The Paths of Latin American Integration

Abstract

The idea of Latin American unity, the supposition of a regional identity, and the proposal for the region's economic and political integration are constants in our ideology today. In truth, although such ideas date from the dawn of our independence, their usage was far more limited then, constituting a distinctive feature of the new nations of Hispanic origin. Nevertheless, after a half century of development, the Hispanoamericanist movement, which found its greatest expression in Bolivar, entered an ireversible decline. It was encrusted behind the blood spilled in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) -- which was headed by Brazil, but joined by Argentina and Uruguay, against Paraguay -- and in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), which pitted Chile against Peru and Bolivia. The demise of the ideal of Hispanoamerican unity -- clearly perceptible in the 1870s -- to some degree expressed the end of the period of invention and quest that followed independence, a time when flights of imagination were still not so harshly constrained by reality. In other words, the economic and political conditions that would subsequently decide the future of the region were just crystallizing. In effect, by then independence had become a closed matter, just as the configuration of the majority of the new Latin American states had also begun to be. Pan-Americanism The ties to capitalist countries set the bases for the definitive form Latin American economic development would take. The Industrial Revolution, carried out by Western Europe and soon after by the United States, made the world market a reality, after having been in formation during previous centuries. It also imposed an international division of labor based on the exchange of manufactured goods for primary goods, reserving for Latin America, among other areas, the production of the latter for export. Latin America lacked facilities for importing capital and technology -- except in particular cases such as communications, especially railroads, or in the transfer of labor and capital involved in European immigration. Consequently, Latin American nations had to mobilize their natural resources and productive capacity to respond to the stimulus generated by external demand. Thus, Latin American nations proceeded to insert themselves into the world economy on the basis of the productive structure created during the colonial period and modified during the five or six decades following independence, as well as on the ability of dominant social groups -- generally located in the capital cities -- to impose their hegemony and subordinate the whole nation. Although this insertion not only allowed, but indeed promoted capitalist development in Latin America, it also necessarily assumed a subordinate character, since manufacturing took place outside the region and the Latin American economies thus became appendices of the industrialized economies (particularly Great Britain) in terms of both production and markets. For the same reasons, this form of insertion also made it impossible for Latin American economies to pursue integration among themselves. The prevailing tendency led Latin American nations not to develop complimentary economies, but to separate and isolate themselves, to turn their backs on one another while looking toward Europe and, to a lesser degree, the United States. It is not surprising, then, that the establishment of dependent capitalist economies, as primary exporters, led to a decline in the integrationist spirit prevailing in Latin America during the half century following the wars of independence. Neither should it be surprising, however, that the idea of integration reemerged precisely where capitalism created space for the development of a powerful industrial economy, i.e., the United States. Latin America's growing importance to the North American economy would lead the United States to heighten its presence in the region and, moving beyond what it considered its traditional zone of influence in the Caribbean, to attempt to line up the entire continent behind it. …