist reaction was

rhetoric of the

—had employed

for decades. In the 1930s,

PRI

officially a "revo-

socialist motifs off

Mexico had seen

real land

and the expropriation of major foreign-owned Precisely for this reason, the

less

—

and

reform

industries.

PRI retained considerable

revolu-

Born

292 tionary legitimacy and, through

in

Blood and Fire

massive patronage, kept a

its

firm grip on industrial workers, urban middle classes, and country

people

alike.

Buoyed by an

oil

boom,

too, the

PRI could

absorb any challenge in the 1960s and 1970s. of

momentary

Games

Its one famous sign Mexico prepared to host the Olympic wanton massacre of protesting university

panic, as

was

in 1968,

a

students in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City. As for Mexican

had not been key

generals, they

And,

in the

decades.

political players for

United States, dire warnings about "Red" Mexico

were already half a century old and not very

ments had long since learned

to live

scary.

U.S. govern-

with a "revolutionary"

Mexico.

The Last Cold War Battles: Central America By the mid-1970s, the revolutionary

tide

had turned

America. Reactionary anticommunist dictatorships,

began

to recede. Bureaucratic authoritarian

and

excesses

hyperinflation

—but

—the

also

creation

of

in turn,

governments

lapsed in the late 1970s and 1980s because of their takes

in Latin

own

colossal

col-

mis-

debts,

because their anticommunist cru-

sades had already succeeded.

What

excuse, now, for dictator-

ship? In Argentina, the military government

made

a desperate

bid for nationalist glory by identifying a new, external enemy:

Great Britain.

Initially,

support for

1982 war with Great Britain over the Falkland,

its

or Malvinas,

Islands.

the military got considerable public

But the gambit backfired when

ill-

equipped, poorly trained Argentine soldiers quickly surrendered. Nothing disgraces military rulers like military defeat. In 1983, Argentina

back

had

real elections

and sent the armed forces

to the barracks.

Uruguay got Peru, Ecuador, tional rule, too,

a civilian president in 1984, Brazil in 1985.

had already returned to constituby that time. Meanwhile, revolutionaries and

and

Bolivia

Reaction

293

reactionaries in Central

be the

last

America fought what turned out

to

major battles of the hemisphere's thirty-year cold

war.

Central America steep

—with volcanoes, —had its

cascading rivers

barely

tropical forests,

felt

ISI.

All

and

Central

American countries depended heavily on a few agricultural exports, especially coffee and bananas. Their populations numbered only a few million, and their capital cities had only a

few hundred

thousand

inhabitants

each.

In

Central

America, urban workers and middle classes had not curbed the power of landowners,

who

still

wealth. Therefore, rural oligarchies

America

in the 1970s, half a

controlled the national still

century after nationalist move-

ments overthrew them elsewhere. The

ernment

in

Guatemala, the

dominated Central

first

fate of the

Arbenz gov-

major hemispheric battlefield

of the cold war, points out another barrier to Central

American

nationalism: the habit of U.S. intervention in 'our backyard."

Throughout the cold war by greedy tyrants furious

who

years, Central

America was plagued

enjoyed U.S. support because of their

anticommunism.

Furious anticommunism certainly characterized the rulers

Guatemalans had groaned under ruthless military or military-controlled governments ever since 1954. The landowners of Guatemala, and those of El Salvador, too, lived of Guatemala.

in

dread of massive peasant uprisings. In the 1970s and 1980s,

Guatemalan armed forces carried on a dirty war against and urban opponents such as student activists and labor leaders. To deprive the guerrillas of support, indigenous peasants were herded into new "model" vilthe

rural guerrilla armies

lages that served as rural concentration conflict"

became

The term has

the U.S. strategists'

its logic,

camps. "Low-intensity

new term

for all this.

from the perspective of a desk

at the

Pentagon, but for the families of the "disappeared" college students whose bodies turned up in garbage dumps, for

Born

294

indigenous people

like

Rigoberta

in

Blood and Fire

Menchu, whose mother and

brother were tortured and murdered by the Guatemalan army, these conflicts were not lacking in "intensity"

Rigoberta Menchu was community wished only to tional customs. Rigoberta's

Quiche Mayan woman whose raise its crops and follow its tradifather became a peasant organizer a

and her brothers joined the

guerrillas.

influenced by liberation theology and

won

for her people. In 1992 she

Rigoberta herself was

became

a

spokesperson

the Nobel Peace Prize for call-

ing world attention to the atrocities of Guatemala's dirty war.

The

story of her

life,

essential reading for

J,

Rigoberta

anyone interested

conflicts" of the cold war.

merged her own deny

the

Menchu

It

was

later

(1984),

shown

story with other people's, but

existence

of

the

horrors

became

in the 'low-intensity

she

had

that she

no one could

The

described.

Guatemalan death toll spiraled toward two hundred thousand, and the military perpetrated 95 percent of the atrocities, just as her story suggested.

Costa Rica,

at the

other extreme of Central America in

all

— escaped indigenous inhabitants before the conquest — and, more the senses

—geographical,

social,

and

political

largely

the crossfire of the cold war. Because Costa Rica had few to

point,

because they were then liquidated by the conquerors

this whitest of

Central American countries was less burdened

by exploitative colonial hierarchies. Consequently, politically explosive, too. Besides,

one of Costa

it

was

Rica's

less

more

innovative presidents had taken the precaution of abolishing

army in the 1940s. between Central America's geographic and demographic extremes was Nicaragua, land of the famous anti-imperialist, Cesar Augusto Sandino, whose guerrilla war against the U.S. Marines had won the rapt attention of nationalists all over Latin America in the 1920s. Since the 1930s, Nicaragua had been ruled by a single family, the Somozas. The Somozas perthe

In

Reaction

295

anticommunism

sonified the perverse side effects of U.S.

in

The Somoza dynasty had its origins in against Sandino, when the first Somoza,

cold war Latin America. the U.S. intervention

whose main qualification was that he spoke good English, headed the Nicaraguan National Guard. Somoza invited Sandino to parlay, had him assassinated, and then used the National Guard to take over Nicaragua totally. Various

Anastasio,

Somozas ran the country almost 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and into the

communist

dow

allies

who

as a private estate during the

dressing to satisfy U.S.

They were sturdy antienough democratic win-

1970s.

also preserved

diplomats.

Symbolically,

the

Somoza mansion stood near the U.S. Embassy on a hill overlooking Managua, the Nicaraguan capital. Rumor had it that an underground tunnel connected the two buildings. Anastasio

Somozas son, also Anastasio, who ruled the country in the 1970s, was a West Point graduate and head of Nicaragua's U.S.trained,

U.S. -equipped

National

Somoza family wealth swelled

Guard.

to include

Meanwhile, about a

the of

fifth

Nicaragua's best land, the country's airline, and other such

tri-

fles.

By 1961, Nicaragua had a revolutionary movement formed in Havana but inspired, too, by Nicaragua's own strong anti-

—

imperialist traditions. Like

Cuba and Mexico, Nicaragua had

long suffered U.S. intervention, and nationalist resentments ran

deep

there.

Remembering Sandino's

earlier anti-imperialist

struggle, the revolutionaries of the 1960s called

themselves the

Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). For almost two

decades, the Sandinistas alone resisted the Somozas. Then, in 1978, the dictator Anastasio

sinating Joaquin tion newspaper.

the

left

and the

lion began,

Somoza overplayed

his

hand, assas-

Chamorro, publisher of a conservative opposi-

Chamorro 's death finally united Nicaraguans right against the

Somozas.

of

A widespread rebel-

and the veteran Sandinistas assumed leadership.

Eventually, the uprising swept

away the National Guard despite

Born

296

arms and

its

training.

Somoza

fled

fate illustrates the international

search of a comfortable

exile,

in

Blood and Fire

Nicaragua for Miami. His

dimensions of the

the unpopular

conflict. In

Somoza accepted

the hospitality of Paraguay's anticommunist strongman, Alfredo Stroessner, one of the world's

when Argentine too,

guerrillas,

who

his bags in

dic-

Asuncion

considered him their enemy,

found him and put an antitank rocket through the wind-

shield of his bulletproof

Back

in

Mercedes Benz.

Nicaragua, the Sandinistas took charge, shoulder-

ing aside Violeta Chamorro,

who

er,

most durable and repressive

But Somoza had hardly unpacked

tators.

widow

of the

murdered publish-

represented the late-blooming anti-Somoza forces of

the right.

The Sandinistas had nonnegotiable revolutionary Cuban inspiration was reflected in their camfull literacy and public health. Hundreds of Cuban

plans. Their

paigns for

teachers, medical personnel, and sanitary engineers arrived to

and West Germany sent substantial aid, Jimmy Carter also gave cautious support, but he was soon replaced by Ronald Reagan. From Reagan's help. France, Spain, too. U.S. President

perspective, Nicaragua

was just another funny-shaped square

on the cold war chessboard. As long tified

else mattered. ror

as the Sandinistas iden-

themselves as revolutionary friends of Cuba, nothing

image

human

The

cold war language of Reagan found a mir-

in Sandinista rhetoric

race," the

about that "scourge of the

United States. Confrontation was

in the

cards.

Following their defeat in 1979, Somoza's trusty National

Guard had regrouped

in

Honduras under CIA supervision. The

Argentine military government, triumphant in their dirty war, sent trainers for this

new

U.S. proxy force called the Contras,

for counterrevolutionaries.

Through the

1980s, the Contras

Honduran side of the Honduran-Nicaraguan border. Reagan called them "Freedom Fighters" and supported them unwaveringly. Honduras filled

raided Nicaragua from bases on the

Reaction

297

up with U.S.

military personnel, supply

The Contras gained

recruits

dumps, and

among Nicaraguans

air bases.

disaffected by

the Sandinista revolution. Contra raiders could wreak havoc

and cripple the economy, but they could not hold Nicaraguan territory.

Havoc was enough, however. The Sandinistas had to conmoney on defense. U.S. forces mined

centrate their time and

Nicaragua's harbors to cut off Gradually, the Nicaraguan

had

Nicaragua

its

trade with other countries.

economy

quintuple-digit

disintegrated.

In

inflation.

By

1990,

1988,

the

Sandinistas lost an election on which they had staked everything.

In a stunning defeat, the

young Sandinista

guerrilla

leader Daniel Ortega took second place to Violeta Chamorro,

who became

the

woman

first

ever elected president in Latin

America. In the 1990s, Nicaragua remained divided, a circumstance dramatized by several

Chamorro s own

family,

which included

prominent Sandinistas as well as opposition leaders. At

one point, two of Chamorro 's sons edited the country's two

main newspapers, both the Sandinista Barricada and the

anti-

Sandinista Prensa.

The

uprising against Somoza, and then the Contra war, had

killed tens of

thousands of Nicaraguans. El Salvador suffered

even more.

Like

Nicaragua under the Somozas, tiny El

Salvador had a totally undemocratic anticommunist govern-

ment through the 1960s and dictatorship, El Salvador

1970s. If

had an equally classic landowning oli-

garchy, called the "fourteen families" families.''

The

precise

or,

number matters

fact, in either case, of oligarchic rule

The misery

Nicaragua had a classic

of the rural poor had

sometimes, "the forty less

than the general

by the few.

made

El Salvador a social

pressure cooker by the 1970s. Long before coffee, Spanish

conquest and colonization had pushed El Salvador's indige-

nous people off

level agricultural land

onto then unwanted

volcanic slopes, where they reestablished their communities.

Born

298

in

Blood and Fire

But those fee. tive

fertile slopes, once terraced, were perfect for cofSo when coffee cultivation began in the 1870s, prospeccoffee planters wanted the slopes also. Liberal reforms

then privatized the indigenous people's newly valuable com-

munity lands, and, coffee

little

by

bought

planters

little,

in fair deals

them.

and unfair ones,

Indigenous

Salvadorans

became agricultural peons on estates that had once been their own lands. Workers were many tiny El Salvador being among the most densely populated landscapes in the

—

Americas began Party

—and

to starve.

wages

Very gradually, the rural poor

During the 1920s, the Salvadoran Communist

became one

attempt to lead

low.

a

of the strongest in Latin America, but

major uprising was savagely crushed

its

in "the

Slaughter of 1932." Military and military-controlled govern-

ments then followed one another in El Salvador for almost half a century, all staunchly anticommunist and allied with the United States. In the 1960s, El Salvador became a showcase of the Alliance for Progress, but little improved in the countryside.

Then,

in the 1970s, the

Salvadoran church began to take

lib-

eration theology's "preferential option for the poor." In effect,

the country's highest Catholic authority decided that anticom-

munism was

a

was an unholy cause. Archbishop Oscar Romero quiet man, named to head the Salvadoran church itself

because he seemed conservative

munist death squads changed

nuns who worked with the the anticommunist slogan.

to the Vatican.

his heart

But anticom-

by targeting priests and

poor. "Be a Patriot, Kill a Priest"

Moved by

was

the butchery of his cler-

gy and flock, the archbishop spoke against the army. The anticommunists viewed this as a dangerous heresy. One day in 1980, a political assassin gunned down Father Romero in front of the altar as he celebrated Mass.

As with Nicaragua's FSLN, Salvadoran revolutionaries drew on historv in naming their Farabundo Marti National

Reaction

299

(FMLN). Farabundo Marti was

Liberation Front

hero of the Salvadoran

a

left,

a

martyred

communist organizer

of the

indigenous uprising of 1932. In addition, Marti had served with Sandino

Nicaragua against U.S. forces there. In the

FSLN

1980s, the

FMLN

in

tried to return the favor

by helping the

against the U.S. -backed Salvadoran army. But the fighting to keep

Sandinistas,

the

Nicaraguan revolution

could offer only a few crates of munitions to the

alive,

FMLN. The tion to

Reagan administration seized on this connecannounce that communism was spreading by conta-

Cuba

gion from

Nicaragua

to

of Reagan's policy,

Critics

erwise.

though the

to

El

Salvador.

(Starving

would never think of rebelling oth-

Salvadorans, in this view,

meanwhile, spoke as

FSLN would, for some reason, never contemFMLN. Neither version captured the truth

plate aiding the exactly.)

The

military

murders of four nuns from the United

States brought Central

American issues home

to observers

Were our tax dollars paying for these down priests and nuns in the name of

of U.S. foreign policy. bullets that cut

democracy? Massive public opposition

to

U.S. policy in

Latin America, led especially by religious groups, arose for the only

time in the cold war.

Through the

1980s,

FMLN

the Salvadoran countryside. cially

now

guerrillas held large portions of

They had strong backing, espe-

among the country people of remote, mountainous areas Honduran border. The FMLN blew up bridges and

along the

power lines and

levied 'war taxes"

their

But they could not defeat the army. The

territory.

Salvadoran military, for

ment.

Its

its

part,

on vehicles traveling through

had U.S.

training

and equip-

troops rode helicopters into guerrilla territory on

search-and-destroy missions.

volcanoes seeking

FMLN

They clambered up the units

sides of

near to the capital

city.

Sometimes, when they thought no one was looking, the army

conducted mass executions of peasants

whom

they suspected

Born

300 of aiding the guerrillas.

One day

in

in 1981, for

Blood and Fire example, an

elite

U.S. -trained battalion entered the tiny village of El Mozote and systematically slaughtered almost everybody there: hundreds of unarmed, unresisting

men, women, and children. Ironically, was not very good: El Mozote, it

their military intelligence

turned out, was not a guerrilla base at

all.

many

In fact,

of the

Mozote had recently converted to U.S. -oriented evangelical Protestantism, and they probably favored the government over the guerrillas. El Mozote illustrates the grisly, indiscriminate violence of military anticommunism in Central families at El

America. Understandably, Salvadorans fled their country by the tens and then hundreds of thousands,

many

to the

United

States.

Because the

FMLN

refused to participate in elections,

being wary of fraudulent "management/' the anticommunists invariably

won, assuring U.S. aid

for the elected

As the war dragged on and the death sixty

thousand

—

toll

government.

mounted

—

forty, fifty,

the anticommunist electoral strength grew.

The country was sick of war, and, by 1990, the war was a stalemate. The stubborn optimism that had sustained the revolutionary vision now drained away day by day. The Nicaraguan election of 1990

ended the Sandinista

revolution. In Europe,

the dramatically rapid crumbling of the Soviet bloc had begun.

FMLN victory seemed further away than ever. And, even if achieved, an FMLN victory would not bring peace; the Nicaraguan experience showed that. So, in 1992, the FMLN

An

signed a peace treaty and laid

down

Guatemalan insurgents,

were running out of steam.

too,

its

arms. Meanwhile, the

A

peace born of exhaustion settled over Central America.

The

cold war was over. But in Latin America, nobody had

won; there were only

losers.

lutionary fervor of the 1950s

Across the hemisphere, the revo-

and 1960s had burned

itself

out in

the 1970s and 1980s. In a few places, such as Uruguay, guerrilla

movements had

led to the collapse of democratic govern-

Reaction ments. In

301

many

als inspired terror.

other places, such as Brazil and Chile, gener-

by national security doctrine had precipitated the

Either way,

America s

bright

hopes of

original sin of social injustice

finally

undoing Latin

had drowned

in

blood

and disillusionment. Latin America had been thoroughly tarized,

occupied by

its

own armed

forces.

mili-

During the 1990s,

—

movements remained active in spots Colombia, Mexico but the sense of a continental revolutionary tide had evaporated totally. As in the rest of the world, the end of the cold war clearly marked the end of an epoch. A new period of history was about to begin. guerrilla

Peru, southern

—

COUNTERCURRENTS La

Violencia, Vabio Escobar,

anb Colombia's

Long Torment

Colombia's 1990s,

making

population it

surpassed

Argentina's

tance,

its size

Colombia has not figured frequently its

the

the third most populous Latin American

country after Brazil and Mexico. Despite

because of

in

and impor-

in

our story

often exceptional politics. For example, con-

servatives, rather than liberals, ruled

Colombia

in the neo-

colonial period. During the stormy years of the cold war, the

Colombian military never took over the country directly. While debt and inflation ravaged Latin America in the 1980s, a so-called Lost Decade for hopes of economic growth, Colombia's economy stayed robust. tendencies continued into the

war over and revolutionaries

And Colombia's

new millennium. With

in retreat

contrary the cold

everywhere else in the

hemisphere, the guerrilla armies of Colombia expanded their operations.

An unusual level of violence has plagued Colombia since the 1940s, when conflicts erupted across the Colombian countryside after the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the

famous populist

leader.

This period, called, precisely, La

Violencia, lasted well into the 1950s. Although channeled by

Colombia's traditional parties, the liberals and the conserva-

La Violencia was less about politics than about socioeconomic conflict in the countryside. Terrified people flocked into the cities, abandoning their rural property or selling out cheaply. Others stayed and bought up the land at bargain tives,

prices.

The use of

which rose class

302

to

women

violence increased in petty street crime,

astounding intensity in the major

began

to

remove

their earrings

cities.

Middle-

and men

their

COUNTERCURRENTS

303

wristwatches before setting foot downtown. In the late 1970s, the rate of violent death in

Colombia began

to set world

records for a country not at war. It

was

in this context of lawlessness that

Pablo Escobar pio-

neered a new business, smuggling marijuana and then cocaine to the

United States. Escobar created a mafia empire and

became Capone

a powerful figure of organized crime,

an earlier period of U.S.

in

much

like

Al

history. (Recall that the

mafia business of Capone likewise centered on an

illegal

drug,

prohibition-era alcohol.) Escobars version of Capones Chicago city of Medellin, and his mafia became known as the Medellin cartel. The terrible scourge of easy money now lent new energy to the violence rampant in

was the Colombian

Colombian

life.

U.S. consumers of

illegal

drugs were able to

pay awesome sums for the Colombian product. Colombian-

grown marijuana, which dominated the trade

in the 1970s,

was

of higher quality than the Mexican marijuana formerly con-

sumed

in the

leaves

grown

United States. Cocaine, which came from coca in

Peru or Bolivia, then refined in and exported

from Colombia, dominated the trade in the 1980s.

It

was a new

drug to U.S. consumers, made available in large quantities for the

first

time by Escobar's organization. The great wealth of

the drug traffickers translated, as great wealth will do, into

power and influence. Meanwhile, Colombia suffered

its

own

version of the cold

La Violencia of FARC and the ELN) were now seen, and saw

war. Rural guerrilla armies with their roots in

the 1950s (the

themselves, as Marxist revolutionaries.

urban a

guerrillas raised the

museum

took their for short

sword of Simon

A

daring group of

Bolivar, taken

from

new revolution. They name, The Nineteenth of April Movement M-19, from the date when they "liberated" the Liberators display case, to symbolize the

—

—

sword. Like the Tupamaros in Uruguay, Colombia's M-19 car " ried out spectacular strikes with high public relations value.

Born

3-4 In

1980,

Blood and Fire

in

they took over the embassy of the

Republic in Bogota during a part},

when

it

was

Dominican full

of diplo-

them hostage 1985, M-19 seized The government

mats, including the U.S. ambassador, and held

two months before escaping

for

the

to

Colombian Supreme Court

Cuba. In building.

refused to negotiate and, after ten hours of ultimatums,

it

sent

a tank in through the front door, followed by troops with guns blazing. Ninety-five Chilians

—

— among them,

all

the country's

Supreme Court justices died in the crossfire. Then things got even worse. In rural areas, the FARC and the

ELN

forced landowners to pay "war taxes," and the

landowners began

to create their

own

paramilitary forces to

help the army fight the guerrillas. Country people found themselves caught in the middle. If they helped the guerrillas, they

risked death at the hands of the paramilitaries or the army. But

the guerrillas might

Meanwhile, the

kill

guerrillas

those

who

refused to help them.

and the mafias clashed. In Medellin,

Escobars enemies armed

a

\igilante

group of their own.

Medellin became a war zone where teenage boys were enlisted as hit

men

police

and courts, the drug

by the hundreds. Under pressure from Colombian traffickers

escaped prosecution by

slaughtering any judge willing to sign a warrant against them.

When

threatened with extradition to the- United States,

Escobar and

his associates reacted with "narco terrorism."

Truck bombs carrying tons of dynamite exploded on the of

Colombian

resisted arrest

cities,

and

and the Medellin

extradition. Journalists

cartel

and

streets

collectively

politicians

who

spoke for extradition were murdered or kidnapped. Escobar

and others offered

to surrender in return for a guarantee of

extradition. In 1991, that deal finally

no

went through. Escobar

surrendered and moved into a jail especially constructed near Medellin,

Although in

ironically,

in

a

former drug- treatment

in custody, the lax conditions of his

facility.

imprisonment

which he gradually surrounded himself with luxury

fur-

COUNTERCURRENTS

305

nishings in mafia-style poor taste

—allowed

Escobar to con-

tinue to supervise his illegal business interests by remote control.

Within a

year,

he had flown the coop. But now, despite

the estimated $3 billion that Escobar had amassed, he led a

miserable existence, permanently on the run. Finally, in 1993,

Colombian police found Escobar by tracing his sons telephone. Escobar was still on the phone when the police arrived at his door. The world's most famous criminal died in his underwear as he

fled across a

Medellin rooftop.

Meanwhile, the drug trade that he

initiated

had become a

source of income for the guerrillas, too, and not only in

Colombia. In neighboring Peru, the Shining Path, an unusual guerrilla

movement with

a ruthless and mystical philosophy,

exercised control over remote areas that exported tons of coca leaves. far

The tangled

from

over.

troubles of the northern

Andes were

still

The pleasures of globalization. Photograph by Jean-Marie Simon. At the dawn of the new millennium, consumer culture is everywhere in Latin America. For the well-off minority, the new accessiblity of imported goods is a boon. But for the poor majority, like the residents of this poor Guatemala City neighborhood, where people can afford to consume little, the lure of consumer culture produces mostly anger and frustration.

II.

NEOLIBERALISM

Por now,

the political

pendulum has swung

decisively

away from nationalism in Latin America. In a sense, nationalism burned itself out in the cold war. Marxist revolutionaries were, in general, strongly nationalist, and the reactionary dictators

who crushed them were

often nationalists, too

—though

of a different kind. Both revolutionary violence and the reactionaries'

bloody victory against the

ism. Already by 1990, nationalism in Latin

left

America, something from the

now, after

sixties generation.

—boosted by

many decades

tion with the

discredited national-

seemed the wave of the past

out of favor

its

And

associa-

one remaining superpower, the United States

liberalism has returned to

fill

the ideological vacuum.

The new

generation of liberals are called weoliberals. For better or worse, neoliberalism

—with

a familiar

emphasis on free trade, export

production, and the doctrine of comparative advantage reigns

supreme

in Latin

America

at the turn of

the third mil-

lennium.

By the mid-1990s,

it

already

seemed

that every president in

the region was a neoliberal. Take Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a formerly Marxist sociology professor, a theorist tists

who had

famous dependency

inspired a generation of radical social scien-

throughout Latin America and the United States during

307

Born

308

in

Blood and Fire

the 1970s and 1980s. By the time he was elected president of Brazil

in

1994,

even Cardoso was a neoliberal. Even the

Peronist leader twice elected president of Argentina, Carlos

Menem, was

a neoliberal.

Even the PRI presidents

supposed heirs of another great nationalist neoliberals. In fact. Carlos Salinas

of Mexico,

tradition,

and Ernesto

were now

Zedillo,

who

led the embattled Institutional Revolutionarv Partv in the 1990s, both

had professional training

in neoliberal

economics

L\S. ivy league universities. Neoliberals got the encouragement of the U.S. government, and they put up sails to catch at

turn-of-the-century winds of globalization. liberals jettisoned all trappings of

and embraced the basic

economic nationalism

liberal faith in the free

market. So they

sold off, or privatized, the state-run corporations services that nationalists

had created

all

and public

over Latin America as

declarations of "economic independence." State bureaucracy is

notoriously inefficient around the world, and state-run tele-

phone and

companies had proved fiascoes

oil

Free-trading neoliberals slashed the import alists

had raised

to protect Latin

in Latin

America.

tariffs that

American

nation-

industries.

They

deregulated capital flows, for example, removing nationalistinspired limits on profit that multinational corporations could freely take out of a country

each

year.

They reduced or removed made basic foodstuffs

the nationalist-inspired subsidies that

and public services affordable

for the poor. (Subsidies interfere

with the free market.) Neoliberals also initiated all-out assaults

on

inflation,

which

substantially

undermines the functioning

of the market.

Neoliberals had few

mended had

new

ideas.

Everything they recom-

already been tried in Latin .America before 1930.

So where did they get

their impressive

with, the ordeal of recent years

momentum? To

begin

had dimmed the glamour of

nationalist revolution. In addition, neoliberals could take credit

for

taming the debt

crisis of

the 1980s,

when many

Latin

Neoliberalism

309

American countries struggled to keep up payments on foreign debts. These debts had grown suddenly huge thanks to high world

oil

As world

and heavy short-term borrowing

prices

short-term loans had to be refinanced at

The

in the 1970s.

interest rates rose steeply in the 1980s, these large

national debts of Latin

much

higher rates.

America mushroomed, much

as

same time. The differowed mostly to foreign

the U.S. national debt was doing at the

ence: Latin American debts were

banks.

The

Brazil

whole rose from

external debts of the region as a

with Mexico and

billion (1986),

$105 billion (1976) to

$397 owing the most. Countries that defaulted on

nal debts

would

their exter-

find themselves internationally bankrupt

and

isolated.

Foreign lenders, such as those of the influential International

Monetary Fund (IMF), believed that the solution American insolvency erals definitely

lay in free

met with

market

So the neolib-

policies.

their approval.

to Latin

To encourage neolib-

eralism in Latin America, foreign lenders gradually "rolled over" the external debts of one country after another into long-

term bonds. These debts continued to increase but

now

the borrowing countries could

The IMF

typically insisted

and Latin America' ing" to

most of all.

s

Still,

poor

make

on reductions

felt

in the 1990s,

the payments.

in social spending,

the pinch of this "belt-tighten-

the crisis was over, and the region

seemed

have turned a corner. Neoliberalism acquired a strong cachet of success in the

1990s.

The

hyperinflation that

had plagued both

Brazil

and

Argentina for decades was halted rather spectacularly, at least for a while,

by neoliberal

policies.

For a few years, Latin

America was heralded among U.S. investors

as a great "emerg-

ing market," offering vast investment opportunities. Neoliberal policies it

came,

encouraged foreign capital

in Latin

America

billions of dollars' worth. U.S. fast

sprang up in major

cities

from Chile

to

—and

in

food franchises

Mexico. In 1994, the

Born

310

in

Blood and Fire

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the lynchpin of Mexican neoliberalism in the 1990s,

creation

the

of

seemed portentous year

later, Brazil,

ed their

own

to people

One

on both sides of the border.

Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay inaugurat-

free trade zone, called

MERCOSUR.

The

freer

trade of the 1990s allowed middle-class apartment dwellers

from Mexico City

to Santiago to access the Internet, tune in

and become more than ever

via satellite to U.S. television,

before

consumers

U.S. -style

Neoliberal reductions in

and greater

The

a

in

brought lower prices

tariff barriers

variety in everything imported,

new

neoliberals also attracted

economy

transnational

from cars

to

VCRs.

transnational corpora-

tions to Latin America, but the impact of that strategy has

One

mixed.

and

is

labor,

parts. ple,

of the

most

common

been

transnational operations

was

the maquiladora, an assembly plant using lots of cheap

most often women's

Low

tariffs facilitate

labor,

put together imported

to

maquiladora production. For exam-

maquiladoras on the Mexican side of the U.S. border

may

receive parts from Asia, assemble them, then send the finished

products across the border for sale in the United States.

Maquiladora workers mean them.

to the

Women who become pregnant,

fired in ras'

little

most

cases.

main reason

ernments

try

for

to

Low

companies that employ

for

example, are quickly

labor costs constitute*the maquilado-

being in Latin America. So neoliberal govhold

wages

down,

even

as

food

and

transportation subsidies are withdrawn from the poor.

Chile stands out as the neoliberal success story of the 1990s.

economic reforms began during the years of famously advised by economists from the

Chile's neoliberal

dictatorship,

University of Chicago, the so-called Chicago Boys. By the 1990s, Chile boasted low inflation,

and

good

credit, steady growth,

diversified exports, going roughly equally to

Asian, and American countries.

economy had been

so steady

The expansion

and vigorous that

European,

of the Chilean it

benefited

all

Neoliberalism Chileans some fited most.

among

311

—

but, as elsewhere, the middle classes bene-

Meanwhile, Chiles distribution of wealth remained

the most unequal in Latin America.

nario of neoliberalism, in other words,

still

The

best-case sce-

promised

least to

the neediest. In a nutshell,

consumers, mostly middle-class people, have

benefited most from neoliberalism. To "shop the world," with-

out trade barriers, ficient

obviously an advantage for those with suf-

On

the other hand, producers have

—

Of

course, most producers are also

out

lost

is

spending money. at least so far.

consumers,

but

in

Americans consume

varying

greatly relatively

little.

degrees.

Measured

Poor

Latin

in dollars, the

economy annually generates nearly $30,000 per person and the Japanese economy nearly $40,000, but the Brazilian economy less than $5,000, the Mexican economy less than $4,000, the Peruvian economy less than $3,000, the Guatemalan economy less than $2,000, and the Honduran economy less than $1,000. Many more Latin Americans are poor, by U.S. standards, U.S.

than are middle-class. Poor Latin Americans buy inexpensive clothing sold in bins, a plastic bucket this week, a cheap digital

watch the

next. Their gain as small-time

been more than

offset

American industries

had kept

or long-term

called informal service sector.

walk,

wash

windshields

recyclables in rickety carts.

maquiladoras, but

one

in the long

loss as producers.

collapse, devastated

tion that the nationalists

unemployment

by their

consumers has

As Latin

by foreign competi-

out, millions of workers face

underemployment in the soThey sell Chiclets on the side-

at

intersections,

Some

and

are glad to find

collect

work

how happy can a maquiladora job make

in

any-

run?

Neoliberal reforms have reduced government spending, a step toward balancing national budgets at a bitter social cost.

The

and reducing debt, but

subsidies, protected industries,

Born

312

state-run

and

corporations,

had created

nationalists

large

in Latin

in

Blood and Fire

bureaucracies

America were

enough. But they also provided a

the

that

inefficient, true

living for millions

whom

the

neoliberals have left unemployed. Similarly, state-run services lost ity

money

partly

because they unprofitably provided

electric-

or running water to the very poor. Privatized telephone

com-

panies, for another example, improved telecommunications for

those

who

could afford a phone, but affording a phone became

more difficult for many. Sound familiar? In many ways, the impact of

neoliberal

reforms resembled the impact of liberal reforms in 1870-1930. Latin America

became more "modern"

sense. Foreign capital

in the technological

and foreign products poured

off people benefited, but less fortunate Latin fered. Familiar winners, familiar losers.

A

in.

Better-

Americans

suf-

glance back at the

1890s puts present-day neoliberal "innovations" in historical perspective.

The PRI technocrats

of the 1990s

cent of the technocratic Cientificos

who

seem reminis-

advised Porfirio Diaz

on the eve of the Mexican Revolution. Not by accident did the

PRI begin

to revise

Mexican

history textbooks to rehabilitate

the image of Diaz, long painted as a villain by the nationalists.

The new textbooks like

also

downplayed revolutionary heroes

Emiliano Zapata. But on the very day that

NAFTA

took

effect in 1994, indigenous rebels calling themselves Zapatistas

declared their opposition to the new trade arrangement. These new Zapatistas were Mayas from villages near the Guatemalan border, an area of

Mexico remote from Zapata's old stomping

ground. They had immediate demands relating to agricultural

had a broader vision. They took Zapata's remind all Mexico of its nationalist heritage.

land, but they also

name

to

Subcomandante Marcos, the mysterious ski-mask- wearing, pipe-smoking Zapatista spokesperson, soon appeared on Tshirts all over the country.

The new Zapatista

in the neoliberal ointment.

It

uprising was a

fly

could not threaten the PRI mili-

Neoliberalism tarily,

but

The new had a

313

tarnished the country's open-for-business" image. '

it

Zapatista

Web

site. It

movement showed

the United States. Thousands of

where the

state

human armed

rights

media

a certain

savvy.

It

could mobilize sympathizers in Europe and

rebellion

them went

was occurring,

to Chiapas, the

international

as

government

observers. There they observed

forces wreaking havoc in

supporting the rebels. Although

Mayan villages suspected of made a show of negotiating,

it

the Mexican government devoted itself mostly to deporting the

observers and crushing the rebellion. To do so,

used

it

all

the

tried-and-true techniques of "low-intensity" warfare, including

widespread arming of

village anti-insurgent militias,

which

have shown a repeated tendency to run amuck, as in Colombia.

The new

Zapatistas never had a prayer of defeating the

Mexican army. Or

rather, prayers they did have.

indigenous people was in Chiapas,

where

op himself

for a

hundred years

still

Friar

Bartolome de

few years

earlier,

conscience of a whole

The cause of Church

the cause of the Catholic las

Casas had been bish-

in the 1500s. Like

Las Casas four

the indigenous Zapatistas haunted the society.

They represented

a potent moral

force.

In their moral challenge to neoliberalism, the

made

new

claims that indigenous people were making

America. In some ways, the

list

of grievances

was

all

Zapatistas

over Latin

five

years old. In 1992, the five-hundredth anniversary of

hundred

Columbus s

first

voyage became the specific occasion of indigenous meet-

ings

and declarations. Understandably, the mood was one of

mourning rather than happy commemoration. At an international

meeting

in

La

Paz, Bolivia, representatives of widely

— Maya,

Nanu-Otomi, Kuna, Cherokee, Quechua, Tarahumara, Aymara, Guaymi, and Nahua, among others declared, on the subject of the glorious Discovery of America: "Our wise men were persecuted, tortured, massacred. Our sacred books and symbols were scattered indigenous peoples

—

Born

314

destroyed.

They had could

Our

gold and

a point.

And

silver, stolen.

was

it

in

Our

a point that

Blood and Fire

territory,

usurped."

few Latin Americans

recognize.

fail to

Whether gathering in Mexico or Ecuador or Bolivia, indigenous leaders demanded sufficient land to farm and a fair share of government

But above

benefits.

all,

they asked to be allowed to

remain themselves, preserving their language, their lifeways, and aspects of their political

autonomy These demands

multiculturalist intellectual erally,

of the 1990s in the

West gen-

but they collided with one of the strongest legacies of twen-

tieth-century nationalism,

By

neoliberal onslaught.

had

mood

reflected the

instilled in

still

widely influential despite the

1992, generations of nationalist teaching

most Latin Americans a strong respect

for

sym-

bols of their mixed-race origins. "Mestizo nationalism," with

emphasis on

racial

its

and cultural amalgamation, remained the

emotional bedrock of national identities wherever people of indigenous

descent carried demographic

weight

—

especially

Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.

After five centuries of struggle, Latin American race relations

still

much

left

to

be desired.

Many

proclaimed that

racism no longer existed, but that was definitely not true. Dark skin color,

whether indigenous or African, remained a

disadvantage.

And

although mestizo nationalism redeemed a

previously scorned racial status, sion, too. After

all,

social

there are as

Whose

it

led to

many

its

own

kind of oppres-

differences within coun-

whose music, whose cuisine, whose skin tone gets to represent the whole nation? According to Mexican nationalist ideology, a mestizo is now tries as

between them.

considered

Mexico.

accent,

somehow more Mexican than

Many

born

others

in

other Latin American nations have instituted

this quasi-official

mestizo self-image.

The mestizo image does

describe many, perhaps most, Latin Americans, but alizes others. In the

Dominican Republic,

for

it

margin-

example, the

Neoliberalism

315

mixed-race image excludes people of strong African descent, especially immigrants from Haiti,

Dominican/' Often

Andes

—

it

—

who appear

"too black to be

Mexico, Central America, and the

in

excludes indigenous people, pushing them to "stop

being Indians/' adopt a mestizo identity, and enter the national

new

mainstream. The

Zapatistas and other indigenous lead-

ers of the 1990s resisted this pressure past.

In Latin

America

more

people

overall,

vocally than in the

who maintained an

2000 constituted a small percentage of

indigenous identity in

the population. Despite

symbolic power, indigenous

its

tance was not going to stop neoliberalism, nor did viable alternative for Latin

movement

Brazil's

encountered similar

America

for black

difficulties.

it

resis-

present a

as a whole.

advancement and

civil rights

Nearly half of all Brazilians are

of pure or mixed African descent.

They

tend, overall, to be the

poorest half of the country, and the darker they are, the poorer. Brazil's

Unified Black

Movement (MNU) was formed in

1978 to

mobilize these people around an awareness of their shared identity

as victims of racism.

shown much about

But the Brazilian poor have never

interest in the

all political

movements;

to Brazil's version of

MNU. partly,

Partly,

they are skeptical

though, they

democracy" has been the widely pop-

ular keystone of the country's national identity. after centuries of official

powerfully

among

respond

mestizo nationalism. Since the 1930s, the

vision of a Brazilian "racial

welcome,

still

Brazilians of

The

idea was so

white supremacy, that it took

all

colors.

The

slogan "racial

democracy" incorrectly suggests an absence of racism, and even though Brazilians used the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of abolition (1988) to

denounce the massive presence of

racism with near unanimity, they have not given up the idea that racial

and

cultural mixing lies at the heart of Brazilian identity.

Therefore, any political

movement

that stresses a distinct black

agenda goes against the grain for many, probably most, Brazilians of African descent.

Born

316

History repeats

Neoliberalism

but

itself,

may be

Blood and Fire

in

never repeats

it

exactly.

itself

the old liberalism deja vu, but Latin

America has changed since

liberalism's last

time around. The

been undone

original sin of social exploitation has not

in Latin

America. The hegemony of European culture remains

But

in the 1900s,

intact.

thanks to the nationalist tide of mid-century,

the great majority of Latin Americans, including the middle

and even some of the very

classes

nous and African heritage,

rich,

now honor

their indige-

Transculturation

at least theoretically.

has continued. Capoeira, an Afro- Brazilian combination of

dance and martial

art,

now

has adherents worldwide.

ants of West African religion, including Brazilian its first

cousin,

Cuban

theon

of

somewhat

gods,

many new believ-

Santeria, have acquired

ers in the late twentieth century.

each

as in ancient

surfers in Bahia, Brazil,

These

associated

Greek

religions include a pan-

with

particular

For example, teenage

now commonly

put themselves in the

sea, as they

combines African and European elements uniquely Brazilian. Candomble and

to

paddle into the

Umbanda,

breakers. Another rapidly growing religion,

moments

qualities,

religion.

hand of Iemanja, goddess of the

include

New vari-

Candomble and

freely

produce something

Umbanda ceremonies both when worshipers feel pos-

of spirit possession,

sessed by invisible forces. In traditional Candomble, these forces are interpreted as ever,

most are

West African

gods. In

its

of indigenous people and African slaves.

to

Umbanda, Another

in

2000

is

Umbanda, how-

Brazilian spirits, including (for believers) the spir-

especially, are middle-class

tide of religious

Many new

converts

and white.

change transforming Latin America

the rise of Protestantism, notably in Brazil but also

elsewhere, from Chile to Guatemala.

Among

the fastest-grow-

ing Protestant groups are the Pentecostals and other evangelical Christian faiths originating in the

United States. After four

centuries in which virtually everyone in Latin America was at least

nominally Catholic, some countries

will

soon be one quar-

Neoliberalism

317

ter Protestant. In others, like

Protestants If

still

Mexico and Colombia, however,

constitute only a few percent of the population.

understanding Latin America has always challenged us in

the United States, perhaps the challenge increasingly, the Latin

all,

getting easier. After

is

Americans are

a United States

us. In

more heavily immigrant than anytime since the early 1900s, Latin Americans are the most numerous immigrants. Mexicans and Mexican Americans Dominicans influential

in

New

York,

Puerto Ricans and

southwest,

the

in

and Cubans

in Florida

communities. In 1990, the U.S.

form

New

York

(0.7 million),

and

Latino populations were Los Angeles (4.7 million), (1.9 million),

Houston

Miami

million),

(1

(0.7 million).

About

Chicago

half of

large,

with the largest

cities

U.S. Latinos are of

all

Mexican descent, but Latin Americans of many other countries can

now be found throughout the United

States.

It is

important

to recognize that U.S. Latinos are divided along national, racial,

and ethnic tle

the umbrella term "Latino"

lines. In fact,

means

lit-

outside the United States. Only here do Mexicans, Puerto

Ricans, and Bolivians

—brought together by the Spanish

guage

—begin

erally

do not identify as Latinos, even

to see

each other as Latinos.

Immigration from Latin America

And

in the is

lan-

Brazilians gen-

United States.

changing our culture.

Spanish-language publications abound. There are Spanish-lan-

guage television networks. Supermarkets carry tortillas, cilantro,

all

over the country

and plantains. Everybody's

tastes are

changing. Sales of spicy salsa have surpassed sales of an older

American

favorite,

lously polyrhythmic

age in

ketchup. Another kind of

salsa,

the fabu-

dance music, was born of Cuban parent-

New York and was

disseminated from there throughout

the Caribbean basin. Salsa remains beyond the ability of most

U.S. dancers; fortunately, the strong Dominican immigration of the 1980s brought merengue, a

more rhythmically

straight-

forward music, easier for gringo dancers to learn.

These changes do not

all

point in the

same

direction.

The

Born

318

in

Blood and Fire

growth of Afro-Brazilian religions points one way; the surge of Protestant denominations points another way.

such as the gender

are changing with painful slowness.

Some

things,

American women,

roles assigned to Latin

Other challenges loom on

the horizon.

Environmental devastation

is

worse

developing countries

in

than in developed ones, because avoiding or fixing sive. In addition, letting factories pollute is

it is

expen-

one way of

attract-

The

area of

ing multinational corporations to Latin America.

maquiladora production along Mexico's border with the United States constitutes a well-known example. Undoubtedly, though,

best-known,

America's

Latin

environmental

largest-scale

Amazonian rain forest. tenth of the Amazonian rain

issues concern the

Perhaps a

been destroyed, but

it still

forest has already

occupies roughly a third of Brazils

national territory, as well as parts of Venezuela, Colombia,

Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. ical forest in

the world.

on the Amazonian

It

remains, by

Human

far,

activity hardly

forest until the 1960s.

It

the largest trop-

made

a scratch

remained the home

of indigenous people living in relatively undisturbed tribal cultures, with a sprinkling of settlers along the

of

them descendants

1900.

Then,

of rubber tappers

in the 1960s

and

major

who

rivers,

many

arrived around

1970s, the Brazilian military gov-

ernment launched one major World Bank-funded develop-

ment

project after another in the

logging

it,

cutting highways into

it,

Amazonian

rain forest:

promoting massive mining

projects (iron, gold, manganese, nickel, copper, bauxite) that

stripped and tore

dams

it,

and building gargantuan hydroelectric

that flooded thousands of square miles of

it.

Highly poi-

sonous mercury Amazonian waterways by the hundred thousand tons. Brazil's military government was especially eager to populate the country's remote Amazonian borders, which it regarded as a securi-

pollution, a by-product of gold mining, entered

ty risk,

with "real

Brazilians'' rather

than indigenous people. In

Neoliberalism

319

Ecuadorian Amazonia, forest tribes

nothing

in only a

few

the Brazilian

Still,

mined

oil drilling

wrought devastation. The

were decimated by disease. Some melted away

to

years.

and Ecuadorian governments were deter-

to exploit the resources of

Amazonia. After

all,

as they

pointed out, the rich farmlands of the Midwestern United States

had once been mostly forested and inhabited by indigenous peoBut tropical rain forest

ple, too.

is

not like other woodlands.

One

of the world s oldest habitats, rain forests have developed a bio-

unequaled anywhere else on the planet. Even more

diversity

than elsewhere, pervasive webs of symbiotic relationships rain forest organisms superspecialized

and

make

intricately interde-

pendent. That interdependence, in turn, makes rain forest ecologies uniquely fragile.

down, a few species of versity

is

the thin

permanently

Amazonian

rential rains

When large areas of the forest are cut

trees

lost.

soil,

when shorn

grow back, but the

Another kind of fragility comes from

which

is

washed away by tortree cover. As a result,

quickly

of protective

cleared land quickly erodes and In the 1980s,

original biodi-

becomes almost

when something like

six

useless.

thousand square miles

of the forest were disappearing each year in clouds of size of

development became obvious. Rondonia, a western dering on Bolivia, had

model

smoke the

Belgium, the disastrous consequences of Amazonian

of

become

agricultural

state bor-

the Brazilian government's great

colonization,

its

much

ballyhooed

"Northwest Pole." But even when the land was allotted settlers

to

poor

from other parts of Brazil, arriving by the hundred thou-

Amazonian colonization rarely worked. The would-be colonists had high hopes but little preparation, and less than a tenth of Rondonia turned out to be suitable farmland anyway. Most settlers gave up after only two or three years. sand each

year,

Their plots were often bought by wealthy ranchers.

Ranching, which uses a accounts for

much

lot of

land and employs few people,

of the deforestation in Amazonia.

The

Born

320

Blood and Fire

in

whom

ranchers are often large-scale speculators for is

a business venture rather than a

live in cities,

ranching

work

itself to

of

life.

ranching

Commonly, they and leave the

in air-conditioned offices,

They buy enormous them with bulldozers, put cattle on them

hired administrators.

tracts of land, clear

until the

way

degraded

and scrubby vegetation

soil

support even cattle, then

sounds unbelievably

—

sell

the land and

also unnecessarily

—

will

move

no longer on. If this

destructive,

it is.

At the turn of the third millennium, Latin America

still

enormous problems. To call them enormous may even be an understatement. Meanwhile, what happens in Latin America has become increasingly important to the rest of the faces

world.

A

leading historian of the region explains why:

The economic expansion far outstripped the

War

II.

While

of all major Latin

American countries has

population growth in the period since World

their populations have doubled, tripled, or almost

quadrupled, their economies have grown ten-, twenty-, or In the 1980s,

fold.

(GNP)

is

sponding

sixteen times

what

figures for Brazil

ples of ten

and

it

was

in the 1940s,

The populations

of

Colombia

larger than in the 1940s; their per capita

eighteen times greater. Growth of both kinds has changed

the relative weight of Latin America in global sis

and the corre-

and Argentina have increased by multi-

eight, respectively.

and Peru are three times

GNP,

thirty-

Mexico's per capita gross national product

affairs.

The debt

cri-

of the 1980s, for example, attracted world-wide attention less

because of

and

its

its

effects at

home

than because of

its

sheer magnitude

potential to disrupt the international financial system.

Similarly, Latin

America has always been Catholic, but now the

majority of the world's Catholics are Latin American.*

*Tulio

Halperin

Donghi, The Contemporary' History of Latin America

(Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.

Press, 1993), 404.

Neoliberalism

A century ago,

321

even Latin America s own leaders only dimly

understood the power of the region's cultural heritage. Today, the vitality and creativity of Latin American

around the world.

imposed

A century ago,

economic model with

their

life

attract interest

Latin America's liberal rulers little

regard for the wish-

es or well-being of the poor majority. Today, the neoliberals

have their

own model

to

impose, but they also have free elec-

With a bit of model will have a

tions to win.

luck, the potential losers in the

neoliberal

better chance to

make

their voic-

es heard.

But what

will the future bring? Will the

new wave

of liber-

alism solve basic problems of social inequity? Careful consideration of Latin

American

for skepticism.

Has the

history in the 1800s provides grounds

nationalist impulse faded forever

the Latin American scene? not.

When

and how

will

A glance back at the

Latin American societies finally

escape the lingering consequences of their 'original birth in blood to these

and

fire five

from

1900s suggests

sin," their

hundred years ago? For the answers

and other questions, watch the news! But prepare

surprises

.

.

.

for

GLOSSARY of Foreign

Language

Terms and Ke$ Concepts

Americanos (Spa.): the nativist term used during the wars of independence to suggest a natural alliance among all people born in Spanish America against the Peninsular Spaniards. Bandeirantes

(Port.): the

based mostly

in

wandering frontier raiders of colonial

Sao Paulo. Their chief

Cabildo (Spa., equivalent

to

cdmara

activity

was

Brazil,

slave hunting.

in Portuguese): the city council,

one of the most important institutions of colonial government.

Around

1810, at the outset of

Spanish America's wars of indepen-

dence, "open" city council meetings (cabildos abiertos) constituted early steps toward

independent authority.

Caste system: a social hierarchy encoded in law and based on inherited characteristics, real or imagined. Latin America's colonial

caste system corresponded

can be usefully contrasted

conomic

or less to

which

what we call race. Caste based more on socioe-

is

factors.

Caudillo (Spa.): a strong al loyalty

more

to class,

of

many

who commands the personThe mid- 1800s was the heyday of

political leader

followers.

caudillismo. Although Brazil has also seen strong leaders, caudil-

lismo has operated more powerfully in Spanish America. Cientificos: see Porfiriato.

Clients: in political terms, clients receive benefits (such as protection or

government employment) from a patron

alty (in civil

in return for their loy-

wars or elections, for example).

323

Glossary

324

Comparative advantage: economists.

If

promoted by free market liberal each producer specializes in what it produces with a concept

comparative advantage, free trade then theoretically creates maxi-

mum benefits for all involved.

Nationalist economists had a coun-

terstrategy: ISI.

Core/fringe: an analytical concept used to assess the geography of large social systems.

colonies

(e.g.,

The

core areas of the Spanish and Portuguese

Mexico,

Peru,

and northeastern

Brazil)

were

defined by their large populations and profitable export products.

The

fringe areas

were poorer and attracted fewer

analogous concept, center/periphery, international

economic

is

colonists.

An

applied to the geography of

relationships.

Creole (equivalent oicriollo, Spa.): a person of Spanish descent born in the

New World.

Brazilians of Portuguese descent tended to be

called simply brasileiros. See also Peninsular.

"Decent people", the phrase gente decente (Spa.) was used especially in

the 1800s to separate prosperous families of European blood

and culture from the poor majority of indigenous, African, or mixed heritage

and the povo

(collectively called the pueblo in

Spanish America

in Brazil).

Dirty war: the guerra sucia (Spa.) was a campaign of terror waged by the Argentine military against left-wing guerrillas and their sympathizers (real

and imagined)

in the 1970s. Similar

but smaller

campaigns were carried out simultaneously by the Chilean, Uruguayan, and Brazilian Ejido (Spa.):

common

militaries.

lands belonging to a town or village.

Mexican Revolution famously restored and created land reform of the 1920s and 1930s.

The

ejidos during

its

Enclave: an area sealed

off, in

some way, from

its

surroundings. In

Latin American history, the most famous enclaves were created by

outside economic interests, such as mining and banana companies.

Encomienda

(Spa.):

an institution whereby groups of indigenous

people were legally "entrusted" to a Spanish conqueror with the duty of paying him labor and/or tribute. In return, the holder of the

encomienda

(the encomendero)

Christian religion.

was

to provide instruction in the

Glossary

325

Estado Novo

(Port., for

"New

State'): the Brazilian

Getulio Vargas, 1937-1945.

regime created by

The Estado Novo's

program and general expansion of government ical of mid-io,oos nationalist movements.

industrialization

activities

were

typ-

Focos: focal points of guerrilla activity intended to create revolutionary conditions in adjacent areas.

exponent of

GNP, GDP: ty:

this strategy (called

Che Guevara was

foquismo)

two similar measures of

the principal

America.

in Latin

economic

total national

activi-

Gross National Product and Gross Domestic Product. The

mer

more inclusive measure, which includes the companies operating abroad. is

Hacienda

a

(Spa.): a large property

owned by one

for-

profits of

family, generally of

Spanish descent. In contrast to plantations (such as Brazilian sugar

many haciendas

plantations, for example),

did not produce lucra-

tive export crops.

Hegemony:

a basic principle of social control, in

dominates others ideologically, with a

which

minimum

a ruling class

of physical force,

dominance seem natural and inevitable. Hegemony usually involves some degree of negotiation.

by making

its

Iberia: the peninsula defining the southwestern extreme of Europe,

separated from France by the Pyrenees Mountains. Both the

Spanish and Portuguese are Iberians, so that term discuss their

Indigenismo

combined

is

often used to

colonial presence in America.

(Spa.): a literary, artistic,

and

political

movement

begin-

ning in the late 1800s, but most characteristic of twentieth-century nationalism, that

honored the indigenous heritage but focused

on assimilating indigenous people into national

life.

ISI imvort-substitution industrialization: the creation of domestic y

industry to provide products previously imported.

I

SI occurred in

Latin America mostly during the mid-ia,oos, encouraged by interruptions of international trade and by nationalist economic policies.

Legitimacy: a quality of governments generally recognized as proper

and

legal

by those

whom

they rule.

Liberalism: a cluster of political ideas, emphasizing

ous

civil, political,

liberties of vari-

and economic kinds. Latin American liberalism

focused on European and,

later,

U.S. models.

Glossary

326

movement

Liberation theology: a small but influential grassroots within the Latin .American Catholic

Church beginning

in the late

1960s. In accord with liberation theology, "consciousness raising"

and

social organizing

Matiaged

among

the poor

became

central missions.

elections: elections at least partly manipulated

by the gov-

ernment to influence the outcome. Such elections were a standard element of rural life throughout Latin .America until the middle of the 19CCS. Managing urban elections is more difficult and requires an especially powerful government (such as Mexico's PRI Manifest Destim a vision of U.S.

According

to this \ision.

territorial

growth

was "manifest"

it

1

in the

mid-i8oos.

totally obvious* that

according to the laws of history, the United States would land

s)wuU\ expand

to the Pacific

and Mexican lands by izjo

Spa.

force,

Ocean, occupying Native .American if

necessary.

of mixed race, especially indigenous .American and

European. The Portuguese equivalent,

an

.African- European mix.

used

is


5-68, 221, 224-25, 251,

262, 284-85

see Sandinista

movement

Fuentes, Carlos, 278

boom (1870-1930),

146, 160, 179-87,

fueros, ecclesiastical, 15-5-56, 158

191-93, 205-6, 213, 222-23, 226 agricultural goods, 172-73, 179-87, 188,

GaitSn, Jorge Eliecer, 241-42, 302

export

in

FSLN,

Garcia M^rquez, Gabriel, 278

191,205-6,213,236 collapse of, 206, 226, 247

Gardel, Carlos, 237

industrialization slighted in, 187, 206, 214,

postwar sequel precursors extradition,

Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 166

gauchos, 126, 169, 183, 196,259-60

227 to,

146,

to,

247-48 149-52

gender

roles, 31, 125,

161-65,318

German Democratic Republic

(East

Germany), 267-68

304

German

Falklands War, 11,292

immigrants, 184, 208-10, 231, 236, 238 Germany, Federal Republic of (West Germany), 296 Germany, Nazi, 215, 217, 229, 267 globalization, 18-19, 306, 308-12

Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front

Goias, Brazil, 83

Ezcurra, Encarnaci6n, 139-41

fabrics, 135,

142

factories, 150, 184, 187, 199, 230, 233,

247^18, 267, 290

288, 298-300

(FMLN),

FARC

(guerrilla army), 288,

fascism, 229,

Goias, Duchess

303-4

246

230 Fernando VII, King of Spain, 97-98, 100, 103, 108

federalism, 127, 129, 195,

Fictions (Borges), field gangs, 11 8,

flooding, 103,

259-60

of,

139

83-84, 313 "Golden Law," Brazilian, 173 "Good Neighbor Policy," U.S., 235, 246 Gorriti, Juana Manuela, 162-63, 165 Goulart, Joao, 280, 280-81 gold, 38, 39, 44, 47, 51, 64, 81,

gracias al sacar (caste exemptions), 86, 142

183

Graham, Mary,

109,318

1

15

Florentine Codex, 59

grain exports, 159, 179, 188

FMLN

Granma

(Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front),

298-300 325 182,246

focos, in guerrilla warfare, 266,

food, 15, 18,34, 115, 118,

distribution of, 65, 79-80, 183,

283-84,

1

1,

266

38, 95-98, 103—4, 135,

141, 144, 150,

198-202,209 of, 95-97

Latin American alliances

Latin American investments

of,

146, 150,

198-99,234-35,250-51

308 ethnic identity and, 157, 187,215,221,

317

liberalism in, 20, 96, 106, 121 military interventions of, 126, 146, 156,

30-31, 40-43, 318-19 40, 47, 95-98, 103, 115, 144,

forest peoples,

France, 17,

(yacht), 263,

Great Britain,

208-9,215,296 as colonial power, 90,

198,

292

as role model, 168-69, 174, 179-80, 199,

206 200

in slave trade, 47,

cultural influence of, 137-38, 142, 144,

168-69, 174, 199 Latin American policy

of,

126-27, 145—47,

114-15, 122-23,

145-46, 170, 198-99,201-2 Great Depression, 199, 206, 226, 229, 236,

239

156-57, 166, 194 liberalism in, 20, 96, 106, 121 as trading power, 106, 122,

105-6, 135

as trading power, 97, 106,

199-200

Great Pyramid, 32, 56 gross domestic product (GDP), 25-27, 325

(GNP), 320, 325

Francia, Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de, 128

gross national product

Franklin, Benjamin, 168

Guacayllano, Catalina, 72

free birth law, Brazilian, 172

Guadalupe, Virgin of, 74-76, 100-101 Guanajuato (Mexico) peasant revolt, 101 guano, 32, 145-46, J 88 Guarani people, 79 Guatemala, 17-18, 26-27, 78, 127, 129, 160,

free blacks, 121, 125, 169, 170, 183

free trade, 203,

307

see also neoliberalism Freire, Paulo,

271-72

French language, 138, 140, 156 French Revolution, 20, 90, 95-96 Freyre, Gilberto, 231

181,

183-86,238,300,311

indigenous peoples

293-94,314

of,

127, 183—84, 256,

Index

34° Guatemala (continued) U.S. intervention

in,

183-84, 186-87, 188, 197,207-11,

255-58, 261-62, 288,

293 Guatemala, University of, 204 Guatemala City, Guatemala, 306 Guayaquil, patriot meeting at ( 1 8 1 7), 110 Guerrero, Vicente, 108 guerrilla movements, 41-42, 102, 108, 263,

213,222,231,236 imperialism, 31-32, 39-40, 51-52, 199-206,

260-62 economic, 184-86, 198-99, 205-6, 222,

225,240-41,263-64 see also neocolonialism

import-substitution industrialization (ISI),

266,271,288,293-301 urban, 274, 279, 281, 285-87, 303-5

Guevara, Che, 244, 261-64, 266-68, 280, 286-87, 289 Guevara, Isabel de, 55 135 gunboat diplomacy, 146-47, 156, 163, 166, guilds, 65,

226-28, 236-39, 241, 293, 325 Inca Empire, 31-33, 45, 50-53, 56-57,

90-91, 145,225 Independence Day, Mexican, 157 independence movements, 10-11, 87-88, 93-113, 119, 159, 162, 198 caste system overthrown by, 93, 103,

203-4

141-42

guns, 46, 49-50, 101,218

clergy in, 100-2, 108, 153

indigenous and mestizo support haciendas, 76, 135-36, 182, 187, 219, 325

203-4, 255, 315 Havana, 80, 179, 187, 209, 245, 263, 268 Havana Conference (1928), 203-4 Hawaiian Islands, 200-201, 224-25 Haya de la Torre, Vfctor Raul, 224-25, 241 Haiti, 48, 90, 93, 130,

health care, 25, 204, 245, 268, 296

heavy industry, 227, 237, 254, 282-83 hegemony, 68-74, 76-77, 87, 97, 137-38, 143, 151, 202, 198-203, 219-20, 272,

social hierarchies preserved by, 93, 99,

103-5, 107-8, 111-12, 118 38-39, 67, 198 indigenismo, 225-26, 237-38, 291, 325 indigenous peoples, 10-1 1, 19-21, 29-33, India,

316,325 Hernandez Martinez, Maximiliano, 238

40-44, 45, 50-52, 58-63, 69-70, 73-77,85,97, 116, 125-27, 159,

312-15

Hidalgo, Miguel, 10, 100-102, 104, 108, 126, 153, 157, Hill,

194.217,270

agricultural practices of, 30-33, 41, 134,

155-56, 182, 194, 258, 294, 297-98 representations of, 28, 220-21, 225,

Henry, 116

Hispaniola, 48

artistic

Hollywood, 205, 214, 221,231

237 autonomy sought

holy men, itinerant, 195-96

beliefs of, 49,

Hitler, Adolf, 217,

holy orders, 40,

229

59-60

Holy Week, 70, 73, 223 Honduras, 16, 18, 26-27, 129, 160, 181,

185-86,227,257,296-97,311 honor system, 71-73, 141, 197 horses, 39, 41-42, 44, 49-50, 67, 80, 102 housing, 73, 75, 83, 186-87, 238, 245-46,

268 Huascar (Inca

human

by, 134,

52 44, 46

leader),

sacrifice,

59-60, 64, 185, 238, 294, 313, 319 of, 31-32, 34, 64

engineering feats

enslavement

of,

41-44, 49, 54, 57, 59,

82-83 in

independence movements, 92, 99-102, 104-5, 113

nationalist celebration of,

Menchu (Menchu), 294 33-38, 41, 43-44, 71-72, 96, 325 identity politics, 23-24, 100-101, 136-37, Rigoberta

313-16 see also multiculturalism; nationalism;

nativism

Iemanja (goddess), 316 immigration, 11, 16, 165-68, 172-73,

164-65, 225-26 225-26, 237-38,

291 nativist appeal to, in neocolonialism,

Iberia,

314-15

51-52, 71-72, 76, 88, 137 destruction of, 1 1, 42^43, 48-49, 53, 57,

literary representations of,

hunter-gatherer societies, 30, 41

J,

for, 92,

99-102, 104-5, 107, 109, 113, 120 nativist appeal of, 100-101, 104-6, 108-10, 113, 119, 133, 136,213 philosophical underpinnings of, 20, 94-96, 104, 106, 119-22

100-101, 105, 113 182-85, 194, 202, 218,

238,256,261 resistance of, 41^12, 63, 80, 82-83, 88-91,

92,99-102, 137,294,299 tributes paid by, 51, 53, 56-57, 59, 80,

102, 146

upward mobility individualism, 155,

of,

142, 148, 154-55

269

"Indo-America" concept, 225, 241

Index

34* 150-51, 187, 199,

industrialization, 23, 122,

222-23, 227-28, 245, 247, 266-67 import-substitution, 226-28, 236-39, 247,

Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822 (Graham), 115 Juarez, Benito, 10, 148, 154-57, 194

293, 325

Juarez Law, 155

promotion of, 206, 214, 223, 227-30, 233, 236-39, 247-49,

judges, 73, 182,

nationalist

282-84 inflation, 18, 132,

252-53, 258, 289, 297,

303, 308-9

192,304 30-31 juntas, military, 280—87 see also cold war politics jungles, stereotypes of,

juntas, patriot, 98, 102-3, 106

informal service sector, 3

see also

1

70-72, 100 Institute of Arts and Sciences, 155 Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexican,

wars of independence

Inquisition, Spanish, 37, 58,

Kahlo, Frida, 212,

Kennedy, John

250

304

Integralist Party, Brazilian,

229-30

intermarriage, 10, 40, 42^13, 53-55, 57, 76,

81-82,85-87,

1,

1 1

169,

King Coffee, 229, 238 Kipling, Rudyard, 202

215-17

see also mestizos; race mixing

labor,

Monetary Fund (IMF), 309 310, 313

International

investments, international, 10, 114—15,

122-23, 146, 150-51, 180, 184, 198-99, 206, 309-10 authoritarian regimes favored for, 191,

193-94, 255-57, 262, 282, 284 expropriation of, 219, 234-35, 250-51,

258, 264, 282, 289-92 military protection of,

203—4, 256-57,

281-82,284 Ireland, 34, 209 iron, 44, 46, 181

Isabel, Princess of Brazil, Isabel,

Queen

220-21,232 265, 277

kidnapping, 274, 278-79, 281-82, 285-86,

seePRl insurance, 222,

Internet,

F.,

of Castile,

289-90,310 76 government protection of, 219, 222-23, 227, 233-34, 256, 258 migrant, 21, 185,210 labor drafts, 57, 134 labor movement, 11,219, 224, 233, 249-50, 256-58, 277, 279, 293 land grants, 52-53, 161,210 landowners, 121, 149, 155-56, 179-84, 302 communal ownership vs., 155—56, 182, colonial attitudes toward, 41,

173

37-38

52-53, 57-59, 64-68, 75-78, 84, 134-35, 181-87, 190, 208, 218, 238,

194,219,252,297-98 152-53, 155,219 export boom, 179, 181-83, 186-87, 206,213,247

ecclesiastical,

ISI (import-substitution industrialization),

in

226-28, 236-39, 241, 293, 325 Islam, 34, 47, 137-38 Italian immigrants, 172-73, 183, 187, 197,

peasantry displaced by, 182-83, 218,

190,

297-98

208-10,231,236 Italy, 229, 236 Iturbide, Augustm de, 108-9, 126

political influence of,

Jamaica, 135, 198

see also oligarchy

134-36, 186, 190,

192-96,237-38,281 workers exploited by, 76, 134-35, 182-84,

298 Japan, 39, 200, 210-11,311

land reform,

jazz,

181,214

81-82, 158 Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 245-46, 252 jewelry, 44, 142,221 Jesuits, 40, 43, 59, 67, 77,

Jews, 34, 37,

1

1,

19, 23,

218-19, 233-34,

238, 256-58, 262-63, 289, 291, 314

jarabes (dances), 136, 221

language, 16,48,82, 111, 126, 153, 164, 166

indigenous, 18, 32, 54, 57, 59, 77, 100,

111-12, 126, 134,291 transculturation

209-10

of,

34, 53, 76, 79, 210,

213

Joao VI, King of Portugal, 96-98, 105-7, 132 John II, King of Portugal, 37

Las Casas, Bartolome de, 59-61, 270-71,

John III (the Pious), King of Portugal, 40-42 John Paul II, Pope, 213 journalists, 163-64, 173, 189, 297 Journal of an Expedition 1400 Miles up the Orinoco, 300 up the Arauca, 1 1

Latin America:

313 as cultural concept,

1

56

cultural diversity of, 16-18, 23-24, 30-33,

debt

93-94,213-14 crisis in, 283, 308-9

Index

342 Latin America (continued)

Liberal Party, Nicaraguan, 160-61

demographics of, 15-18, 25-26, 87, 99-100, 134, 181, 187, 190,227-28,

liberation theology,

245, 298, 302, 320 European immigrants in,

libraries, public,

165-68,

11, 16,

270-73, 281, 294, 298-99, 326

life

168

expectancy, 17, 25-27, 245, 284

172-73, 183-84, 186-87, 188, 197,

Life

207-10,213,222,231,236

light industry,

307-12, 320-21 development in, 122-23, 149-50, 159, 179-82, 214, 220, 252,

Lincoln, Abraham, 148

globalization of, 18-19,

infrastructure

282-83,318-19 international investment

in, 10,

1

14-15,

122. 146, 150-51, 180, 184, 191,

198-99,203-6,250-51 Marxist movements in, 212, 221, 225, 229, 232-33, 244, 255, 260-69 Soviet influence

in,

ofFacundo, The (Sarmiento), 168, 196 227 Lima, Peru, 65, 74, 79-80, 110, 115, 145-46, 163-64, 168, 187,241,245

Lingua Geral (General Tongue), 59, 82 Lisbon, Portugal, 31, 34, 106 literacy, 17, 25-27, 138, 165, 189, 191-92, 220-22, 246, 256, 268, 271-72, 284 literatura

political,

statistical portrait of,

114-17, 137, 161-65, 168,

189-90,237,246

257-58, 260, 264-65.

275-76

de cordel (popular poems), 242

literature, 68,

25-27

165-66, 168-69, 196.204-5.

217,225-26,258-60,278

of,

21-23, 115-17, 178, 202-3

llaneros, 103,

A

Descriptive Surrey (Schurz),

loans,

buyers. 154. 173, 189, 195

109 94-95, 123, 150,283,309 Lopez, Francisco Solano, 1 70 Lost Decade (1980s), 18, 302 Louis XVI, King of France, 95 'low -intensity conflict," 293-94, 313

Le Corbusier, 252

Lugares, Pancho (fictional character), 136

stereotypes Latin America.

31» Latin language, 138, 166 laundresses, 141, 181, 189

legal systems, 71,

1

1

1,

127, 153, 281

138,

155,230,290

legitimacv. 55. 71, 97. 100, 103. 123,

291-92, 325 I., 260

M- 19

Lenin, V.

Leon. Kingdom

of, 36,

1

1

95-96, 98, 1 19-24. 152-60, 190-93, 229-30, 325

liberalism. 10-11, 19-20,

Catholic Church challenged by, 96, 121, 127, 152-57, 159-60,

164-65,219

conservative backlash against, 96, 121, 124,

126-29, 149, 152, 156, 165 Eurocentric bias

of, of,

121, 155,

165-68

165-69, 191, 199 federalism and, 127, 129. 195, 230

independence movements, 94, 105-9, 113, 119 individualism emphasized in. 155-56, 269 literary expressions of, 161-67 popular resistance to, 195-96. 215 in

1 1

1-13,

1

Las, 274,

mafias,

303-5

Magalhaes, Benjamin Constant Botelho de,

173-74 Mahan. Alfred Thayer, 200-201 Malcolm X. 264

19-24,

Malinche I.Aztec woman), 49, 54-55, 65, 116 managed elections, see elections, managed Managua, Nicaragua, 295 Manaus, Brazil. 185 Manifest Destiny, 202, 326 manifestos, 172-73, 232 Mansa Musa, King of Mali, 47 manufacturing, 135. 150. 184. 187, 199-200.

227,230.310

126-27, 131-37, 143-45. 148 Progress espoused by, 149. 151-52,

maquiladoras, 310-11

159-61, 171, 172-74, 190-91, 199 social mobility aided by, 113, 141-43, 148

Mariategui, Jose Carlos, 225

in trade policy, 16, 97,' 135, 137. 149,

marijuana, 303

Liberal Partv, British, 199

286

Madrid, Spain, 31,80

Males, 137

136-3", 144-45.

in postcolonial regimes,

Colombian, 288, 303-5 Joaquim Maria, 189-90

Assis,

Madero, Francisco, 217-19 Madres de la Plaza de Mayo,

39

55

educational goals

guerrillas,

Machado de

37

Leopoldina, Empress of Brazil,

Lerdo Law,

197-98 Lumiere brothers, 205 lunfardo, 210 Lutz, Berta, 197-98 Luisi, Paulina.

legislative assemblies, 109, 113, 123, 132,

Marcos. Subcomandante, 312

159

Marie .Antoinette, Queen of France, 95 Marines. U.S., 200, 203-5, 235, 255, 294

Index

343 customs revenues in, 193 of, 26-27, 64-66, 99, 102,

marriage, 56, 68, 70, 73, 81-82, 139-41,

economy

163-64

122-23, 156, 159, 180-84, 193-94,

see also intermarriage

252-53,292,311

Marshall Plan, 253,277 \l.iiti.

nabundo, 299

I

Marti, Jose\

204-5

299 Marxism, 229-30, 242, 253, 255, 257-58, 275-76, 277-78, 284-85, 288-90,

martyrs, 83, 90, 112, 266-68,

295-301,303 dissent repressed

European invasions 217 folk arts of, 17,221 foreign businesses

112, 136, 159

261-62, 266, 269,

275-76 of, 240, 254-57, 260, 265, 269, 275-76, 279, 289-90, 296, 299

U.S. fear

materialism, 151, 191, 195-96,

83-84

John, 1 16 Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 10, 156-57 language, 54, 137

land reform

in, 157, 212, 217-22, 224-25, 233-34, 238, 242 patronage politics in, 126-27, 193, 292 popular uprisings in, 88-89, 100-102, 104,

108,

racial

313

mixing

in,

53-55, 86, 217, 225,

314-15 socialism

221,291-92

in,

U.S. interventions

in,

144, 146-47, 157,

175,201,217,220,295 Mexico, University of, 68, 292 Mexico City, Mexico, 16, 65, 74,

"melting pot" idea, 87

294

308

merchants, 66, 73, 121, 128, 132, 135-36, 146-47, 173, 181,210 mestizos, 18, 54-55, 75-76, 79, 82, 84-87, 125, 127, 136, 154, 189-90, 202,

326

independence movements, 93-94, 101-2, 105, 108, 111-12, 194 legal status of, 85-87, 142 nationalist celebration of, 87, 215-17, 220, in

238,241-42,314-15 social rise of, 148,

242, 249, 252-53,

in,

291-92

medicine, 34, 163, 189, 296 Rigoberta,

26, 31, 99-100, 181,

populist politics

1

Medellin, Colombia, 271-72, 303-5

Carlos,

of,

186-87, 227

media, mass, 228, 230-31, 237, 253, 263,

Menem,

157,217-18,233,301

population

137-38,256,294,312-14

Menchu,

218-19, 233-34, 238,

in, 19,

252,291

people, 19, 32-33, 45, 54, 65, 89,

Revolution, Argentine,

17-18, 53, 59,

nationalism

Mawe,

May

in,

134,220,238,313-14,314 industrialization of, 237-38, 252-53

252

204-5

Matto de Turner, Clorinda, 164-65, 225

Mayan Mayan

indigenous traditions

military establishment in, 108-9, 155-56,

Revolution

Masters and the Slaves, The (Freyre), 231

Brazil,

14-15, 180, 184,

economy, 19, 308-12, 320 independence of, 94, 98-102, 104, 108-9,

267, 269

internationalist vision of,

Mato Grosso,

1

in global

in,

225, 232-33, 255, 259-60, 276-78

Cuban

in,

127, 156-57, 194,

193-94,234-35,291-92

intellectuals associated with, 212, 221,

see also

of,

154-55, 189-90, 194

79, 115,

modernization

of,

179, 187, 193-94,

see also Tenochtitlan

Michoacan, Mexico, 233-34 middle class, 16, 19, 35, 149, 184, 190-91, 206, 258, 267, 282-83

anticommunism

of, 276, 280 economy, 306, 310-11 urban, 149, 179-81, 213-14, 221-23 working-class alliances with, 223-25, 230,

in global

Mexican Revolution, 10, 212, 217-22, 224-25, 233, 252 Mexicas people, 10, 32, 49-51, 74-75

Middle East, immigration from, 210-11 migrant workers, 21, 210

Mexico, 10, 26-27, 30, 38, 109, 129, 152-57,

militias, 104,

262 74-75, 136,212

190, 236, 255, arts of,

civil

wars

in,

colonial, 10,

Minas Gerais,

156-57

of. 10,

45, 48-57, 100,

126,258,267,313

220

184

83, 195

mineral rights, 176-77, 219 mining, 10, 19, 57, 64-67, 75, 77, 122,

145^6,

63-66, 73-77, 78, 86,

98-102 conquest

233,247,280

mills, sugar, 66,

church establishment in, 74-75, 108, 152-57, 159,313,317

292 226

116, 147, 157, 186-87, 242, 245,

177, 181, 184, 187, 227,

258

64-65, 80, 122, 282 nationalization of, 230, 258, 264 population shifts due to, 64-65, 83-84 logistical

support

for,

Index

344 Miranda. Carmen. 231-32 58-6

missionaries. 43. 56.

Gabr

Mistral.

Napoleon III. Emperor of France. 15b- r Napoleonic Wars. 95-98. 106. 206, 280 *"narco terrorism." 304—5

-

7,

1

77.

_

7

mita labor draft. 5". 134. 326 Mitre. Bartolome. 165-6". 169

National .Association of Manufacturers. U.S..

Mixtec people, 65. 194

National Guard. Nicaraguan.

MNR

nationalism. 10-11,20.94. 113, 15". 205.

199

National Revolutionary Moverr.Bolivian. 2

:

:

7

213-43.326

Moctezuma. Aztec emperor. 49-50, 54 Moctezuma, Isabel Techichpotzini. 54-55

Modern

.Art

WeeL

Sao Paulo 1922

monarchy. 89. 123.

32

with. 240. 254-56, 264 _ economic, 222-23. 228-29, 248-4-

:

monopolies. 17

300-301, 307. 308 promoted bv. 206. 214, --"-49. 223 227233.2 266-67, 282-84

19, 97. 122

202-3

145.

Montevideo. Uruguav.

1

failure of,

industrialization

J

1

210 22 287 Montoneros guerrillas. Argentine 274 288 Montt. Manuel. 158-60 _ Moors. 34-5 " Morazin. Francisco

lower-class support of. see populism

Marxist strains -

mass

-

;

2 1 2. 221. 22

of. c

t>-69,303

politics of. 22

247

Morelos. Jose Maria. 10. 101-2. 104. 108. :

.31-33.238,

241.291.314

-

126. 153

225

5

ethriK

73

Monroe Doctnne.

_

communism equated

311

98

constitutional.

moneylender

:

chic

95-96

absolute. 3". "0.

295-%

30,

240-43.

_

middle-class support

of.

2 1 3-

I

-

22

-280

27

mixing of races celebrated bv. 8". 2 4-1 ". _- ; 23 -32 - "-38. 314-15

Mosquera. Tomas Cipnano de. 1 58 Mothers of the Plaza de Maw. 2 "4. 286 Motolinia. Toribio de. 59 movies. 1". 17

1

multiclass alliances

230.:

221.23

in.

214-15, 225

247

242

.

2f

212.217-2 2 : 3-30. 263. 280-81.291 rhetoric of. 214230. 240-43.281.296 svmbolsof. 15". 212.2 18-20. 229^ 268-69.314 revolution-

made

America

in Latin

Mozambique.

27

2

48

36.

mules. 64-65. 83-84. 86. 101. 122. 150

217.314

multiculturalism. 23

urban orientation

multinational corporations. 185-86. 254.

261.264.308 mural> 74.2

murders,

2

-

see also nativism:

1

218. 242

polr. 6.

-

-

1-S2.

290, 293-94. 295-96.

3d

298-300.

;

Bolivian. 2

2 -

MNR

Movement

.

7

national security doctrine. U.S.. 276-80, 301 or

.

. 22

-51-32.

fan

14,47 Mussolini, Benito i

populism

National Palace. Mexicar

271

as status svmbol. 142. 185

Mn

213-14. 221-23. 233,

National Motor Factor). Brazilian. 230 National Revolutionary

music. 68. 87. 163. 181. 210,268

Afro-Cuban 75 nationalist promotion _ 314 1

of.

281

-

-

National Steel

Company.

Brazilian.

230

"

National University. Colombian

_

Women's Secondary School. Permian. 164 nativism. 100-102, 104-8, 109-10, 113, 119. 133. 136-38. 141.215 _ National

~

Nabuco, Joaquim. N.AFTA North .American Free Trade Agreement.. 19.310.312 Nahuatl language. 32 ; 53-54 r " I

74-7

Napoleon I. Emperor of France. 95-98, 106, 280

see also nationalism

Navarre.

Kingdom

of,

navies. 95, 145. 166.

Nazism

36 198-200. 281

29.267

-

Negrete. Jorgt

. 2

neocolonialism. 10-11. .--"

•

_

127

IS.

1

"9-206

22

Index

345

authoritarian governments

190-96, 204,

in,

226,2 48 colonial patterns repeated in, 180, 184, 261

industry neglected

187, 206, 214, 227,

in,

Oaxaca, Mexico, 154-55 Ocampo, Melchor, 153-54

O'Gorman, Camila, 140 oil

industry, 184, 188, 194, 223, 255,

282-83,

309,319

248 peasants dispossessed

182-84, 195,

in,

218,258

nationalization of, 219, 234-35, 264, 291,

308

political corruption in, 186, 190,

192-95,

oligarchy,

1

1,

192, 194-96, 206, 237-38,

293, 297-98, 327

204

248-49

moral challenge to, 313-14 Neruda, Pablo, 259-60 Netherlands, 47, 72

mass opposition to, 223-24, 228, 240-42, 247, 249-50, 258 Olympic Games (1968), 292 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcfa MSrquez), 278 Open Veins of Latin America (Galeano), 261 oratory, political, 138, 167, 240-43, 250 Organization of American States (OAS), 254-55, 262, 265-66 Orinoco plains, Venezuela, 103, 109 Ortega, Daniel, 297 Othello (Shakespeare), 34 Ouro Preto, Brazil, 90

New Cinema, 278 New Deal, 230, 256 New Granada, 66, 78,

Pablo (Colombian boy), 14 Pacific War (1879-84), 176-77, 177

postwar resurgence profitability of,

of,

180-81, 185-87, 191,

205-6, 226, 260 resistance to, 195-96, 204-6, 214-17,

225-26, 248-49, 260 scientific pretensions of, 191, 193,

215-17

transportation infrastructure for, 179,

181-82, 185-86

307-21 echoed in, 308, 312

neoliberalism, 18, liberalism

see also

81, 103, 129

Colombia; Ecuador; Venezuela

New Laws

of the Indies for the

Good

Treatment and Preservation of the Indians, 60, 88 New Mexico, 88-89, 147, 220 "new song" movement, 268 New Spain, see Mexico newspapers, 1 17, 121, 138, 162, 165-66, 186, 192, 200, 204, 263, 297 New York, N.Y., 200, 204, 264, 317 New York stock market, 206, 226 Nicaragua, 16, 18, 26, 129, 189, 227, 255,

294-98 movement 295-300

Sandinista

U.S. interventions

in,

in,

213, 288,

Nineteenth of April Movement, nitrates,

Nobel

mining

Prize, 237,

1

Pampas

1 1, 30, 33, 126 26-27, 49, 80, 185-86, 238 U.S. imperialism in, 201, 203-4, 235 Panama Canal, 201 Pan-American Conference of Women, 197

people, Argentine,

Panama,

16,

Pan American Union, 203, 235, 254-55 pan o palo ("carrot or stick") policy, 193 papacy, 71, 153,273,298 Paraguay, 16, 18, 26-27, 55, 79-80, 113, 130, 227, 296, 310 170

wars fought by, 170, 175-76, 175 Parana, Brazil, 210 Paris, France, 17, 142, 180, 185, 187, 199,

see

M-19

Colombian

of,

1

220-21,232, 237 palenques, 89-90, 328 Palmares, 82-83, 89-90

isolationist policy of, 128,

160-61, 203-4,

295-97, 299 Niemeyer, Oscar, 252 guerrillas,

Paez, Jose Antonio, painting, 212,

177, 179

259-60, 294

nonsedentary peoples, 11, 30, 33, 64, 126,

329 North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA), 19,310,312 "Nuestra America" movement, 204 Nueva Granada, viceroyalty of, see New

Granada

218 Parra, Violeta,

268

parties, political, 10,

106-7, 121-22, 160-61,

199,255,271,281 in coalitions, 229-30, 287, 288-90 Communist, 221, 229-30, 242, 253, 255, 257-59, 264, 287, 298 personal politics vs., 124-25, 128-29,241, 280 populist, 223-25, 251, 257-58 revolutionary, 219-20, 224-25, 228-30 171,

Pasteur, Louis, 171

OAS

(Organization of American States),

254-55, 262, 265-66

Patagonian sheep herders' strike (1921), 224 paternalism, 238, 240, 242

Index

346 258

Patiiio family,

pianos and piano playing, 142, 187

patriarchy, 70-73, 111-12, 138-41, 197, 250,

269

Pius IX, Pope, 153

170

Patriotic Volunteers, Brazilian,

politics, 11,

50-52

Pizarro, Francisco, 45,

patronage, royal, 70, 124

patronage

Pinochet, Augusto, 290-91

88 plantation system, 41^43, 64, 66-67, 103, Pizarro, Gonzalo,

124-29, 135-36, 152,

190, 192-93, 223-24, 276, 327

173,208,210 266—67

131, 136, 162,

patrons, 135, 323

government control

patron saints, 70, 74-75

in neocolonialism, 182, 184, 187,

Paul

III,

Pope, 60

Peasant Leagues, Brazilian, 281, 288

293-94 of, 182-83, 195,218, 297-98, 302 hunger suffered by, 101, 283-84, 298-99 murder of, 293-94, 299-300 traditionalism of, 121, 219, 266, 276

peasant uprisings, 10,89, 100-102, 157,

195-96,217-18,233,281,293, 298-99 Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, 11, 106-7,

1

19,

222-23,233

261,298,327

95-96, 105-6,

260-62, 269, 278

(APRA), 224-25, 241 popular culture, 75. 87,

1

36, 205,

22

see also transculturation

popular sovereignty, 95-96, 105-7, 109, 113, 119, 121-22, 128 see also liberalism; republicanism

Popular Unity coalition, Chilean, 288, population density, 10, 16-17, 25-26, 29, 31,

298

populism, 11, 240-43, 246-53, 284-85, 327

see also mestizos

193-94, 217-18, 328

Porfiriato, 10,

Perez Jimenez, Marcos, 255

see also Dfaz, Porfirio

province, Brazil, 42, 106

249-50

Per6n, Isabel, 285 Per6n, Juan, 11, 240, 242-43, 249-51, 280,

284-85

Portales, Diego,

1

76

port facilities, 122-23, 150, 167, 179-80,

214,222 37-38,95-98, 105-7, 132

Portugal,

1 1, 19, 29, 38-43, 45, 81-84, 95, 105-7, 132-33,

Portuguese Empire,

Peronism, 11, 243, 249-51, 260, 284-86,

308

58, 63,

144

Peru, 18, 26, 32-33, 38, 55, 80, 129, 130,

conquest

political parties, see parties, political

political philosophy, 20, 90,

99, 186-87,

"people-in-between," 55, 86-87

240, 242-43,

193-94, 230, 233,

304-5

289-90

peons, peonage, 134-35, 182-83, 190,208,

1,

259 police, 129, 133, 191,

Socialist, 256,

1

163,

269

U.S., 200,

Popular American Bevolutionarv Alliance

132-33 Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 11, 133, 139, 171-74 PEMEX, 234 Peninsulars, 91, 99-102, 104, 108, 1 1-12, 122, 136, 162, 180,327

1

Amendment,

110-12, 119-21, 149-50, 155 Progress in, 151-52, 190-91,205

see also slavery

Per6n, Evita,

Piatt

poetry, 68, 137, 138, 161, 166, 189-90, 242,

dispossession

Pernambuco

256

42—43, 66, 75-77, 80-81, 118, 135, 173

slaves in,

peasantry, 66, 76, 84, 134-35, 256, 271-72,

pensions, 219,

of,

165,211,292,318 of,

45, 50-53, 56-57,

economy of, 64-66, 78, 145-46,311,320 foreign businesses

in,

88

102, 122-23,

114-15, 146, 184-85

guano boom in, 145-46 independence of, 94, 102, 104, 110, 145 literature of, 164-65, 225-26, 278 mass politics in, 224-25, 241, 291 race mixing in, 86, 225 rebellions in, 91, 102, 104, 111,301, 305 wars fought by, 176-77, 177 Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation, War of, 1 76 Philippines, 1 78, 200-201

in Africa, 44,

46^8,

67, 77

fringe areas of,

81-84

profitability of,

66-67, 76, 83

see also Brazil

Portuguese language, 34, 48, 82, 85, 138,

156,231 positivism, 191, 193. 196,

328

postcolonialism, 10-11, 119-47, 328

conservative politics

in,

111-12, 120-21,

124, 126-29, 133-34, 136-3". 144. 149, 156-60, 165, 171, 191 constitutions of, 93, 119, 123, 128, 132

corruption

economic

in,

120,

124-29

1 19-20, 123 137-38, 142-45

failure of,

Eurocentrism

of,

Index

347 119-20, 123-24, 127-29,

instability of,

proxy force, 255-58, 262, 264-65, 275-76,

328

131. 142-43, 191 liberalism

119-21, 123-24, 126-27,

in,

131-37, 143-44, 148, 149 partisan politics in, 121-22, 124-25,

128-29 movements

r.idieal

137-38

in,

maintained

in,

(common

142-43

people),

Pueblo rebellion, HH 89 Puerto Rico, 16, 18, 110, 120, 129, 144, 184, 200-201,203-4, 317

punishment, 55, 59, 89-90, 101-2,

slavery in, 111, 116-17, 118, 131, social inequality

pueblo, el

133-35

111,

1

1

1-12,

140, 157, 165,

Pyramid of the Sun, 32, 56

133-43, 148, 151 social mobility in, 113,

141-43, 148, 155

Quechua

language, 18, 57, 76,

Quetzalcoatl,

poverty, 16, 19, 21, 76-77, 80, 146, 179-83,

Quiroga, Facundo, 163 Quito (Ecuador), 89, 109

in,

282-83 in neoliberalism, 306, 308, 310-12 spiritual, 179,204-5 women in, 140-41, 183, 245-46 povo, o (common people), 142-43 186, 238-39, 252, 261-62,

see also class

Quiche language, 76

race mixing, 40, 48, 53-55, 57, 75-77,

84-87, 169,213 artistic

representations

in caste system,

geographic patterns

presidency, 123-27, 158-59, 191, 195, 230,

nationalistic

223, 242, 286, 297, 307-8

230

312-13

J

79, 82, 169,

225

215-17,

87,

20-21, 63, 137-38,

48, 169, 180, 186, 189-90, 214, 268,

314-15 141-42

289

58-61, 70, 72, 140, 152-53,

164-65,219,298-99 of, 59,

61, 77, 100-101,

270-73, 278 Joaquin, 158

independence movements, 93, 99, 103, 105, 107, 118, 120 literary explorations of, 162, 164-65,231 nationalist rejection of, 87, 214—17, 231, in

238,314-15 311-12

privatization, 298, 308,

Progress, 10-11, 149-74, 181-82,

scientific rationalization of, 169, 191,

328

153-54, 159, 164 authoritarian rule accepted with, 190-93, anticlericalism linked

to,

196

215-17,231 racial stereotypes,

21-23, 115-16, 164, 178,

202-3 Radical Civic Union, Argentine,

foreign models of, 145, 151, 163, 165-69,

171, 174, 179, 185, 191, 196,205-6,

214,248,253 204-5, 213 landowners enriched by, 149, 179, 181-82,

185,206

railroads,

1

1,

223-24

237

122-23, 146, 150, 159, 180-82,

199,214

nationalization of, 222, 230, 234, 250-51,

256 ranchers, 79-81, 103, 126, 183, 195,

liberalism linked to, 149, 151-52, 159-60,

165, 190-91, 199

popular response

to,

of,

214 204-6 161-65

169, 189-91,

rebellions against, 195-96,

women empowered

by,

prostitution, 68, 84, 141

21,37-38, 61, 115-16, 121,202,

300,316-18

319-20

Reagan, Ronald, 290, 296, 299 Rebellion in the Backlands (da Cunha), 196

151-52, 172—74,

191-92 premises

radio, 228,

184, 186, 191, 193,

intellectual disaffection with,

Protestants,

of,

caste system of, 85-87, 89, 99, 120,

price controls, 195, 227-29,

racist

of, 18,

promotion

racial discrimination,

219-20, 234, 252-53, 291-92, 308,

Prieto,

85-87, 111, 142

see also intermarriage; mestizos

(Institutional Revolutionary Party), 10,

155,

86, 162, 164-65,

225,231,237,314-15

press freedom, 70, 96, 100, 162, 165, 193,

radicalism

of,

276, 217

system

power generation, 137, 150,283

priests, 23, 56,

1-12, 291

1

quilombos, 82-83, 89-90, 328

Prensa (newspaper), 297

PRI

1

49-50

136-38 women in, 133, 138-41 Potosf, Peru, mines at, 64-65, 79, 184 transculturation

reconquest, Iberian, 37-38, 52 Redemption of Ham (Broncos y Gomez), 2J6 refineries, sugar, 66, 184 reform movements, 10-11, 152-57, 222-24 agrarian, 11, 19,23,218-19 Reform period (Mexican), 154-57 refrigerators, 183,227,253 Regency period, Brazilian, 11, 133-34

Index

348 religion,

16,35^10,47,96, 115, 121, 137,

152, 161

liberal

hegemonic power native, 49,

of,

69-70, 76—77

51-52, 56,76,88

transculturation of, 74-77,

women

in,

indigenous influences on, 74—77

55, 62,

to,

monarchy aligned

316-17

68-72

35-37, 39, 52, 56 republicanism, 20, 90, 93, 95-96, 104, 106-7, 113, 120, 140-41, 151, religious conversion,

171-74 124-29, 241

personal leadership

vs.,

popular distrust

123, 127-29, 134

of,

challenge

96, 121, 127, 152,

155-56, 164-65 with, 37, 70, 96,

radical clergy in, 59, 61,

100-102, 270-73,

ultramontane, 153, 158-60

Romanticism, 162, 164 Romero, Oscar, 298 Rondonia, Brazil, 319 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 228, 230, 232-33,

see also liberalism

235-36, 242

retirement benefits, 219, 222, 233

Roosevelt, Theodore, 201-4,

revolutionary movements, 10-11, 19, 191,

Roosevelt Corollary, 202-3, 326

268-69

128-29 275-76, 277-78, 284-85, 288-90,

295-301,303 217-25, 228-30, 233,

252,263,275-76,291

138,213,214-15,222,225,230, 240-43,281,296 7

Brazil, 78, 84,

in,

115-17, 187,

Rio de

la Plata,

131,

183-84 230

la Plata,

rubber, 179, 184-85, 188, 195, 318

(mounted police), 194 208-9 also Soviet Union

rurales

Russia, 200, see

Russian Revolution, 221

Sab (Avellaneda), 161-62, 164 sacrifice,

44, 46, 51

Sahara desert, 38, 47

96-98, 105-6, 139

67, 79, 115, 166, 170,223,

74-75

Saint Vituss Dance, 88

viceroyalty of, 66, 78, 79-80,

308 165-66

Salinas, Carlos,

salons, 163,

Salvador (Bahia), Brazil, 42, 75, 78, 84, 90,

196,231-32,316

104, 113 see also

human,

saints, 70,

286 Rio de

65-66, 83, 329

Sahagiin, Bernardino de, 59

industrialization of, 226, royal court at,

royal fifth,

sacraments, 56, 70, 154

78

210,228,231,237,245

boom

"Rough Riders," 201

rumba, 214

270-73, 281, 294, 298-99 see also populism Revolution of 1930, Brazilian, 229 rhetoric, political, 100-102, 108, 113, 136, religious-based,

coffee

139-41, 146-47, 165-67, 187 de, 139-41

Manuela (Manuelita)

see also taxation

nationalist, 10, 212,

Rio de Janeiro,

Rosas, Juan

Rosas,

Marxist, 221, 244, 256-58, 260-69, 271,

228

Monroe Doctrine Manuel de, 11, 126-27, 136-37,

see also

88-91, 102, 104-5, 1 1 regimes overthrown by, 124-25,

colonial-era,

Ribeyrolles, Charles,

Argentina

Salvarrieta, Policarpa,

112

Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, 210, 229

samba, 231-32, 237

Rio Pact (1947), 254

Sandinista movement, 273, 288,

riots,

129, 132, 195-96, 228,

Rivera, Diego, 212, 220-21, 232,

295-300

Sandino, C