If you read one book about Latin America, make sure it isn’t Open Veins of Latin America. Michael Reid’s book – Forgotten Continent – is far more balanced and analytical.
“The main argument of this book is that for the first time in Latin America’s history, genuine and durable mass democracies have emerged across much of the region,” writes Reid, who was the Americas editor for The Economist and a reporter for the BBC.
The present unrest in neighbouring Venezuela might seem to falsify Reid’s prediction but, in fact, the late Hugo Chavez was already on the wrong side of history, as his successor Nicolas Maduro is now. “A sense of perspective is important,” Reid points out; “two generations ago a majority of Latin Americans lived in semi-feudal conditions in the countryside; little more than a generation ago, many were being murdered because of their political beliefs.”
The book’s 12 chapters cover the colonisation of the continent by Spain, the Cold War period, the impact of the Washington Consensus, populism in various South American nations, and the reformist movement in economics and politics.
Reid hold that “the legacy of the Iberian colonial order [made Latin America] ill-equipped for democracy and development.” The Spanish brought traditions of a militarised feudalism, a “militant intolerant Catholicism,” and mercantilism – the doctrine that trade was a zero-sum game so gold and silver were the ultimate sources of wealth rather than being commodities. This colonial heritage led directly, according to Reid, to centralisation, a lack of sharp demarcation between the executive and the judiciary, and what he calls “regulatory mania.”
“Legislation in Latin America often embodies an ideal world, impossible to carry out in practice,” he writes – a point worth noting for those who like to cite utopian theory as though it justifies totalitarian practice. Reid describes the main academic school of Latin American politics, dependency theory, as “a theory in search of facts.” This theory, he says, has also served to prop up what economists call the natural resource myth – the view that wealth is inherent in minerals rather than in productivity of a populace. Here, ideologues usually use this argument about Africa rather than Latin America.
Reid’s conclusion is that “the current democratic wave in Latin America is quantitatively different from those that went before, in at least four ways.” He argues that the pendulum between dictatorship and democracy has stopped, there is universal suffrage, decentralisation, and deeper democracy (as suggested by the prosecution for former politicians, a state that our country has yet to achieve).
Reid is the consummate journalist, having a clear grasp of economic and political theories, knowledgeable about history, and able to write clearly and concisely. Perhaps this is why his book is not so well-known as Open Veins, written by the Uruguayan Marxist journalist Eduardo Galeano, who Reid describes as “a writer of brilliance and passion.” But his history, he says, “is that of the propagandist, a potent mix of selective truths, exaggerations and falsehood, caricature and conspiracy theory.”
That ideological approach, unfortunately, more readily finds favour among academic types here than rigorous argument.
REVIEW BY KEVIN BALDEOSINGH
BOOK INFO
Forgotten Continent
Michael Reid.
Yale University Press, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0300116168; 400 pages.