Dictatorship in South America

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Dependency, Development, and Liberation

Latin America in the Cold War

How does a country develop? Is economic development simply created by a free marketplace? Or is it possible to accelerate development by guiding the market? If so, how can a government engineer that development? In the twentieth century, these were among the most pressing questions facing Latin America, and the answers to them had enormous consequences.

At the beginning of the century, liberalism was the predominant political and economic ideology in Latin America. It entailed constitutional republican government whose role was to preserve order, protect private property, and promote free trade. In practice, this meant that a handful of people controlled farmland, mines, mills, and the labor to exploit them. This minority profited by exporting agricultural commodities and minerals, while importing manufactured goods. It was a system that placed great wealth in a few hands, and its critical integer was cheap labor. The patrons of the economic system were also the directors of the political system.

By the middle decades of the century, social groups including women, urban workers, and rural laborers, pressed for political and economic inclusion. At the same time, Latin Americans began to ask whether it was possible to catch up with wealthy, powerful, and industrialized nations like the United States, Britain, Germany, or Japan. The dual impulses of political inclusion and economic growth were interrelated, and a new kind of politician, populists, learned to tap the groundswell of new voters and the appeal of economic development. Populist politicians cultivated a mass following by promising rights to workers, access to health and education, industrialization, and rising wages. In Brazil, Getúlio Vargas played this role in the 1950s, building on the base of labor legislation and state sanctioned unions he created during 15 years of mostly dictatorial rule (1930–45). Argentina had one of the most charismatic populists, Juan Perón (1946–55). Chile, by contrast, had little populist experience because traditional political parties expanded their appeal to workers, producing electoral competition between its center Christian Democratic Party and leftist groups like the Socialist Party, which culminated in the presidential election of Salvador Allende (1970–3).

By the end of the Second World War, Latin Americans faced a transcendent question: what is the path to development? And this question begat two difficult ones: Who bears the costs? And who reaps the rewards? The answers to the first question reflected a broad consensus: the state must act where the market had failed to propel economic development. But the second set of questions were divisive: any development plan confronted the gulf between those who traditionally held wealth and political power, and those who did not.

What did development mean? It was the response to underdevelopment, which had many facets. Economically, underdevelopment meant reliance on export agriculture sustained by impoverished rural laborers, as well as reliance on imported technology, manufactured goods, and capital. It also meant deficient infrastructure. Take Brazil as an example: much of its territory was unreachable by road. Its rail lines and highways were inadequate and badly conserved. The reach of electricity, telephone, telegraph, as well as water and sewer treatment was restricted to urban areas in a country where the majority of the national territory and population were rural. Politically and socially, it meant weak institutions with a limited reach. Education and access to healthcare were restricted: in 1950, 57% of Brazilians were illiterate (and consequently lacked the right to vote). The armed forces lacked capacity, training, and equipment. Adding to these challenges, Brazil’s population was exploding: Of 52 million inhabitants in 1950, more than half were under the age of 20.

“Developmentalism” was the art of correcting underdevelopment. Among 1950s U.S. intellectuals, modernization theory was an especially influential vision of development which was based on the assumption that underdeveloped societies faced a lag relative to developed societies. It presumed a linear path of evolution in which the United States sat hierarchically above Latin America. Under this model, which became the logic of U.S. foreign assistance programs during much of the Cold War (1945–90), societies like Argentina, Brazil, and Chile should embark on projects to become more like the United States. Understandably, this model appealed to mid-century U.S. intellectuals and policymakers. In Latin America, modernization theory and its colonialist implications, held less sway.

The most powerful diagnoses of underdevelopment and its remedies came from Latin America itself, especially the social scientists associated with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), headquartered in Santiago, Chile, and directed between 1950 and 1963 by Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch. Prebisch’s approach, structuralism, interpreted the world as divided between a core (countries which were capital rich and industrialized), and a periphery (poor countries which relied on exports of raw materials, and were politically and economically vulnerable to the influence of core nations). For Prebisch, Latin American countries could not industrialize just by following liberal free-market rules. Instead, industrialization needed a push by the state through a process called import-substitution industrialization (ISI). This could be achieved through tariff barriers to keep imports out, as well as state financing or even ownership of industry. Prebisch’s ideas were a located between liberal thought and more radical developmentalist thinking. For instance, he believed ISI had to be balanced with private ownership, free trade, and limited public spending.

Prebisch’s approach became a springboard for a new interpretation of development and underdevelopment called dependency theory, pioneered by later generations of social scientists affiliated with ECLA. Dependency theorists offered a new diagnosis of the conditions that made that role necessary: industrialized countries in the northern hemisphere prevented the industrialization of countries in the southern hemisphere. Dependency theory was largely the opposite of modernization theory: it saw the terms of the relationship of countries like Argentina to countries like the United States as a perverse engine that inhibited development and reinforced inequality in Latin America. It was also pessimistic that development could be achieved under capitalism.

Dependency theorists drew from Marxism as well as from Prebisch’s structuralism. They believed the relationship between core and periphery trapped Latin America in poverty and underdevelopment. Specifically, trade between the United States and countries like Argentina, Brazil, or Chile was governed by “unequal exchange” between the low value of agricultural and mineral exports relative to the high value of manufactured imports. This unequal exchange was dynamic: over time, the value of agricultural goods continued to decrease relative to the value of industrial goods.1 In other words, Chile would have to export many, many grapes in order for a few Chileans to afford a car imported from the United States. In turn, exporting cars meant that many more people in the United States could afford Chilean grapes. Dependency theory explained that this growing differential trapped these countries in underdevelopment.

The solution to this problem, according to structuralists and dependency theorists was to replace the free-market doctrine of promoting the export of commodities for which they had a comparative market advantage (like coffee or copper) with policies such as ISI, fostering the creation of domestic industry. Dependency theorists went further, stressing social and economic reforms to combat poverty, such as land redistribution. These perspectives were widely shared: Prebisch was Argentine, Chile was the host of ECLA, and many influential dependency theorists were Brazilian, including Celso Furtado, who would serve as minister of planning (1962–3) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who would be the first elected Brazilian president to serve his full term after the end of military rule (1994–2002), though by this point he had renounced the theories he pioneered. Not all Latin Americans were dependency theorists, and disputes about the path to development paved the road to dictatorship, as three examples show.

In Brazil, the debate over oil exploration exemplified divergent paths to development. Nationalists like populist Getúlio Vargas rallied around the slogan “the oil is ours!” and sought to create a state monopoly to control the new industry. Since oil was a strategic resource, it should not be owned by foreigners, nor should foreigners reap the profits from extracting and refining Brazilian oil for Brazilian consumers. Conservative opponents argued for foreign investment: it was foreign companies, not the state, which had the capital and the technology to develop the oil industry. The outcome was a compromise: a new state company, Petrobras, held a monopoly over extraction but shared refining and distribution with private (mostly foreign) companies. The debate over oil reflected the ongoing political struggle over the development.

In Argentina, populist Juan Perón nationalized industries and pushed ISI to a degree well beyond that advocated by structuralists and dependency theorists. Prebisch disagreed with Perón’s takeover of the Central Bank (which Prebisch...