The Mystery of Discrimination in Latin America

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that Latin America is a highly discriminatory society. This belief is hardly surprising given the history of ethnic and class conflicts in the region and the plethora of anecdotal evidence rein forcing this notion. However, whereas it cannot be argued that many societies in the region do, in fact, discriminate, the crucial questions have barely been broached. Understanding the extent of such discrimination and exploring the channels through which it operates deserve special attention. How widespread is discrimination in Latin America? The primary opinion survey in the region, Latinobar?metro, explores discriminatory perceptions for representative samples of the population of eighteen countries.1 As shown in figure 1, when individuals were asked in 2001 who they think suffers the most from discrimination, they consistently and overwhelmingly highlighted the poor, followed by indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants. This pattern is consistent across countries in the region. In all the countries surveyed, poverty is perceived as being the main driver of discrimination, with responses varying from 14 percent in the case of Panama to 49 percent in the case of Nicaragua. Figure 2 illustrates these results for the countries surveyed. These results, however, are not entirely consistent with the answers to a similarly worded question asked only a few years later. Starting in 2004, the same Latinobar?metro survey asked Latin Americans why they think people