Trouble Down Below
FALCOFF, MARK
Trouble Down Below What’s wrong with Latin America BY MARK FALCOFF What’s new in Latin America? One way of fi nding out is to go to the website of the Spanish edition of the Miami...
...But while on some historical issues he is right on the mark—he dismisses charges of U.S...
...The CIA did not blow up a Belgian ammunition ship in Havana harbor in 1960, nor was it responsible for the fl ight of Jean-Paul Aristide from Haiti...
...tomorrow will be pretty much like today...
...Not surprisingly, the debates on immigration policy underway in our own presidential campaign are followed with acute apprehension in nearly two dozen countries to the south...
...Institutions are weak or nonexistent...
...Is the Herald exaggerating or sensationalizing...
...Today is like yesterday...
...But in 2002, the income per capita in both Portugal and South Korea was twice that of Mexico and Brazil...
...Retired military offi cer [in Argentina] caught with 1,100 kilos of cocaine...
...A case in point: In 1966, Mexico was richer than Portugal and Brazil was more affl uent than South Korea...
...In 1950, the average income per head in Latin America was 25 percent of the United States (while in Asia it was 10 percent...
...So has hyperinfl ation...
...The escape valve of emigration is important not merely for poor countries like Bolivia or Ecuador but even in relatively sophisticated societies like Mexico, Colombia, or Costa Rica...
...One of them is Michael Reid, a British journalist married to a Peruvian who, for many years, has reported on the region for the Economist...
...But he discards cultural and historical explanations, even though he fails to come up with a satisfactory alternative...
...In fact, it reads like back issues of Reid’s magazine, stitched together and perhaps expanded at greater length...
...it is written in the Economist’s house style: a confl ation of condescension, hard economic data, and on-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand pronouncements which seem always somehow to come down (just barely) on the side of optimism...
...The thesis of the book—it can be easily discerned from the subtitle—is that Latin America is at an institutional fork in the road...
...But a careful reading of Reid’s survey, which admittedly covers a huge and complex area, nonetheless leads to one dismal conclusion...
...Police lack clues in the case of the murder of a former Ecuadorian congressman...
...To this end he has penned this book—a vast tour d’horizon chock-full of data, local color, Mark Falcoff, resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, is at work on a book about the Hispanosphere...
...Recently, for example, these were the lead stories: “Rosales [leader of the opposition in Venezuela] denounces kidnappings by the FARC [the Colombian guerrillas] in Venezuela...
...Reid says that the good news about the region is that the swing of the pendulum between weak civilian governments and incompetent (sometimes hideously repressive) military dictatorships has come to an end...
...As someone who has been following the Latin American prints for more than four decades, I can attest that these stories represent a quite typical diet of the daily news reports coming out of the huge continent to our immediate south...
...To be sure, Reid’s approach is not ideological...
...It is knowledgeable, trenchant, and for the most part eminently fair and objective...
...Not that this is all bad...
...the one that follows will no doubt be taken to task for excessive meddling and lack of “mutual respect...
...No wonder investors have misplaced the region’s collective phone number...
...It is refreshing, in a book of this sort, to see that the usual rosary of accusations against the United States is missing...
...The fundamental problem is not the faux-r?volutionisme of populist demagogues, who are bound to come to a bad end, but the highly unsatisfactory performance of the new democracies...
...In the same year it was estimated that remittances to their home countries amounted to $54 billion, which is to say, more than all the foreign direct investment and foreign aid to the region combined...
...One way of fi nding out is to go to the website of the Spanish edition of the Miami Herald...
...Former vice-president denounces electoral fraud in Paraguay...
...The Bush administration stands condemned for failing to give Latin America the priority it imagines it is due...
...But as he points out, “It is neither poor enough to attract pity and aid, nor dangerous enough to excite strategic calculation, nor until recently has it grown enough economically to quicken board room pulses...
...He does, however, more broadly grasp the central paradox of interAmerican relations...
...Reid carefully dispenses with this argument, even to the point of defending the much-maligned “Washington Consensus...
...almost all are affl icted by racial and social divisions and discrimination, exemplifi ed by the fact that educational budgets— as, indeed, most government benefi ts, including social security and pensions—are tilted towards a small but still sizable “white” or “near-white” minority...
...In fact, as Reid notes, the only serious revolution of which Latin America seems capable is out-migration...
...the other is the search for peaceful cooperation...
...In 2005, an astounding 22 million Latin Americans worked in the developed world, having arrived there legally or illegally, followed by another 3-5 million who now work in more prosperous neighboring countries, such as Bolivians who emigrate to Chile or Paraguayans to Brazil...
...And back again...
...Even in the best of cases one is left with scattered archipelagos of progress in a huge sea of mediocrity and stagnation...
...Forgotten Continent is probably the best general book currently available on Latin America, and one not likely to be superseded for some time...
...While there have been periodic attacks on vested privilege—in Mexico, Peru, Argentina, or Nicaragua, for example—rather than creating new and lasting opportunities for the landless or unemployed, they have usually ended up leaving the entire society poorer or, in the best of cases, simply creating a new class of well-connected generals and politicians who are entrepreneurs...
...Whatever is wrong with Latin America is the fault of the United States—either by intervening in matters that don’t concern it, or by failing to embrace the region’s problems as its own...
...At this writing at least one out of every ten Argentines lives in Europe, Canada, or the United States...
...In spite of this discouraging picture, some people seem to think that, with all our other problems, we should be spending far more time agonizing about the fate of these dysfunctional societies...
...The truth is that these are conquest societies, orphans of long-disappeared empires who lack any vision of a national project, or commitment to it (Brazil is a possible exception) or even, in many cases, any clear notion of national identity...
...Reid is not optimistic about the possibilities of populism resolving the region’s problems, even in countries like Venezuela that are currently awash in petrodollars...
...This is the fate that undoubtedly awaits Cuba once the Castro brothers have departed...
...Young people all over the continent dream of leaving, and many do...
...But his metaphorical fork in the road is more imaginary than real...
...Whether in the case of Latin America such optimism is justifi ed is quite another matter...
...I’ve got a problem...
...Six bodies bound in a shallow grave in Northern Mexico [apparently members of the Ju?rez narco-cartel...
...Huge arsenal discovered in a Honduran jail...
...Actually, he might have said, both at the same time...
...Many Latin American politicians and their epigones in the American academy blame everything on “neo-liberalism”—that is, the free market reforms enacted in the go-go 1990s...
...Here and there he fi nds bright spots in all the crucial areas—economic policy, rule of law, governance, even education— and obviously some countries (notably Chile and, to some extent, Brazil) are doing much better than others...
...observations, and economic analysis...
...One path has been taken by the fragile but sometimes determined efforts at democracy by about a dozen countries, led by Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and Uruguay, followed at some distance by countries like Peru, most of Central America, and Paraguay...
...What’s the problem...
...Why outsiders should try to solve the Latin American conundrum when so many Latins themselves have all but given up on it is a question that this otherwise comprehensive book fails to address...
...Not at all...
...Who will want to bother to plow through its 400 pages (some rather long on facts and fi gures) is hard to say...
...Not surprisingly, Latin America as a whole has lost signifi cant geopolitical weight over the last four decades...
...In that regard he is quite right, and he has plenty of facts and fi gures to back him up...
...But in 2000, Latin America had dropped to 20 percent of its northern neighbor while Asia had risen to a full 25 percent...
...Some, like Bolivia, are merely geographical expressions rather than real countries...
...what are you going to do about it...
...Reid notes, for example, that intervention is only one side of American policy...
...too many crucial national issues are solved privately or en familia...
...The bad news is that these societies—even ones ruled by more or less civilized rules of the electoral game—are still vastly underperforming compared with their (theoretical) potential...
...as publishers and agents have been telling me for years, books on Latin America appeal only to a leftwing market—and not a very large one at that...
...The other has been taken by republics that have succumbed to the populist temptation—led, of course, by Venezuela’s clownish dictatorpresident Hugo Ch?vez, but followed closely by Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, and the on-again/offagain Kirchners in Argentina...
...As noted earlier, Reid is troubled by our current lack of interest in the region, and thinks that more attention and resources need to be devoted to it, not just by the United States but by the European Union as well...
...This, together with its deteriorating infrastructure, declining physical security, and loss of global competitiveness condemns Latin America to permanent residence in the slummy suburbs of Western civilization—an admittedly unenviable position, but one apparently determined by its tragic history...
...namely, the onagain off-again Latin complaints against Washington...
...Venezuela and Colombia on the verge of breaking diplomatic relations...
...responsibility for the coups in Chile and Brazil—on others he is quite wrong...
Vol. 13 • May 2008 • No. 34
