US Great Depression Stimulated Latin American Industry
The Great Depression of the 1930s is regarded by most Americans as a period of great economic hardship, however the collapse of international trade stimulated the growth of the Latin American industrial economy which had up until that point remained stagnant. Nations that had formerly been colonies could no longer afford to focus on cash crops or raw materials production, and had no choice but to develop manufactured goods and even automobiles.
Land Of The Free Supports Dictators
The United States, while verbally committed to freedom and independence, did its best to stifle nascent nationalist revolutions in Latin America, throwing its support behind several leaders who were in fact corrupt dictators who offered their people very little freedom. The ironic and hypocritical foreign policy was ostensibly to deter the spread of Communism in Latin America, where many of the guerrillas had a very leftist ideology that went far beyond liberalism and was more Marxist in character.
Intervention Provoked Nationalist Cultural Response
The wave of US military interventions in Central and South American affairs, coming as they did on the heels of the US annexation of Puerto Rico and Hawaii, provided a strong basis in fact for Latin American fears of economic, cultural, and military domination by a foreign colonial power. Resistance to colonial encroachment was one of the factors that stimulated near-universal interest in unique national identities for Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, and other Latin American nations. This national identity, uniquely, was not based solely on ethnicity but on shared cultural values that transcended race, gender, and class.
Irony of Class and Revolution
In order to successfully wrest control from European colonial interests, early Latin American leaders (who typically were born to European families) needed to convince the people they economically dominated to participate in the rebellion without including them as part of the colonial system they were rebelling against. Ironically, when artisans, small landowners, and laborers joined forces to expel the Europeans, they did not experience a meaningful change in socioeconomic status: the vast majority of wealth remained concentrated in the hands of the elite. The slaves, for the most part, remained slaves.
Pace Of Development
Brazil, considered during the colonial era to be an economic backwater that lacked the natural resources of Argentina and Mexico, is now the economic leader with the largest South American economy.
