The roots of the Latin American crisis

Review of Silver, Sword, and Stone Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story by Marie Arana

Marie Arana identifies three themes in Latin America history: silver (the extraction economy based on colonial servitude); sword (authoritarian institutions that coerce the underclass through violence as well as administration); and stone (the Catholic infrastructure that provides justification for all of that while simultaneously fighting it). With these themes, she plows through the details of brutal conquest, despotic regimes, revolutions, endemic exploitation, and occasional redemption over the last 500 years. The portrait that emerges is relentless – grotesque brutality, bleak prospects, and depressingly repetitive. If there is change, almost inevitably it is a switch of elites, who despite their rhetoric seek to maintain their privilege and power over the masses by any means necessary.

The story begins with Cristóbal Colón’s discovery of the Americas in 1492. Arana argues that the Spanish were particularly bloodthirsty and ruthless, coming as they did from the slow reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Umayyads and the expulsion or forced conversion of the Jews. Moreover, indebted and exhausted from a long war, Spain was extremely hungry for gold and silver, which Colón promised would be found in abundance in the Indies. Though Colón failed to find much gold, Hernán Cortés in Mexico and Francisco Pizzaro in Peru did.

The rush was on. Impoverished fortune seekers and mercenaries from Spain flocked to the Americas to establish colonies beholden to the crown, promising a fixed percentage of their booty. It was a peculiar type of entrepreneurship, relying first on expropriation of Mexican and Peruvian treasuries and then on the enslavement of Amer-Indians to work in mineral-rich mines and later, in fields. To do so, of course, military forces of a few hundred had to conquer huge, massively rich empires. Marching into Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1519,Cortés succeeded first; not only did the Spaniards have guns and horses, which “surprised” the Aztecs in the schoolbook version, but a plague of smallpox and other European diseases was decimating the population in unprecedented proportions, killing perhaps 95% of the population. In a single generation, the Aztec Empire’s population dropped from approximately 20 million to 1 million. Aztec society was literally collapsing when the Spaniards arrived in Tenochtitlan, throwing all of their beliefs into question. Cortés’ victory created a template for Pizzaro, who in 1529 quickly overran the Incan Empire in Peru, perhaps the largest in the world at that time.

To govern such vast and rich territories, the sovereigns in Spain combined uncontrolled violence with the active support of the Catholic Church. Beyond the toll of disease, the killing was on a genocidal scale. The regimes they installed consisted of military governors, whose mansions were built next to Catholic complexes. Symbiotic, to say the least. If under the nominal control of the Spanish Crown, local elites were largely left to their own devices: because it took so long for information and orders to cross the Atlantic, they enjoyed extraordinary freedom to do as they saw fit. While the church predominantly supported secular authorities with ideological justifications against the “savages” accused of cannibalism and incest, there were a number of priests who questioned the need for the rampant killing, enslavement, and cruelty.

In spite of this criticism, which eventually reached the sympathetic ear of Charles I just prior to his abdication, the Spanish Empire established a caste system. At the top were pure-blood Spanish appointees of the King, who controlled virtually everything from gigantic haciendas. They represented a pseudo-aristocratic recreation of feudal Spain, paying tribute for the right to exploit whatever they could. Below the pure bloods, there were the Criollo, who were born on the American Continent, presumably “pure white”, yet were barred from holding high office or directly influencing policy; this exclusion dangerously embittered them. The remaining 90% of the population were the Amer-Indians, who were forced to provide tribute; if they couldn’t, they were forced to work as slaves in the mines and on haciendas.

Once the order was stabilized, the Jesuits began to create huge autonomous communities, which by some estimates occupied up to 50% of the surviving indigenous peoples. This was the beginning of an economic empire of the Catholic church with the Spanish Empire. While the Jesuits were ejected by Charles III in 1767 as subversive or too independent – they were critical of the social order and sincerely sought to better the lives of the surviving autochthonous population – conservative priests then took their place and continued to enrich the church. The Jesuits had conformed to the ancient precepts of work, education, and behaving ethically. In contrast, the new Church masters tended to act in their own interest, amassing land, investing in mining and primitive industries, as well as maintaining the administrative infrastructure of the provinces.

The inherent imbalances in this social order doomed it to regular outbreaks of extreme violence, most often local, but eventually transnational in the work of Simón Bolívar, who liberated a huge portion of the Americas from Spanish rule. Once the various states had won their independence in the early 19^th Century, the Spanish withdrawal was harshly abrupt, including even the Catholic Church. As the greedy, narrow-minded Criollo took their turn at head of proto-nation states, order broke down, ushering in an era of extreme instability and violence that has lasted more or less up to present. New layers have been added, of course, such as the post-World War II obsession with communism or the present development of the narco-state that is based on cocaine and drug smuggling, all run by competing cliques of gangsters or fanatical ideologues. Even revolutionaries that started out as sincere reformers (Castro, Hugo Chávez, even Bolívar to name a few) she argues, ended up as despots who clung to power for far too long. It is a horrific story.

Arana goes pretty easy on the United States’ participation in these events. As she portrays it, American corporations took advantage of the short-sighted cupidity of the Criollo, who sold off national assets piecemeal to United Fruit, Rio Tinto, and many others. In other words, in her view it is the Latin Americans themselves who are largely to blame for their exploitation, even for the meddlesome messes that the CIA created in the 1950s and later. I must admit that I find that perspective somewhat weak, the sole failure of coverage.

Be that as it may, Latin America will continue in its struggle for justice and liberation. At present, it is the most violent region in the world: though representing only 8% of world’s population, it accounts for 38% of worldwide criminal murders. San Salvador is the most dangerous city on Earth, with 108 murders per 100,000, which is twenty times the rate of the US and one hundred times that in the UK. Its democratic institutions are still weak, its economies remain relatively under-industrialized, and its citizens have little hope for improvement.

Rather than a narrative history, Arana’s book presents a series of essays that provide background, evoke key events, and follow several representative individuals. As a reading experience, it is very dense. Her writing style is elegant and highly literary.

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