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Geography.pdf

5 REGIONS

THE NORTH THE WEST THE SOUTH BRAZIL

CONCEPTS, IDEAS, AND TERMS

● The growing power of indigenous peoples: “Latin” America no more ● Democracy gains, but not without setbacks ● Tentative efforts toward economic integration: China lends a hand ● Chile: Star of the realm ● The poor performance of rich Argentina ● Brazil: Superpower in the making?

In This Chapter

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1 Altiplano 2 Land alienation 3 Plural society 4 Commercial agriculture 5 Subsistence agriculture 6 Free Trade Area of the Americas

(FTAA) 7 Urbanization 8 Rural-to-urban migration 9 Megacity

10 “Latin” American City model 11 Informal sector 12 Barrio (favela) 13 Insurgent state 14 Failed state 15 Von Thünen model 16 El Niño 17 Forward capital 18 Cerrado

19 Growth-pole concept

Photos: © H. J. de Blij

FIGURE 5-1 © H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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OF ALL THE continents, South America has themost familiar shape—a giant triangle con- nected by mainland Middle America’s tenuous land bridge to its neighbor in the north. South America also lies not only south but mostly east of its northern coun- terpart. Lima, the capital of Peru—one of the conti- nent’s westernmost cities—lies farther east than Miami, Florida. Thus South America juts out much more prominently into the Atlantic Ocean toward southern Europe and Africa than does North America. But lying so far eastward means that South America’s western flank faces a much wider Pacific Ocean, with the dis- tance from Peru to Australia nearly twice that from Cal- ifornia to Japan.

As if to reaffirm South America’s northward and eastward orientation, the western margins of the con- tinent are rimmed by one of the world’s longest and highest mountain ranges, the Andes, a gigantic wall that extends unbroken from Tierra del Fuego near the continent’s southern tip in Chile to northeastern Venezuela in the far north (Fig. 5-1). The other major physiographic feature of South America dominates its central north—the Amazon Basin; this vast humid- tropical amphitheater is drained by the mighty Ama- zon River, which is fed by several major tributaries. Much of the remainder of the continent can be classi- fied as plateau, with the most important components being the Brazilian Highlands that cover most of Brazil southeast of the Amazon Basin, the Guiana Highlands located north of the lower Amazon Basin, and the cold Patagonian Plateau that blankets the southern third of Argentina. Figure 5-1 also reveals two other note- worthy river basins beyond Amazonia: the Paraná-

1. South America’s physiography is dominated by the Andes Mountains in the west and the Amazon Basin in the central north. Much of the remain- der is plateau country.

2. Almost half of the realm’s area and just over half of its total population are concentrated in one country—Brazil.

3. South America’s population remains concentrat- ed along the continent’s periphery. Most of the interior is sparsely peopled, but sections of it are now undergoing significant development.

4. Interconnections among the states of the realm are improving rapidly. Economic integration has become a major force, particularly in southern South America.

5. Regional economic contrasts and disparities, both in the realm as a whole and within individ- ual countries, remain strong.

6. Cultural pluralism exists in almost all of the realm’s countries and is often expressed regionally.

7. Rapid urban growth continues to mark much of the South American realm, and urbanization over- all is today on a par with the levels of the United States and Western Europe.

S o u t h A m e r i c a

MAJOR GEOGRAPHIC QUALITIES OF

Defining the Realm South America is a realm in dramatic transition, and it is not clear where this transition will lead. During much of the twentieth century, South American countries were in frequent political turmoil. Dictatorial regimes ruled from one end of the realm to the other; unstable gov- ernments fell with damaging frequency. Widespread poverty, harsh regional disparities, poor internal surface connections, limited international contact, and econom- ic stagnation prevailed.

Entering the second decade of the twenty-first centu- ry, things were quite different. Democracy had taken hold almost everywhere. Long-isolated countries were becom- ing more interconnected through new transport routes

and trade agreements. New settlement frontiers were being opened. Energy resources, some long exploited and others newly discovered, boosted national economies when world prices rose. Foreign states and corporations appeared on the scene to buy commodities and invest in infrastructure. The pace of globalization increased from Bogotá to Buenos Aires.

But these exciting developments must be seen against a backdrop of persistent problems. The realm’s giant, Brazil, is embarked on a program of land reform, a cam- paign against poverty, and an effort to maintain financial rigor that have all run up against endemic corruption in government. The economy of Argentina is just recover-

Paraguay Basin of south-central South America, and the Orinoco Basin in the far north that drains interior Colombia and Venezuela.

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F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“From this high vantage point I got a good perspective of a valley near Pisac in the Peruvian Andes, not far from Cuzco. This was part of the Incan domain when the Spaniards arrived to overthrow the empire, but the terraces you can see actually predate the Inca period. Human occupation in these rugged mountains is very old, and undoubtedly the physiography here changed over time. Today these slopes are arid and barren, and only a few hardy trees survive; the stream in the valley bottom is all the water in sight. But when the terrace builders transformed these slopes, the climate may have been more moist, the countryside greener.” © Courtesy Philip L. Keating.

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builders whose stone structures (among which Machu Picchu near Cuzco is the most famous), roads, and bridges helped unify their vast empire; they also proved themselves to be efficient administrators, successful farmers and herders, and skilled manufacturers; scholars

ing after an implosion that shook the country to its core. Whereas Chile is the realm’s success story, emerging from the horrors of the Pinochet era as a stable and vibrant democracy with a thriving economy, neighbor- ing Bolivia is in the grip of a social revolution arising in part from the realization of its energy riches. And on the north coast lies Venezuela, its oil reserves among the largest in the world (and by far the largest in the realm) and its political life dominated by a one-time coup leader whose closest ideological ally is Cuba’s communist ruler and whose major adversary is the U.S. government.

Today, the United States hopes to foster democracy and encourage regional economic integration, but many South Americans remember past U.S. toleration of, and even support for, the realm’s former dictators. Venezuela’s populist leader champions the poor and uses oil income to counter American influence, campaigning vigorously against the notion of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and warning South American governments against capitalist plots. Such advice finds a ready market because the great majority of South Americans remain mired in poverty. By some measures, the disparity be- tween rich and poor is wider in this realm than in any other, and wealth is disproportionately concentrated in the hands of a small minority (the richest 20 percent of the realm’s inhabitants control 70 percent, while the poorest 20 percent own 2 percent). The question of the day is whether South America can sustain its progress against political, ideological, and economic odds.

STATES ANCIENT AND MODERN

Thousands of years before the first European invaders appeared on the shores of South America, peoples now referred to as Amerindians had migrated into the conti- nent via North and Middle America and founded soci- eties in coastal valleys, in river basins, on plateaus, and in mountainous locales. These societies achieved differ- ent and remarkable adaptations to their diverse natural environments, and by about one thousand years ago, a number of regional cultures thrived in the elongated val- leys between mountain ranges of the Andes from pre- sent-day Colombia southward to Bolivia and Chile. These high-altitude valleys, called altiplanos, provided fertile soils, reliable water supplies, building materials, and natural protection to their inhabitants.

The Inca State

One of these altiplanos, at Cuzco in what is now Peru, became the core area of South America’s greatest indige- nous empire, that of the Inca. The Inca were expert

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America, but the great majority of the settlers stayed on or near the coast, as is reflected in the current map (Fig. 5-3). Almost all of the realm’s major cities have coastal or near-coastal locations, and the current pop- ulation distribution map gives you the impression of a continent yet to be penetrated and inhabited. But look carefully at Figure 5-3, and you will see a swath of population well inland from the coastal settle- ments, most clearly in Peru but also northward into Ecuador and southward into Bolivia. That is the lega- cy of the Inca Empire and its incorporated peoples, surviving in their mountainous redoubt and still num- bering in the millions.

studied the heavens, and physicians even experimented with brain surgery. Great military strategists, the Inca integrated the peoples they vanquished into a stable and well-functioning state, an amazing accomplishment given the high-relief terrain they had to contend with.

As a minority ruling elite in their far-flung empire, the Inca were at the pinnacle in their rigidly class-structured, highly centralized society. So centralized and authori- tarian was their state that a takeover at the top was enough to gain immediate power over all of it—as a small army of Spanish invaders discovered in the 1530s. The European invasion brought a quick end to thousands of years of Amerindian cultural development and changed the map forever.

The Population Map— Then and Now

If we were able to reconstruct a map of South America’s population before the arrival of the Europeans (a “pre- Columbian” map, as it would be called), it would look quite different from the current map (Fig. 5-2). Indigenous Amerindian societies in- habited not only the Andes and adja- cent lowlands but also riverbanks in the Amazon Basin, where settlements numbering in the thousands subsisted on fishing and farming. They did not shy away from harsh environments such as those of the island of Tierra del Fuego in the far south, where the fires they kept going against the bitter cold led the Europeans to name the place “land of fire.”

Today the map looks quite differ- ent. Many of the indigenous soci- eties succumbed to the European invaders, not just through warfare but also because of the diseases the Hispanic conquerors brought with them. Geographers estimate that 90 percent of native Amazonians died within a few years of contact, and the peoples of Tierra del Fuego also are no longer there to build their fires. From one end of South Amer- ica to the other, the European arrival spelled disaster.

Spanish and Portuguese colonists penetrated the interior of South

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CHIBCHA 1200–1538 A.D.

CHAVIN 1000–500

B.C.

Machu Picchu Cuzco

INCA 1200–1535 A.D.

Bogotá

Quito

Tumbes

Bahia

Rio de Janeiro São Paulo

Buenos Aires

Belém

Lima

Santiago

Tordesillas Line (1494)

Caracas

TIAHUANACO 600–1000 A.D.

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INDIGENOUS AND COLONIAL DOMAINS OF

SOUTH AMERICA Peoples of the Caribbean fringe

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Amerindian Reawakening

As we note in the regional discussion, South America’s long-downtrodden Amerindians are staging a social, political, and economic awakening. They are not alone in this—in Chapter 4 we saw the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico’s Chiapas State achieve national atten- tion—but they have begun to realize their potential in several South American countries where their numbers translate into strength. Mexico’s Amerindian population represents less than one-third of the total, but Peru’s Amerindians constitute about 45 percent, and in Bolivia they are in the majority at 55 percent.

Today, Amerindian political lead- ers are emerging to bring the plight of the realm’s indigenous peoples not only to local but also to interna- tional attention. Amerindians were conquered, decimated by foreign di- seases, robbed of their best lands, subjected to forced labor, denied the right to grow their traditional crops, socially discriminated against, and swindled out of their fair share of the revenues from resources in their tra- ditional domains. They may still be the poorest of the realm’s poor, but they are now asserting themselves. For some states in this realm, the consequences of this movement will be far-reaching.

The Iberian Invaders

The modern map of South America (Fig. 5-4) started to take shape when the Iberian colonists began to understand the location and eco- nomies of the Amerindian soci- eties. The Inca, like Mexico’s Maya and Aztec peoples, had accumulat- ed gold and silver at their head- quarters, possessed productive farmlands, and constituted a ready labor force. Not long after the de- feat of the Aztecs in 1521, Francis- co Pizarro sailed southward along the continent’s northwestern coast, learned of the existence of the Inca Empire, and withdrew to Spain to organize its overthrow. He returned to the Peruvian coast in 1531 with

183 men and two dozen horses, and the events that fol- lowed are well known. In 1533, his party rode victori- ous into Cuzco.

At first, the Spaniards kept the Incan imperial struc- ture intact by permitting the crowning of an emperor who was under their control. But soon the breakdown of the old order began. The new order that gradually emerged in western South America placed the indige- nous peoples in serfdom to the Spaniards. Great hacien- das were formed by land alienation (the takeover of indigenously held land by foreigners), taxes were insti- tuted, and a forced-labor system was introduced to max- imize the profits of exploitation.

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SOUTH AMERICA: POPULATION DISTRIBUTION, 2010

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a Portuguese sphere of influence because Spain and Portugal had signed a treaty in 1494 to recog- nize a north-south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands as the boundary between their New World spheres of influ- ence. This border ran approxi- mately along the meridian of 50°W longitude, thereby cutting off a sizeable triangle of eastern South America for Portugal’s exploitation (Fig. 5-2). But a brief look at the political map of South America (Fig. 5-4) shows that this treaty did not limit Portuguese colonial territory to the east of the 50th meridian. Instead, Brazil’s boundaries were bent far inland to include almost the entire Amazon Basin, and the country came to be only slightly smaller in territorial size than all the other South Am- erican countries combined. This westward thrust was the result of Portuguese and Brazilian penetra- tion, particularly by the Paulistas, the settlers of São Paulo who needed Amerindian slave labor to run their plantations.

The Africans

As Figure 5-2 shows, the Spaniards initially got very much the better of the territorial partitioning of

South America—not just in land quality but also in the size of the aboriginal labor force. When the Portuguese began to develop their territory, they turned to the same lucrative activity that their Spanish rivals had pursued in the Caribbean—the plantation cultivation of sugar for the European market. And they, too, found their labor force in the same source region, as millions of Africans (nearly half of all who came to the Americ- as) were brought in bondage to the tropical Brazilian coast north of Rio de Janeiro. Not surprisingly, Brazil now has South America’s largest black population, which is still heavily concentrated in the country’s poverty-stricken northeastern States. With Brazilians of direct or mixed African ancestry today accounting for nearly half of the population of 201 million, the Africans decidedly constitute the third major immi- gration of foreign peoples into South America.

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IquitosGuayaq uil

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Fortaleza

Belém São Luís

Teresina Recife

Maceió

Maracaibo Maracay Barquisimeto

Valencia

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Tucumán

Rio de Janeiro

Bahía Blanca

Rosario

Mendoza

Concepción

Valparaíso Córdoba

Falkland Islands (U.K.)

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Buenos Aires MontevideoSantiago

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La Paz

Lima

Quito

Bogotá

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ECUADOR

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São José dos CamposCuritiba

Bucaramanga

National capitals are underlined

POPULATION

SOUTH AMERICA: POLITICAL UNITS AND MODERN REGIONS

The North

The West

The South

Brazil

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50,000–250,000

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Lima, the west-coast headquarters of the Spanish con- querors, soon became one of the richest cities in the world, its wealth based on the exploitation of vast Andean silver deposits. The city also served as the cap- ital of the viceroyalty of Peru, as the Spanish authorities quickly integrated the new possession into their colonial empire (Fig. 5-2). Subsequently, when Colombia and Venezuela came under Spanish control and, later, when Spanish settlement expanded in what is now Argentina and Uruguay, two additional viceroyalties were added to the map: New Granada and La Plata.

Portuguese Brazil

Meanwhile, another vanguard of the Iberian invasion was penetrating the east-central part of the continent, the coastlands of present-day Brazil. This area had become

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Longstanding Isolation

Despite their adjacent location on the same continent, their common language and cultural heritage, and their shared national problems, the countries that arose out of South America’s Spanish viceroyalties (along with Brazil) until quite recently existed in a considerable degree of isolation from one another. Distance and phys- iographic barriers reinforced this separation, and the realm’s major population agglomerations still adjoin the coast, mainly the eastern and northern coasts (Fig. 5-3). The viceroyalties existed primarily to extract riches and fill Spanish coffers. In Iberia there was little interest in developing the American lands for their own sake. Only after those who had made Spanish and Portuguese Amer- ica their home and who had a stake there rebelled against Iberian authority did things begin to change, and then very slowly. Thus South America was saddled with the values, economic outlook, and social attitudes of eigh- teenth-century Iberia—not the best tradition from which to begin the task of forging modern nation-states.

Independence

Certain isolating factors had their effect even during the wars for independence. Spanish military strength was always concentrated at Lima, and those territories that lay farthest from their center of power—Argentina and Chile—were the first to establish their independence from Spain (in 1816 and 1818, respectively). In the north Simón Bolívar led the burgeoning independence move- ment, and in 1824 two decisive military defeats there spelled the end of Spanish power in South America.

This joint struggle, however, did not produce unity because no fewer than nine countries emerged from the three former viceroyalties. It is not difficult to understand why this fragmentation took place. With the Andes inter- vening between Argentina and Chile and the Atacama Desert between Chile and Peru, overland distances seemed even greater than they really were, and these obstacles to contact proved quite effective. Hence, from their outset the new countries of South America began to grow apart amid friction and even wars. Only within

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“Salvador is one of Brazil’s oldest and most vibrant cities. Magnificent churches, public buildings, and mansions were built during the time when this was, by many measures, the most important city in the Southern Hemisphere. Long the capital of Brazil, Salvador was the point of entry for tens of thousands of Africans, and the fortune-making plantation economy, augmented by the whaling industry, concentrated enormous wealth here, some of which went into the construction of an opulent city center. But fortunes change, Salvador lost its political as well as economic advantages, and the city fell into disrepair. Walking the streets of the old town in 1982, I noted the state of decay of much of Salvador’s architectural heritage and wondered about its survival: weathering in this tropical environment was destroying woodwork, façades, and roofs. But then the United Nations proclaimed Salva- dor’s old town a World Heritage site, and massive restoration began (left). By the late 1990s, much of the district had been revived (right), and tourism’s contribution to the local economy was on the rise.” © H. J. de Blij.

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the past two decades have the countries of this realm finally begun to recognize the mutual advantages of increasing cooperation and to make lasting efforts to steer their relationships in this direction.

CULTURAL FRAGMENTATION

When we speak of the interaction of South American countries, it is important to keep in mind just who does the interacting. The fragmentation of colonial South America into ten individual republics, and the subsequent postures of each of these states, was the work of a small minority that constituted the land- holding, upper-class elite. Thus in every country a vast majority—be they Amerindians in Peru or people of African descent in Brazil—could only watch as their European masters struggled with each other for su- premacy.

Using the Land

South America, then, is a continent of plural societies, where Amerindians of different cultures, Europeans from Iberia and elsewhere, Africans mainly from west- ern tropical Africa, and Asians from India, Japan, and Indonesia cluster in adjacent areas. The result is a cul- tural kaleidoscope of almost endless variety, whose internal divisions are also reflected in the realm’s eco- nomic landscape. This is readily visible in the map of South America’s dominant livelihood, agriculture (Fig. 5-5). Here commercial or market (for-profit) and subsistence (primarily for household use) agriculture exist side by side to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world. The geography of commercial agricultur- al systems (as shown by areas of soybean and non-soy grain production) was initially tied to the distribution of landholders of European background, while subsis- tence farming (such as highland mixed subsistence-mar- ket, agroforestry, and shifting cultivation) is associated with the spatial patterns of indigenous peoples as well as populations of African and Asian descent. Nonethe- less, these patterns are changing in this era of global- ization.

Cultural Landscapes

The cultural landscape of South America, similar to that of Middle America, is a layered one. Amerindians cul- tivated and crafted diverse landscapes throughout the continent, some producing greater impacts than others.

When the Europeans arrived, the cultural change that resulted from depopulation severely impacted the envi- ronment. Native peoples became minorities in their own lands, and Europeans introduced crops, animals, and ideas about land ownership and land use that changed South America irreversibly. They also brought in Africans from various parts of Subsaharan Africa. Europeans from non-Iberian Europe also started immigrating to South America, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. Japanese settlers arrived in Brazil and Peru dur- ing the same era. All of these elements have contributed to the present-day ethnic composition in this realm.

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Figure 5-6 shows the distinct concentrations of Am- erindian and African cultural dominance, as well as areas where these groups are hardly present and people of European ancestry dominate.

ECONOMIC INTEGRATION

As noted above, the separatism that has so long charac- terized international relations in this realm is giving way as South American countries discover the benefits of forg- ing new partnerships with one another. With mutually advantageous trade the catalyst, a new continentwide spir- it of cooperation is blossoming at every level. Periodic flareups of boundary disputes now rarely escalate into open conflict. Cross-border rail, road, and pipeline pro- jects, stalled for years, are multiplying steadily. In south- ern South America, five formerly contentious nations are developing the hidróvia (water highway), a system of river locks that is opening most of the Paraná-Paraguay Basin to barge transport. Investments today flow freely from one country to another, particularly in the agricul- tural sector. Similar ideas have been proposed to connect the Paraná-Paraguay rivers to the Amazon River system.

ARGEN T I NA

CHILE

ECUADOR

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VENEZUELA SURIN AM

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SOUTH AMERICA: DOMINANT ETHNIC

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Recognizing that free trade could solve many of the realm’s economic-geographic problems, governments are now pursuing several avenues of economic suprana- tionalism. In 2010, South America’s republics were affil- iating with the following major trading blocs:

• Mercosur/l (Mercosur in Spanish; Mercosul in Por- tuguese): Launched in 1995 by countries of the South- ern Cone and Brazil, this Common Market established a free-trade zone and customs union linking Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and now Venezuela. Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru are asso- ciate members. This organization is becoming the dominant free-trade organization for South America.

• Andean Community: Formed as the Andean Pact in 1969 but restarted in 1995 as a customs union with common tariffs for imports, this bloc is made up of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Venezuela was a member until it withdrew in 2006.

• Union of South American Nations (UNASUR): Founded in 2008 in Brasília, Brazil, the 12 independent countries of South America signed a treaty to create a union envisioned as similar to the European Union (see Chapter 1) with the goal of a continental parliament, a coordinated defense effort, one passport for all its cit- izens, and greater cooperation on infrastructure devel- opment. However, significant disagreement between member-states about details still puts these efforts years into the future. UNASUR had been preceded by the South American Community of Nations.

• Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA): The Unit- ed States and other NAFTA proponents have tried to move this hemispheric free-trade idea forward, but it has been resisted by peasants and workers in South Amer- ica, and formally opposed by Mercosur/l. As long as the terms of trade remain set by the North, the Southern partners will be reluctant to participate in this initiative.

URBANIZATION

As in most other realms, South Americans are leaving the land and moving to the cities. South America started rela- tively early in this urbanization process, which intensified throughout the twentieth century. With South America’s urban population now at 81 percent, the realm ranks with those of Europe and the United States. The urban popula- tion of South America has grown annually by about 5 per- cent since 1950, while the increase in rural areas was less than 2 percent. These numbers underscore not only the dimensions but also the durability of the rural-to-urban migration from the countryside to the cities.

FIGURE 5-6

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*As noted on page 20, a cartogram is a specially transformed map in which countries and cities are represented in proportion to their populations. Those containing large numbers are blown up in popu- lation space, while those containing lesser numbers are shrunk in size accordingly.

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“Two unusual perspectives of Rio de Janeiro form a reminder that here the wealthy live near the water in luxury high-rises, such as these overlooking Ipanema Beach, while the poor have million-dollar views from their hillslope favelas, such as Rocinho.” © H. J. de Blij.

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Regional Patterns

The generalized spatial pattern of South America’s urban transformation is displayed in Figure 5-7, which shows a cartogram of the continent’s population.* Here we see not only the realm’s countries in population- space relative to each other, but also the proportionate sizes of individual large cities within their total nation- al populations.

Regionally, southern South America is the most high- ly urbanized. Today in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, almost all of the population resides in cities. Ranking next in urbanization is Brazil. The next highest group of countries borders the Caribbean in the north. Not sur- prisingly, the Andean countries constitute the realm’s least urbanized zone. Figure 5-7 tells us a great deal about the relative positions of major metropolises in their countries. Three of them—Brazil’s São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and Argentina’s Buenos Aires—rank among the world’s megacities (cities whose populations exceed 10 million). But even in the Amazon Basin the population is now 70 percent urban.

Causes and Challenges of Cityward Migration

In South America, as in Middle America, Africa, and Asia, people are attracted to the cities and driven from the poverty of the rural areas. Both pull and push fac- tors are at work. Rural land reform has been slow in com- ing, and for this and other reasons every year tens of thousands of farmers simply give up and leave, seeing little or no possibility for economic advancement. The cities lure them because they are perceived to provide opportunity—the chance to earn a regular wage. Visions of education for their children, better medical care, up- ward social mobility, and the excitement of life in a big city draw hordes to places such as São Paulo and Caracas.

But the actual move can be traumatic. Cities in devel- oping countries are surrounded and often invaded by squalid slums, and this is where the urban immigrant most often finds a first—and frequently permanent— abode in a makeshift shack without even the most basic amenities and sanitary facilities. Unemployment is per- sistently high, often exceeding 25 percent of the avail- able labor force. But still the people come, hopeful for a better life, the overcrowding in the shantytowns wors- ens, and the threat of epidemic-scale disease (and other disasters) rises.

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The “Latin” American City Model

The urban experience in the South and Middle American realms varies because of diverse historical, cultural, and economic influences. Nonetheless, there are many com- mon threads that have prompted geographers to search for useful generalizations. One is the model of the intraurban spatial structure of the “Latin” American city proposed by Ernst Griffin and Larry Ford (Fig. 5-8).

Model and Reality As noted in Chapter 1, the idea behind a model is to create an idealized representation of reality, displaying as many key real-world elements as possible. In the case of South America’s cities, the basic spatial frame- work of city structure, which blends traditional ele- ments of South and Middle American culture with modernization forces now reshaping the urban scene, is a composite of radial sectors and concentric zones.

Rio de Janeiro

Buenos Aires

São Paulo

Lima

Bogotá

Santiago

Belo Horizonte

La Paz

Santa Cruz

Guayaquil

Quito

Cali

Medellín

CaracasMaracaíbo

Bucaramanga Barquisimeto

Barranquilla

Cartagena Valencia

Belém

Fortaleza

Recife

Maceió

Salvador

Brasília

Manaus

São Luís

Teresina

Goiânia

Campo Grande

Montevideo (Uru.)

Córdoba

Rosario

Campinas

Curitiba Santos

São José dos Campos

Pôrto Alegre

Mendoza

Maracay

Asunción

Valparaíso

Concepción

Arequipa

ARGENTINA

GUYANA SURINAME

FRENCH GUIANA

VENEZUELA

COLOMBIA

BRAZIL

BOLIVIA

PARAGUAY

CHILE URUGUAY

PERU

ECUADOR

5,000,000

1,000,000

Urban-Area Population

10,000,000

25,000,000

Country Population

500,000

5,000,000

POPULATION CARTOGRAM OF SOUTH AMERICA

Modified after Wilkie, 1984.

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Di sa

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pi ne

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Zone of In Situ Accretion

Zone of Peripheral Squatter Settlements

Central Business DistrictCBD

Commercial/Industrial

Elite Residential Sector

Zone of Maturity

A GENERALIZED MODEL OF LATIN AMERICAN CITY STRUCTURE

After Griffin and Ford, 1980.

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the Plaza de San Martín, flanked by impressive buildings but, unusual for such squares in Iberian America, carpeted with extensive lawns shaded by century-old trees. Getting a perspective of the plaza was difficult until I realized that you could get to the top of the ‘English Tower’ across the avenue you see in the foreground. From there, one can observe the prominent location occupied by the monument to the approximately 700 Argentinian military casualties of the Falklands War of 1982 (center), where an eternal flame behind a brass map of the islands symbolizes Argentina’s undiminished determination to wrest the islands from British control.” © H. J. de Blij.

Concept Caching

w w w. c o n c e p t c a c h i n g . c o m

Anchoring the model is the CBD, which is the prima- ry business, employment, and entertainment focus of the surrounding metropolis. The CBD contains many modern high-rise buildings but also mirrors its colonial

beginnings. As shown in Figure 4-4, by colonial law Spanish colonizers laid out their cities around a cen- tral square, or plaza, dominated by a church and gov- ernment buildings. Santiago’s Plaza de Armas, Bogotá’s Plaza Bolívar, and Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo are classic examples. The plaza was the hub of the city, which later outgrew its old center as new commercial dis- tricts formed nearby; but to this day the plaza remains an important link with the past (photo below).

Radiating outward from the urban core along the city’s most prestigious axis is the commercial spine, which is adjoined by the elite residential sector (shown in green in Fig. 5-8). This widening corridor is essen- tially an extension of the CBD, featuring offices, retail facilities, and housing for the upper and upper-middle classes.

The three remaining concentric zones are home to the less fortunate residents of the city, with income level and housing quality decreasing as distance from the CBD increases. The zone of maturity in the inner city contains housing for the middle class, who invest sufficiently to keep their aging dwellings from deteri- orating. The adjacent zone of in situ accretion is one of much more modest housing interspersed with un- kempt areas, representing a transition from inner-ring affluence to outer-ring poverty and taking on slum characteristics.

The outermost zone of peripheral squatter settle- ments is home to the millions of relatively poor and unskilled workers who have recently migrated to the

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Regions of the Realm

● Mercosur/I, the South American common market, supposedly stands for open trade and democracy. Venezuela’s (pending) accession raises questions about the organization’s future direction.

● Colombian cocaine comes to North American con- sumers from staging points in remote parts of the country. On its way to Brazil, much of it is redistrib- uted from interior French Guiana, where it may account for one-fifth of the territorial economy.

● President Evo Morales of Bolivia is campaigning for a 10-kilometer (6-mi) stretch of Chilean Pacific coastline to end his country’s landlocked situation. His ally, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, proclaims that he would “like to swim on a Bolivian beach.”

● Watch for Argentina’s leadership to revive Argenti- na’s claim to the (British) Falkland Islands. Hugo Chávez has told the United Kingdom that the islands belong to Argentina and should be “turned over.”

POINT S TO PONDER

ponent of demography and culture. Brazil in some ways is a bridge between the Americas and Africa, which is why we discuss it last in this chapter, just before we turn to Subsaharan Africa.

M A J O R C I T I E S O F T H E R E A L M

City Population* (in millions)

Asunción, Paraguay 2.1 Belo Horizonte, Brazil 5.9 Bogotá, Colombia 8.1 Brasília, Brazil 3.8 Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.0 Caracas, Venezuela 3.2 Guayaquil, Ecuador 2.7 La Paz, Bolivia 1.7 Lima, Peru 8.3 Manaus, Brazil 1.9 Montevideo, Uruguay 1.5 Quito, Ecuador 1.8 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 12.2 Santiago, Chile 5.9 São Paulo, Brazil 26.2

*Based on 2010 estimates.

city. Here many newcomers earn their first cash income by becoming part of the informal sector, in which workers are undocumented and money transactions are beyond the control of government. The settlements consist mostly of self-help housing, vast shantytowns known as barrios in Spanish-speaking South Ameri- ca and favelas in Brazil. Some of their entrepreneur- ial inhabitants succeed more than others, transforming parts of these shantytowns into beehives of activity that can propel resourceful workers toward a middle-class existence.

A final structural element of many South American cities forms an inward, narrowing sectoral extension of the zone of peripheral squatter settlements and is known as the zone of disamenity. It consists of undesirable land along highways, rail corridors, riverbanks, and other low- lying areas; people are so poor that they are forced to live in the open. Thus this realm’s cities present enormous contrasts between poverty and wealth, squalor and comfort—harsh contrasts all too frequently seen in the cityscape.

South America divides geographically into four rather clearly defined regions (Fig. 5-4):

1. The North consists of five entities that display a com- bination of Caribbean and South American features: Colombia, Venezuela, and those that represent three historic colonial footholds by Britain (Guyana), the Netherlands (Suriname), and France (French Guiana).

2. The West is formed by four republics that share a strong Amerindian cultural heritage as well as pow- erful influences resulting from their Andean phys- iography: Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and, transitionally, Paraguay.

3. The South, often called the “Southern Cone,” in- cludes three countries that actually conform to the much-misused regional term “Latin” America: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (all with strong Euro- pean imprints and little remaining Amerindian influ- ence) plus aspects of Paraguay.

4. Brazil not only is South America’s giant, accounting for just about half the realm’s territory as well as pop- ulation, but is fast developing into the Western Hemi- sphere’s second superpower. In Brazil the dominant Iberian influence is Portuguese, not Spanish, and here Africans, not Amerindians, form a significant com-

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THE NORTH: FACING THE CARIBBEAN

As Figures 5-5 and 5-6 remind us, the countries of South America’s northern tier have something in common besides their coastal location: each has a coastal tropi- cal-plantation zone on the Caribbean colonial model. Especially in the three Guianas, early European planta- tion development entailed the forced immigration of African laborers and eventually the absorption of this ele- ment into the population matrix. Far fewer Africans were brought to South America’s northern shores than to Brazil’s Atlantic coasts, and tens of thousands of South Asians also arrived as contract laborers and stayed as set- tlers, so the overall situation here is not comparable to Brazil’s. And it is also distinctly different from that of the rest of South America.

Today, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana still display the coastal orientation and plantation dependen- cy with which the colonial period endowed them, al- though logging their tropical forests is penetrating and ravaging the interior. In Venezuela and Colombia, how- ever, farming, ranching, and mining drew the population

inland, overtaking the coastal-plantation economy and creating diversified economies.

Figure 5-9 shows that not only Venezuela but also Colombia is Caribbean in its orientation: in Venezuela, coastal oil and natural gas reserves have replaced plan- tations as the economic mainstay, and Colombia’s An- dean valleys open toward the north where roads, railways, and pipelines lead toward Caribbean ports such as Cartagena and Barranquilla. Colombia’s Pacific coast is hardly a factor in the national economy despite the out- let at Buenaventura. But, as we will see, the North’s loca- tional advantages are countered by physical, economic, and political obstacles that continue to prevent the real- ization of their full potential.

Colombia

Imagine a country more than twice the size of France, not at all burdened by overpopulation, with an environ- mental geography so varied that it can produce crops ranging from the temperate to the tropical, possessing world-class oil reserves and other natural resources. This

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Ciudad Bolívar

Ciudad Guayana

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Paramaribo Cayenne

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80° 70°

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60°70°80°

Longitude West of Greenwich

T H

G U I A N A S

NETH. ANTILLES

LESSER ANTILLES

Maracay

Bucaramanga

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Guayaquil Cuenca

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CAÑO LIMÓN OILFIELD

CUSIANA- CUPIAGUA OILFIELD

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Mountains and highlandsClaimed by Venezuela

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Under 50,000

50,000–250,000

250,000–1,000,000

1,000,000–5,000,000

Over 5,000,000

POPULATION

National capitals are underlined

400

0 400 600 800

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1000 Kilometers200

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(see photo above) and seems to be centrally situated, but in fact it lies in the southeastern quadrant of Colombia’s most densely peopled sector.

We noted earlier that Colombia’s population clusters, of which there are about a dozen, are not well intercon- nected. Several of these lie on the Caribbean coast, cen- tered on Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta, old colonial entry points. Others are anchored by major cities

Looking over the CBD of Bogotá, Colombia in a southeasterly direction, where high relief curtails building, you are reminded of the formidable and divisive topography of this large country. The airport (Eldorado International!) lies behind us to the northwest, and the larger and less prosperous suburbs occupy the hilly area to the west (to the right of this view). With more than 8 million inhabitants, metropolitan Bogotá is larger than Colombia’s next seven urban areas combined and is the country’s primate city— but terrain, distance, and persistent insurgencies erode the capital’s supremacy. © Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images, Inc.

country is situated in the crucial northwest corner of South America, with 3200 kilometers (2000 mi) of coast- line on both Atlantic (Caribbean) and Pacific waters, closer than any of its neighbors to the markets of the north and sharing a border with giant Brazil to the south. Its nation uses a single language and adheres to one dom- inant religion. Wouldn’t such a country thrive, near the very center of the burgeoning economic geography of its hemisphere?

The answer is no. Colombia has a history of strife and violence, its politics unstable, its economy damaged, its future clouded. Colombia’s cultural uniformity did not produce social cohesion. Its spectacular, scenic physical geography also divides its population of 45.7 million into clusters not sufficiently interconnected to foster integra- tion; even today, this huge country has less than 800 kilo- meters (500 mi) of four-lane highways. Its proximity to U.S. markets is a curse as well as a blessing: at the root of Colombia’s latest surge of internal conflict lies its role as one of the world’s largest producers of illicit drugs.

History of Conflict

Colombia’s current disorder is not its first. In the past, civil wars between conservatives and liberals (based on Roman Catholic religious issues) developed into con- flicts pitting rich against poor, elites against workers. In Colombia today, people still refer to the last of these wars as La Violencia, a decade of strife beginning in 1948 during which as many as 200,000 people died. In the 1970s, disaster struck again. In remote parts of the country, groups opposed to the political power structure began a campaign of terrorism, damaging the develop- ing infrastructure and destroying confidence in the future. Simultaneously, the U.S. market for narcotics expanded rapidly, and many Colombians got involved in the drug trade. Powerful and wealthy drug cartels formed in major cities such as Medellín and Cali, with networks that influenced all facets of Colombian life from the peasantry to the politicians. The fabric of Co- lombian society unraveled.

People and Resources

As Figures 5-1 and 5-9 show, Colombia’s physiography is mountainous in its Andean west and north and com- paratively flat in its Llanos (Plains) interior. Look at Fig- ure 5-3, and you can see how Colombia’s scattered population tends to cluster in the west and north, where the resources and the agricultural opportunities (including the coffee for which Colombia is famous) lie. On the map, the capital of Bogotá (elevation: 2700 meters [8500 ft]), forms the largest and most important of these clusters

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such as Medellín and Cali. What is especially interest- ing about Figure 5-9 in this context is how little devel- opment has taken place on the country’s lengthy Pacific coast, where the port city of Buenaventura, across the mountains from Cali, is the only place of any size. The map suggests that Colombia’s Pacific Rim era, already in full force in Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, has yet to arrive.

The map also shows that Colombia and neighboring Venezuela share the oil and gas reserves in and around the “Lake” Maracaibo area (“Lake” because this is real- ly a gulf with a narrow opening to the sea), but Venezuela has the bigger portion. Recent discoveries, however, have boosted Colombia’s production along the base of the easternmost cordillera, and our map shows a growing system of pipelines from the interior to the coast. Mean- while, the vast and remote interior proved fertile ground for that other big money-maker in Colombia: drugs.

Cocaine’s Cost

With its energy, mineral, and agricultural productivity, Colombia might have been on the fast track toward pros- perity, but the rise of the narcotics industry, fueled by outside (especially U.S. but also Brazilian and Euro- pean) demand, and coupled with its legacy of violence, crippled the state for decades and threatened its very sur- vival. In a country as large and physiographically diverse as this, there are many opportunities to avoid detection and evade law enforcement, ranging from farming coca plants to smuggling weapons (see box titled “The Geog- raphy of Cocaine”). Drug cartels based in the cities con- trolled vast networks of producers and exporters; they infiltrated the political system, corrupted the army and police, and waged wars with each other that cost tens of

thousands of lives and destroyed Colombia’s social order. The drug cartels organized their own armed forces to combat attempts by the Colombian government to control the illegal narcotics economy, and kidnapped and killed citizens at will even as the Colombian gov- ernment appealed to the United States for help in its ineffective campaign. Meanwhile, the owners of large haciendas in the countryside hired private security guards to protect their properties, banding together to expand these units into what became, in effect, private armies. Colombia was in chaos as narcoterrorists com- mitted appalling acts of violence in the cities, rebel forces and drug-financed armies of the political “left” fought paramilitaries of the political “right” in the coun- tryside, and Colombia’s legitimate economy, from cof- fee growing to tourism, suffered fatally. To further weaken the national government, the rebels even took to bombing oil pipelines.

State of Insurgency

What happened in Colombia beginning in the 1970s and escalating in the three decades following was not unique in the world—states have succumbed to chaos in the past—but this was an especially clear-cut case of a process long studied and modeled by political scientists. By the turn of this century, certain parts of Colombia were beyond the control of its government and armed forces. There, insurgents of various stripes created their own domains, successfully resisting interference and de- manding to be left alone to pursue their goals, illegiti- mate though they might be. Leaders of some of these insurgent domains even sent emissaries to Bogotá to ne- gotiate their terms for “independence.”

When it comes to energy resources, Venezuela is in the lead in South America, but Colombia has formidable reserves as well, the most extensive of which lie in the central north on the inland side of the Andes’ easternmost range. This example of the industry’s environmental impact shows what is reputedly the largest oilfield in South America, based on reserves in the Cusiana river basin, about 250 kilometers (150 mi) east of Bogotá in the heart of the country. © Gamma Presse, Inc.

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The Geography of Cocaine

A N Y G E O G R A P H I C A L D I S C U S S I O N of northwestern South America today must take note of one of its most widespread activities: the production of illegal narcotics. Of the enormous flow of illicit drugs that enter the United States each year, the most widely used substance is cocaine—all of which comes from South America, mainly Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Within these three countries, cocaine annually brings in billions of (U.S.) dollars and “employs” tens of thousands of workers, constituting an industry that functions as a powerful economic force. Those who operate the industry have accumulated con- siderable power through bribery of politicians, kidnappings and other forms of intimidation, threats of terrorism, and alliances with guerrilla groups in outlying zones beyond gov- ernmental control. The cocaine industry itself is structured within a tightly organized network of territories that encom- pass the various stages of this drug’s production.

The first stage of cocaine production is the extraction of coca paste from the coca plant, a raw-material-oriented activity that is located near the areas where the plant is grown. The coca plant was domesticated in the Andes by the Incas centuries ago; millions of their descendants still chew coca leaves for stimulation and brew them into coca tea, the leading beverage of high-altitude South America. The main zone of coca-plant cultivation is along the east- ern slopes of the Andes and in adjacent tropical lowlands in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Today, five areas dominate in the growing of coca leaves for narcotic production (see Fig. 5-11): Bolivia’s Chaparé district in the marginal Ama- zon lowlands northeast of the city of Cochabamba; the Yun- gas Highlands north of the Bolivian capital, La Paz; north-central Peru’s Huallaga and neighboring valleys; south-central Peru’s Apurimac Valley, southeast of Huan- cayo; and the green-colored zones (in Fig. 5-10) around the guerrilla-controlled territories of southern Colombia. These areas, which can produce as many as nine crops per year, are especially conducive to high leaf yields thanks to favor- able local climatic and soil environments that also allow plants to develop immunity to many diseases and insect rav- ages. Despite government efforts to aerially spray herbicides and manually eradicate plants in the field, all of these areas continue to thrive as coca cultivation has become a full- fledged cash crop. Operations in guerrilla-controlled por- tions of Colombia have reached the scale of plantations, inducing thousands of local subsistence farmers (sometimes at gunpoint) to join the more lucrative ranks of the field workforce. In Peru and Bolivia, the specialized coca-cul- tivation zones have lured an even larger peasant-farmer pop- ulation to abandon the less profitable production of food crops (coca’s per-acre income is now seven times greater than cocoa’s), thereby further reducing the capability of these nutrition-poor countries to feed themselves.

(As [U.S.-supported] government efforts to eliminate coca-raising have intensified in recent years, the geography of production has made certain adjustments. The most aggressive pursuit occurred in Colombia, and the net effect was the displacement of coca cultivation to nearby Andean countries. This shift, however, actually appears to have strengthened rather than weakened the industry: recent press reports indicate that not only are coca-leaf prices— and overall productivity—rising steadily, but also that street prices for cocaine are falling worldwide.)

The coca leaves harvested in the source areas of the An- des and adjoining interior lowlands make their way to local collection centers, located at the convergence of rivers and trails, where coca paste is extracted and pre- pared. This begins the second stage of production, which involves the refining of that coca paste (about 40 percent pure cocaine) into cocaine hydrochloride (more than 90 percent pure), a lethal concentrate that is diluted with substances such as sugar or flour before being sold on the streets to consumers. Cocaine refining requires sophis- ticated chemicals, carefully controlled processes, and a labor force skilled in their supervision, and here Colom- bia has predominated. Most of this activity takes place in ultramodern processing centers located in the rebel-held territory of the lowland central-south and east, beyond the reach of the Bogotá government. Interior Colombia also possesses the geographic advantage of intermediate location, lying between the source areas to the south (as well as locally) and the U.S. market to the north.

The final stage of production entails the distribution of cocaine to the marketplace, which depends on an effi- cient, clandestine transportation network that leads into the United States. Private planes operating out of remote airstrips were the preferred “exporting” method until about a decade ago, but aggressive U.S. measures along the coasts of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico have effec- tively closed down trans-Caribbean flight paths. Most cocaine now travels overland to be smuggled by sea through northwestern South America’s Pacific and Caribbean sea- ports. As noted in Chapter 4, its main destination is Mexi- co, which today supplies at least 90 percent of all the cocaine that enters the United States. This rerouting through Mexico has been aided by the greatly increased northward flow of goods into the U.S. under NAFTA—pro- viding ever greater opportunities for smuggling via the mil- lions of trucks that cross the border each year. It has also triggered the rapid rise of organized crime (see pp. 214–215) as several Mexican drug gangs evolved into sophisticated international cartels that control both the cocaine inflow and retail distribution within the United States, and increasingly dictate the terms of operation to their South American suppliers.

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13 14

Viewing this process institutionally, political scientists recognized three evolutionary stages. During the first, contention, a rebellion erupts, sustains itself, and be- comes based in some part of a country. During the sec- ond stage, equilibrium, the rebels gain effective control over a territorially defined sector of the state, establish a capital, impose rules of conduct, and have sufficient strength to bring the national government to the negoti- ating table. If they succeed, they may achieve secession from the state or even bring the government down and take control of all of it. But equilibrium may also be fol- lowed by a third stage, counteroffensive, in which the state, perhaps with the support of outside forces, resumes the conflict and ultimately defeats the insurgents.

We will encounter instances of all three stages in this model in later chapters of this book. The geographer Robert McColl looked at the sequence in spatial context and formulated the concept of an insurgent state to rep- resent the second stage, that of equilibrium. He argued that this equilibrium implied the formation of more than just a rebel base: this is the moment of truth when the rebel domain takes on the elements of a nascent state complete with boundaries, a core area as well as a cap- ital, a local government, and schools and other social ser-

vices that substitute for those the formal state may have provided previously.

Colombia in the 1990s and early 2000s contained sev- eral entities that were taking on the properties of insurgent states, and one of these, the red-striped zone shown in Fig- ure 5-10, even acquired a name—“Farclandia”—after the initials of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), one of the most brutal and by far the most pow- erful among Colombia’s insurgent groups. In late 1999, FARC had the Colombian government on the ropes, forc- ing it to demilitarize its area south of Bogotá about the size of Switzerland and announcing plans for a second insur- gent state centered on the remote southeastern town of Mitú. It appeared to be just a matter of time before the national government in Bogotá would lose control, equi- librium would turn into disintegration, and Colombia would devolve into a failed state (a country whose insti- tutions have collapsed and in which anarchy prevails).

Counteroffensive?

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, Co- lombia mounted a counteroffensive whose effectiveness remains in doubt. In 2002, newly elected President

Alvaro Uribe began a twin campaign to defeat the rebels militarily and to persuade them through legal means to give up their arms. He secured sig- nificant assistance from the United States and was able to increase the pressure on armed rebels as well as coca growers, invaded “Farclandia,” and scored some noteworthy suc- cesses in killing and arresting lead- ers as well as freeing hostages held by the rebels. Colombia’s nascent insurgent states weakened, and dis- array marked the once-formidable rebel armies. Reelected in 2006 by a people weary of conflict and willing to accept the inequities inherent in the pacification effort, Uribe contin- ued his campaign, although charges of links between government mem- bers and right-wing paramilitaries eroded public support.

The government matched its domestic counteroffensive with an international campaign to help revive the economy, promoting market-ori- ented, business-friendly policies. Under the political circumstances, it is remarkable that economic growth before the global downturn of 2008

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Amazon R.

Lake Maracaibo

M agd

alena

C au

ca R .

O ri

no co

R .

Putumayo R.

Guajira Peninsula

E C U A D O R

P A N A M A

V E N E Z U E L A

B R A Z I L

P E R U

ARAUCA

GU AJ

IRA

APURE PROV.

CAUCA

C H

O C

VICHADA

META

GUAINIA

GUAVIARE

AMAZONAS

CASA- NARE

URABÁ

CAQUETÁPUTUMAYO

Leticia Corridor

Bogotá

Caracas

Cali

Medellín

Barranquilla

Maracaibo

Guayaquil

Quito

Cartagena

Bucaramanga

Panama City

Pasto

Buenaventura

Santa Marta

Cúcuta

Colón

Tumaco

Esmeraldas

Florencia

Turbo

Popayan

Miraflores

Leticia

Mitú

Santa Rita

La Guaira

Coveñas

Under 50,000

50,000–250,000

250,000–1,000,000

1,000,000–5,000,000

Over 5,000,000

National capitals are underlined

COLOMBIA

400 Kilometers 2000

0 200 Miles100

Leading areas of insurgency Area of abrogated insurgent state, "Farclandia"

Coca-growing area RoadPipeline

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savanna grasses and scrub woodland support cattle graz- ing on higher ground, but widespread wet-season flood- ing of the more fertile lower-lying areas has thus far inhibited the plainland’s commercial farming potential (much of the development of the Llanos to date has been limited to the exploitation of its substantial oil reserves). Crop-raising conditions are more favorable in the tierra templada areas (see the discussion of the altitudinal zonation concept on p. 215) of the Guiana Highlands. Economic integration of this more remote interior zone with the rest of Venezuela has been spearheaded by the discovery of rich iron ores on the northern flanks of the Guiana Highlands southwest of Ciudad Guayana. Local railroads now connect with the Orinoco, and from there ores are shipped directly to foreign markets.

Oil and Politics

Despite these opportunities, Venezuela since 1998 has been in upheaval as longstanding economic and social problems finally intensified to the point where the elec- torate decided to push the country into a new era of radi- cal political change. For nearly two decades since the euphoric 1970s, oil had not bettered the lives of most Venezuelans. A major reason was that the government unwisely acquired the habit of living off oil profits, forc- ing the country to suffer the consequences of the long global oil depression that began in the early 1980s. Venezuela found itself heavily burdened by a huge foreign debt it had incurred in borrowing against future oil rev- enues that were not materializing fast enough. By the mid- 1990s, the government was required to sharply devalue the currency, and a political crisis ensued that resulted in a severe recession and widespread social unrest. With more and more Venezuelans enraged at the way their oil-rich country was approaching bankruptcy without making progress toward the more equitable distribution of the national wealth, voters resoundingly turned in an extreme direction in the 1998 presidential election. Expressing their disgust with Venezuela’s ruling elite of both political par- ties, they elected Hugo Chávez, a former colonel who in 1992 had led a failed military coup. Reaffirming their deci- sion in 2000, Venezuelans gave nearly 60 percent of their votes to Chávez, apparently providing him with a mandate to act as strongman on behalf of the urban poor and the increasingly penurious middle class.

Chávez has indeed pursued this course since entering office in 1999, sweeping aside Congress and the Supreme Court, supervising the rewriting of the Venezuelan consti- tution in his own image, and proclaiming himself the leader of a “peaceful leftist revolution” that will transform the country. Although he professes that social equality ranks highest on his agenda, Chávez has stirred up racial divi- sions by actively promoting mestizos (68 percent of the

was as high as 8 percent annually, led by revenues from energy, metals, and agricultural products; the compara- tive lull in violence boosted coffee exports, cut-flower exports (Colombia ranks second in the world in this busi- ness), and tourism.

But Colombia remains a nation in crisis, not all of it of its own making. About 70 percent of the cocaine con- sumed in the United States comes from Colombia; most of the remainder goes to Brazil or Europe. American sup- port for Uribe’s antidrug campaign (Plan Colombia), logistical as well as financial, raises political issues in Bogotá, where extraditions of Colombian druglords to the United States are not universally popular. Converse- ly, the U.S. Congress refused to approve a free-trade agreement with Colombia because of the Uribe govern- ment’s alleged tilt toward right-wing paramilitaries in connection with the amnesty program. Colombians argue that the cocaine keeps flowing because Americans con- tinue to buy it, and that Americans should look in the mirror before they accuse others of bad behavior. In 2010, Colombia’s future still remained clouded. Sixty years—more than two generations— of violence have created propensities that cannot be cast off overnight.

Venezuela

A long and tortuous boundary separates Colombia from Venezuela, its neighbor to the east. Much of what is important in Venezuela is concentrated in the northern and western parts of the country, where the Venezuelan Highlands form the eastern spur of the north end of the Andes system. Most of Venezuela’s 29.1 million people are concentrated in these uplands, which include the cap- ital of Caracas, its early rival Valencia, and the com- mercial/industrial centers of Barquisimeto and Maracay.

The Venezuelan Highlands are flanked by the Maracai- bo Lowlands and “Lake” Maracaibo to the northwest and by a vast plainland of savanna country, known as the Llanos, in the Orinoco Basin to the south and east (Fig. 5-9). The Maracaibo Lowlands, once a disease-infested, sparsely peo- pled coastland, today constitute one of the world’s leading oil-producing areas; much of the oil is drawn from reserves that lie beneath the shallow waters of the lake itself. The country’s third-largest city, Maracaibo, is the focus of the petroleum industry that transformed the Venezuelan econ- omy in the 1970s; however, as we shall see, since then oil has been more of a curse than a blessing.

The Llanos on the southern side of the Venezuelan Highlands and the Guiana Highlands in the country’s southeast, like much of Brazil’s interior, are in an early stage of development. The 300- to 650-kilometer (180- to 400-mi)-long Llanos slope gently from the base of the Andean spur to the Orinoco River. Their mixture of

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population) over people of European background (21 per- cent). And in the international arena, Chávez sparks con- troversy at every turn: angering the government of neighboring Colombia by expressing his “neutrality” in its confrontation with cocaine-producing insurgent forces; unsettling another neighbor, Guyana, by aggressively reviv- ing a century-old territorial claim to the western zone of that country (the striped area in Fig. 5-9); embracing Fidel Castro and his successor, and providing communist Cuba with oil in exchange for the assignment to Venezuela of thousands of doctors and technicians; and obstructing the globalization plans of the United States throughout South America, using the windfall income from high-priced oil to reward allies in this effort with substantial subsidies.

In 2006, Chávez was reelected with an overwhelming majority over an opponent from the oil-rich western State of Zulia, where oil and cattle dominate the economy— the “Texas of Venezuela.” Opposition to Chávez is so strong in this corner of the country (the State encircles Lake Maracaibo) that a pro-autonomy movement has arisen there, a devolutionary response to the current gov- ernment’s populist policies.

Undaunted, Chavez continued to raise Venezuela’s profile in the Western Hemisphere and in the world beyond. He expounded his anti-American message in Moscow, proclaimed his solidarity with Iran’s president, and hosted Russian warships in Venezuelan ports. In Middle America, he took up common cause not only with Cuba but also with Nicaragua, where he promised to build an oil refinery, fund social programs, and pro- vide low-cost fuel. And in South America, Chavez used his financial resources to support Bolivian President Evo Morales, the realm’s first national leader of Amerindian ancestry, who faced powerful opposition from the coun- try’s wealthy Hispanic minority.

Chávez has positioned himself as the champion of Venezuela’s (and South America’s) poor, trumpeting his “Bolivarian Revolution” as a local alternative to what he describes as the insidious encroachment of U.S. imperi- alism. He has taken Venezuela to center stage in the ideo- logical contest in this realm, casting doubt on the virtues of democracy and free enterprise, castigating elites for not doing enough to reduce the gap between rich and poor, and urging the downtrodden to assert themselves. His message resonates across the continent.

The “Three Guianas”

Three small entities form the eastern flank of the realm’s northern region: Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. They are good reminders of why the name “Latin” Amer- ica is inappropriate: the first is a legacy of British colo-

nialism and has English as its official language; the sec- ond is a remnant of Dutch influence where Dutch is still official among its polyglot of tongues; and the third is still a dependency— of France. None has a population exceed- ing one million, and all three exhibit social indices and cultural landscapes more representative of Caribbean islands than South America. Here British, Dutch, and French colonial powers acquired possessions and estab- lished plantations, brought in African and Asian workers, and created economies similar to those of their Middle American domains (see Fig. 4-6).

Guyana, with 820,000 people, still has more inhabi- tants than Suriname and French Guiana combined. When Guyana became independent in 1966, its British rulers left behind an ethnically and culturally divided popula- tion in which people with South Asian (Indian) ancestry make up about 50 percent and those with African her- itage (including African-European ancestry) 36 percent. This makes for contentious politics, given the religious mix, which is approximately 50 percent Christian and 45 percent Hindu and Muslim. Guyana remains dominantly rural, and plantation crops continue to figure strongly among exports (gold from the interior is the most valu- able single product). Oil may soon become a factor in the economy, though, because a recently discovered reserve that lies offshore from Suriname extends westward beneath Guyana’s waters. Still, Guyana is among the realm’s poorest and least urbanized countries, and it is strongly affected by its neighbor’s narcotics industry. Its thinly populated interior, beyond the reach of antidrug campaigns, has become a staging area for drug distrib- ution to Brazil, North America, and even Europe. A recent official report suggests that drug money amounts to as much as one-fifth of Guyana’s total economy.

Venezuela’s land claim against Guyana may be in abeyance, but the United Nations in 2007 settled a dispute with Suriname over a potentially oil-rich maritime zone in Guyana’s favor (Fig. 5-9). Some experts believe that this offshore basin may hold more oil than Europe’s North Sea, which would—if properly managed—transform Guyana’s economy. Exploratory drilling began in 2009.

Suriname actually progressed more rapidly than Guyana after it became independent in 1975, but persis- tent political instability soon ensued. The Dutch colonists brought South Asians, Indonesians, Africans, and even some Chinese to their colony, making for a fractious nation. More than 100,000 residents—about one-quarter of the entire population— emigrated to the Netherlands, and were it not for support from its former colonial ruler Suriname would have collapsed. Still, the rice farms laid out by the Dutch give Suriname self-sufficiency and even allow for some exporting, and again plantation crops continue to figure among the exports. Suriname’s lead-

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ing income producer, however, is its bauxite (aluminum ore) mined in a zone across the middle of the country. And the recent oil finds (Fig. 5-9) may provide impor- tant revenues in the years ahead.

Suriname, whose population totals 480,000, is one of South America’s poorest countries, and its prospects re- main bleak. Along with Guyana, Suriname is involved in an environmental controversy centering on its luxuri- ant tropical forests. Timber companies from Asia’s Pacif- ic Rim offer large rewards for the right to cut down the magnificent hardwood trees, but conservationists are try- ing to slow the destruction by buying up concessions before they can be opened to logging.

Suriname’s cultural geography is enlivened by its lan- guages. Dutch may be the official tongue, but other than by officials and in schools it is not heard much. A mix- ture of Dutch and English, Sranan Tongo, serves as a kind of common tongue, but you can also hear Amerindi- an, Hindi, Chinese, Indonesian, and even some French Creole in the streets. Suriname may have a Dutch past, but today it is a member of Caricom, the English-speak- ing, supranational Caribbean economic organization.

French Guiana, the easternmost outpost of Caribbean South America, is a dependency—mainland South America’s only one. This territory is an anomaly in other ways as well. Consider this: it is not much smaller than South Korea (population: nearly 50 million) with a pop- ulation of just over 200,000. Its status is an Overseas Département of France, and its official language is French. Nearly half the population resides in the imme- diate vicinity of the capital, Cayenne.

In 2009 there still was no prospect of independence for this severely underdeveloped relic of the former French Empire. Gold remains the most valuable export, and the small fishing industry sends some exports to France. But what really matters here in French Guiana is the European Space Agency’s launch complex at Kourou on the coast, which accounts for more than half of the territory’s entire economic activity. From plantation farming to space- port . . . this must be the ultimate story of globalization.

THE WEST: ANDEAN SOUTH AMERICA

The second regional grouping of South American states—the Andean West (Fig. 5-11)—is dominated physiographically by the great Andes Mountains and his- torically by Amerindian peoples. This region encom- passes Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and transitional Paraguay, the last with one foot in the West and the other in the South (Fig. 5-4). Bolivia and Paraguay also constitute South America’s only two landlocked countries.

Spanish conquerors overpowered the Amerindian na- tions, but they did not reduce them to small minorities as happened to so many indigenous peoples in other parts of the world. Today, roughly 45 percent of the people in Peru, the region’s most populous country, are Amerindi- an; in Bolivia Amerindians are in the majority at 55 per- cent. About 25 percent of Ecuador’s population identifies itself as Amerindian, and in Paraguay the ethnic mix, not regionally clustered as in the other three countries, is overwhelmingly weighted toward Amerindian ancestry.

As the Data Table inside the back cover reports, this is South America’s poorest region economically, with lower incomes, higher numbers of subsistence farmers, and fewer opportunities for job-seekers. There is no oil- rich Venezuela or agriculturally bountiful Argentina in South America’s West. For a very long time, the urbane lives of the land-owning elite have been worlds away from the hard-scrabble existence of the landless peonage (the word peon is an old Spanish term for an indebted day laborer). But today, this region, like the realm as a whole, is stirring, and oil and natural gas are part of the story. In Bolivia, the first elected president of Amerindi- an ancestry is trying to gain control over an energy indus- try not used to his aggressive tactics. In Ecuador’s 2006 elections, a populist gained the presidency on a promise to divert more of the country’s oil revenues toward domestic needs. In Peru, where an energy era seems to be opening as new reserves are discovered, the govern- ment is under pressure to protect Amazonian peoples and environments, limit foreign involvement, and put domes- tic needs and rights first.

In short, this is a crucial region in significant transi- tion, where U.S. ambitions and intentions collide with domestic initiatives and where globalizers and locals find themselves face to face.

Peru

Peru straddles the Andean spine for more than 1600 kilo- meters (1000 mi) and is the largest of the region’s four republics in both territory and population (28.7 million). Physiographically and culturally, Peru divides into three subregions: (1) the desert coast, the European-mestizo region; (2) the Andean highlands or Sierra, the Amerindi- an region; and (3) the eastern slopes, the sparsely popu- lated Amerindian-mestizo interior (Fig. 5-11).

Three Subregions

Lima and its port, Callao, lie at the center of the desert coastal strip, and it is symptomatic of the cultural divi- sion prevailing in Peru that for nearly 500 years the

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capital city has been positioned on the periphery, not in a central location in a basin of the Andes. From an eco- nomic point of view, however, the Spaniards’ choice of a headquarters on the Pacific coast proved to be sound, for the coastal subregion has become commercially the most productive part of the country. A thriving fishing industry contributes significantly to the export trade; so do the products of irrigated agriculture in some 40 oases

Triple Frontier area

Popayán

Esmeraldas

Ambato

Riobamba

Talara

Cuenca Guayaquil

Loja

Piura

Leticia

Pucallpa

Rio Branco

Assis

Iñapari Cerro de Pasc

Húanuco

Trujillo

Bayovar Cajamarca

Lima Huancayo

Pisco Paracas

Chimbote

Cuzco

La Paz

Oruro Tacna

Puno

Ilo

El Alto

Sucre

Potosí

Santa Cruz

Tarija

Resistencia

Asunción

Antofagasta

Salta

Tucumán

Ayacucho

Ica

San Juan

Matarani Cochabamba

Iquitos

Chiclayo

Callao

Arequipa

Arica

Cuiabá

Corumbá

Quito Portoviejo

Santa Elena

Machala

Tingo Maria

Ciudad del Este

Grande Campo

C oa

st al

H ill

y B el

T h e C h a p a r é

P a n d

A l

i p

l a

n o

Huallaga Valley

M o

n t

a ñ

O r i e

n t e

( E a s t e r n )

S l o p e s

O r i e n t e

C h

a c

D e

s e

r t

C o

r d

i l l e r a O c c i d e n t a l

( W e

s t

e r

n )

C o rd .

O r i e n t a l

( E a st ern)

Y u n g a s H i g h l a n d s

CAMISEA GASFIELD

M a d r e d e D i o s

B e n i

S a n t a

C r u z

PERU

CHILE

C O L O M B I A

ECUADOR

A R G E N T I N A

P A R A G U A Y

B R A Z I L

B O L I V I A

Lake Titicaca

Lake Poopó

Ma de

ira R.

Amazon R.

Marañón R.

Uc ay

ali R.

G ua

ya s

B en

i R .

Pa ra

n á

R .

Paraguay R

Pantanal Wetland

P e

r u

( H u

m b

o l d

t )

u r r e n t

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

Putum

ayo R.

20°

80° 70° 60°

20°

10°

80°

Longitude West of Greenwich

70°

10°

0° Equator

60°

0°

Tropic of Cap ricorn

THE WEST: ANDEAN SOUTH AMERICA

0 200 400 600 800 1000 Kilometers

0 200 400 600 Miles

Mountain basins and valleys

Coastal hills

Chaco

Andean foothills and bordering lowlands

Railroad

Road

Pipeline

Major oases (Peru) or moist coastal plains (Ecuador)

Mountains

POPULATION

National capitals are underlined

1,000,000–5,000,000

Under 50,000 50,000–250,000

250,000–1,000,000

Over 5,000,000

Gasfield

Coalfield

Oilfield

distributed all along the arid coast, which include fruits such as citrus, olives, and avocados, and vegetables such as asparagus (a big money-maker) and lettuce.

The Sierra (Andean) subregion occupies about one- third of the country and is the ancestral home of the largest component in the total population, the Quechua- speakers, who had been subjugated by the Inca rulers when the Spanish conquerors arrived. Their survival dur-

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ing the harsh colonial regime was made possible by their adaptation to the high-altitude environments they inhab- ited, but their social fabric was ripped apart by commu- nalization, forced cropping, religious persecution, and outward migration to towns and haciendas where many became serfs. Another Amerindian people, the Aymara, live in the area of Lake Titicaca, making up about 6 per- cent of Peru’s population but larger numbers in neigh- boring Bolivia (ca. 25 percent).

Although these Amerindian people make up almost half of the population of Peru, their political influence remains slight— even during the recent term of President Alejan- dro Toledo, who had strong support in the Andean districts. Nor is the Andean subregion a major factor in Peru’s com- mercial economy— except, of course, for its mineral store- house, which yields copper, zinc, and lead from mining centers, the largest of which is Cerro de Pasco. In the high valleys and intermontane basins, the Amerindian popula- tion is clustered either in isolated villages, around which people practice a precarious subsistence agriculture, or in the more favorably located and fertile areas where they are tenants, peons on white- or mestizo-owned haciendas. Most of these people never receive an adequate daily caloric intake or balanced diet of any sort. The wheat pro- duced around Huancayo, for example, is mainly exported and would in any case be too expensive for the Amerindi-

E V E N I N A realm marked by an abundance of primate cities, Lima (8.3 million) stands out. Here reside 29 per- cent of the Peruvian population—who produce over 70 percent of the country’s gross national income, 90 per- cent of its collected taxes, and 98 percent of its private investments. Economically, at least, Lima is Peru.

Lima began as a modest oasis in a narrow coastal desert squeezed between the cold waters of the Pacific and the soaring heights of the nearby Andes. Near here the Spanish conquistadors discovered one of the best nat- ural harbors on the western shoreline of South America, where they founded the port of Callao; but they built their city on a site 11 kilometers (7 mi) inland where soils and water supplies proved more beneficial. This city was named Lima and quickly became the Spaniards’ head- quarters for all their South American territories.

Since independence, Lima has continued to dominate Peruvian national life. The city’s population growth was manageable through the end of the 1970s, but the past three decades have witnessed a disastrous doubling in its size. As usual, the worst problems are localized in the peripheral squatter shantytowns that now house close to one-half of the metropolitan population. Lima’s CBD,

however, is worlds removed from this squalor, its historic landscape dotted with five-star hotels, new office towers, and prestigious shops as foreign investments have poured in since 1990.

AMONG THE REALM’S GREAT CITIES . . . Lima

Government Palace Congress

Maritime Terminal CBD

La Victoria

Magdalena Nueva

Miraflores

San Miguel

Surquillo

Barranco

Rimac

Barrio Obrero Industrial

CALLAO

PACIFIC OCEAN

Ríma c River

Jorge Chavez International Airport

L I M A

5 Kilometers

3 Miles

ans themselves to buy. Potatoes, barley, and corn are among the subsistence crops grown here in the tierra fría zone, and in the tierra helada of the higher basins the Amerindi- ans graze their llamas, alpacas, cattle, and sheep. The con- trasts between the prosperous coast, booming Lima, and the thriving north on the one hand, and this poverty-strick- en southern Andean zone on the other, constitute a threat to Peru’s long-term stability.

Of Peru’s three subregions, the Oriente, or East—the inland slopes of the Andes and the Amazon-drained, rain- forest-covered montaña—is the most isolated. The focus of the eastern subregion, in fact, is Iquitos, a city that looks east rather than west and can be reached by ocean- going vessels sailing 3700 kilometers (2300 mi) up the Amazon River across northern Brazil. Iquitos grew rapid- ly during the Amazon wild-rubber boom of a century ago and then declined; now it is finally growing again and reflects Peruvian plans to open up the eastern interior.

Today, the Oriente subregion is on the threshold of a new energy era. Petroleum had been discovered west of Iquitos as long ago as the 1970s, when oil began to flow through a pipeline across the Andes to the Pacif- ic port of Bayovar. But major new discoveries of oil and gas reserves since the turn of the millennium are promising (some say the verb should be threatening) to open a new energy era for Peru, with associated impacts

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Ecuador

On the map, Ecuador, smallest of the three Andean West republics, appears to be just a northern corner of Peru. But that would be a misrepresentation because Ecuador possesses a full range of regional contrasts (Fig. 5-11). It has a coastal belt; an Andean zone that may be narrow (under 250 kilometers [150 mi]) but by no means of lower elevation than elsewhere; and an Oriente—an east- ern subregion that is as sparsely settled and as econom- ically marginalized as that of Peru. As in Peru, nearly half of Ecuador’s population (which totals 14.4 million) is concentrated in the Andean intermontane basins and valleys, and the most productive region is the coastal strip. Here, however, the similarities end.

Ecuador’s Pacific coastal zone consists of a belt of hills interrupted by lowlands, of which the most important lies in the south between the hills and the Andes, drained by the Guayas River. Guayaquil—the country’s largest city, main port, and leading commercial center—forms the focus of this subregion. Unlike Peru’s coastal strip, Ecuador’s is not a desert: it consists of fertile tropical plains not afflicted by excessive rainfall. Seafood (espe- cially shrimp) is a leading product, and these lowlands support a thriving commercial agricultural economy built around bananas, cacao, cattle-raising, and coffee on the hillsides. Moreover, Ecuador’s western subregion is also far less Europeanized than Peru’s because its white com- ponent of the national population is only about 7 percent.

A greater proportion of whites are engaged in admin- istration and hacienda ownership in the central Andean zone, where most of the Ecuadorians who are Amerindi- an also reside—and, not surprisingly, where land-tenure reform is an explosive issue. The differing interests of the Guayaquil-dominated coastal lowland and the Andean- highland subregion focused on the capital (Quito) have long fostered a deep regional cleavage between the two. This schism has intensified in recent years, and autono- my and other devolutionary remedies are now being openly discussed in the coastlands.

In the rainforests of the Oriente subregion, oil produc- tion is expanding as a result of the discovery of addition- al reserves. Some analysts are predicting that interior Ecuador as well as Peru will prove to contain reserves com- parable to those of Venezuela and Colombia, and that an “oil era” will soon transform their economies. As it is, oil already tops Ecuador’s export list, and the industry’s infra- structure is being modernized. This is essential because much ecological damage has already been done: the trans- Andean pipeline to the port of Esmeraldas, constructed in 1972, was the source of numerous oil spills, and toxic waste was dumped along its route in a series of dreadful envi- ronmental disasters. A second, more modern pipeline went into operation in 2003, but like Peru, Ecuador faced grow-

on the Amerindian peoples still living an isolated exis- tence in this remote, forested East. Already, pipelines carry natural gas from the Camisea reserve (north of Cuzco) to a conversion plant on the Paracas Peninsula south of Lima, from where an ocean-floor pipeline sends it to an offshore loading platform for tankers tak- ing it to the U.S. market (Fig. 5-11). Other reserves will come “on line” later, but already environmentalists and supporters of indigenous rights are raising issues in the interior even as political activists are arguing against the terms of trade with the oil companies Peru has accept- ed. They argue that the proceeds will further benefit the already-favored coastal, northern, and urban residents of Peru, and leave the disadvantaged residents of the interior even further behind. In mid-2009, deadly clash- es between Amerindians and industry-supporting gov- ernment forces killed dozens.

From Insurgency to Stability

By the turn of this century, Peru appeared to have put behind it the lengthy period of instability during which its government was threatened by well-organized guer- rilla movements. The most serious threat, which for a time during the 1980s seemed on the verge of achieving an insurgent state in its Andean base, was the so-called, Maoist-inspired Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) movement. But forceful counteroffensive action under the later-disgraced president of Japanese ancestry, Alber- to Fujimori, defeated the rebel movement and returned Peru to political stability and economic growth.

The social cost of the Fujimori regime, however, was high. Democratic principles were violated, and corruption was endemic. The Amerindian population made no sig- nificant gains, and the wealth gap increased. Nonetheless, the country held together during the next administration despite low public support, violent clashes between Andean mining companies and Amerindian villagers, strikes by coca farmers demanding legalization, and other major challenges. Then, in 2006, a presidential election evolved into an ideological contest between a former president, supported by the traditional Hispanic and mes- tizo sector, and a candidate who had significant Amerindi- an support as well as the endorsement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. The former president, Alan Garcia, was narrowly elected, suggesting that Peru was not yet ready for the transition already underway in its neighbors. But developments in other parts of Andean South America, and in the realm as a whole, make it likely that Peru, too, will come to confront the implications of its cultural geography. Amerindians form a near-majority, they are restive, and they now have models of empowerment they have not previously seen. The question is what course Peru’s transition will take.

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F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“I can’t remember being hotter anyplace on Earth, not in Kinshasa, not in Singapore . . . not only are you near the equator here in steamy Guayaquil, but the city lies in a swampy, riverine lowland too far from the Pacific to benefit from any cooling breezes and too far from the Andes foothills to enjoy the benefits of suburban elevation. But Guayaquil is not the disease-ridden backwater it used to be. Its port is modern, its city-center waterfront on the Guayas River has been renovated, its international airport is the hub of a commercial center, and it has grown into a metropolis of 2.7 million. Ecuador’s oil revenues have made much of this possible, but from the White Hill (a hill that serves as a cemetery, with the most elaborate vaults near its base and the poorest at the feet of the giant statue of Jesus that tops it) you can see that globalization has not quite arrived here. High-rise development remains limited, international banks, hotels and other businesses remain comparatively few, and the ‘middle zone’ encircling the city shows little evidence of prosperity (top). Beating the heat and glare is an everyday priority: whole streets have been covered by makeshift tarpaulins and more permanent awnings to protect shoppers (bottom). Talk to the locals, though, and you find that there is another daily concern: the people ‘up there in the mountains who rule this country always put us in second place.’ Take the 45-minute flight from Guayaquil to cool and comfortable Quito, the capital, and you’re in another world, and you quickly forget Guayaquil’s prob- lems. That’s just what the locals here say the politicians do.” © H. J. de Blij.

Concept Caching

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ing opposition from environmentalists and activists who, in 2005, shut it down for a week. With revenues from oil and gas exports exceeding 50 percent of all exports, Ecuador’s leaders are hearing an increasingly familiar refrain from its people: demand more from the compa- nies and give these funds to those who need it. But it is not as simple as that: oil and gas exploration and exploita- tion require huge investments, and foreign companies can afford to spend what the government’s own state compa- ny, PetroEcuador, cannot. That leads to difficult choices, because the state needs income to cover its obligations. Clearly, energy riches are a double-edged sword.

There is more to Ecuador’s economic geography than its energy sector, of course, but the country’s other com- mercial opportunities (fish from its waters, fruits from the coast, flowers from the cooler slopes) do not reach their full potential because the country is in a difficult social transi- tion. Ecuador’s plural society is strained by a growing social movement, led by its indigenous peoples, that reflects what is happening in the Andean region generally.

Bolivia

Nowhere in this region are the problems faced by Ecuador and to a (hitherto) lesser extent by Peru more acute than they are in landlocked, volatile Bolivia. Before reading further, take a careful look at Bolivia’s regional geogra- phy in both Figures 5-11 and 5-12. Bolivia is bounded by remote parts of Brazil and Argentina, mountainous Andean highlands and altiplanos of Peru, and coveted coastal zones of northern Chile. As the maps show, the Andes in this area broaden into a vast mountain complex some 700 kilometers (450 mi) wide. On the boundary between Peru and Bolivia, freshwater Lake Titicaca lies at 3700 meters (12,500 ft) above sea level and helps make the adjacent Altiplano livable by ameliorating the cold- ness in its vicinity, where the snow line lies just above the plateau surface. On the surrounding cultivable land, pota- toes and grains have been raised for centuries dating back to pre-Inca times, and the Titicaca Basin still sup- ports a major cluster of Aymara subsistence farmers. This

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and the harsh exploitation of its labor force hangs heavily over a society where about two-thirds of the people, almost all Amerindian, live in dire poverty. In recent years, however, this underrepresented aboriginal majority has been making an impact on nation- al affairs. In 2003, violent opposition to a government plan to export natur- al gas to the United States via a new pipeline to the Chilean coast led to chaos and the government’s resigna- tion. In 2005, Bolivian voters elected their first Aymara (Amerindian- ancestry) president, Evo Morales, who proceeded to nationalize the country’s natural gas resources.

Departments and Capitals

Landlocked, physiographically bisect- ed, culturally split, and economically divided, Bolivia is a state in trouble. The country’s prospects are worsened by its political geography: look at Fig- ure 5-12 and you can see that Bo- livia’s nine provinces are regionally divided between Amerindian-majority Departments (as subnational units are called here) in the west and those with

mestizo majorities in the east. The capital, La Paz, lies in the Amerindian-majority mountains, but many mestizo Bolivians do not recognize it as such: historically, the func- tions of government have been split between La Paz (the administrative headquarters) and Sucre (which lost most government branches in 1899 during a civil war but retained the Supreme Court, calling itself the “constitu- tional capital”). And some mestizo Bolivians even suggest that the eastern city of Santa Cruz should be considered as a candidate for “compromise capital” of their country.

The Santa Cruz Department, like the others in the Ori- ente, stands in sharp contrast to those of the Andes in the west. Here the hacienda system (see p. 203) persists almost unchanged from colonial times, its profitable agriculture supporting a wealthy aristocracy. Nearly 90 percent of Bolivia’s agriculturally productive land is still owned by about 50,000 families, much of it taken during the colo- nization period and the rest expropriated during subsequent military dictatorships. Now this eastern zone of Bolivia proves to contain rich energy resources as well, adding to its economic advantage. So there is talk (and there are fre- quent public demonstrations) in support of autonomy, even secession here, but neither the haciendas nor the energy industry could function without the Amerindian labor force.

A N

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BENI LA PAZ

PANDO

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CHUQUISACA

POTOSÎ

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Pilom ayo R.

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Iténea R.

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Lake Titicaca

Lake Poopó

PACIFIC OCEAN

Uyuni Salt Flats

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La Paz

Antofagasta

Cochabamba

Sucre

Potosí

Tarija

Arica

Iquique

El Alto

Yacuíba

Concepción

Oruro

Montero

Trinidad

RiberaltaCobija

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58° Tropic of Capricorn

Longitude West of Greenwich

Under 50,000

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1,000,000–5,000,000

National capitals are underlined

BOLIVIA

400 Kilometers 2000

0 200 Miles100

Mestizo majority

Gasfield Road Gas pipeline

Amerindian majority

Main coca-growing areas

portion of the Altiplano is the heart of modern Bolivia and also contains the capital city, La Paz.

The landlocked state of Bolivia is the product of the Hispanic impact, and the country’s Amerindians (who still make up at least 55 percent of the national popula- tion of 10.4 million) no more escaped the loss of their land than did their Peruvian or Ecuadorian counterparts. What made the richest Europeans in Bolivia wealthy, however, was not land but minerals. The town of Potosí in the eastern cordillera became a legend for the immense deposits of silver in its vicinity; tin, zinc, copper, and sev- eral ferroalloys were also discovered there. Amerindian workers were forced to work in the mines under the most dreadful conditions.

Today natural gas and oil, exported to Argentina and Brazil, are major sources of foreign revenues, and zinc has replaced tin as the leading metal export. But Bolivia’s economic prospects will always be impeded by the loss of its outlet to the Pacific Ocean during its war with Chile in the 1880s, despite its transit rights and dedicated port facilities at Antofagasta.

More critical than its economic limitations or its land- locked situation is Bolivia’s social predicament. The gov- ernment’s history of mistreatment of indigenous people

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Less than ten years ago Bolivia was in chaos, a fail- ing state on the brink of all-out civil war. Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, openly involved himself in the country’s politics through public opposition to the then-Bolivian leadership and by supporting the Amerindian side in the dispute. When Evo Morales was elected and began trying to gain control of the energy industry while making moves to alter the divi- sion of national wealth, the struggle between east and west took a new turn.

By the end of the first decade of this century, Bolivia still hung together, even as the president sought to change the constitution and the three eastern Depart- ments tried to secure greater autonomy (their local newspapers often refer to Spain’s Catalonia as their model for the future). When energy prices were high, there was money to spend on the social programs Pres- ident Morales had promised to expand. But when, toward the end of the decade, the price of natural gas declined even as the Bolivian government got into trade disputes with its neighbors Brazil (the main market for Bolivia’s gas) and Argentina, the specter of state fail- ure rose again. The combination of rising expectations among Amerindian citizens and devolutionary hopes among the minority mestizos cast an ominous cloud over Bolivia’s future.

Paraguay

Paraguay, Bolivia’s landlocked neighbor to the south- east, is one of those transitional countries between regions and exhibits properties of each (see Fig. 5-4; additional examples on the world map [Fig. G-2] are Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Sudan). Certainly, Paraguay (population: 6.5 million) is not an “Andean” country: it has no highlands of consequence. Its well-watered eastern plains give way to the dry scrub of the Chaco in the west. Nor does it have clear, spatially entrenched ethnic divisions among Amerindians, mestizos, and others as do Bolivia and Peru. But Amerindian ances- try dominates the ethnic complexion of Paraguay, and Amerindian Guaraní is so widely spoken in the coun- try that this is one of the world’s most thoroughly bilin- gual societies. And continuing protests by landless peasants mirror those occurring elsewhere in South America’s West. Looking south, there is little in Paraguay’s economic geography to compare to Argenti- na, Uruguay, or Chile, as the back-cover Data Table con- firms. In a sense, Paraguay is a bridge between West and South, but not a heavily traveled one.

Paraguay is transitional in another way: as many as 300,000 Brazilians have crossed the border to settle in eastern Paraguay, where they have created a thriving

commercial agricultural economy that produces soy- beans, livestock, and other farm products exported to or through Brazil. Brazil, of course, is the giant in the Mer- cosur/l free-trade zone, but Paraguay is in a geographi- cally difficult position: Paraguay often complains that Brazil does not live up to its regional-trade obligations and creates unacceptable difficulties for Paraguayan exporters. Meanwhile, politicians raise fears that grow- ing Brazilian immigration is creating a foreign enclave within Paraguay, where people speak Portuguese (includ- ing in the local schools), the Brazilian rather than the Paraguayan flag flies over public buildings, and a Brazilian cultural landscape is evolving. Like Bolivia, Paraguay pays heavily for its landlocked weakness.

Paraguay’s human geography reflects this. As the Data Table inside the back cover shows, the country’s low GNI resembles that of countries of the West, not the more advantaged South. This is also one of South Amer- ica’s least urbanized states, and poverty dominates the countryside as well as the slums encircling the capital, Asunción, and other towns (Fig. 5-11). In 2007, nearly two-thirds of the population lived at or below the offi- cial poverty level. Although records are inadequate, research suggests that 1 percent of the population owns about 75 percent of the land. That may be a record for inequality in the South American realm.

In 2008, Paraguay ended its history of ruthless dicta- torial rule with the election of a radical, pro-Guaraní priest, Fernando Lugo, who in his days as a missionary supported hacienda invasions by landless peasants and promised land reform and other remedies for the poor.

Money for these remedies will be hard to come by, but in July 2009 President Lugo scored a major success when he negotiated new terms with Brazil for the sale of Paraguay’s share of electricity generated by Itaipu Dam located on the Paraná River between the two countries. When this huge dam’s turbines began producing power in 1984, each country (then ruled by dictators) got 50 percent of the electricity, but severely underdeveloped Paraguay needed just a tiny fraction of that. So Paraguay’s ruler agreed to sell to Brazil the remainder of his coun- try’s share at prices far below market value. Democrati- cally elected Lugo persuaded Brazil’s (also democratic) government to begin paying market rates for the 40 per- cent of Paraguay’s Itaipu-generated power it sells every year, adding hundreds of millions of dollars to Paraguay’s income. Furthermore, Brazil will assist Paraguay in build- ing a modern transmission line from Itaipu to Asunción, to be ready in 2012 and mark the start of a crucial expan- sion of Paraguay’s electrical-power infrastructure.

Another problem arising from Paraguay’s long-term weakness and misrule lies in the southeast, where the borders of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay converge in a chaotic scene of smuggling, money laundering,

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B O L I V I A

P A R A G U A Y

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Tierra del Fuego

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Viedma

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Comodoro Rivadavia

Concepción

Chiloé Island

Mendoza

San Juan Córdoba

Rosario

Santa Fe

Paysandú Salto

Corrientes Resistencia

Tucumán

Chuquicamata

Antofagasta Salta

Arica

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Itaipu Dam Triple Frontier area

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(U.K.)

THE NORTH

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Tacuarembó

Paso de los Toros

Melo

Treinta-y-Tres

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Montevideo Punta del Este

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B R A Z I L

AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE ZONES OF URUGUAY

After Griffin, 1973.

Urban areas Market garden (orchards or vineyards) Dairying Intensive cereals Cereals with livestock Extensive sheep grazing Extensive cattle ranching (beef) Railroads Roads

0 10050 150 Kilometers

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political intrigue, and even terrorist activity, centered on the town of Ciudad del Este. Locals call this the Triple Frontier, and warning flags went up when reports of Hizbullah (Iranian-backed terrorist) activity were con- firmed by the discovery of maps of the area in a Taliban safe house in Afghanistan. Paraguay’s state system clearly needs strengthening, and not just for domestic reasons.

THE SOUTH: MID-LATITUDE SOUTH AMERICA

South America’s three southern countries—Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay— constitute a region sometimes referred to as the Southern Cone because of its tapered, ice-cream-cone shape (Fig. 5-13). As noted earlier, Paraguay has strong links to this region and in some

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ITS NAME MEANS “fair winds,” which first attracted Euro- pean mariners to the site of Buenos Aires alongside the broad estuary of the muddy Rio de la Plata. The shipping function has remained paramount, and to this day the city’s residents are known throughout Argentina as the porteños (the “port dwellers”). Modern Buenos Aires was built on the back of the nearby Pampa’s grain and beef industry. It is often likened to Chicago and the Corn Belt in the United States because both cities have thrived as interfaces between their immensely productive agricultural hinterlands and the rest of the world.

Buenos Aires (13.0 million) is yet another classic South American primate metropolis, housing nearly one-third of all Argentines, serving as the capital since 1880, and func- tioning as the country’s economic core. Moreover, Buenos Aires is a cultural center of global standing, a monument-studded city that contains the world’s widest boulevard (Avenida 9 de Julio).

During the half-century between 1890 and 1940, the city was known as the “Paris of the South” for its archi- tecture, fashion leadership, book publishing, and per- forming arts activities (it still has the world’s biggest opera house, the Teatro Colón). With the recent restoration of democracy, Buenos Aires is now trying to recapture its golden years. Besides reviving these cultural functions, the

city has added a new one: the leading base of the hemi- sphere’s motion picture and television industry for Spanish- speaking audiences.

AMONG THE REALM’S GREAT CITIES . . . Buenos Aires

Avenida 9 de Julio

Teatro Colón (Opera House)

CBD

San Isidro

San Fernando

General San Martín

Caseros

Morón

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Almirante Brown

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ways forms part of it, although social contrasts between Paraguay and those in the Southern Cone remain sharp.

Since 1995, the countries of this region have been drawing closer together in an economic union named Mercosur/l, the hemisphere’s second-largest trading bloc after NAFTA. Despite setbacks and disputes, Mercosur/l has expanded and today encompasses Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, and (pending ratification) Venezuela; Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia participate as associate members.

Argentina

The largest Southern Cone country by far is Argentina, whose territorial size ranks second only to Brazil in this geo- graphic realm; its population of 40.6 million ranks third after Brazil and Colombia. Argentina exhibits a great deal of physical-environmental variety within its boundaries, and the vast majority of the Argentines are concentrated in the physiographic subregion known as the Pampa (a word meaning “plain”). Figure 5-3 underscores the degree of clustering of Argentina’s inhabitants on the land and in the

cities of the Pampa. It also shows the relative emptiness of the other six subregions (mapped in Fig. 5-13): the scrub- forest Chaco in the northwest; the mountainous Andes in the west, along whose crestline lies the boundary with Chile; the arid plateaus of Patagonia south of the Rio Colorado; and the undulating transitional terrain of intermediate Cuyo, Entre Rios (also known as ”Mesopotamia” because it lies between the Paraná and Uruguay rivers), and the North.

The Argentine Pampa is the product of the past 150 years. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when the great grasslands of the world were being op- ened up (including those of the interior United States, Russia, and Australia), the economy of the long-dormant Pampa began to emerge. The food needs of industrializ- ing Europe grew by leaps and bounds, and the advances of the Industrial Revolution—railroads, more efficient ocean transport, refrigerated ships, and agricultural machinery—helped make large-scale commercial meat and grain production in the Pampa not only feasible but also highly profitable. Large haciendas were laid out and farmed by tenant workers; railroads radiated ever farther outward from the booming capital of Buenos Aires and brought the entire Pampa into production.

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A Culture Urban and Urbane

Argentina once was one of the richest countries in the world. Its historic affluence is still reflected in its archi- tecturally splendid cities whose plazas and avenues are flanked by ornate public buildings and private mansions. This is true not only of the capital, Buenos Aires, at the head of the Rio de la Plata estuary—it also applies to interior cities such as Mendoza and Córdoba. The cul- tural imprint is dominantly Spanish, but the cultural land- scape was diversified by a massive influx of Italians and smaller but influential numbers of British, French, and German immigrants. A sizeable immigration from Lebanon resulted in the diffusion of Arab ancestry to more than 8 percent of the Argentinian population.

Argentina has long been one of the realm’s most urbanized countries: 91 percent of its population is con- centrated in cities and towns, a higher percentage even than Western Europe or the United States. Almost one- third of all Argentinians live in metropolitan Buenos Aires, by far the leading industrial complex where pro- cessing Pampa products dominates. Córdoba has become the second-ranking industrial center and was chosen by foreign automobile manufacturers as the car-assembly center for the expanding Mercosur/l market. One in three Argentinian wage-earners is engaged in manufacturing, another indication of the country’s economic progress. But what concentrates the urban populations is the pro- cessing of products from the vast, sparsely peopled inte- rior: Tucumán (sugar), Mendoza (wines), Santa Fe (forest products), and Salta (livestock). Argentina’s prod- uct range is enormous. There is even an oil reserve near Comodoro Rivadávia on the coast of Patagonia.

Economic Boom and Bust

Despite all these riches, Argentina’s economic history is one of boom and bust. With just over 40 million inhab- itants, a vast territory with diverse natural resources, ade- quate infrastructure, and good international linkages, Argentina should still be one of the world’s wealthiest countries, as it once was. But political infighting and eco- nomic mismanagement have combined to ruin a vibrant and varied economy. What began as a severe recession toward the end of the 1990s became an economic col- lapse in the first years of this century.

To understand how Argentina finds itself in this situa- tion, a map of its administrative structure is useful. On paper, Argentina is a federal state consisting of the Buenos Aires Federal District and 23 provinces (Fig. 5-14). As would be expected from what we have just learned, the urbanized provinces are populous, while the mainly rural ones have smaller populations—but the gap between

Buenos Aires Province (whose capital is La Plata), with nearly 15 million, and Tierra del Fuego (capital: Ushu- aia), with barely over 100,000, is wide indeed. Several other provinces contain under 500,000 inhabitants, so that the larger ones in addition to dominant Buenos Aires are also disproportionately influential in domestic poli- tics, especially Córdoba and Santa Fe, both with capitals of the same name.

The never-ending problem for Argentina has been corrupt politics and associated mismanagement. Fol- lowing an army coup in 1946, Juan Perón got himself

SANTA CRUZ

CHUBUT

RÍO NEGRO

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elected president, bankrupted the country, and was suc- ceeded by a military junta that plunged the country into its darkest days, culminating in the “Dirty War” of 1976–1983 which saw more than 10 (and perhaps as many as 30) thousand Argentinians disappear without a trace. In 1982, this ruthless military clique launched an invasion of the British-held Malvinas (Falkland Islands), resulting in a major defeat for Argentina. By the time civilian government replaced the discredited junta, inflation was soaring and the national debt had become staggering (see the Issue Box entitled “Who Needs Democracy?”). Economic revival during the 1990s was followed by another severe downturn that exposed the flaws in Argentina’s fiscal system, includ- ing scandalously inefficient tax collection and uncon- ditional federal handouts to the politically powerful provinces.

In 2003, a new administration took office led by Pres- ident Néstor Kirchner, who hails from a small Patagon- ian province, not from one of the country’s traditional power centers. He won on the Peronist Party platform, and then, true to Argentinian political tradition, two years later took on the political bosses in Buenos Aires Province by supporting the Senate candidacy of his wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, against the spouse of the province’s most powerful politician. Fernandez de Kirchner won decidedly, cementing her husband’s pres- idential power and allowing him to pursue goals he had long embraced: combating foreign economic interven- tion, controlling domestic companies, reviving Argenti- na’s export economy by keeping its currency artificially low, and ending military immunity from prosecution (in response to growing public demands for justice follow- ing the military dictatorship).

In another one of those operatic scenarios that makes locals say “Only in Argentina,” President Kirchner announced in mid-2007 that he would not seek reelec- tion to a second four-year term and instead nominated his wife as his party’s presidential candidate. Fernandez de Kirchner won decisively, beating 13 other candidates with 45 percent of the vote; but economic problems soon intruded into her post-election political honeymoon despite her party’s comfortable majorities in both the Chamber and the Senate. As the Data Table at the back of the book shows, Argentina has the highest per-capita GNI in the realm, but rising inflation and growing labor troubles cost the president much of her public support. Foreign investors were reluctant to assume risks in a country whose government habitually ignored contract terms. Moreover, Argentina continued to cope with un- certainties as to its energy supplies. The end of the old boom-and-bust cycle is not yet in sight.

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“You could see this (what I thought was a) church from many kilometers away on the fieldtrip to Coquimbo, a coastal town about 300 kilometers (200 mi) north of Valparaíso, Chile, where the climatic transition to the desert north is evident all around. But it was this urban scene that taught me a lesson: I glanced at the tower and assumed that this was an unusually prominent Roman Catholic church looming over the townscape, as you see all over the realm. But my colleague advised me to look closer. ‘See any crosses?’ he asked. I didn’t. ‘Anything unusual about the architecture?’ I noticed the arched courtyard. ‘Remind you of anything?’ Well, yes, but surely not here? Here indeed—a mosque serving a widely scattered but significant minority, visible from afar and symbolizing change in a realm where evangelical movements are by no means the only challenge to Roman Catholicism’s historic domination. I had seen the growing presence of Islam in the greater Lima area days earlier, but that was to be expected in a city of its dimensions and international linkages. But here in relatively remote Coquimbo?” © H. J. de Blij. Concept Caching

w w w. c o n c e p t c a c h i n g . c o m

Chile

For 4000 kilometers (2500 mi) between the crestline of the Andes and the coastline of the Pacific lies the nar- row strip of land that is the Republic of Chile (Fig. 5- 15). On average just 150 kilometers (90 mi) wide (and only rarely over 250 kilometers or 150 mi in width), Chile is the world’s quintessential example of what elon- gation means to the functioning of a state. Accentuated by its north-south orientation, this severe territorial atten- tuation not only results in Chile extending across numerous environmental zones; it has also contributed

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SOUTH AMERICA DOES!

“I’m old enough to remember the good as well as the bad old days here in Argentina. As a young man I worked for the national railroad company when that guy Perón came on the scene. I guess he learned his craft from the fascists in Italy, because he excelled in election by intimidation. He divided this country as never before, spending money on the work- ers and the poor while curbing freedoms and even abolish- ing freedoms guaranteed under our constitution. To tell you the truth, my salary actually went up a bit, and I even voted for him the second time around—largely, I think, because I wanted to do something for his beautiful wife Evita, who was loved by the whole country (except the military).

“Anyway, if you looked around South America in those days, we could have done worse. Wall-to-wall dictators. The military and police, secret and otherwise, put the fear of God into the populace, helped by the church. At least we had a guy who went through the motions of election. While those others divided the wealth among their cronies, Perón tried to spread it around. Even wealth we didn’t have! Yes, he certainly put us into debt. And he had his cronies too.

“When they finally deposed Perón, I thought that we might see democratic elections here. (In retrospect, I don’t know why I thought that—Spain and Portugal were ruled by two of the worst, Franco and Salazar; that’s our ‘Latin’ her- itage). Well, you already know how wrong I was. Instead of more democracy, we got military repression. We lived in ter- ror, not just fear. You’ve probably heard of those nuns who asked questions about the fate of a baby whose mother had ‘disappeared.’ They loaded them into a helicopter, in their outfits, and threw them out over the Rio de la Plata. Later I heard some soldiers joke about ‘the flying nuns.’ Rumors of what could happen to you were rife. Everyone knew some- one who knew someone who was a victim.

“Our cloud of military terror lifted after they made their mistake in the Malvinas, 25 years ago, and since then we’ve had a taste of real democracy. It hasn’t been easy, but let me tell you, it’s better than ‘strongman’ rule so many of us South Americans are familiar with. Most of all, there’s openness. You can express your views without fear. Political parties can argue their positions without military intimidation. Corrupt public officials can be found out by reporters, and they can’t send machine-gun-toting colonels to kill their pursuers. Yes, there are downsides—that openness applies to the economy too, and as we’ve discovered, outsiders can interfere in our financial affairs. But I’d rather have democracy and open dis- order than dictatorship and isolated order, and I’ve known them both.”

SAY NO TO THE EXCESSES OF DEMOCRACY!

“You can’t help noticing that the Great Democratic Revolu- tion that was supposed to be sweeping Middle and South America is not exactly a success. Here in Brazil we’ve had democratic government of a sort since 1989, when our man Fernando Collor de Mello was allowed by the military to win an election. You’ll remember what happened to him. He resigned three years later after being implicated in a corrup- tion and influence-peddling scheme. I’m sure the poor ben- efited hugely from this return to democracy.

“South American countries have a history of being led by men who captured the imagination of the nation and whose vision forged the character of the state. These men knew that the state must serve the people. The state must ensure that its railroads and bus services are available at low cost to all citizens. The state must provide electricity, fuel, and clean

water. The state must staff and maintain the schools. The state and the church are indivisible, and the networks of the church are in the ser- vice of the state. If the military is needed to maintain order in the interest of stability, so be

it. Call them strongmen if you like, but they personified their nations and did so for centuries.

“Democracy is a luxury for rich countries. The Americans like to teach us about democracy, but as a geography high- school teacher here in Santa Catarina, let me ask you this: how can the U.S. call itself a democracy when, in their Sen- ate, a few hundred thousand people in Wyoming have the same representation as over 30 million in California? Oh, I see. You call yourself a ‘representative republic.’ Well, then don’t lecture us about democracy. Even Juan Perón was ‘democratically’ elected, you know. In fact, most of those allegedly dictatorial rulers you so harshly criticize would probably win at the ballot box.

“Anyway, look at what democracy has done for Argenti- na and for Venezuela before the Venezuelans had the good sense to throw the rascals out and elect Chávez. Look what it is doing for Peru, where democratically elected President Toledo was trying to sell off the electric company serving Arequipa before the citizens stopped him. That ‘openness’ you hear pro-democracy advocates talk about just means that outsiders can come in, put your country in debt, demand ‘privatization’ of public companies, buy up corpo- rations and banks and haciendas, fire thousands of work- ers to increase profits and share prices back home, and make the poor even poorer. What we need in this part of the world is a strong hand, not only to guide the nation but to pro- tect the state.”

Who Needs Democracy?

Vote your opinion at www.wiley.com/college/deblij

Regional ISSUE

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to the country’s external political, internal administrative, and general economic problems. Nonetheless, through- out most of their modern history, the Chileans have made the best of this potentially disastrous centrifugal force: from the beginning, the sea has constituted an avenue of longitudinal communication; the Andes Mountains con- tinue to form a barrier to encroachment from the east; and when confrontations loomed at the far ends of the country, Chile proved to be quite capable of coping with its northern rivals, Bolivia and Peru, as well as Argenti- na in the extreme south.

Three Subregions

As Figures 5-13 and 5-15 indicate, Chile is a three-sub- region country. About 90 percent of its 17.1 million peo- ple are concentrated in what is called Middle Chile, where Santiago, the capital and largest city, and Val- paraíso, the chief port, are located. North of Middle Chile lies the Atacama Desert, wider, drier, and colder than the coastal desert of Peru. South of Middle Chile, the coast is broken by a plethora of fjords and islands, the topog- raphy is mountainous, and the climate—wet and cool near the Pacific—soon turns drier and colder against the Andean interior. South of the latitude of Chiloé Island, there are few permanent overland routes and hardly any settlements. These three subregions are also apparent on the realm’s cultural map (Fig. 5-6), as well as the map of South America’s agricultural systems (Fig. 5-5). In addition, a small Amerindian subsistence zone in north- easternmost Chile’s Andes is shared with Argentina and Bolivia.

Some intraregional differences exist between north- ern and southern Middle Chile, the country’s core area. Northern Middle Chile, the land of the hacienda and of Mediterranean climate with its dry summer season, is an area of (usually irrigated) crops that include wheat, corn, grapes, and other Mediterranean products. Livestock raising and fodder crops also take up much of the pro- ductive land, but continue to give way to the more ef- ficient and profitable cultivation of fruits for export. Southern Middle Chile, into which immigrants from both the north and Europe (especially Germany) have pushed, is a better-watered area where raising cattle has pre- dominated. But here, too, more lucrative fruits, vegeta- bles, and grains are changing the area’s agricultural specializations.

Prior to the 1990s, the arid Atacama region in the north accounted for more than half of Chile’s foreign revenues. The Atacama Desert contains the world’s largest exploitable deposits of nitrates, which was the country’s economic mainstay before the discovery of methods of

SaltaSalta

SucreSucre

75°

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75° 70° 65°

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Iquique

Copiapó

La Serena Coquimbo

Valdivia

Arica

Antofagasta

Chuquicamata

Valparaíso

Rancagua

Talca

Chillán Concepción

Temuco

Puerto Montt

Comodoro Rivadavia

Salta

Tucumán

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Puerto Natales Río Gallegos

Puerto Williams

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CHILE

B O L I V I A

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Chonos Archipelago

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Lake San Martín

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CHILE

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National capitals are underlined

POPULATION

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Under 50,000

50,000–250,000

250,000–1,000,000

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FIGURE 5-15

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synthetic nitrate production a century ago. Subsequently, copper became the chief export (Chile again possesses the world’s largest reserves, which in 2008 accounted for more than half of all export revenues). It is mined in sev- eral places, but the main concentration lies on the east- ern margin of the Atacama near Chuquicamata, not far from the port of Antofagasta. For most of the past decade, commodity prices were high and Chile’s export revenues soared; but prices plunged sharply as global recession deepened in 2009, underscoring the risks involved—and the continuing need for economic diversification.

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“In a small, admission-charge private museum I found a treasure of historic information about this place in Chile— its environmental challenges ranging from droughts to earthquakes, its growth as a center for irrigated agriculture augmented by mining in the hinterland, its religious importance as the site of many churches and convents. But what matters today is tourism and retirement. Not only is La Serena (just inland from Coquimbo) on the international visitor circuit, but it lies at the center of a growing cluster of second-home and retirement complexes, benefiting from its equable climate and attractive scenery, and from the Southern Cone’s comparative economic prosperity. So La Serena has become an amusement park, its stores converted to boutique shops, its historic homes on visitor tours, its plaza throbbing with the music of competing boomboxes, its streets clogged by buses. An older resident sitting on a park bench had his doubts. ‘All this started when they built this Pan-American Highway right past us,’ he said. ‘Now you can get here by sea, by road, even by air. Is this your first visit? You came too late.’ No doubt about it: what I saw here wasn’t what I read in those faded pages in the museum.” © H. J. de Blij.

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Political and Economic Transformation

Chile today is emerging from a development boom that transformed its economic geography during the 1990s, a growth spurt that established its reputation as South America’s greatest success story. Following the with- drawal of its brutal military dictatorship in 1990, Chile embarked on a program of free-market economic reform that brought stable growth, lowered inflation and unem- ployment, reduced poverty, and attracted massive for- eign investment. The last is of particular significance because these new international connections enabled the export-led Chilean economy to diversify and develop in some badly needed new directions. Copper remains the single leading export, but many other mining ventures have been launched. In the agricultural sphere, fruit and vegetable production for export has soared because Chile’s harvests coincide with the winter farming lull in the affluent countries of the Northern Hemisphere. Industrial expansion is occurring as well, though at a more leisurely pace, and new manufactures include a modest array of goods that range from basic chemicals to computer software.

Chile’s increasingly globalized economy has pro- pelled the country into a prominent role on the interna- tional economic scene. The United States, long Chile’s leading trade partner, now is in second place compared to the Asian Pacific Rim, where China takes the bulk of Chile’s exports followed by Japan and South Korea (Argentina remains Chile’s leading source of imports, mostly energy, which is a potential problem given Ar- gentina’s own rising needs). Chile’s regional commerce also is growing, and Chile has affiliated with Mercosur/l as an associate member.

A “Chilean Model”?

Chile’s economic and democratic transformation has been widely touted as a “Chilean model” to be followed by other Middle and South American countries. But Chile benefits from an unusual combination of oppor- tunities, and some economic geographers argue that Chile has in fact not taken sufficient advantage of all of them. Exports should be more diversified, and Chile’s dependence on high copper prices entails a major risk. Despite reform efforts by President Michelle Bachelet, the education system remains inadequate. Income inequality—that realmwide affliction—has improved, but nearly 20 percent of Chileans still live in poverty. The plight of Chile’s small number of indigenous peo- ple, brought to national attention by the Mapuche of the forested south, is of national concern. But compare

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on Uruguay’s beaches, they cost the Uruguayan econo- my hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Argentinians, who dislike large foreign invest- ments anyway (the factories were to be built by Finnish and Spanish companies), argued that the paper mills would accelerate deforestation, cause river pollution, cre- ate acid rain, and damage the farming, fishing, and tourist industries. When the presidents of the two countries met to negotiate a solution and Uruguay’s leader agreed to halt construction for a “study period,” Urugayan public opinion showed strong opposition to the compromise.

This issue reveals how quickly nationalist feelings can overwhelm the need for international cooperation. It also shows that Mercosur/l partners are far from unit- ed on economic matters, and indicates that the collab- oration implied by Mercosur/l membership is still a distant reality.

BRAZIL: GIANT OF SOUTH AMERICA

The next time you board an airplane in the United States, don’t be surprised if the aircraft you enter was built in Brazil. When you go to the supermarket to buy provisions, take a look at their sources. Chances are some of them will come from Brazil. When you listen to your car radio, some of the best music you hear is likely to have originated in Brazil. The emergence of Brazil as the regional superpower of South America and an economic superpower in the world at large is going to be the story of the twenty-first century. In 2003 Brazil’s newspapers carried quotes from national lead- ers who asked why Brazil, for all its territorial size, population numbers, and energy needs, did not have a nuclear-energy program. Why, asked one editorial, should countries like North Korea and Pakistan have nuclear weapons when Brazil does not even possess nuclear technology? Certainly not because Brazil lacks the capacity.

Why is Brazil so upward-bound today? In large mea- sure it is because, after a long period of dictatorial rule by a minority elite that used the military to stay in power, Brazil embraced democratic government in 1989 (its first democratically elected president was ousted on charges of corruption three years later) and has not looked back since. The era of military coups and repeat- ed quashings of civil liberties is over, and in Brazil’s presidential election of 2002 the leader of the Workers Party, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula, was elected in a runoff that marked a watershed in Brazilian democratic politics. (In a show of displeasure

Chile to virtually any other country in this realm: the Chilean model may not always apply, but the Chilean example certainly provides hope for the future.

Uruguay

Uruguay, unlike Argentina or Chile, is compact, small, and rather densely populated. This buffer state of old became a fairly prosperous agricultural country, in effect a smaller-scale Pampa (though possessing less favorable soils and topography). Figures 5-1 and G-7 show the similarity of physical conditions on the two sides of the Plata estuary. Montevideo, the coastal cap- ital, contains almost 40 percent of the country’s popu- lation of 3.3 million; from here, railroads and roads radiate outward into the productive agricultural interi- or (Fig. 5-13). In the immediate vicinity of Montevideo lies Uruguay’s major farming area, which produces vegetables and fruits for the metropolis as well as wheat and fodder crops. Most of the rest of the country is used for grazing cattle and sheep, with beef products, wool and textile manufactures, and hides dominating the export trade. Tourism is another major economic activ- ity as Argentines, Brazilians, and other visitors increas- ingly flock to the Atlantic beaches at Punta del Este and other thriving resort towns.

Concentricity and Conflict

In Chapter 1, we noted the work of von Thünen and his model layout of agricultural zones (pp. 45–46). Here in Uruguay we can discern a real-world example of that scheme (inset map, Fig. 5-13). Market gardens and dairy- ing cluster nearest the urban area of Montevideo, with increasingly extensive agriculture ringing this national market in concentric land-use zones.

Uruguay’s 177,000 square kilometers (68,000 sq mi), about the size of Florida, evince a low physiologic den- sity (see p. 414), and with the Montevideo urban area comprising 1.5 million people, there is plenty of agri- cultural potential here. But Uruguay’s government seeks to diversify the economy, and one of its plans—the con- struction of two large cellulose (paper) factories on the Uruguayan side of the Uruguay River where it forms the border with Argentina—has caused a quarrel between the two Mercosur/l neighbors that has exposed some serious rifts. Montevideo is the administrative headquarters of Mercosur/l, but, like Paraguay, Uruguay has long felt neglected and even obstructed by its much larger neigh- bors. When Argentinians across the river began demon- strating, blocked a bridge, and stopped taking vacations

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at the result, the United States did not send a single high- ranking representative to Lula’s inauguration.) A cham- pion of the poor and dispossessed, Lula came into office amid a rising tide of expectations but with the reality of a faltering economy confronting his government. In his first term, Lula skillfully managed Brazil’s numerous countervailing forces, unleashing the country’s region- al and global potential. But toward its end his party faced bribery and corruption allegations that came close to the president’s inner circle. Nonetheless, he was reelected to a second term in 2006 and continued his successful administration.

The Realm’s Giant

By any measure, Brazil is South America’s giant. It is so large that it has common boundaries with all the realm’s other countries except Ecuador and Chile (Fig. 5-4). Its tropical and subtropical environments range from the equatorial rainforest of the Amazon Basin to the humid temperate climate of the far south. Territorially, Brazil occupies just under 50 percent of South America and is exceeded on the global stage only by Russia, Canada, the United States, and China. But in population size, it accounts for just over half the realm’s total and is again the world’s fifth-largest country (surpassed only by China, India, the United States, and Indonesia). The Brazilian economy, with its modern industrial base, is now the ninth largest on Earth, and is likely to continue advancing in the international ranks and become a world force as the twenty-first century unfolds.

Population Patterns

Brazil’s population of 200.6 million is as diverse as that of the United States. In a pattern quite familiar in the Americas, the indigenous inhabitants of the country were decimated following the European invasion (fewer than 200,000 Amerindians now survive deep in the Amazon- ian interior). Africans came in great numbers, too, and today there are about 13 million Afro-Brazilians in Brazil. Significantly, however, there was also much racial mixing, and 86 million Brazilians have combined Euro- pean, African, and minor Amerindian ancestries. The remaining 102 million—now barely in the majority at 51 percent—are mainly of European origin, the descendants of immigrants from Portugal, Italy, Germany, and East- ern Europe. The complexion of the population was fur- ther diversified by the arrival of Lebanese and Syrian Muslims following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire

nearly a century ago. Estimates of the Muslim compo- nent in the Brazilian population suggest that about 10 million can claim to be of Arab descent, of whom about 1 million are nominally Muslims. But practicing Mus- lims are far fewer in number: in 2009 Brazil had only about 50 functioning mosques.

Another significant, though small, minority began arriving in Brazil in 1908: the Japanese, who today are concentrated in São Paulo State. The more than 1 mil- lion Japanese-Brazilians form the largest ethnic Japan- ese community outside Japan, and in their multicultural environment they have risen to the top ranks of Bra- zilian society as business leaders, urban professionals, farmers—and even as politicians in the city of São Paulo. Committed to their Brazilian homeland as they are, the Japanese community also retains its contacts with Japan, resulting in many a trade connection. And in recent years some ethnic Japanese have been emi- grating to Japan, where young families are needed in a fast-aging population.

A National Culture

Brazilian society, to a greater degree than is true elsewhere in the Americas, has made progress in dealing with its racial divisions. To be sure, blacks are still the least advan- taged among the country’s major population groups, and community leaders continue to complain about discrimi- nation. But ethnic mixing in Brazil is so pervasive that hardly any group is unaffected, and official census statis- tics about “blacks” and “Europeans” are meaningless. What the Brazilians do have is a true national culture, expressed in an historic adherence to the Catholic faith (now eroding under Protestant-evangelical and secular pressures), in the universal use of a modified form of Por- tuguese as the common language (“Brazilian”), and in a set of lifestyles in which soccer, “beach culture,” distinc- tive music and dance, and a growing national conscious- ness and pride are fundamental ingredients.

Changing Demography

Brazil’s population grew rapidly during the world’s twentieth-century population explosion. But over the past three decades, the rate of natural increase has slowed from nearly 3.0 percent to 1.4 percent, and the average number of children born to a Brazilian woman has just about been halved from 4.4 in 1980 to 2.3 in 2008. These dramatic reductions occurred in the absence of any active family-planning policies by Brazil’s federal or State governments and in direct con- tradiction to the teachings of the Catholic Church, re-

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F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“Near the waterfront in Belém lie the now-deteriorating, once-elegant streets of the colonial city built at the mouth of the Amazon. Narrow, cobblestoned, flanked by tiled frontages and arched entrances, this area evinces the time of Dutch and Portuguese hegemony here. Mapping the functions and services here, we recorded the enormous diversity of activities ranging from carpentry shops to storefront restaurants and from bakeries to clothing stores. Dilapidated sidewalks were crowded with shoppers, workers, and people looking for jobs (some newly arrived, attracted by perceived employment opportunities in this growing city of 2.3 million). The diversity of population in this and other tropical South American cities reflects the varied background of the region’s peoples and the wide hinterland from which these urban magnets have drawn their inhabitants.” © H. J. de Blij.

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flecting religion’s changing role in this former bastion of Roman Catholicism. Brazil’s rapid urbanization, its persisting economic uncertainties, and the widespread use of contraceptives are among factors influencing this significant change.

African Heritage

As we noted earlier, Afro-Brazilians still suffer dispro- portionately from the social ills of this relatively inte- grated nation. And yet Brazil’s culture is infused with

African themes, a quality that has marked it from the very beginning. Three centuries ago, the Afro-Brazilian sculptor and architect affectionately called Aleijadinho was Brazil’s most famous artist. The world-famous com- poser Heitor Villa-Lobos used numerous Afro-Brazilian folk themes in his music. So many Africans were brought in bondage to the city and hinterland of Salvador (Bahia State) from what is today Benin (formerly Dahomey) in West Africa that Bahia has become a veritable outpost of African culture. Candomblé, one of the Macumba reli- gious sects arising from the arrival of African cultures in Brazil, is concentrated in Salvador and Bahia (Fig. 5-16). Its presence there has led to a reconnection with modern Benin as Afro-Brazilians travel to West Africa to search for their roots and West Africans come to Bahia to expe- rience the cultural landscape to which their ancestors gave rise.

In some parts of Bahia, the rural Northeast, and urban areas in Brazil’s core you can almost imagine being in Africa. As a nation, Brazil is taking an increased interest in African linkages, not least because the Lusitanian world incorporates not only Portugal and Brazil but also Angola and Moçambique, where the Portuguese colonial experi- ment failed but where the Lusitanian imprint also survives.

Inequality in Brazil

For all its accomplishments in multiculturalism, Brazil remains a country of stark, appalling social inequalities (Fig. 5-17). Although such inequality is hard to measure precisely, South America is often cited as the geograph- ic realm exhibiting the world’s sharpest division between affluence and poverty. And in South America, Brazil is reputed to have the widest gap of all.

The Scourge of Poverty

Data that underscore this situation include the following. Today, the richest 10 percent of the population own two- thirds of all the land and control more than half of Brazil’s wealth. The poorest 20 percent of the people live in the most squalid conditions prevailing anywhere on the planet, even including the megacities of Africa and Asia. According to UN estimates, in this age of adequate available (but not everywhere affordable) food, about half the population of Brazil suffers some form of mal- nutrition and, in the northeastern States, even hunger. Packs of young orphans and abandoned children roam the cities, sleeping where they can, stealing or robbing when they must. Some of the world’s most magnificent central cities are ringed and sectored by wretched favelas

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where poverty, misery, and crime converge (see Fig. 5-8 and the right-hand photo on p. 242).

Most Brazilian voters had long believed that these conditions were worsening, that what economic devel- opment was taking place benefited those already well off, and that powerful corporations and foreign

investors were to blame for the spiral of rising and growing unemployment. When the latest official reports announced that the number of Brazilians afflicted by poverty had increased by 50 percent since 1980, the people demanded change, and, as we will note, they achieved that in 2002.

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BRAZIL: SUBREGIONS, STATES, AND RESOURCES

National capitals are underlined

POPULATION

SUBREGIONS South

Interior

North

Road

Railroad

0 800 Kilometers

400 600

200 300 400 500 Miles

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1,000,000–5,000,000

FIGURE 5-16

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Brazilian manufacturers attain world-class quality. During the mid-1990s, the revenues from industrial exports surpassed those from agriculture. Commerce with Ar- gentina made that member of Mercosul (as the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians call Mercosur) one of Brazil’s leading trade partners. On the global stage, Brazil became a formidable presence in other ways. The country’s enormous and easily accessible iron ore deposits, the relatively low wages of its workers, and the mecha- nized efficiency of its steelmakers enable Brazil to produce that commodity at half the cost of steel made in the United States. This causes American steel producers to demand government protection through tariffs, which goes against purported U.S. principles of free trade.

A New Era

Even though Brazil has become a major player on the world’s economic stage, it has not escaped the cycles of boom and bust that affect transforming economies. Needing loans from international lending

agencies to weather the downturns, Brazil’s government had to agree to terms that included the privatization of public companies ranging from telephones to utilities. This often meant layoffs, rising prices to consumers, and even civil unrest. Brazil’s currency, the real, was devalued in 1999, resulting in the outflow of billions of dollars withdrawn from Brazil’s banks by panicked depositors. Strikes and marches against increased gas prices, highway tolls, and utility charges paralyzed the country for days. Newspapers reported scandals and corruption involving leading public figures and hun- dreds of millions of reais. In the political campaign that led up to the presidential election of 2002, these issues guaranteed the defeat of the right-of-center government held responsible for it all. In that election a leftist can- didate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, won in a landslide victory. He faced the daunting task of adhering to Bra- zil’s existing financial commitments while steering a new course toward more fairness, openness, and hon- esty in government.

Continuing Challenges

The new left-of-center government in 2002 inherited Brazil’s massive social problems without adequate re- sources to address them. The incoming administration

FRENCH GUIANA

PARAGUAY

COLOMBIA

VENEZUELA

GUYANA

SURINAME

Equator

BOLIVIA

PERU

URUGUAY

ARGENTINA

nrocirp aCfocip

orT

50°

60°70°

40°

30°

20°

10°

0°

50° 40°70°

0°

10°

60°

Longitude West of Greenwich

AT L A N T I C

O C E A N

AT L A N T I C O C E A N

BRAZIL: THE GEOGRAPHY OF WEALTH

Source: Based on UN Human Development Index: 1.0 = most developed,

0.0 = least developed

> 0.80

0.75 – 0.80

0.70 – 0.75

0.65 – 0.70

< 0.65

0 1,200 Kilometers

800

400 600 800 Miles

400

200

Development Prospects

Brazil is richly endowed with mineral resources, includ- ing enormous iron and aluminum ore reserves, extensive tin and manganese deposits, and sizeable oil- and gas- fields (Fig. 5-16). Other significant energy developments involve massive new hydroelectric facilities and the suc- cessful substitution of sugarcane-based alcohol (gasohol) for gasoline—allowing well over half of Brazil’s cars to use this fuel instead of costly imported petroleum. Besides these natural endowments, Brazilian soils sus- tain a bountiful agricultural output that makes the coun- try a global leader in the production and export of coffee, soybeans, and orange juice concentrate. Commercial agriculture, in fact, is now the fastest growing econom- ic sector, driven by mechanization and the opening of a major new farming frontier in the fertile grasslands of southwestern Brazil (see pp. 276–277).

Industrialization has propelled Brazil’s rise as a glob- al economic power. Much of the momentum for this con- tinuing development was unleashed in the early 1990s after the government opened the country’s long-protected industries to international competition and foreign invest- ment. These new policies are proving to be effective be- cause productivity has risen by over a third since 1990, as

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focused on two key areas: land reform and poverty reduction. At the turn of this century, 1 percent of Brazilians owned 50 percent of all productive land. But the government was able to settle only about 60,000 landless families per year, far below what was needed. This resulted in protests and disruptions, which in turn scared off investors, affecting the jobless rate. By 2006, the government had found the resources to increase the rate of settlement, but the voters who elected President Lula da Silva had expected much more. And in the poverty arena, the administration began a Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) program, but in the process created a huge, corruption-riddled bureaucracy. Officially, Brazil counts some 40 million people who live on half the minimum wage of about U.S. $80 per month or less, and the question was how to aid these poorest of the poor with government handouts that had to be modest because of budgetary constraints. By 2006, this mud- dled plan had been replaced by a much more efficient subsidy program that had significant results in the poorest States. This Bolsa Familia (Family Fund) plan gives families small amounts of cash to keep their chil- dren in school and to ensure their vaccinations against diseases that especially afflict the poor. In just a few years this program has become so successful that it now serves as a model for antipoverty campaigns in many other parts of the world.

Oil in Brazil’s Future?

Brazil has been paying for its improvements with rev- enues mainly derived from commodities—iron ore, soybeans, coffee, orange juice, beef, sugar—that, dur- ing the first decade of this century, commanded high prices on international markets. Economic geographers note that Brazil’s dependence on commodities is risky and that the country is linked ever more strongly to the world economy. This means that a global economic downturn could hurt Brazil more than was true in the past, when Brazil imported less and domestic products were protected by tariff barriers. According to this assessment, Brazil does not invest enough of its nation- al income in technology, education, public services, infrastructure, and other needs, and when a downturn comes it could damage the country’s prospects (it was too early to tell if this occurred in 2009).

In the past, a leading concern for Brazil was ener- gy and its costs. Recessions were deepened by high oil and gas prices, and other than some small domestic reserves and those in neighboring Bolivia there were few nearby sources from which to acquire what was needed. But in 2008 Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency announced the discovery of what it described

as an “enormous” oil reserve, possibly the third-largest in the world, much larger than the nearby Tupi Reserve found the previous year in the same area off Rio de Janeiro beneath Atlantic waters (Fig. 5-16). The new- found reserve, appropriately called Carioca-Sugar Loaf, is being explored as you read this. Drilling deep below the sea through thick rock layers will be very costly, and if an energy era is in prospect for Brazil, it will be years off and require foreign investment and technology to which the state-owned oil company, Petrobras, is not accustomed—but the stakes could hardly be higher. A decade from now, optimistic pro- jections suggest, Brazil may rank among the world’s top ten oil producers.

Brazil’s Subregions

Brazil is a federal republic consisting of 26 States and the federal district of the capital, Brasília (Fig. 5-16). As in the United States, the smallest States lie in the north- east and the larger ones farther west; their populations range from about 400,000 in the northernmost, periph- eral Amazon State of Roraima to more than 40 million in burgeoning São Paulo State. Although Brazil is about as large as the 48 contiguous United States, it does not exhibit a clear physiographic regionalism. Even the Amazon Basin, which covers almost 60 percent of the country, is not entirely a plain: between the tributaries of the great river lie low but extensive tablelands. Given this physiographic ambiguity, the six Brazilian subregions discussed next have no absolute or even generally accept- ed boundaries. In Figure 5-16, those boundaries have been drawn to coincide with the borders of States, mak- ing identifications easier.

The Northeast 1 was Brazil’s source area, its cul- ture hearth. The plantation economy took root here at an early date, attracting Portuguese planters, who soon im- ported the country’s largest group of African slaves to work in the sugar fields. But the ample rainfall occurring along the coast soon gives way to lower and more vari- able patterns in the interior, which is home to about half of the region’s 50-plus million people. This drier inland backcountry— called the sertão—is not only seriously overpopulated but also contains some of the worst pover- ty to be found anywhere in the Americas. The Northeast produces less than one-sixth of Brazil’s gross domestic product, but its inhabitants constitute more than one- fourth of the national population. Given this staggering imbalance, it is not surprising that the region contains half of the country’s poor, a literacy rate 20 percent below Brazil’s mean, and an infant mortality rate twice the national average.

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AMONG THE REALM’S GREAT CITIES . . . Rio de Janeiro

Much of the Northeast’s misery is rooted in its un- equal system of land tenure. Farms must be at least 100 hectares (250 acres) to be profitable in the hard-scrabble sertão, a size that only large landowners can afford. Moreover, the Northeast is plagued by a monumental environmental problem: the recurrence of devastating droughts at least partly attributable to El Niño (periodic sea-surface-warming events off the continent’s north- western coast that skew weather patterns).

Understandably, these conditions propel substantial emigration toward the coastal cities and, increasingly, out of the Northeast to the more prosperous Brazilian sub- regions that line the Atlantic seaboard to the south. To stem that human tide, Brazil’s government has pursued the purchase of underutilized farmland for the settling of landless peasants; although tens of thousands of families have benefited, overall barely a dent has been made in the Northeast’s massive rural poverty crisis.

The Northeast today is Brazil’s great contradiction. In cities such as Recife and Salvador, hordes of peasants dri- ven from the land constantly arrive to expand the sur- rounding shantytowns. As yet, few of the generalizations about emerging Brazil apply here, but there are some bright spots. A petrochemical complex has been built near Salvador, creating thousands of jobs and luring foreign investment. Irrigation projects have nurtured a number of productive new commercial agricultural ventures. Tourism is booming along the entire Northeast coast, whose thriving beachside resorts attract thousands of vacationing Europeans. Recife has spawned a budding software industry and a major medical complex. And For- taleza is the center of new clothing and shoe industries that have already put the city on the global economic map.

The Southeast 2 has been modern Brazil’s core area, with its major cities and leading population clus- ters. Gold first drew many thousands of settlers, and other

S A Y “ S O U T H A M E R I C A ” and the first image most peo- ple conjure up is Sugar Loaf Mountain, Rio de Janeiro’s landmark sentinel that guards the entrance to beautiful Guanabara Bay. Nicknamed the “magnificent city” be- cause of its breathtaking natural setting, Rio replaced Sal- vador as Brazil’s capital in 1763 and held that position for almost two centuries until the federal government shifted its headquarters to interior Brasília in 1960. Rio de Janeiro’s primacy suffered yet another blow in the late 1950s: São Paulo, its hated urban rival 400 kilometers (250 mi) to the southwest, surpassed Rio to become Brazil’s largest city—a gap that has been widening ever since. Although these events triggered economic decline, Rio (12.2 million) remains a major entrepôt, air-travel and tourist hub, and center of international business. As a focus of cultural life, however, Rio de Janeiro is unques- tionably Brazil’s leader, and the cariocas (as Rio’s residents call themselves) continue to set the national pace with their entertainment industries, universities, museums, and libraries.

On the darker side, this city’s reputation is increasing- ly being tarnished by the widening abyss between Rio’s affluent and poor populations—symbolizing inequities that rank among the world’s most extreme (see photos, p. 242). All great cities experience problems, and Rio de Janeiro is currently bedeviled by the drug use and crime waves emanating from its most desperate hillside favelas (slums) that continue to grow explosively.

Nonetheless, Rio’s planners recently launched a major project (known as “Rio-City”) to improve urban

life for all residents. This ambitious scheme is designed to reshape nearly two dozen of the aging city’s neigh- borhoods, introduce an ultramodern crosstown expressway to relieve nightmarish traffic congestion, and—most importantly—bring electrical power, paved streets, and a sewage-disposal network to the belea- guered favelas.

Municipal Theater

City University

Guanabara Palace

CBD

Niterói

Neves

Duque de Caxias

Campos Elyseos

São Gonçalo

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Guanabara Bay

Iguaçu River

Sarap uí C

anal

Botafogo Bay

São João

de Merit

Santos Dumont Airport

Manguinho Airport

Rio de Janeiro International Airport

RIO DE JANEIRO

Ilha do Governador

Costa e Silva

President Bridge

Ipanema Beach

Copacabana Beach

Leblon Beach

Sugar Loaf Mtn.Corcovado

0 5 Kilometers

3 Miles

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mineral finds also contributed to the influx—with Rio de Janeiro itself serving as the terminus of the “Gold Trail” and as the long-term capital of Brazil until 1960. Rio de Janeiro became the cultural capital as well, the country’s most international center, entrepôt, and tourist hub. The third quarter of the twentieth century brought another mineral age to the Southeast, based on the iron ores around Lafaiete carried to the steelmaking complex at Volta Redonda (Fig. 5-16).

The surrounding State of Minas Gerais (the name means “General Mines”) formed the base from which industrial diversification in the Southeast has steadily expanded. The booming metallurgical center of Belo Horizonte paved the way and is now the endpoint of a rapidly developing, ultramodern manufacturing corridor that stretches 500 kilometers (300 mi) southwest to met- ropolitan São Paulo (Fig. 5-16).

São Paulo State 3 is the leading industrial produc- er and primary focus of ongoing Brazilian development. This economic-geographic powerhouse accounts for nearly half of the country’s gross domestic product, with an economy that today matches Argentina’s in overall size. Not surprisingly, this subregion is growing phe- nomenally (it already contains 20 percent of Brazil’s population) as a magnet for migrants, especially from the Northeast.

The wealth of São Paulo State was built on its coffee plantations (known as fazendas), and Brazil is still the world’s leading producer. But coffee today has been eclipsed by other farm commodities. One of them is orange juice concentrate (here, too, Brazil leads the world). São Paulo State now produces more than double the annual output of Florida, thanks to a climate all but devoid of winter freezes, to ultramodern processing plants, and to a fleet of specially equipped tankers that ship the concentrate to foreign markets. Another leading pursuit is soybeans, in which Brazil ranks second among the world’s producers.

Matching this agricultural prowess is the State’s industrial strength. The revenues derived from the cof- fee plantations provided the necessary investment capi- tal, ores from Minas Gerais supplied the vital raw materials, the nearby outport of Santos facilitated access to the ocean, and immigration from Europe, Japan, and other parts of Brazil contributed the increasingly skilled labor force. As the capacity of the domestic market grew, the advantages of central location and agglomeration secured São Paulo’s primacy. This also resulted in met- ropolitan São Paulo becoming the country’s—and South America’s—leading industrial complex and megacity (population: 26.2 million).

São Paulo may not have an imposing skyline to match New York or a skyscraper to challenge the Sears (now Willis) Tower of Chicago, but what this Brazilian megacity does have is mass. São Paulo is more than just another city—it is a vast conurbation of numerous cities and towns containing more than 26 million inhabitants who constitute the third-largest human agglomeration on Earth. This view shows part of the razor-sharp edge of the CBD, a concrete jungle with little architectural distinction but vibrant urban cultures. In the foreground, juxtaposed against the affluence of downtown, the teeming inner city reflects the opposite end of the social spectrum—a chaotic jumble of favelas that mainly house the newest urban migrants, especially from Brazil’s hard-pressed Northeast. São Paulo, demographers say, gives us a glimpse of the urban world of the future. © AP/Wide World Photos.

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S Ã O P A U L O , W H I C H lies on a plateau 50 kilometers (30 mi) inland from its Atlantic outport of Santos, possesses no obvious locational advantages. Yet here on this site we find the third-largest metropolis on Earth, whose popu- lation has multiplied so uncontrollably that São Paulo has more than doubled in size (from 11 to just over 26 mil- lion) over the past three decades.

Founded in 1554 as a Jesuit mission, modern São Paulo was built on the nineteenth-century coffee boom. It has since grown steadily as both an agricultural pro- cessing center (soybeans, orange juice concentrate, and sugar besides coffee) and a manufacturing complex (accounting for about half of all of Brazil’s industrial jobs). It has also become Brazil’s primary focus of com- mercial and financial activity. Today São Paulo’s bustling, high-rise CBD (see photo, p. 274) is the very symbol of urban South America and attracts the continent’s largest flow of foreign investment as well as the trade-related activities that befit the city’s rise as the business capital of Mercosul (Mercosur).

Nonetheless, even for this biggest industrial metro- polis of the Southern Hemisphere, the increasingly glob- al tide of postindustrialism is rolling in and São Paulo is being forced to adapt. To avoid becoming a Detroit- style Rustbelt, the aging automobile-dominated manu- facturing zone on the central city’s southern fringes is today attracting new industries. Internet companies, in particular, have flocked here in such numbers that they already constitute Brazil’s largest cluster of e-commerce activity—and prompt many to now call this area Silicon Village.

Elsewhere in São Paulo’s vast urban constellation— whose suburbs now sprawl outward up to 100 kilometers (60 mi) from the CBD—additional opportunities are being exploited. In the outer northeastern sector, new research facilities as well as computer and telecommunications- equipment factories are springing up. And to the west of central São Paulo, lining the ring road that follows the Pinheiros River, is South America’s largest suburban office complex replete with a skyline of ultramodern high-rises.

The huge recent growth of this megacity has also been accompanied by massive problems of over- crowding, pollution, and congestion. Traffic jams here are among the world’s worst, with more than twice as many gridlocked motor vehicles on any given day than in Manhattan. Staggering poverty—on a par with Mex- ico City’s—is the most pressing crisis as the ever- expanding belt of shantytowns tightens its grip on much of the metropolis. With its prodigious growth rate expected to persist through the foreseeable future, can anything prevent Greater São Paulo from ap- proaching an unimaginable population of 50 million barely 20 years from today?

AMONG THE REALM’S GREAT CITIES . . . São Paulo

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Diadema

Santo André

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Tietê River

Tamanduatei River

Aricanduva River

Congonhas Airport

Guarulhos International

Airport

SÃO PAULO

To Santos

5 Kilometers

3 Miles

The South 4 consists of three States, whose com- bined population exceeds 27 million: Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul (Fig. 5-16). South- ernmost Brazil’s excellent agricultural potential has long attracted large numbers of European immigrants. Here the newcomers introduced their advanced farming

methods to several areas. Portuguese rice farmers clus- tered in the valleys of Rio Grande do Sul, where tobac- co production has now propelled Brazil to become the world’s leading exporter. The Germans, specialists in raising grain and cattle, occupied the somewhat higher areas to the north and in Santa Catarina. The Italians

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This is not the U.S. Great Plains but the heart of Brazil’s cerrado in eastern Mato Grosso State, where the flat terrain of the fertile, well-watered savanna is ideally suited for large- scale, highly mechanized agriculture. As Figure 5-5 shows, farm production here is dominated by soybeans, the cheapest and most efficient source of protein available, and in high demand across the world. This crop has expanded like wildfire in the Central- West subregion, and the soy frontier is now pushing northward into the Amazon rainforest itself. Brazil’s acreage has more than doubled since 2000, propelling the country into the topmost ranks of soybean producers; in 2008, Brazil accounted for no less than 28 percent of the global output, second only to the United States’ 33 percent. © D. Donne Bryant/Stock Photography.

selected the highest slopes, where they established thriving vineyards. All of these fertile lands proved highly productive, and with growing markets in the large urban areas to the north, this tristate subregion became Brazil’s most affluent corner.

With the South firmly rooted in the European/com- mercial agricultural sphere (Figs. 5-5, 5-6), European- style standards of living match the diverse Old World heritage that is reflected in the towns and countryside (where German and Italian are spoken alongside Por- tuguese). This has led to hostility against non-European Brazilians, and many communities actively discourage poor, job-seeking migrants from the North by offering to pay return bus fares or even blocking their house- hold-goods-laden vehicles. Moreover, extremist groups have arisen to openly espouse the secession of the South from Brazil.

Economic development in the South is not limited to the agricultural sector. Coal from Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul is shipped north to the steel plants of Minas Gerais. Local manufacturing is growing as well, especially in Pôrto Alegre and Tubarão. During the 1990s, a major center of the computer software industry was established in Florianópolis, the island city and State capital just off Santa Catarina’s coast. Known as Tecnópolis, this budding technopole contin- ues to grow by capitalizing on its seaside amenities, skilled labor force, superior air-travel and global com- munications linkages, and government and private- sector incentives to support new companies. Only the

sparsely populated interior portion of the South has lagged behind the rest of the region, despite the recent completion of massive Itaipu Dam in westernmost Paraná State.

The Interior 5 subregion—constituted by the States of Goiás, Mato Grosso, and Mato Grosso do Sul—is also known as the Central-West. This is the region that Brazil’s developers have long sought to make a part of the country’s productive heartland, and in 1960 the new capital of Brasília was deliberately situated on its mar- gins (Fig. 5-16).

By locating the new capital city in the wilderness 650 kilometers (400 mi) inland from its predecessor, Rio de Janeiro, the nation’s leaders dramatically sig- naled the opening of Brazil’s development thrust to- ward the west. Brasília is noteworthy in another regard because it represents what political geographers call a forward capital. A state will sometimes relocate its capital to a sensitive area, perhaps near a peripheral zone under dispute with an unfriendly neighbor, in part to confirm its determination to sustain its position in that contested zone. Brasília does not lie near a con- tested area, but Brazil’s interior was an internal fron- tier to be conquered by a growing nation. Spearheading that drive, the new capital occupied a decidedly for- ward position.

Despite the subsequent growth of Brasília to 3.8 mil- lion inhabitants today (which includes a sizeable ring of peripheral squatter settlements), it was not until the 1990s that the Interior began its economic integration

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on the nearby Tocantins River and an 850-kilometer (535-mi) railroad to the Atlantic port of São Luis. This ambitious development project also emphasizes the exploitation of additional minerals, cattle raising, crop farming, and forestry. What is occurring here is a man- ifestation of the growth-pole concept. A growth pole is a location where a set of activities, given a start, will expand and generate widening ripples of development in the surrounding area. In this case, the stimulated hinterland could one day cover one-sixth of all Ama- zonia.

Understandably, tens of thousands of settlers have descended on this part of the Amazon Basin. Those seek- ing business opportunities have been in the vanguard, but they have been followed by masses of lower-income laborers and peasant farmers in search of jobs and land ownership. The initial stage of this colossal enterprise has boosted the fortunes of many towns, particularly Manaus northwest of Carajás. Here, a thriving indus- trial complex (specializing in the production of elec- tronic goods) has emerged in the free-trade zone ad- joining the city thanks to the outstanding air-freight operations at Manaus’s ultramodern airport. But many problems have also arisen as the tide of pioneers rolled across central Amazonia. One of the most tragic in- volved the Yanomami people, whose homeland in Roraima State was overrun by thousands of claim-stak- ers (in search of newly discovered gold), who triggered violent confrontations that ravaged the fragile aborigi- nal way of life.

Another leading development scheme, known as the Polonoroeste Plan, is located about 1600 kilometers (1000 mi) to the southwest of Grande Carajás in the 2400-kilometer (1500-mile)-long Highway BR-364 cor- ridor that parallels the Bolivian border and connects the western Brazilian towns of Cuiabá, Pôrto Velho, and Rio Branco (Fig. 5-16). Although the government had planned for the penetration of western Amazonia to pro- ceed via the east-west Trans-Amazon Highway, the mi- grants of the 1980s and 1990s preferred to follow BR-364 and settle within the Basin’s southwestern rim zone, mostly in Rondônia State. Agriculture has been the dominant activity here, but in the quest for land, bit- ter conflicts continue to break out between peasants and landholders as the Brazilian government pursues the volatile issue of land reform.

This region of Brazil is well known for the defor- estation occurring there (an environmental issue of glob- al significance that is discussed in the box on p. 220 in Chapter 4). Cutting the forest results directly from log- ging operations, but more of it is a matter of land occu- pation and use by settlers. The usual pattern of settlement

with the rest of Brazil. The catalyst was the exploita- tion of the vast cerrado—the fertile savannas that blan- ket the Central-West and make it one of the world’s most promising agricultural frontiers (at least two- thirds of its arable land still awaits development). As with the U.S. Great Plains, the flat terrain of the cer- rado is one of its main advantages because it facilitates the large-scale mechanization of farming with a mini- mal labor force (see photo, p. 276). Another advantage is rainfall, which is more prevalent there than in the Great Plains or Argentine Pampa (Fig. G-6).

The leading crop is soybeans, whose output per hectare here exceeds even that of the U.S. Corn Belt. Other grains and cotton are also expanding across the farmscape of the cerrado, but the current pace of region- al development is inhibited by a serious accessibility problem. Unlike the Great Plains and Pampa, the growth of an efficient transportation network did not accompa- ny the opening of this farming frontier. Thus the Interior’s products must travel along poor roads and intermittent railroads to reach the markets and ports of the Atlantic seaboard. Today several projects are finally underway to alleviate these bottlenecks, including the privately financed Ferronorte railway that links Santos to the southeastern corner of Mato Grosso State, and the improved, so-called Soy Highway north to the Amazon River port city of Santarém.

The North 6 is Brazil’s territorially largest and most rapidly developing subregion, which consists of the seven States of the Amazon Basin (Fig. 5-16). This was the scene of the great rubber boom a century ago, when the wild rubber trees in the selvas (tropical rainforests) produced huge profits and the central Amazon city of Manaus enjoyed a brief period of wealth and splendor. But the rubber boom ended in 1910, and for most of the seven decades that followed, Amazonia was a stagnant hinterland lying remote from the centers of Brazilian settlement. All that changed dramatically during the 1980s as new development began to stir throughout this awakening region, which currently is the scene of the world’s largest migration into virgin territory as more than 200,000 new settlers arrive each year. Most of this influx is occurring south of the Amazon River, in the tablelands between the major waterways and along the Basin’s wide rim.

Development projects abound in the Amazonian North. One of the most durable is the Grande Cara- jás Project in southeastern Pará State, a huge multi- faceted scheme centered on one of the world’s largest known deposits of iron ore in the hills around Cara- jás (Fig. 5-16). In addition to a vast mining complex, other new construction here includes the Tucuruí Dam

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of vast stands of tropical woodland (see photo above). Since the 1980s, an area of rainforest almost the size of Ohio has been lost annually in Amazonia— accounting for over half of all tropical deforestation on the planet and worsening an environmental crisis of global proportions.

Brazil is the cornerstone of South America, the dom- inant economic force in Mercosur/Mercosul, the only dimensional counterweight to the United States in the Western Hemisphere, a maturing democracy, and an emerging global giant. The future of the entire South American realm depends on Brazil’s stability and social as well as economic progress.

This is what the Amazon’s equatorial rainforest looks like from an orbiting satellite after the human onslaught in preparation for settlement. The colors on this Landsat image emphasize the destruction of the trees, with the dark green of the natural forest contrasted against the pale green and pinks of the leveled forest. The linear branching pattern of deforestation here in Rondônia State’s Highway BR-364 corridor is explained in the text. But farming here is not likely to succeed for very long, and much of the cleared land is likely to be abandoned. Then the onslaught will resume to clear additional land—as an entire ecosystem comes ever closer to failing forever. © NRSC LTS/Photo Researchers.

in this part of Brazil goes like this. As main and branch highways are cut through the forest, settlers follow (often due to government-sponsored land-occupation schemes), and they move out laterally to clear land for farming. Subsistence crops are planted, but within a few years weed infestation and declining soil fertili- ty make the plots unproductive. As soil fertility con- tinues to decline, and with few markets for commercial crops, the settlers plant grasses and then sell their land to cattle ranchers. The peasant farmers then move on to newly opened areas, clear more land for planting, and the cycle repeats itself. Unfortunately, this not only entrenches low-grade land uses across wide- spread areas, but also entails the burning and clearing

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What You Can Do R E C O M M E N D A T I O N : Take up a Region! As you encounter the world’s regions in this book, is there one that inter- ests you more than others, one that arouses your curiosity so that you might want to learn more about it than this course can offer? Well, regional specialists are ever fewer and farther between in our increasingly computer-screen-dominated world, and regional knowledge could benefit you for a lifetime. We recommend that you follow your interest in a realm or a region that forms part of it—South America’s “Southern Cone” or Southern Africa or Mainland Southeast Asia— and pursue it in the news, in your reading, in other courses. English-language newspapers (with corresponding websites) are published in almost every major city, from Jakarta to Buenos Aires to Beijing, and it’s fascinating to see what con- cerns people there on a daily basis—the local news and the letters to the editor can give you insights you’ll never find on the networks. Who knows, you may even travel there and start a specialization that could become a hobby, if not a pro- fessional sideline!

GEOGRAPHIC CONNECTIONS

Geographic Literature On South America: The key introductory works on this realm were authored by Blouet & Blouet, Brom- ley & Bromley, Caviedes & Knapp, Clawson, James & Minkel, Kent, Morris, and Preston. These works, together with a compre- hensive listing of noteworthy books and recent articles on the geography of South America, can be found in the References and Further Readings section of this book’s website at www.wiley.com/college/deblij

1 South America is a realm of diverse cultural landscapes and numerous immigrant sources. Some countries that

are relatively homogeneous culturally, such as Colombia and Venezuela, are as divided politically and economically as are other countries with strong and obvious cultural-geo- graphic divisions such as Peru and Bolivia. In virtually all South American countries, such divisions have slowed devel- opment and hampered national integration. What do you see as the best solution(s) for the realm and its states as they seek to overcome these historic obstacles? What evi- dence is there on the continent of “what works” and what does not?

2 Brazil is the giant of South America, and it has the largest and most productive economy. But Brazil is

unlike other South American states in a number of ways (for example, there is no megacity on a scale with São Paulo any- where else in the realm), so that what locals call the “Brazil- ian model” of development may not work in other countries. Still, Brazil does share key qualities with its many neighbors, and its experiences can help these neighbors in their efforts to make progress. Discuss the important similarities and dif- ferences between Brazil and the rest of South America that have a bearing on the still-evolving relationships among countries in this realm.

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