Why are Latins 'backward'?
ABRAMS, ELLIOTT
Why Are Latins 'Backward'? Not Enough Protestants, Too Many Intellectuals By Elliott Abrams As Lawrence Harrison reminds us in The Pan-American Dream, Latin America nas been getting bad press...
...John Womack, the Harvard Mexico expert, who taught that the best way for Americans to help Mexico "is to dedicate themselves to a profound democratic reform"—of the United States—"with the goal of installing some kind of socialism...
...But Harrison has only a vague idea of how the great mass of Latins is to become "modern...
...Most Mexican intellectuals, Harrison writes, "have spent the last four decades contriving specious theories that blamed Mexico's ills on the United States...
...Harrison is as big a booster of Protestantism as Jerry Fal-well...
...var, the Liberator, predicted the region would "ineluctably fall under the domination of obscure small tyrants of every color and race," and concluded that the wisest course for a Latin American was to emigrate...
...and Jews, Arabs, and (recently) Koreans all over the place...
...While Ibero-Catholic culture helps explain Latin America's comparative backwardness, meddlesome intellectuals peddled "costly nonsense" that has wrought immense harm...
...For the different paths taken by North American and Latin American countries since independence, he offers a very simple cause: "the strikingly different values, attitudes, and institutions that have flowed from the Anglo-Protestant and Ibero-Catholic traditions...
...Until recently, they've been right...
...Moreover, he has said much of this before, and Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind (1985) is a better presentation of his overall views about culture and development...
...Harrison emerges reasonably optimistic about Latin America...
...Richard Fagen of Stanford, who wrote that "muckraking and informational activity" that was admittedly "less than scholarly by conventional definitions'' was necessary to check "the worst excesses of American power, whether perpetrated by the Marines or by the multinationals...
...Simon BoliElliott Abrams is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...Thomas Jefferson worried tnat the ''priest-ridden" Spanish colonies, if liberated, would "become the murderous tools of their respective Bonapartes...
...Not Enough Protestants, Too Many Intellectuals By Elliott Abrams As Lawrence Harrison reminds us in The Pan-American Dream, Latin America nas been getting bad press for a long time...
...He is right to focus on building schools and courthouses, and equally correct to note the importance of policies that reward saving and protect property rights...
...Since almost none of them have had the good manners to admit they were wrong, Harrison identifies the very worst of them: • Raul Prebisch, the Argentine economist...
...He thinks Protestantism is a sure-fire way to convert Latins to better behavior...
...So is immigration...
...Under this theory, the United States profited from Latin backwardness, and kept the Third World in penury as a matter of deliberate policy...
...Harrison, a former USAID mission director in Haiti and Nicaragua, has spent the last decade asking why some cultures prosper and others flounder...
...Swiss, Italians, and Japanese in Brazil...
...Protestants," he says, "generally attach higher importance to work, education, sobriety, honesty, and community responsibility...
...Still, The Pan-American Dream is a useful reminder that liberty and the free market depend ultimately on what people believe, not on what their governments enact...
...His suggestions, such as improving Latin judiciaries and universities and building up the non-governmental sector, are solid...
...Prebisch headed the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, where he taught "dependency theory" to thousands of disciples...
...Immigrants carry a culture of resourcefulness with them, and those Latins who convert to Protestantism can be expected to take on Protestant ways...
...His book has other weaknesses: Chapters on drug trafficking and on U.S...
...immigration policy seem more like an editor's idea of what's hot than organic parts of Harrison's argument about modernization in Latin America...
...If he is optimistic about Brazil and Chile, it is in part because of the rise of Protestantism there, while the weakness of Protestantism in Mexico helps explain its very slow transformation...
...And that is not to forget the Ford Foundation, which paid for most of this destructive theorizing and self-promotion...
...But Cas-taneda, who once wrote that "democracy is in absolute contradiction with capitalism," has consistently been among the most strident...
...Harrison notes that Latin America's entrepreneurial classes consist disproportionately of foreigners: Basques in Chile...
...Today their theories have been junked and their greatest works are laughable, but on they go, pontificating, getting grants, being interviewed by CNN and the New York Times for their expertise on Latin American life...
...The only irredeemably sick culture Harrison shows us is that of the leftist intellectuals who foisted their pet theories on the Latin countries for several damaging decades...
...Jorge Castaneda, the occasional Newsweek columnist and former Carnegie fellow...
...On how to transform the culture, however, Harrison has little to offer beyond suggesting that foreign-aid donors conduct "values and attitude research" and include "analysis of traditional child-rearing practices...
...One of his disciples, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, is now president of Brazil—and doing a decent job of it, too—but not too many years ago sought to cure Latin underdevelopment by constructing "paths to socialism...
...Latin culture can change, as we have seen in Spain...
...Culture being all-important, an official embrace of democratic capitalism is only a start...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 20
