Module 7
Latin America
a. Area and Population
With its 38 countries, Latin America consists of a mainland region that extends
from Mexico south to Argentina and Chile, together with the islands of the Caribbean
Sea. Its maximum latitudinal extent of more than 85 degrees, or nearly 5,900 miles (c.
9,500 km), is greater than that of any other major world region. Its maximum east-west
measurement, amounting to more than 82 degrees of longitude, is also impressive.
Latin America’s two main subregions are neatly offset from one another
geographically. The northern part, known as Middle America, includes Mexico; the
countries of Central America (Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua,
Costa Rica, and Panama); Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola;
Cuba; and the smaller islands of the Caribbean. It trends sharply northwest to southeast
before intersecting with the north-south orientation of the continent of South America.
South America protrudes much farther into the Atlantic Ocean than the Caribbean realm
or Latin America’s northern neighbor, North America. In fact, the meridian of 80 degrees
west longitude (80°W), which touches the west coast of South America in Ecuador and
Peru, passes through Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Brazil also lies less than 2,000 miles
(3,200 km) west of Africa, to which it was joined in the supercontinent of Pangaea until
around 110 million years ago.
Latin America has a land area of slightly more than 7.9 million square miles (20.5
million sq km), with South America accounting for 6,893,000 square miles (17,869,000
sq km) and Middle America 1,047,000 square miles (2,713,000 sq km). The total is about
2.5 times the size of the conterminous United States.
Latin America’s 2007 population of 569 million represented 8.5 percent of the
world total. The population has uneven distributions and densities. Most of Latin
America’s people are packed into two major geographic alignments. The larger of these
two areas, known as “the rim” or “the Rimland,” is a discontinuous ring around the
margins of South America. The second, generally a highland, extends along a volcanic
belt from central Mexico southward into Central America.
About two-thirds of Latin America’s people live along the South American
Rimland. There are two major segments of the rim. The much larger segment, in terms of
both population and area, extends along the eastern margin of the continent from the
mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil southward to the humid pampa (subtropical
grassland) around Buenos Aires, Argentina. The second segment is located partly on the
coast and partly in the high valleys and plateaus of the adjacent Andes Mountains. It
stretches around the north end and down the west side of South America. This crescent
begins in the vicinity of Caracas, Venezuela, on the Atlantic coast and arches all the way
around to the vicinity of Santiago, Chile, on the Pacifi c side of the continent.
This second segment is more fragmented, broken in many places by steep Andean
slopes and coastal desert. A strip of hot, rainy, and thinly populated coast lies between
Caracas and the mouth of the Amazon River. In the far south on the Atlantic side of the
continent, the population rim is again broken in the rugged, relatively inaccessible, rain-
swept southern Andes and the dry lands of Argentina’s Patagonia in the Andean rain
shadow. These territories have only a sparse human population, far exceeded by the
millions of sheep that graze in Patagonia and adjacent Tierra del Fuego.
The second major alignment of populated areas in Latin America lies on the
mainland of Middle America. It runs along an axis of volcanic land dominating central
Mexico and from there reaches southeastward through southern Mexico and along the
Pacifi c side of Central America to Costa Rica. This belt is characterized by good soils,
enough rainfall for crops, and elevations high enough in most places to moderate the
tropical heat. In Pacifi c Central America, more people live in the highlands than the
lowlands.
The pattern of core and hinterland is especially noticeable in Brazil and
Argentina. Most Brazilians live along or near the eastern seaboard south of Belém, a port
city in northeastern Brazil, whereas large areas in the interior are still thinly populated. In
Argentina, about three fourths of the population is clustered in Buenos Aires and the
adjacent humid pampas. Mexico and the Andean countries also have this kind of spatial
imbalance in their populations.
Not every country, however, displays this pattern of core and hinterland. El
Salvador and Costa Rica (both with densely settled volcanic lands) and most Caribbean
islands are different. The combined populations of the Caribbean is much less than that of
central Mexico. But these islands have heavy population densities, grown over a long
period of expanding population on restricted territories. The crowding is often aggravated
by high rates of natural population increase or steep slopes limiting opportunities for
farming and settlement.
Most Latin American countries are in the second stage of the demographic
transition, clearly recognizable as less developed countries (LDCs) having relatively high
(although declining) birth rates and low death rates due to advances in the spread of
medical technologies. The highest population growth rates tend to be in the least
developed countries, notably those of Central America; Guatemala and Nicaragua have
the highest in Latin America at 2.8 and 2.3 percent per year (French Guiana, owned by
France, has a rate of 2.7 percent per year), and Honduras has the lowest per capita GNI
PPP of all the Central American countries. The lowest per capita GNI PPP in all of Latin
America belongs to the island nation of Haiti. It might be expected to have the highest
population growth rate and probably would if not for the scourge of HIV/AIDS. Haiti has
the highest infection rate in the Western Hemisphere, affecting some 4 percent of adults.
Its annual population growth rate is held down by losses to AIDS to just 1.8 percent. The
lowest annual rate of population change is 0.3 percent in Cuba, thanks more to steadfast
Communist promotion of family planning rather than general prosperity. The overall rate
of increase for the population of Latin America is 1.5 percent, which is the average for
the world’s less developed countries. This regional rate of increase is down considerably
from the high of 3 percent in 1960, thanks in large part to the fact that the region’s
economies are generally improving, albeit slowly.
b. Physical Geography and Human Adaptations
The climatic and biotic diversity of Latin America is extraordinary. Even within
some single countries (Ecuador for example), conditions range over a very short
horizontal distance from sea-level tropical rain forests to alpine tundra. The tropical rain
forest climate and biome, with heavy year-round rainfall, continuous heat and humidity,
and superabundant vegetation dominated by large broadleaf trees, is generally a lowland
type lying mainly along and near the equator, with segments extending to the tropical
margins of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The largest segment, representing
the world’s largest continuous expanse of tropical rain forest, lies in the basin of the
Amazon River system. Additional areas are in southeastern Brazil, eastern Panama, the
western coastal plain of Colombia, on the Caribbean side of Central America and
southern Mexico, and along the eastern (windward) shores of some Caribbean islands,
particularly Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Much of the original tropical rain forest
vegetation of the islands has been lost to human activity, and even the vast Amazon forest
is under considerable pressure.
On either side of the principal region of tropical rain forest climate, the tropical
savanna climate extends to the vicinity of the Tropic of Capricorn in the Southern
Hemisphere and, with more fragmentation, to the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern
Hemisphere. Still farther poleward, in the eastern portion of South America, lies a large
area of humid subtropical climate, with cool winters unknown in the tropical zones. Its
Northern Hemisphere counterpart is north of the Mexican border in the southeastern
United States. In South America, this climate is associated mainly with prairie grasses in
the humid pampas of Argentina, Uruguay, and extreme southern Brazil. On the Pacifi c
side of South America, a small strip of Mediterranean or drysummer subtropical climate
in central Chile is similar to that in southern California. This is an ideal climate for wine
production, and Chilean wines are now well established on world markets.
One of the most signifi cant features of Latin America’s physical geography with
respect to human adaptations is a series of highland climates arranged into zones by
elevation. This zonation results from the fact that air temperature decreases with
elevation at a normal rate of approximately 3.6°F (1.7°C) per 1,000 feet (c. 300 m). At
least four major zones are commonly recognized in Latin America: the tierra caliente (hot
country), the tierra templada (cool country), the tierra fría (cold country), and the tierra
helada (frost country). At the foot of the highlands, the tierra caliente is a zone embracing
the tropical rain forest and tropical savanna climates. The zone reaches upward to
approximately 3,000 feet (c. 900 m) above sea level at or near the equator and to slightly
lower elevations in parts of Mexico and other areas near the margins of the tropics. In this
hot, wet environment, the favored crops are rice, sugarcane, bananas, and cacao. Latin
America’s blacks are concentrated in many of the tierra caliente zones, a legacy of the
slave trade when they were forced to work the region’s plantations.
The tierra caliente merges almost imperceptibly into the tierra templada, which fl
anks the rugged western mountain ranges and is the uppermost climate in the lower
uplands and highlands to the east. Sugarcane, cacao, bananas, oranges, and other lowland
products reach their uppermost limits in the tierra templada, but this zone is most famous
as coffee habitat. The upper limits of this zone—approximately 6,000 feet (1,800 m)
above sea level—tend to be the upper limit of European-introduced plantation agriculture
and modern commercial crops in Latin America. Densely inhabited sections occupy large
areas in southeastern Brazil, Colombia, Central America, and Mexico. Although
broadleaf evergreen trees characterize the moister, hotter parts of this zone, coniferous
evergreens replace them in parts of the zone’s poleward margins. In places such as the
highlands of Brazil and Venezuela, where there is less moisture, scrub forest or savanna
grasses prevail.
Adjoining a large section of the Pacifi c Ring of Fire and fronting two seasonal
hurricane regions, Latin America is beset by natural hazards. A belt of land stretching
from northern Mexico all the way to Tierra del Fuego, the “Land of Fire” at the southern
tip of South America, has a violent history of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Hurricanes originating in the Pacifi c but most especially in the Atlantic have had
sometimes devastating impacts. A single storm can wreck the economy of an island
nation, as Hurricane Ivan did by wiping out Grenada’s nutmeg crop in 2004. The
monstrous Hurricane Mitch (category 5, highest on the Beaufort scale) was an unusually
late storm that made landfall in Honduras on October 28, 1998, and roamed for fi ve days
over that country and Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. Its ferocious
winds and rainfalls of up 2 feet (60 cm) brought fl oods, landslides, and storm damage—
intensifi ed by the region’s widespread deforestation—that killed an estimated 15,000
people; infl icted enormous damage on property, crops, roads, power, and other
infrastructure; and left disease epidemics in its wake. As if Mitch were not enough, the
region had also suffered from drought and fi res visited on it in 1997 and 1998 by El
Niño.
c. Cultural and Historical Geographies
In 1492, as they do today, the Maya inhabited southern Mexico, Belize, and
Guatemala. They practiced agriculture based on maize (corn), squash, beans, and chili
peppers and had by 200 c.e. developed a highly complex civilization in both lowland
tropical rain forests and highland volcanic regions. They created monumental religious
and residential structures, including pyramids, temples, and astronomical observatories.
They built stone roadways through dense forest areas but notably had no wheeled
vehicles, nor did they have the sailing vessels, the plow, beasts of burden, and some other
tools and trappings associated with civilizations elsewhere.
The Maya had highly developed systems of mathematics, astronomy, and
engineering and an extremely precise calendar (which ends, some say ominously, on
December 21, 2012). The Maya also had a hieroglyphic writing system that survives on
stone monuments and in a handful of books. Regarding them as heretical, Spanish priests
put almost all of the written volumes to the torch. On July 12, 1562, Bishop Diego de
Landa destroyed at least 30 Mayan books in a bonfi re outside a church in Mexico’s
Yucatán Peninsula. “They contained nothing in which there were not to be seen
superstitions and falsehoods of the devil,” de Landa later wrote. “We burned them all.”
Many Maya watched this event, which, de Landa recalled, “they regretted to an amazing
degree and which caused them much affliction.
In South America, the Inca built an empire about 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long
from northern Ecuador to central Chile. They controlled it for only about a century before
1532, when the Spanish conquistadors, under Francisco Pizarro, began their subjugation.
The Inca’s origins, dating to about 1200 c.e., are not fully known. From their governing
center in Cuzco, Peru, the Inca engineered a system of roads, suspension bridges, and
settlements that connected and supported their empire. The road system ran more than
2,500 miles (c. 4,100 km) and was busy with movement of trade and tribute. The Inca
also achieved great skill in stoneworking, terrace construction, and irrigation networks.
Remarkably, they had neither paper nor a writing system but kept mathematical records
by knotted ropes called quipus (pronounced “kee-pooz”).
Still another group, the little-known Nazca culture, left a unique legacy on the
landscape of South America about 2,000 years ago. Their “Nazca lines” in the desert of
southern Peru is a complex of nearly 200 square miles (c. 520 sq km) of massive carvings
in the sandy surface, depicting birds, insects, and fi sh, the smallest of which is an animal
fi gure some 80 feet (c. 23 m) in length. These designs can only be appreciated from the
air, giving rise to the improbable theory that they were built as landmarks for “ancient
astronauts.” No written records of the Nazca culture survive, so the purpose of their lines
may never become known. Another of the less celebrated civilizations of South America
is the Chibcha of what is now Colombia. The Chibcha lived in small agricultural villages
rather than large cities, and their exquisite gold work is a major legacy of their culture.
Speakers of Chibchan languages now live in the Andes of Colombia and Ecuador and as
far north as Costa Rica. Beneath the dominant imported languages of Spanish and
Portuguese, the linguistic substrate of Latin America is still rich.
With the exception of the Nazcans (whose record ends about 600 c.e.), the groups
just discussed were only the largest major civilizations at the time of the Spanish
conquest. There were smaller civilizations and others that predated the conquest. Far
more numerous were the groups that practiced hunting and gathering or agriculture but
did not build cities and civilizations. Their legacy survives today in the cultures and
languages of a rich variety of Native American ethnic groups. Linguistic geographers
disagree sharply over Native American language distributions, so only very general
patterns.
Six Native American language families are represented in Mexico and Central
America. The Hokan-Siouan language family has speakers in Mexico’s Baha Peninsula
and in El Salvador and adjacent Honduras. The Aztec-Tanoan language family includes
the Nahuatl that the Aztecs spoke and that is still spoken in northern Mexico today. The
OtoManguean language family includes seven languages spoken mainly in northern
Mexico. There is a small Totonac language family region on the Gulf of Mexico.
Southern Mexico is home to the Penutian and Mayan language families. The indigenous
cultures these languages represent form a signifi - cant minority overall in Mexico at 30
percent, but they comprise over 50 percent in some southern states of the country. The
Mayan language family has fi ve major subfamilies, representing more than 60 million
speakers living all across the realm of the ancient Maya, especially in Guatemala. Some
Maya, particularly in highland Guatemala, never did mix with outsiders and are
ethnically little changed from their forebears. The Maya of highland Guatemala tend to
speak Mayan as their fi rst language, but many are bilingual with Spanish. With its 23
Maya groups, Guatemala’s population is more than 40 percent Native American overall.
First came death, both deliberate and unintended. Series of expeditions to the New
World convinced the Spaniards that there were riches worth pursuing in that far-off land.
The Spanish conquistador Hernando (Hernán) Cortés landed on Mexico’s coast near
present-day Veracruz in 1519 and led his cohort of invaders inland, building alliances
with ethnic groups opposed to the Aztecs and killing those who would not join him.
Unfortunately for the Aztecs, Cortés’s arrival seemed to fulfi ll the prophecy that
Quetzalcoatl, a fair-skinned, bearded Aztec god would return one day, approaching from
the east. In Tenochtitlán, the Aztec leader, Moctezuma, received Cortés and his army as
emissaries of Quetzalcoatl. Cortés and just 30 men took Moctezuma prisoner and were
unopposed, apparently because of the widespread belief in Quetzalcoatl’s return. Using a
divide-and-conquer strategy that enlisted local forces, Cortés achieved a military victory
over the Aztecs in 1521, destroying Tenochtitlán and laying the foundation for Mexico
City in its ashes.
Despite the dominance in Latin America of culture traits derived from Europe, a
large majority of the original European settlers or their descendants intermarried with
Native Americans or blacks. Only Argentina, Uruguay, and Costa Rica have signifi cant
white European ethnic groups today. These are mainly families of immigrants from
Europe who arrived relatively recently, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Scattered districts in other countries are also predominantly European.
Black Latin Americans of relatively unmixed African descent live in the greatest
numbers on the Caribbean islands and along the Atlantic coastal lowlands in Middle and
South America. These are the areas to which African slaves were brought during the
colonial period, mainly to work on sugar plantations. An estimated 3 to 4 million were
sold in Brazil alone. Slavery was gradually abolished during the 19th century, although
not until the 1880s in Brazil and Cuba. By that time, slavery had generated large fortunes
for many owners of plantations and slave ships. The African peoples it introduced to the
region have made cultural contributions that today provide a varied, vibrant, and
important part of Latin American civilization.
d. Economic Geography
Latin America is generally a region of less developed countries (LDCs) where
people do not enjoy a high standard of living. It is not the worst off of the major world
regions; in fact, its overall per capita GNI PPP is more than three times that of sub-
Saharan Africa. But compared to North America or Europe, the Latin American region as
a whole is quite poor, with an estimated one-third of its residents living in poverty. Both
poverty and unemployment have diminished in recent years for the region as a whole;
thanks to its relative abundance of raw materials, Latin America has benefi ted from the
global boom in commodities related in large measure to China’s dynamic growth. As in
Africa and elsewhere, Chinese interests are scouting out every possible prospect in Latin
America that could help feed that nation’s voracious appetite for minerals, energy, and
food. In some Latin American countries, this raises the same fears as in Africa: that
China is seeking to develop a classic mercantile relationship with Latin America, taking
raw materials and profi tably selling its own manufactured goods. But for now, the infl ux
of Chinese capital is welcomed. Economic growth for the region averaged 5 percent per
year from 2004 to 2007. The wealthiest independent countries on a per capita GNI PPP
basis are Trinidad and Tobago and Argentina, while the poorest are Haiti and Bolivia.
Although Latin America’s overall situation is improving, the region suffers from
notoriously large discrepancies between the haves and the have-nots. The glitter of the
great metropolises like Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, with their forests of new
skyscrapers, may distract attention from poverty, but portions of these cities are massive,
squalid slums, known as favelas in Brazil and barrios in Spanish-speaking countrie. Such
shantytowns, which are practically universal in the world’s LDCs, are full of
unemployed, underemployed, and ill-fed people. Many prefer their plight in them to the
conditions of the depressed rural landscapes from which they came. They aspire to the
upward mobility that is at least within view in the urban areas.
Although the total number of Latin Americans employed in farming has not
declined much in recent decades, the value of agriculture in national economies has
experienced a marked percentage decline as economies have become more diversifi ed.
But in many countries, more than half of all export revenue is still derived from farm
products, and some countries rely mainly on one or two agricultural commodities. As in
other LDCs, overreliance on a narrow range of exports makes the Latin American
countries economically vulnerable to changes in market conditions, competition from
other sources, and changing consumer appetites. Reliance on coffee and bananas has
whipsawed the economic fortunes of many countries, especially those in Central America
that came to be known disparagingly as “banana republics”.
Farms in Latin America can be divided into two major classes by size and system
of production. Large estates with a strong commercial orientation are known as latifundia
(sing., latifundio). These estates, whether called haciendas, plantations, or some other
name, are owned by families or corporations. Some have been in the hands of the same
family for centuries. The desire to own land as a form of wealth and a symbol of prestige
and power has always been a strong characteristic of Latin American societies. Spanish
and Portuguese sovereigns granted huge tracts to members of the military nobles who led
the way in exploration and conquest. Some of this land has been reallocated to small
farmers by government action from time to time. But in many countries, a very large
share of the land is still in the hands of a small, wealthy, landowning class.
Latin America is a large-scale producer of a small number of key minerals,
notably petroleum, iron ore, bauxite, copper, tin, silver, lead, zinc, and sulfur. Only a
handful of Latin American nations gain large revenues from exporting these minerals.
Even in the countries that do have large mineral output—notably Mexico, Venezuela,
Chile, Ecuador, and Brazil—much of the profi t appears to be dissipated in the form of
showy buildings, corruption, illadvised development schemes, and enrichment of the
upper classes and foreign investors. Latin America has thus suffered from the same
“resource curse” that has stricken other parts of the developing world. Even though
benefi ts to the broader population from such mineral production is often minimal, that
production has funded the development of signifi cant infrastructure, including new
highways, power stations, water systems, schools, and hospitals, and hence created jobs.
Many Latin American countries are trying to reduce their dependence on raw
materials and boost their exports of value-added manufactured products, thus improving
their fi nancial situations. To do so, they have formed or joined free-trade agreements
(FTAs), particularly with their giant neighbor to the north.
Mercosur is not a lightweight: In value of products traded, this is the third-largest
trade group in the world, after NAFTA and the EU. Mercosur and the European Union
negotiated an important trade pact in 2004 in which Europe offered the South American
countries more generous import quotas for beef, dairy products, sugar, and coffee. In
turn, Mercosur offered the European Union privileged access to investments in
telecommunications, banking, and other services. The South American countries
embraced the agreement in part at the urging of the regional heavyweight, Brazil, which
did not want to be seen as bowing fi rst and foremost to U.S. interests in another pact, the
FTAA (to be discussed shortly).
Using NAFTA as its foundation and DR-CAFTA as a building block, the United
States is taking the lead in establishing a hemisphere-wide trade organization called the
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Like the political organization known as the
Organization of American States (OAS), it would include all of the countries of North,
Middle, and South America, with the exception of Cuba. Originally envisioned for
establishment in 2005, this agreement is proving very diffi cult to achieve because some
of its loudest critics in Latin America—Brazil in particular—insist that the United States
is including too many restrictions in its vision of “free” trade. Mercosur members
including Brazil want to see the United States drop the huge subsidies of many
agricultural products and steel that keep American farmers and factory workers in
business but that shut out Brazilian products. In return, Mercosur would endorse patent,
copyright, and other IPR protection of U.S. industries. With the FTAA stalled, the United
States has chosen to negotiate one-on-one trade agreements with members of the
proposed FTAA, beginning with Chile in 2004 and Peru in 2007.
More and more Latin American families, particularly from Mexico, Central
America, and the Caribbean, have come to rely on having at least one member work
abroad to help out the family economy. Among the largest sources of income for Latin
American economies are the remittances, or earned savings, sent home by people
working abroad, especially in the United States. In 2006, Latin Americans working
typically two jobs in the United States and earning less than $20,000 per year sent home
more than $45 billion (50 percent more than in 2004), typically in periodic electronic
transfers of $200 to $300 each. Mexico is the world’s third-largest remittance market
(after China and India), with $23 billion infused into the country from Mexican laborers
in the United States.
Tourism has become a major regional economic asset to Latin America,
generating critical foreign exchange; only oil exports are more valuable. During what
many North Americans see as their too-long winters, they are bombarded by television
and print advertisements of vacation in paradise: Jamaica and hosts of other destinations
of the Caribbean basin and western Mexico. A wide variety of vacation experiences are
available, from the hedonistic resort complexes that tourists seldom leave (one resort on
Jamaica actually is called Hedonism) to the insular sea voyage that offers day trips ashore
in exotic destinations to whitewater and rain forest adventures of the ecotourist variety.
The region benefi ts from the proximity of its year-round warmth to the wealthy
and mobile and seasonally chilled U.S. and Canadian populations. Tourism revenues refl
ect that distance-decay relationship: the highest tourism receipts in Latin America fl ow
to Mexico, the nearest neighbor to the wealthy countries, but tend to fall off for more far-
fl ung destinations. Countries in which tourist dollars amount to more than 50 percent of
the nation’s foreign exchange include Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, and Barbados.
e. Geopolitical Issues
The central geopolitical reality of Latin America is that it is in America’s
backyard. For better or worse, the United States has staked its geostrategic claim to the
region. Much of the United States itself is comprised of land wrested from Mexico in
confl icts of the early 19th century. In 1823, U.S. intentions for Latin America were
formulated in a policy known as the Monroe Doctrine, after U.S. President James Monroe
announced that the United States would prevent European countries from undertaking
any new colonizing activities in the hemisphere. Many subsequent interventions, wars,
investments, and other U.S. activities may be seen in light of this seminal policy. Even
more consequential was the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, whereby
the United States declared that it had the right to supervise the internal affairs of Latin
American countries to ensure U.S. national security.
Ever since the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed, the United States has had a
particularly fi rm hand in Central America. Washington has dealt unapologetically and
sometimes harshly with perceived threats to the United States from this region. Examples
include U.S. actions to support governments against nationalist insurgencies or insurgents
against leftist governments: El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s, Cuba in the 1960s,
and Nicaragua in the 1950s were the most signifi cant instances.
Constructed between 1904 and 1914 by American contractors, the Panama Canal
is a product of U.S. commercial and strategic interests. For decades, it was sovereign U.S.
territory, carefully monitored by an American military presence, and the United States
kept more than half of the transit fees charged to ships using it. In the late 1970s,
however, the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter accepted the Panamanians’
complaint that U.S. control of the canal was an outmoded vestige of colonialism. Carter
negotiated the transfer of authority over the canal to Panama in a treaty that went into
effect in 1999. Now the revenues from ships transiting the canal are exclusively
Panama’s.
From a strategic and economic defense standpoint, however, the United States is
still deeply involved with the canal. The U.S. Navy is concerned that its two access points
(Balboa in the Pacifi c and Cristóbal in the Atlantic) are now controlled by a company
with strong backing from China, the canal’s second-largest user. The United States has
already effectively invoked the Roosevelt Corollary since returning control of the canal;
in 1989, U.S. troops invaded Panama and ousted its ruler, Manuel Noriega, whom the
Americans accused of facilitating the illegal trade of drugs into the United States. The
U.S. war on drugs has been another central geopolitical issue of the region since the early
1970s.
Washington’s thinking has been that the best way both to obtain Colombia’s oil
and to stem the drug tide is to take on Colombia’s main rebel army, the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia. FARC became the quintessential narcoterrorist organization,
deriving most of its funding from the profi table cocaine industry based mainly in the
areas it controlled. FARC and another rebel group, the National Liberation Army (ELN),
took control of areas containing much of Colombia’s roughly 40 billion barrels of
petroleum. FARC attacked the petroleum infrastructure, especially the 500-mile (800-
km) pipeline between Canon Limon and Covenas. That pipeline is partially owned by
Occidental Petroleum of Los Angeles. Occidental and other U.S. companies spent tens of
millions of dollars lobbying the U.S. government to help protect Colombia’s oil from the
rebels and therefore allow American fi rms to operate more freely and safely in the
country.
Their lobbying paid off. With U.S. funding and training as part of the Plan
Colombia program, which began in 2000, Colombian forces undertook conventional drug
war tactics, such as stepped-up herbicide spraying of coca crops, confi scation of traffi
ckers’ assets, and shooting down suspected drug-carrying planes. In a related operation
dubbed Plan Patriot, U.S. military personnel civilian contractors targeted FARC to both
reduce drugs and secure oil. To date, these efforts have succeeded in wresting much
control from FARC. The government-backed “paramilitary” forces that both fought these
rebels and had their own stake in the drugs trade have also been weakened, and the
security situation in Colombia is much improved.
Between about 1980 and 2000, U.S. administrations exercised a hands-on policy
in Latin America. Through a combination of blunt U.S. military interventions and the
countries’ own efforts, Latin America witnessed an overall transformation of political
systems from authoritarian to multiparty democratic. In the thinking of successive U.S.
administrations, those greater political freedoms should have ushered in more prosperity.
This was one component of the so-called Washington Consensus. In this
politicaleconomic philosophy, the United States would press the democratic governments
of Latin America to open markets 235 to international trade, reduce tariffs, expand
quotas, sell off state companies to private investors, allow more foreign investment, cut
government spending, and reduce bloated bureaucracies. These reforms would bring the
prosperity that would solve the region’s problems. If serious problems emerged, the
United States could help; it did act, for example, to prevent a fi nancial crisis that shook
Mexico in 1994 from spreading.
Bolivia had been a strong advocate of a proposed development to export Bolivia’s
natural gas, mainly to the United States, through a pipeline that would cross Chile to a
Pacifi c port. Native American Bolivian peasants, backed by labor unions, student groups,
and opposition politicians, complained that royalties for Bolivia from the gas sales would
be so low that the common people would never realize any benefi t from them. They
cited Bolivia’s history as a colony stripped of its silver and tin to enrich the Spaniards and
local aristocrats and insisted that again only foreigners and Bolivia’s elite would gain
from the gas project. These opponents wanted the gas to remain in Bolivia, where it could
form the basis for new local industries. (They also resented the pipeline’s passing through
Chile, a focus of Bolivian anger ever since Chile, following an 18th-century war, seized
lands that cut Bolivia off from the sea.) Their votes were instrumental in bringing Evo
Morales, himself an Aymara, to offi ce. Morales championed their cause by announcing
that his government would nationalize (impose government control over) all of Bolivia’s
critical energy and other resources and use them for the benefi t of the people. The
successful “ideology of fury” expressed by the Aymara in Bolivia is now rattling nerves
among the elites in other countries of Latin America with large indigenous populations,
including Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Guatemala, and even Mexico.
f. Mexico: Higher and Further
The federal republic of Mexico—offi cially, Los Estados Unidos Mexicanos
(United Mexican States)—is the largest, most complex, and most infl uential country in
Middle America. The country’s great population of 106 million in 2007 makes Mexico
by far the world’s largest nation in which Spanish is the main language. Compared to
most of the world’s countries, Mexico is a spatial giant, but its large size tends to go
unrecognized because it lies in the shadow of the United States. Triangular in shape,
Mexico’s area of 756,000 square miles (c. 2 million sq km) is nearly eight times that of
the United Kingdom, and its elongated territory would stretch from the state of
Washington to Florida if superimposed on the United States. Its capital, Mexico City,
stands now as the world’s second-largest city in population (after Tokyo-Yokohama),
with a whopping 22.7 million inhabitants. Mexico is one of the most urbanized countries
of Middle America, with about 75 percent of its people living in cities. In these and many
other attributes, Mexico in the Latin American context seems to live up to its motto:
“Higher and Further.”
Mexico’s modern cultural patterns are the legacy of three major eras: the long
Native American era prior to the Spanish conquest, the Spanish colonial era of the 16th to
early 19th centuries, and the Mexican era following independence in 1821. In the Native
American era, the region was home to indigenous peoples speaking hundreds of
languages and dialects. Many of these cultures were very advanced and among other
things produced the remarkable architectural legacies of Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá.
Richly varied indigenous cultures persist today. While some of the Native American
groups are racially almost identical to their pre-Columbian ancestors, the greater part of
the people of Mexico are mestizos of mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry. Of
Mexico’s population, Native Americans (locally called indios or indigenas) make up 30
percent, mestizos 60 percent, and ethnic Europeans (nearly all of Spanish ancestry) only
9 percent.
The Spanish colonial era lasted nearly three centuries. Following the overthrow of
the Aztec empire by Hernando Cortés in 1521, the Spanish crown established the
Viceroyalty of New Spain. Ruled from Mexico City, the viceroyalty grew to encompass
the area of modern Mexico, most of Central America, and about one-quarter of the
territory of today’s 48 conterminous United States. Spanish administrators, fortune
hunters, settlers, and Catholic priests established the Hispanic pattern of life, refl ecting
Spanish language and culture, that is still prominent today. Spanish is spoken as a fi rst
language by 88 percent of the people, and 89 percent follow the Roman Catholic faith
that the Spaniards introduced into the region.
The present settlement pattern was strongly infl uenced by the distribution of
Native Americans at the time the Spanish arrived. The conquerors sought out
concentrations of Native Americans who would become laborers and Christian converts.
Spanish settlements thus tended to grow near existing population centers or were
established as port cities with access to indigenous settlements and resources lying
inland. A great number of today’s towns and cities originated as Catholic missions
established in the midst of indigenous populations. Spanish infl uences are found in
architectural styles and urban layouts. Towns and cities characteristically have a Spanish-
inspired rectangular grid of streets surrounding a plaza (zócalo) at the urban center. The
plaza functioned both as the major site for periodic markets and as a setting for the
dominant Catholic church in the settlement. The Spanish hunger for precious metals
greatly expanded mining, particularly of silver, and many of Mexico’s larger cities were
founded as silver-mining camps or regional service centers for these mining areas.
During the 1850s and 1860s, a dynamic Native American reformist named Benito
Juárez ruled, but then Mexico endured a long period (1876–1910) of despotic rule by
President Porfi rio Díaz. Under Díaz, democratic processes were suspended and the rural
population sank deeper into poverty, even as heavy foreign investments were made in
railroads, the oil industry, metal mining, coal mining, and manufacturing. Political
discontent over national disunity and weakness, internal oppression and corruption,
foreign exploitation, poverty, and cries for land reform ultimately triggered the Mexican
Revolution of 1910–1920, led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, which ousted Díaz
and turned into a destructive struggle among personal armies of regional leaders. In 1917,
a new constitution was enacted under which land reform was an urgent priority. After
that, huge acreages were expropriated from haciendas by the government and
redistributed or restored to landless farmers and farmworkers, most particularly in a
program that provided ejidos, or communal farmlands, to mainly Indian village farmers.
Large haciendas still exist, especially in the dry north, but they contain only a very small
proportion of Mexico’s cultivated land.
A little over one-half of Mexico lies north of the Tropic of Cancer and is
dominated by desert and steppe climates with hot summers and warm to cool winters,
depending on elevation. South of the Tropic of Cancer, where about four-fi fths of all
Mexicans live, seasonal temperatures vary less, but elevation differences create
conditions ranging from high temperatures in the tierra caliente of the lowlands along the
Gulf of Mexico through moderate heat in the tierra templada of the low highlands to cool
temperatures in the tierra fría of the highlands. Nearly all the tropical areas are humid
enough to support rain-fed crops, but irrigation is often used to increase crop diversity
and productivity.
Agriculture is still a very important source of livelihood and export revenue for
Mexico. Leading agricultural exports are sugar, coffee, corn, citrus fruit, and cattle. Corn
(maize), fi rst domesticated in Mexico about 9,000 years ago, is by far the most important
food crop. Beans, squash, and chili peppers, also an inheritance from the Native
American past, are universal Mexican foods, interpretations of which have become
widespread in North American fastfood and kitchen cultures. Mexico has great
agricultural variety, despite its mountainous environment and the fact that only one-
eighth of the country is cultivated. Good cropland exists mainly on the fl oors and lower
slopes of mountain basins with volcanic soils and on scattered, small alluvial plains. In
many places, even the steep slopes are farmed as milpas (slash-and-burn plots) by peasant
farmers desperate for access to land.
Mexico’s turbulent and complex geology has produced diverse mineral resources.
Mexico ranks highly among the world’s producers of such commodities as metals, oil,
gas, and sulfur, with oil the country’s most important export. The Mexican oil industry is
a government monopoly (carried on by a government corporation, Petróleos Mexica nos,
or PEMEX), and the United States is its largest foreign customer, taking in 90 percent of
the country’s oil exports. Mexican oil represented 15 percent of oil imported to the
United States in 2007, making Mexico the largest foreign supplier after Canada.
Mexico is strongly regionalized (for the country’s physical geography.. Its major
subregions are Central Mexico, the country’s core; Northern Mexico—dry, mountainous,
and intertwined with the United States through migration and maquiladoras; the Gulf
Tropics, an area of hot, wet coastal lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico, together with an
inland fringe of tierra templada in low highlands; and the Pacifi c Tropics, a poorly
developed southern outlier of humid mountains and narrow coastal plains.
Many Latin American countries have a sharply defi ned core region where
national life is centered, and Mexico is a classic example of this cultural and
demographic pattern. About half of the population inhabits contiguous highland basins
clustered along an axis from Guadalajara (population 4.1 million) at the northwest to
Puebla (population 2.8 million) at the southeast. Toward the eastern end of the axis is
massive Mexico City. The basins comprise Mexico’s core region, often referred to as
Central Mexico, the Central Plateau, or the Mexican Plateau. The basin fl oors vary in
elevation from about 5,000 feet (c. 1,500 m) to 9,000 feet (c. 2,700 m), with each basin
separated from its neighbors by a hilly or mountainous rim. Ash ejected from the region’s
many volcanoes has added fertility to the soils. The centers of the basins contain fl at and
sometimes marshy land. This swampiness has led populations to cluster on higher sloping
land, and population pressure has led to cultivation of steep slopes, causing much soil
erosion. The prevailing tierra fría environment limits the growth of crops to those less
susceptible to frost damage, such as corn, sorghum, wheat, and potatoes. Beef, dairy
cattle, and poultry fare well in this environment.
North of the Tropic of Cancer, Mexico is characterized by ruggedness, aridity,
and a ranching economy that supports a generally sparse population. There are some
widely separated spots of more intense activity based on irrigated agriculture, mining,
heavy industry, and diversifi ed border industries adjacent to the United States. Most of
Northern Mexico lies above 2,000 feet (600 m) in elevation, with lowland strips along the
Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of California, and the Pacifi c. The climate is desert or steppe,
except where elevations are high enough to yield more rainfall, and there are coniferous
forests. Most of the forested land is in the Sierra Madre Occidental—the westernmost of
the region’s two mountain ranges—which serves as the country’s main source of timber.
The Gulf Tropics are Mexico’s main producer of tropical plantation crops. Cacao,
sugarcane, and rubber are leading export crops in the lowlands, and coffee exports come
from a strip of tierra templada along the border between the lowlands and Mexico’s
Central Plateau. The greater part of Mexico’s Gulf Tropics lies in the large Yucatán
Peninsula, where the Maya civilization fl ourished in pre-Columbian times. The
peninsula’s east coast, fronting the Caribbean, is being developed and promoted as the
“Riviera Maya.” From Cancún southward stretches a swath of tourist resorts of varying
degrees of harmony with the landscapes and seascapes. The sultry and exotic
environment is an irresistible draw for U.S. tourists, who make up 80 percent of Mexico’s
foreign visitors and whose dollars provide Mexico with much needed revenue. Tourism
overall is Mexico’s fourth-largest source of foreign currency earnings (after maquiladora
manufacturing, oil, and remittances from Mexican workers abroad), with about 20
million visitors in 2007 generating an estimated $10 billion in income for the country.
g. Central America: Beyond Banana Republics
Environmentally, the region is both very rich and threatened. With about 8
percent of the world’s biodiversity, Central America suffers from habitat destruction
rooted in poverty and profi teering. In “debt-for-nature swaps,” the United States has
recently forgiven portions of the foreign debts of Guatemala, Belize, and Panama, in
exchange for promises by the those countries to establish forest preserves. Preservation of
the moisture-retaining tropical forests in the watershed of the Panama Canal is critical for
proper operation of the waterway, so investment in that resource is especially benefi cial
to Panama.
Geographic fragmentation, both physically and politically, is a major
characteristic of Central America. Five countries— Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras,
Nicaragua, and Costa Rica—were originally governed together as a part of New Spain in
a unit called the Captaincy-General of Guatemala. Composed of many small settlement
nodes isolated from each other by mountains, empty backlands, and poor transportation,
the unit never established strong geopolitical cohesion. Separate feelings of nationality
became strong enough to fracture overall unity after the end of Spanish imperial rule in
1821. The area gained independence from Mexico in 1825 as the Central American
Federation, but in 1838–1839, this loose association fragmented into the fi ve republics of
today. In recent decades, there were serious international tensions affecting the fi ve
countries, associated in part with antigovernment guerrilla warfare in various countries.
However, by the mid-1990s, tensions had lessened, and the Central American area
appeared to enter a new era of greater political stability.
Guatemala fared the worst. A long civil war there, costing more than 200,000
lives, fi nally ended in 1996. The bloodletting began in 1954 when the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency undertook a coup to oust the country’s president. President Guzman
had resisted the powerful infl uence of the United Fruit Company (UFC) in Guatemala,
confi scating 400,000 acres of land from UFC with an aim to subdivide it among the
landless poor. U.S. President Eisenhower, interpreting this action against a U.S. company
as a sign that Guatemala might drift toward communism, ordered the coup. In a scorched-
earth campaign against leftist rebels, government forces carried out most of the killings in
the subsequent civil confl ict. The army leveled more than 400 villages and massacred
tens of thousands of civilians, mainly from among the country’s poor, disfranchised,
Native American Maya. The war over, Guatemala still suffers from banditry and from
underdevelopment; 8 in 10 Guatemalans are poor.
All Central American countries except Belize share the volcanic highlands that
reach south from Mexico. Here lie the core regions, including the political capitals, of
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The only cities with over
a million people in their metropolitan areas are the capitals of those countries,
respectively: Guatemala City, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Managua, and San José. Each
of these is a primate city serving as the demographic, economic, and political
heavyweight of the nation. Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador are the most
urbanized Central American populations, with roughly 60 percent of their peoples living
in cities, while Guatemala is the least urban with about 40 percent.
Commercial production of coffee, bananas, cotton, sugarcane, beef, and other
commodities provides the majority of Central American exports. While not a major shift
toward manufacturing, that is considerable diversifi cation beyond the region’s “banana
republic” days. As seen earlier in the case of Guatemala, in the early 1900s, the United
Fruit Company had a virtual monopoly of Central American banana production. The
company established railways to transport the produce from growing areas to coastal
ports. The UFC acquired an enormous infl uence over national political systems and
came to be seen by Central Americans as an extension of offi cial U.S. interests. Banana
exports continue to be very important in the economies of Honduras, Panama, and Costa
Rica. A trade dispute known as the “banana war” broke out in the late 1990s between the
United States and the European Union over U.S. corporate banana production from this
area as the United States pressed to have Europe open its protected markets to Central
American bananas.
All the countries except overcrowded El Salvador still have pioneer zones,
especially on the Caribbean lowlands, where new agricultural settlement is taking place.
Settlers generally come from overcrowded highlands, often aided by government
colonization plans featuring land grants and the building of roads to get products to
market and bring in supplies. Many peasants still practice the ancient milpa form of
slash-and-burn agriculture.
There is some manufacturing in the few large cities, but the products are generally
simple consumer goods for domestic markets. A few factories assemble foreign-made
cars, but industries comparable to the maquiladoras of Mexico are few. “Cut-and-sew”
apparel exports are crucial to El Salvador and Honduras, and baseballs hand-stitched
from U.S. components are made in a free-trade zone in Costa Rica. Characteristically for
the region, a large share of the profi ts from industrial enterprises makes its way into very
few pockets.
h. The Caribbean Islands: From Rastafari and Reggae to Baseball and Communism
Cuba, the largest island, is mostly lowland, with low mountains at the eastern and
western ends. The next-largest islands—Hispaniola (on which Haiti and the Dominican
Republic are located), Jamaica, and Puerto Rico—are steeply mountainous or hilly. These
four large islands are known together as the Greater Antilles.
Most of the remaining islands are rather small and make up the group known as
the Lesser Antilles. They fall into two broad physical types: low, fl at limestone islands
rimmed by coral reefs, including the Bahamas (northeast of Cuba) and a few others, and
volcanic islands, such as the Virgin Islands, Leeward Islands (roughly the northern half
of the Lesser Antilles), and Windward Islands (roughly the southern half of the Lesser
Antilles), stretching along the eastern margin of the Caribbean from Puerto Rico toward
Trinidad and Tobago. Each of the volcanic islands consists of one or more volcanic cones
(most of which are extinct or inactive), with limited amounts of cultivable land on lower
slopes and small plains. Barbados, east of the Windward Islands, is a limestone island
with elevated rolling surfaces. The country of Trinidad and Tobago, just off the northeast
corner of South America, includes a low mountain range in northern Trinidad that is an
offshore continuation of the Andes and is level to hilly elsewhere.
Tourism and plantation agriculture are the islands’ economic mainstays, overall.
Tourists, primarily from the United States, are a major source of revenue on many
islands, most notably the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.
Despite an offi cial ban, increasing numbers of U.S. tourists are also visiting Cuba,
already a favored destination for European tourists. Tourism has become Cuba’s leading
source of foreign exchange. Sugarcane, the crop around which the island plantation
economies were originally built, is still the main export crop in Cuba, Barbados, and a
few other places. Other commercial crops include coffee, bananas, spices, citrus fruits,
and coconuts. Production comes from large plantations or estates worked by tenant
farmers or hired laborers, from small farms worked by their owners, and in Cuba, from
stateowned farms. In pre-Columbian times, important crops in this region included
tobacco, indigo, and cacao.
Mineral production is absent or unimportant on most islands, the most important
exceptions being Jamaica (bauxite), Trinidad and Tobago (petroleum and natural gas),
and Cuba (metals). Manufacturing has increased and now provides the largest exports
from some islands, including chemicals from Barbados and clothing from St. Kitts and
Nevis. Dominica and some of the other smaller island countries are making money
through Internet gambling and offshore banking, enterprises also undertaken by many
small, resource-poor islands in the Pacifi c. Jamaica and Curaçao (in the Netherlands
Antilles) are developing their communications infrastructure with the aim of luring
information technology (IT) services. Dominica and Grenada get an economic lift from
medical schools established on the islands to serve medical students who fail to pass the
qualifying exams for U.S. schools.
More than 3 million people live on the Lesser Antilles islands scattered in a
1,400-mile (2,250-km) arc from the Virgin Islands (east of Puerto Rico) to near
Venezuela. This string of small islands on the eastern edge of the Caribbean Sea has a
variety of political entities. The Netherlands Antilles and Aruba are Dutch dependencies
evolving toward greater self-government. Guadeloupe and Martinique are French
overseas departments, and Montserrat (an island racked by volcanic eruptions in 1995
and 1997) and Anguilla are still British dependencies. Britain began its withdrawal from
the islands with independence for Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in 1962. Since then,
Barbados and six smaller units have gained independence from Britain. Britain also
granted independence to the Bahamas in 1973 but retains as colonies the British Virgin
Islands, the Cayman Islands, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. All the former colonies
are still members of the Commonwealth of Nations.
The island economies suffer from many serious problems, including unstable
agricultural exports, limited natural resources, unfavorable trade balances, a shortage of
industries, and chronic unemployment. A shared trait of the islands is their history of
European colonialism and plantation slavery. Such generalizations contribute to some
understanding of the islands but give little hint of the individuality of these small units.
Just one example—Trinidad and Tobago—is discussed here. Trinidad and Tobago (a
single political entity) is the largest, most resource-rich, and most ethnically varied of the
eastern Caribbean island countries.
Trinidad, the larger of the two islands, has offshore oil and natural gas deposits
and is the Western Hemisphere’s largest supplier of liquefi ed natural gas. Some 40
percent of the country’s population is black. Most blacks live in the urban areas and favor
work in the fossil fuel industry. Another 40 percent descended from immigrants from the
Indian subcontinent and live mainly in the intensively cultivated countryside. Indians
began coming to the islands as indentured workers after slavery was abolished. Among
their descendents is V. S. Naipaul, who has written fi ne portraits of Indian life on
Trinidad and Tobago, including The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira. About
18 percent of the islanders are classifi ed as “mixed,” and there are small numbers of
Chinese, Madeirans, Syrians, European Jews, Venezuelans, and others. This ethnic
complexity is refl ected in religion, architecture, language, diet, social class, dress, and
politics.
i. The Andean Countries: Lofty and Troubled
The South American countries of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and
Bolivia—all within the tropics and traversed by the Andes Mountains—are grouped in
this book as the Andean countries. Common interests among them were recognized in
1969, when fi ve countries signed the Cartagena (Colombia) Agreement, which created a
new free-trade zone called the Andean Group. At fi rst, Chile was part of the group, but it
later withdrew. Although the Andes Mountains run its entire length, Chile is not classifi
ed as an Andean country because its major traits are more akin to its southern neighbors.
Venezuela came late to the Andean Group, which is now made up of Bolivia, Peru,
Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
These countries share several traits. One is environmental zonation. The region
has pronounced vertical and horizontal zonation, with extreme environmental contrasts
and areas are that isolated from one another by natural barriers. Andean glaciers, like
those in most other parts of the world, are retreating, with similar implications for
reduced water supplies downstream. Another common trait is that all have fragmented
settlement patterns, owing primarily to the broken topography of the countries; this
fragmentation is especially evident in Peru. Each country contains both well-populated
highlands and an extensive fringe of lightly populated interior lowlands or low uplands
being settled by pioneers. And each country except Bolivia has an economically
productive lowland region.
The population of Venezuela is concentrated mainly in Andean valleys and basins
not far from the Caribbean coast, as it was when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. The
main city and capital, Caracas (population 3.8 million), is in the highlands. At an
elevation of 3,300 feet (c. 1,000 m), Caracas has a tierra templada climate. Around
Caracas, the Spanish found gold, a large indigenous population from which to draw
forced labor, and climatic conditions suitable for commercial production of sugarcane
and, later, coffee. Labor needs associated with sugarcane led to the 16th-century
introduction of African slaves, accounting for most ancestors of the country’s 10 percent
black population.
The three entities on the northeastern edge of South America are not classifi ed as
Andean and are culturally more similar to the Caribbean islands than the rest of the South
American continent: independent Guyana (formerly British Guiana), independent
Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), and French Guiana, which is an overseas department
of France and hence is a member of the European Union. All three units (collectively
called the Guianas) have populations of less than 1 million. They have a long plantation
history, with sugar most important in Guyana and French Guiana and tea and coffee in
Suriname. The Guianas are very ethnically diverse, with signifi cant populations of
Indians, Chinese, and other Asian groups originally brought to work on the plantations,
living alongside Europeans, indigenous peoples, and the descendants of African slaves.
Ethnic violence has been a problem, especially in Guyana. Christianity, Judaism,
Hinduism, and Islam are all practiced in the Guianas.
The Dutch traded their settlement of New Amsterdam (later called New York
City) to the British for the rights to Suriname and its coastal richness for agricultural
exploitation. Separately, Guyana was initially colonized by the Dutch but was later taken
over by the British. The infamous mass suicide of a religious cult of U.S. origin, known
as the Jonestown massacre, took place in Guyana in 1978. French Guiana was home to
Devil’s Island, a notorious colonial island prison used as recently as 1954. Today, the
three countries’ economies are still mainly agricultural (especially with exports of sugar
and timber), but revenues from bauxite mining and tourism are growing. With Brazilian
investment, Guyana wants to capitalize on the current boom in sugarcane-based ethanol
production. French Guiana is the wealthiest of the three, largely because of the subsidies
it receives from France.
Within its wide expanse of the Andes, Colombia includes many populous valleys
and basins, some in the tierra fría and others in the tierra templada. The great majority of
Colombia’s mestizos and whites are scattered among these upland settlement clusters,
which tend to be separated by sparsely settled mountain country with extremely diffi cult
terrain. Lower valleys and basins, along with some coastal districts, were developed by
plantation agriculture that employed slaves. That legacy is apparent in Colombia’s
demographics, with 14 percent of the country’s population mulatto and 4 percent black.
Peru is a poor nation with populations fragmented by great ruggedness (in the
Andes), dryness (along the coast), and forested wilderness (in the Amazon lowland).
More than half of the population, mainly Native Americans, lives in the Andean
altiplano, the local name for the high intermontane plain extending from southern Peru
into west central Bolivia. Some of these highlanders are descendants of the ancient
civilization of the Inca, centered around Cusco (population 300,000) in Peru’s southern
Andes. The highlands, generally higher than in Ecuador and Colombia, are a poor
environment for surplus-producing cash crop agriculture. Agricultural holdings tend to be
in the tierra fría, where cool temperatures preclude export crops such as coffee,
sugarcane, and cacao. The typical household economy is focused on potatoes, grains, and
livestock, especially llamas and alpacas, raised for family consumption and local sale.
Farmed areas in central and southern sections of the Peruvian Andes tend to be so dry
that only irrigated areas are productive. Machu Picchu and other Inca sites in the
highlands are important tourist magnets, generating welcome revenue for Peru.
Bolivia is a land of extreme alpine conditions. It is the poorest Andean country
and one of the poorest in all of Latin America, with an annual per capita GNI PPP of only
$2,890, compared to $8,900 for the Latin American average. Bolivia’s unemployment
rate has remained high for the past quarter century. The country’s exports have grown
slowly and foreign investment has been low. These were conditions ripe for the
ascendancy of an advocate of the poor, Evo Morales, who became the country’s fi rst
Native American president in 2006.
Like the other Andean countries, Bolivia has a sparsely populated tropical
lowland east of the mountains. But unlike the others, it has no coastal lowland to
supplement the production of its mountain basins and valleys. Although limited by
extreme tierra fría conditions combined with aridity, about 10 percent of Bolivia’s people
are engaged in farming. La Paz (population 1.9 million) is the main city and the de facto
capital. (Sucre is the legal capital, but the supreme court is the only branch of the
government located there.) At an elevation of about 12,000 feet (c. 3,700 m), La Paz
averages 45°F (8°C) in the daytime in its coolest month and only 53°F (12°C) in its
warmest month.
Farther north, in the lowland tropical rain forest climates and in the tierra
templada of the Andean slopes, other pioneers have move in to pan for gold, raise cattle,
cut wood, and grow coffee, sugar, and coca. Bolivia’s indigenous peoples have chewed
coca leaves for centuries without ill effect. The country became a major producer and
exporter of cocaine, a far more dangerous product of coca leaves, in the late 20th century.
Most of the country’s coca output comes from the Chapare region of central Bolivia.
With U.S. aid, the government has promoted the substitution of bananas and pineapples
for coca. Coffee has also become a replacement crop in regions of the tierra templada and
tierra fría.
