As the twentieth century concludes, Latin America has changed in fundamental ways that could hardly have been foreseen when modern studies of the region began in the 1960's. In this essay, we'll review four of these far-reaching alterations.

These new directions coexist, we will also note, with some all-too-familiar and stubborn realities that tend to undercut them. This varied and (in part) conflicting picture underscores how important it is that we examine the region searchingly and without preconceptions.

I begin with a vignette -- a thought-provoking image from the Latin American grassroots -- that may help us relate extensive social changes to the individual experiences of people in Latin America. The image I have in mind is almost a parable, and like other such illustrative stories, it is vivid, enduring, and a bit ambiguous. One can keep returning to it for new insights, turning it over to perceive new facets, so to speak, in the light of evolving social experience.

Some years ago when I was a graduate student, I embarked on a steamship across Lake Titicaca, crane then lifted and swung across the dock, above the narrow gap of water, over the ship's deck and then down into the hold where stevedores stood ready to unload it. Each loading cycle took about ten minutes.

As I stood on the deck, I began to notice activity on the dock. A Bolivian indigenous woman, perhaps fifty-five years old, was working there with a broom. She wore the distinctive women's garb of the Aymara-speaking people (about 2-million strong) who live in northern Bolivia and southern Peru: flat slipper-shoes, a capacious felt skirt buoyed by numerous petticoats, a colorful shawl, and a bowler hat set at a rakish angle.

Each time the loaded pallet swung overhead, the dock-sweeper would dart forward and sweep carefully beneath its path, gathering her sweepings into a sack with a dust-pan. The Aymara woman was carefully "rescuing" -- to use a term that is common in Bolivia -- a fine coating of tin ore that filtered down to the dock planks, through the gaps in burlap sacking and the open-work pallet.

In hours of painstaking labor, she gleaned a few dollars' worth of metallic powder to help support her family, as the bulk of the nation's mineral wealth was shipped abroad.

I had never seen a clearer illustration of what social scientists and social critics have termed Latin America's "dependency" -- the exploitative influence of outside forces over the region's economic wealth and productivity. Like her native country, like her entire region in the world, the dock-sweeper could only retain a modest fraction of the extraordinary natural wealth with which Latin America was endowed.

Her predicament sums up much of Latin America's history, and much of the region's present circumstances too. What is not yet clear is whether she will represent the future of Latin America as well.

Four new social, political and economic conditions have appeared during the past ten years in Latin America, altering some of the region's most fundamental characteristics.

First, democratic regimes have become the norm rather than the exception in the nations south of the Rio Grande. Latin America's past propensity for authoritarian and especially military rule is justly famous, and as recently as 1979 there were only two elected democratic governments on the South American continent.

Today, in the Western Hemisphere, only the Cuban government cannot trace its origin to formalized popular choice (though the pedigrees of some national elections in the region are rather questionable). Even more striking, the Latin American military has been systematically marginalized from the political arena in many nations. As two political scientists have recently observed, "Since 1976, outside of Suriname, Haiti and Peru, all attempts to overthrow a constitutional government chosen through general fraud-free elections have failed."1

In vivid illustration of this trend, some officers in the once-powerful Argentine army now drive taxis at night to supplement their meager salaries, and Argentine army bases are occasionally rented out as backdrops for fashion photography and TV commercials.

A second trend is towards economic openness and burgeoning trade among Latin American nations. In South America, for example, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay have created a free trade area known as "Mercosur," and Chile has become an associate member.

Mercosur members conduct fully 30 percent of their international trade with one another, a dramatic increase from the 10 percent level that was traditional for many decades. In part recognizing the potential for from Bolivia to Peru. Titicaca is the world's highest navigable lake, located more than 12,400 feet above sea level. As the S.S. Inca, a vessel launched in 1903, prepared for departure from the windswept, cold and battered little port town of Guaqui, Bolivia, I stood on deck to watch the ship take on cargo.

In addition to a few dozen passengers, the Inca carried mainly concentrated tin ore from Bolivia's mines 300 miles south. Packed in large burlap sacks, the tin ore was a dull gray powder, resembling Portland cement. It would be off-loaded in Peru and shipped 6,000 miles away to Great Britain, to be smelted into metallic tin.

An ancient steam crane was used to load this ore into the ship. Workers packed twenty-five or thirty bags onto a wooden pallet made of slats, which the economic growth in Latin America, foreign direct investment has also begun to flourish. Outside capitalists invested $38.5 billion in the region in 1996, up from $15.4 billion only five years earlier.

Latin America also enjoys growing prestige among international investors for its relatively prudent economic management, contrasting with the recent financial debacles in East Asia. To be sure, Latin America continues to suffer from widespread official corruption, an issue tackled only minimally by most nations.

Democratization and economic openness may well be mutually reinforcing. Critics often focus on the harsh effects of neo-liberal development models on employment, poverty, and income distribution. While many of those criticisms are justified, there may also be links between participating in globalized trade and bolstering the region's democratic political legitimacy.

New exporters in nations ranging from Argentina to the Dominican Republic now recognize that the global marketplace views a relatively stable civilian government as a pre-requisite for inclusion in the new world of trade and investment.

The Organization of American States has even revised its charter, creating a process through which any new military governments, created by coups d'état, will automatically be threatened with expulsion from that hemispheric body.

A third trend has to do with technology, especially in the fields of communications and data-processing. There are certain limited but clear advantages of being a "late-comer" to economic development among world regions.

For example, cellular telephone service is expanding rapidly, and some of the "most backward" nations are benefitting differentially precisely because they could not afford older wired phone systems. As a "late-comer," La Paz, Bolivia now has one of the hemisphere's most sophisticated cellular phone systems. Unlimited Internet access now costs an average of only $39 per month in Latin America -- relatively close to this service's cost in the "first world" at present.

The tendency of computer technology to diffuse rapidly around the globe also provides a "fairer deal" than Latin America received in the past, when new global scientific knowledge was being applied in fields such as heavy industry. In automobile technology, for example, Latin America continues to lag other world regions.

Until recently, Mexico was the only nation in the world where the original Volkswagen "beetle" -- a basic design fully sixty years old! -- was still produced, and Ford made and sold its Falcon model in Argentina, more than thirty years after that auto was introduced in the United States.

By contrast, new versions of Windows software arrive in Latin America, well-translated into Spanish and Portuguese, very quickly after they are developed for the U.S. and European markets. Latin America is starting to take full advantage of this new technical opportunity: on average, consumers in each Latin American nation now spend $327 million annually on computer software.

Fourth, Latin America's demographic expansion -- so headlong in the 1960's that social scientists marveled and had to re-calculate their statistical models -- is now clearly slowing down. Latin America's annual rate of population growth fell from 2.4 percent in the 1970's

to 2.1 percent in the 1980's and to 1.9 percent in the first half of the 1990's.

Certainly this change represents no panacea for the region's urgent development needs, but it heartens economic planners who earlier felt they were on a hopeless demographic treadmill. Latin American nations now have the relative luxury of worrying about how relatively fewer workers in the mid-21st century will support the future pensioners who are now in grade school.

Three stubborn problems deeply rooted in Latin America's past, however, are at best only partly addressed by the new developments we've examined.

First, Latin America continues to display one of the worst income-distribution patterns of any world region. The World Bank and the International Labor Organization have found that the poorest one-fifth of the population in Latin America tends to receive only 3.1 percent of total national income, as against 6.5 percent received by the poorest one-fifth in a sample of nations from other regions (both industrialized and developing).

In Brazil, the region's largest nation, the least-affluent 50 percent of the population receives only 12.6 percent of yearly national income. Moreover, the situation is getting worse. Of thirteen Latin American nations studied by the World Bank, nine had worse inequality in 1989 than they had in 1980 -- and inequality increased from 1990 to 1994 in seven of twelve nations studied by the United Nations.2

In addition to the human misery it inflicts, this condition limits the size of Latin American markets, and places strain on new democratic governments. Inequality tends to be worsened by neo-liberal economic reforms. Maldistribution might be alleviated somewhat by regional economic growth, but most Latin American economies have expanded only anemically during the 1990's. About the only really positive sign on the horizon for reducing poverty and inequality is the prospect that a slowdown in population growth may force employers to pay higher wages over the long run.

Second, land-tenure conflicts continue to simmer in many nations of Latin America. Since colonial times, the region has been marked by large plantations coexisting with numerous tiny parcels. As health conditions improve and more young people survive to adulthood, pressure on the land tends to increase but obstinacy among major landlords usually persists.

Latin American nations where this form of property inequality especially roils politics include Colombia and Brazil. When I was recently in Colombia, a leading social scientist there observed to me that rural insurgency affects fully 40 percent of the nation's townships. "The persistence of that rebelliousness for more than forty years," he remarked, "is based on real injustices, not just on habits of banditry."

Third, Latin America and the Caribbean are in the midst of an educational crisis. Although illiteracy in the region does not appear very high when one lumps entire nations together, when one studies the poorest people the inadequacy of available education becomes much clearer. Only 9 percent of all Peruvians are reportedly unable to read and write, but 26 percent of the poorest rural people in that nation are illiterate. More than 35 percent of the poorest Brazilians also fall into that category, even in cities where basic education is usually far more available than it is in the countryside.

Teacher salaries are also deplorably low, and they have dropped in recent years. In Argentina, the average teacher receives only 45 percent of the salary prevalent in the 1980's, while in Mexico the equivalent fraction is only 40 percent.

These deep-set problems have a haunting familiarity: they existed 35 years ago, and were noted then by authors including Frank Tannenbaum, Robert Alexander, Victor Urquidi, and many others. They are all the more troubling because they have the potential to slow or even reverse some of Latin America's promising positive trends. An educated workforce is needed by modern economies -- but almost all Latin American nations are short of public goods such as education. Persistence of a situation where the poorest 20 percent receives 3 percent of national income clearly threatens social peace so necessary for attracting foreign investment -- and in fact this is already a critical problem in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Colombia and other nations.

Latin American nations will have to combine skilled leadership, economic entrepreneurship, and more than a little good luck to begin tackling these challenges. What if anything can social science contribute?

In addition to discovering new social data and placing it in context, I believe we should learn from our analytic mistakes in the 1960's. Then, Latin America's future possibilities were defined as "reform or revolution" -- omitting many other possible scenarios, including political stagnation, harsh right-wing dictatorships, gradual or precipitate decline -- all of which came

about, to different degrees in different nations.

In the new century, we need to keep our consciousness wide open to perceive new dangers. These hazards include a grasping personalism in politics backed by the techniques of public-relations manipulation; Presidents Alberto Fujimori of Peru and Carlos Menem of Argentina typify this anti-democratic trend.

A second danger lies in rampant human rights abuses by the military, under the guise of counter-guerrilla or counter-narcotics efforts; today Colombia suffers greatly from this scourge.

Finally, some Latin Americans are ready, perhaps even eager, to minimize social injustice. Economist Hernando de Soto's notable tract The Other Path, which highlights the enterprise and grip of Peru's poor, was welcome by member of the polo-playing set in Latin American as though de Soto were ignoring the gross inequality that affects millions in Latin American nations.3

Let us seek some perspective. Will Latin American's positive recent developments maintain their momentum into the new millennium? Or does the dock-sweeper in Bolivia stand as a portent of Latin America's future as well as a symbol of the region's past?

Hope fully her descendants can move will beyond her role of gleaning a meager income from the leavings of dependent development. Resilient, often far-sighted and reflective people at the region's grassroots will play an important role in setting Latin America's course over the coming years. But it is disturbing to reflect how easy it would be to re-interpret the Aymara woman's methodical but sparse gathering by the lakeside.

I can well conjecture how a contemporary image-merchant might "re-package" her as a vigorous, entrepreneurial representative of an indigenous culture, taking advantage of opportunities offered by her nation's insertion in global markets. We must be sure that new social realities, and new life-chances for Latin Americans, stand behind the new terms we use.

1. Jorge I. Domínguez and Jeanne Kinney Giraldo, "Conclusion: Parties, Institutions and Market Reforms in Constructing Democracies," in Jorge I. Domínguez and Abraham F. Lowenthal, eds., Constructing Democratic Governance: Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1990's - Themes and Issues (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 4-5.

2. George Psacharopoulos et al., "Poverty and Income Distribution in Latin America: The Story of the 1980s" (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, Technical Paper No. 351, 1997).

3. Hernando de Soto, The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).

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