A Political Geography of Latin America

Jonathan R. Barton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134828067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The nation-states and peoples of South and Central America, Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, that together form the political geographical region of Latin America, encompass a wide range of societies, politics and economies. This text exposes the differences between places, regions and countries, individuals and societies, offering an invaluable insight into the themes of political and economic development, and provides a guide to understanding power and space relations. From the Antarctic to the tropical jungles, the coastal communities to the highland villages, the mega-cities to isolated rural existence, the political geographies of lives, localities, cities and rurality are too sophisticated to be subjected to generalizations. Adopting a critical human geography perspective, Jonathon Barton provides an understanding of similarities, difference and sophisticated human geographies.

1
POWER TO THE PEOPLE?

Political geography and Latin America

The writer of a geographical work on South America or on any part of it, unless he is setting forth the results of his own personal observations, has a more difficult task than the historian who treats of what has happened there. The Spanish and the Portuguese, both in Europe and in the New World, have been more interested in describing characters and events than in studying the physical milieu and its influence upon human activities. Individual authors and learned societies in the Iberian Peninsula and in South America have had a great deal to say about what people did and said but are mainly silent about places.

(Shanahan, 1927; eleventh edition, 1963, viii)

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY, LATIN AMERICA AND THE ‘SOUTH’

The globalisation of political geography

From its stirrings as an academic sub-discipline over a hundred years ago, political geography has preoccupied itself with the organisation and activities of nation-states. The focus has been on the spatial dimensions of nation-states and the power relations that are established within and between them. Traditional definitions of political geography are wide-ranging but they generally encompass the same key characteristics: the nation-state, territory, inter- and intra-state relations. These characteristics were derived from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when political geographers were writing principally from the perspective of their own nation-state in terms of geopolitical relationships with other states. An understanding of the historical context in which the early political geographers were writing is important in order to interpret their theories. However, the late twentieth-century political geography landscape is significantly different from that of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century and requires a broader set of characteristics.

The origins of political geography are to be found in Europe and the United States of America in the writings of men such as Friedrich Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellén, Halford Mackinder and Alfred Mahan at the end of thenineteenth century (see Parker, 1985; Glassner, 1996; Taylor, 1993a). The influence of these writers is reflected in political geography’s evolution during the twentieth century. Europe and the USA have continued to be the foci of political geography research and it is writers from these areas that dominate in terms of international publishing. The reason for the persistence of this geographical bias is that the two World Wars and the ensuing Cold War turned the attentions of political geographers in the northern hemisphere (the North) in on themselves due to the proximity of nation-state conflicts and turbulent power-space relations that were ripe for geopolitical analysis. At the same time, the southern hemisphere states (the South) were being represented predominantly in terms of their relationship with Cold War superpowers.

The ending of the Cold War in the late 1980s with the Eastern European democratic transitions and the fragmentation of the Soviet Union has provided political geographers with an opportunity for a ‘refocusing’ of their research activities. The globalising processes of the post-Cold War period have created the need for a movement from a centring of research on Europe and the USA towards a global perspective on power and space. This refocusing process has also been prompted by profound changes in the South. Increasing political and socio-economic turbulence has challenged the centripetal forces of European wars and the Cold War in terms of academic attention within the North.

The most important of these changes has been the decolonisation process that has taken place throughout the South. This process of gaining independence from imperial powers has led to a proliferation of countries seeking to establish economic, political and cultural autonomy and a reorganisation of their international linkages. The reorganisation is an attempt to break from their colonial pasts to construct post-colonial national political economies (Corbridge, 1993). The impacts of this decolonisation process have been far-reaching and have been felt within the North as well as the South, shaping changes in economic as well as political relations.

Before 1945, political geographers based in Europe and the USA were working within a web of imperial and colonial ties that linked up the spaces of the world.¹ This was their framework of analysis and the imperial powers were central to their perspectives on the world. The decolonisation process changed this predominant framework. Themes of globalisation, prompted by transnational actors and processes moving between nation-states, have led to a more fluid global arena of political forces (including nation-states and movements within civil society), economic forces, and social and cultural forces (such as environmental and social movements). Within this global framework, imperial ties have been weakened. However, at the same time new ties have emerged which are allied with the globalisation of finance, trade and economic activities, and the operations of supranational bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank.

These new ties can be described, as neocolonial links since the direct political control of formal imperialism has been replaced by economic influences and control emanating from the North. The G7 (group of seven leading economic powers) is an example of this continuing Northern predominance. While the traditional colonial relations of empires were distinctive in that they were established via inter-state political and military interventionism, neocolonial relations are based on state and non-state actors principally utilising the tools of financial and commercial interventionism. Military intervention has also been employed, as in US-Latin American relations. Within the globalised context of neocolonialism, the manipulation of armed force is being replaced gradually by the manipulation of market force. It is no longer the links between nation-states alone that are important, but also those between firms, banks, multilateral agencies and other independent organisations and movements.

Latin America and the South

The role of the South within this framework is critical to an understanding of the functioning of global relations. This was recognised within the discourse of the North-South divide that emanated from the reports of the Brandt Commission (1980, 1983) following its research into issues of global development. If the findings and recommendations of the Brandt Commission are to be taken seriously, political geography must be wholly inclusive of the South due to the complex interrelations between North and South, in terms of production and consumption, health and welfare, and the environment. The South is neither an ‘add-on’ nor ‘peripheral’ to the whole if one recognises these interrelationships. For this reason, power-space relationships in the South are deserving of comparison and critical analysis on numerous analytical levels, from the inter-municipal to the global. By adopting an inclusionary perspective of what constitutes the global, the South and its internal diversity can be highlighted and worked into theories of how the geopolitical economy (international political economy and its spatial dimensions) is changing.

Comparisons of power-space relations within the South will undoubtedly establish a better understanding of what constitute political geographies of the South as different from the North or as complementary to them. As one of the key regions within the South, Latin America’s political geography contributes to an understanding of global political geographies, inclusive of the South, rather than excluding it as in the past.

Political geographies of the South are relatively scarce and build on the regional and geopolitical bases of the sub-discipline. The following three texts reveal the coverage of particular Southern regions. E.A.Boateng’s (1978) Political Geography of Africa focuses on regional divisions of the continent and themes associated with administration, colonialism and identities linked with nationhood. This contrasts somewhat with Drysdale and Blake’s (1985) The Middle East and North Africa: A Political Geography, which takes a look at issues of regional organisation and conflict between nation-states and ‘critical issues’ such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and petroleum resources. Southeast Asia: Essays in Political Geography written by Lee Yong Leng (1982) provides yet another selection of political geography themes, highlighting maritime geopolitics, regional identities and the geopolitical economy of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional trading bloc. Beyond these texts, there is relatively little coverage of the South in political geography, especially if discussions relating solely to boundaries and frontiers are discounted. The geographical coverage of the articles in Political Geography Quarterly (later Political Geography) and other leading international geographical journals supports this observation.

As with other Southern regions, Latin America is diverse and complex in its geography. The complexity of Latin American societies and spaces is characterised within the continent’s contemporary literary genre of magical realism, embodied in the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende and Alejo Carpentier, and in the folklores and traditions of indigenous societies.² This range of literature and cultural practices provides a clearer mental image of the Central and Southern Americas than any map since they are multi-dimensional, physical and metaphysical, historical and contemporary, reflecting the violently real, deeply spiritual and strikingly polarised features of Latin American societies. Latin American spaces, and thus geographies, also reflect these complexities. However, what the map (the geographer’s traditional tool) offers that a study of the societies per se cannot, is to provide a spatial and physical context for the activities of these societies.

By locating societies in spaces and by recognising that they exist with, influence and are influenced by their environments, it is possible to establish an understanding of the socio-spatial frameworks within which individuals, communities and societies operate. More important to the political geographer are the relationships of power within and between these social actors (and their institutions), the processes that link people with spaces, and the changes that take place between the two.

While Latin America does not figure greatly within political geography literature, beyond the study of boundary geopolitics that has preoccupied Latin American political geographers (see Chapter 2), several key Anglo-European political geographers have undertaken research in the region. In 1907 and 1911, the North American political geographer Isaiah Bowman travelled to Latin America on expeditions under the auspices of Yale University and the American Geographical Society.³ The research undertaken was wide-ranging, covering physical form and economic production and containing references to the cultural make-up of Andean societies. These judgemental references were typical of the cultural and anthropological perspectives of the time. However, Bowman (1914, 172) did succeed in making the important link between geography and development, conceding that the difficulties of securing a livelihood under harsh conditions explained much of the ‘low stage of development’.⁴

Carl Sauer, another renowned US-based geographer, conducted fieldwork in Latin America (principally Mexico) from the 1920s to the 1950s, making important links between geography, anthropology and history (West, 1979).
Eighty years of geographical interest and Latin American ‘development’ later, this text attempts to bring together the geography of Latin America with issues of development and their power-space (political geography) dimensions.

Defining spaces

From the outset, there are two definitional obstacles to overcome. First, there is the locational reference to Latin America. The word America is commonly used within English language literature to refer to North America. There is a clear element of ethnocentricity within this linguistic usage since the Americas are continental reference points inclusive of North, Central and South.⁵ The manner in which the word America has been linguistically usurped reflects the self-centring of the Anglocentric world with reference to the two American continents, reinforcing constructions of US hegemony within these regions.

Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein (1992, 549) note that the geosocial construction of the Americas came about as a result of South and Central America’s insertion into the European-based capitalist economy. They continue that, ‘There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas.’ It is this construction of the Americas, as emerging as a result of its insertion into the capitalist economy, as Europe’s ‘New World’ and the USA’s ‘backyard’, that has led to Central and South America being constructed as peripheral to other powers. This construction of peripherality has played a critical role in the development of Latin America in terms of its political and commercial relations with nation-states in the northern hemisphere.

A further caveat to the use of America as a term must be the recognition of the territorial integrity of the continents prior to recognition and conquest by Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus.⁶ The German geographer Martín Waldseemüller was the first person to coin the term America, in honour of Vespucci, in a map of the ‘New World’ published in 1507 (Williamson, 1992). With regard to these points, the term Latin America refers to the post-Iberian conquest period, the period after Columbus’s ‘discovery’ when Latin-based languages (Spanish and Portuguese) were brought to Central and South America; the term Latin America was first coined in France during the 1860s (Braudel, 1994).

The long history of the Americas prior to the conquest by Columbus in 1492 is referred to as the pre-Columbian period of the Americas and encompasses 20,000 years of social change and political geography. This has to be compared with the 500-year timespan of the Iberian and independence periods. The use of Columbus’s conquest as a reference point for the political, cultural and socio-economic changes within the Americas reveals the impact of the Iberian conquest and colonisation within the history of the continent: from the European perspective it is a historical juncture characterised by ethnocentric constructions such as ‘discovery’ and ‘the New World’; from the Amerindian perspective, it is a historical juncture characterised by the initiation of Iberian genocide and exploitation.⁷

The second definitional issue is the terminology used to refer to the development condition or status of Latin American societies. Is Latin America: Third World? Developing World? Less Developed World? Underdeveloped World? Newly Industrialising? Low Income? Middle Income? Low Consumption? South? Clearly there is little right or wrong within the semantic minefield of terminology due to the range and complexity of socio-economic situations, and also factors of quality of life (Wolf-Phillips, 1987). I use the term South for the following reasons: it is a geographical reference to the southern hemisphere rather than a relative socio-economic reference; it is broad and therefore acts as a geographical ‘catch-all’, avoiding attempts to classify, rank or group countries or regions. The obvious criticism is that Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are also southern hemisphere nation-states and that many countries with similar development characteristics within the South are located in the North. All universalising statements are liable to be flawed, so the defence follows that the South is a geographical reference within which the majority of countries share similar environmental, social, cultural, political and economic development contexts and conditions.

The South definition is neither precise, inclusive nor exclusive, and as such it reflects the heterogeneity of Latin American circumstances. Rather than attempting to justify the term, it is better to point out that there are many and various contradictions and ambiguities within this universalisation. The definition should continue that a recognition of difference within the South is as important as a recognition of the difference between North and South. Difference characterises individuals, communities, provinces, nation-states and continents as much as hemispheres. An attempt to group and classify agents (such as people) and structures (such as nation-states) should not obscure the differences within and among them. Searching for uniformity should not lead to a blindness of difference. There are many, varied political geographies within the continent and none is more justified or valid than others, they are merely different.

This introductory chapter provides a context for the study of Latin America from a political geography perspective. By looking at political geography’s central themes of power and space, the evolution of the subdiscipline itself and theories for the understanding of Latin America, a framework is constructed for the following chapters. Chapter 2 addresses the historical evolution of power-space relations relating to social and economic changes within Latin America and in international relations. Three historical periods are discussed: the pre-Columbian period (prior to Spanish and Portuguese conquest) to the turn of the sixteenth century; Iberian imperialism to the early nineteenth century; and the post-independence period to the present day.

Chapter 3 brings these historical themes up to date by looking at contemporary issues relating to geopolitics and geoeconomics within the continent. The fourth chapter is an analysis of the Latin American state, particularly with respect to the stability of political systems, forms of control over urban and rural areas, and issues of regional development. Chapter 5 provides an overview of the social and cultural diversity of the continent and its significant role in shaping late twentieth-century political geographies.
Diversity in terms of social movements, ethnicity, nationhood, gender and sexuality are raised in this context. The concluding chapter advocates a shift in the theoretical balance within political geography as regards the South, and also new directions in studying...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• 1: POWER TO THE PEOPLE?
• 2: FROM PRE-COLUMBIAN TO POST-COLD WAR GEOPOLITICS
• 3: LATIN AMERICAN GEOPOLITICAL ECONOMY
• 4: THE ORGANISATION OF CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN SPACE
• 5: COMMUNITIES OF POVERTY, BODIES OF POWER
• 6: TOWARDS A DEMOCRATIC POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY OF LATIN AMERICA
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES