CH 6 Neocolonialism

1.What was the Liberal Plan ? Who prospered? Who remained impoverished ?
The liberal plan to make Latin America resemble Europe or the United States partly
succeeded. But Progress turned out differently in Latin America.
Landowners and urban middle-class people prospered, but the life of Latin America’s
rural majority improved little, if at all. To the contrary, agrarian capitalism
laid waste to the countryside and
destroyed traditional lifeways, impoverishing the rural people spiritually and
materially.

2. What was there to gain from Progress ? Who were the direct beneficiaries of this
?
Elite and middle-class Latin Americans had a lot to gain from Progress. First and
foremost, they stood to profit from the great export boom, over half a century of
rapid, sustained economic growth, never
equaled in Latin America before or since. The direct beneficiaries of this export
bonanza were the large landowners, whose property values soared with the approach
of the railroad tracks

3. How did Italian immigrants join The Brazilian cofee trade?

Coffee boomed in the tropics, creating several kinds of neocolonial landscapes. In
the deep red soils of São Paulo, Brazil, Italian
immigrants tended coffee after abolition because freed slaves wanted nothing to do
with plantations.

4. How did the rubber trade expand in Brazil? What was the end of result for
indigenous people?
In the rain forests of Amazonia, neocolonialism brought a rubber boom. Rubber
harvesters lived isolated along riverbanks deep in the Amazon basin, tapping sap
from rubber trees. In Brazil, the tappers were
mainly refugees from droughts of the arid sertão lands of northeastern Brazil.
Meanwhile, the rubber boom ravaged indigenous people, their tribes decimated by
alcohol and disease.

5. What were the "Banana Republics "? How did they maintain their banana enclaves ?
United Fruit made several Central American nations into “banana republics,” where
it could keep governors, cabinet ministers, even presidents in its deep corporate
pockets.
The banana companies acquired millions of acres for their plantations, millions
more for future use, and millions more simply to head off possible competition.
Companies like United Fruit reserved managerial positions for white US personnel
and hired “natives” for the machete work.

6. How did the change in Education open up opportunities?

Still, as part of a slow, steady process happening all across Latin America,
talented mestizos were joining the middle classes of Latin American countries,
finding more opportunities and meeting
less prejudice than did socially ascendant black people in the United States.

7. How did governance change in the Neocolonial period ? What kind of government
did Latin America have?
Until 1930, the balance of population and power rested in the countryside, where
landowners controlled not only the national wealth but also the electoral system.
Such “managed elections” were essential to the political system of neocolonialism

8. Wha are oligarchies? How do they differ from Dictatorships? How are they the
same?
Oligarchies (from Greek, meaning “rule by a few”) represented a narrow ruling
class. Within oligarchies, elections served to measure the strength of client
networks. Even when ballots were
not freely cast or fairly counted, they still showed who controlled what, and where
—information that helped negotiate oligarchic power sharing. Dictatorships, on the
other hand, centered on one all-powerful
individual. Dictators might hold elections purely for the aura of legitimacy or to
impress their foreign associates. Oligarchies and dictatorships provided
stability, the virtue always most desired by foreign investors

9. How did the US and Europe trade and finance influence Latin America?
In ideology and values, as in trade and finance, neocolonialism meant the
absorption of Latin America into an international system dominated by Britain and
the United States.
It is here, in friction with powerful outsiders, that Latin Americans began to feel
the colonial in neocolonialism.

10. What was the United States vision of Manifest Destiny? What was the Monroe
Doctrine? How did the Roosevelt Corollary extend the Monroe Doctrine?
In the United States, visions of a Manifest Destiny of irresistible, inevitable US
expansion into Latin America had stirred some people’s imaginations for
generations.
Since 1823, the reader may recall, US diplomats had proclaimed the Western
Hemisphere off-limits to powers outside it. In 1905, Theodore
Roosevelt provided the Monroe Doctrine with a corollary. The Roosevelt Corollary to
the Monroe Doctrine made the US Marines a sort of hemispheric police force to
prevent European
military intervention in Latin America.

CH7 NATIONALISM

1. Who were the Nationalist? What was their vision of Latin America?
The nationalists very often were urban, middle-class people, recent immigrants or
of racially mixed heritage.
Nationalism fostered collective self-respect by positively reinterpreting the
meaning of Latin American racial and cultural difference.

2. Why did Latin American nationalsit call for "race mixing " ?
Latin American nationalists celebrated the mixing of indigenous, European, and
African genes. Each country’s unique physical type, argued some nationalists, was
an adaptation to its environment.

3. Wha did the Mexican constitution of 1917 call for ? How did it change the power
of the church and foreigners?
The Constitution of 1917, still Mexico’s constitution, showed strong nationalist
inspiration. Article 27 reclaimed for the nation all mineral rights, for instance,
to oil, then in the hands of foreign companies.
The new constitution also sharply limited the privileges of foreigners and, as a
legacy of earlier Mexican radicals, curbed the rights of the Catholic Church.

4. How was Nationalism in Argentina and Uruguay different than in Mexico ?

In Argentina and Uruguay, nationalism showed a different face. In this most
urbanized, literate, and middle-class
part of Latin America, the core constituency of nationalism was stronger than in
Mexico.

5. What was the " tragic week "of 1919 ?

During the presidency of Yrigoyen', the greatest stain on his record is his violent
repression of organized labor during the “Tragic Week” of 1919 and the strike of
Patagonian sheep herders in 1921.

6. How did the Great Depression change Latin America?

The Great Depression of the 1930s finished the demolition of neocolonialism and
energized nationalist movements throughout Latin America.

7. How did the Estado Novo get created in Brazil?

Vargas deftly negotiated the political tangles of the early 1930s, playing
liberals, conservatives, communists, Tenentes, and Integralists against each other.
Then, in 1937 he assumed dictatorial power
with the support of the army and went on the radio to announce a nationalist
institutional makeover for Brazil: the Estado Novo, or New State.

8. How did Lazaro Cardenas transform Mexico ? What was Article 27 about ?
During his six years in office, he distributed almost forty-five million acres of
land, twice as much as in the previous twenty-four years put together.
The foreign owners were shocked when Cárdenas then decreed the expropriation of the
oil companies in accord with Article 27 of the Mexican constitution.

9. What was the U.S. " Good Neighbor Policy " ?

The world seemed a dangerous place in the 1930s, and FDR thought the United States
badly needed allies in Latin America. As world war loomed on the horizon, he did
everything possible to cultivate Latin American goodwill. In his inaugural address,
he announced a “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Latin America.

10. Why did Central America not get the same nationalist results as the rest of
Latin America?
The growth of an urban middle class had left some partsof Latin America virtually
untouched. Central America provides a good example. The internal markets of Central
American countries
were too small to support much industrialization. So old-style landowning
oligarchies had not, for the most part, ceded control to more progressive
nationalist coalitions on the isthmus between Panama and Guatemala.