Scarcity and Latin America Abundance

The nationalist-capitalist project collapsed in the 1980s due to corruption and inequity in which enormous debts to foreign (mostly U.S.) banks resulted in retrenchment, job loss, and impoverishment. Neoliberalism is the intellectual movement that corresponds to the dismal era of economic retrenchment and return of U.S. domination in the period from 1982 to the twenty-first century. As a set of ideas, neoliberalism differs little from those advocated by "científicos" and modernizers of past epochs except, perhaps, in its emphasis on the example of U.S.. and East Asian business practices, such as private entrepreneurship. Again the assumption is that Latin America is characteristically backward and needs to import models for achieving abundance from more "successful" societies.

There are, however, two alternatives on the intellectual horizon. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto propounds the argument that Latin America has been hobbled by monopolies of economic and political power and that enduring prosperity will be created by the acts of millions of tiny entrepreneurs—street vendors, small businesspeople, and the like. This is clearly an idea of its time, related to neoliberalism and reflective of the retreat of the grand projects of the state and the proliferation of microscopic businesses among the unemployed, but it does touch on the persistent problem of stultifying monopolies of power in the region.

Meanwhile, welling up from innumerable social movements are the offshoots of dependency theory but with a new focus on indigenous cultures, women, and ecology. Like dependency theory, these diverse ideas (for which we do not yet have a name) locate abundance inside Latin America, in its forests and waters and in its pre-Hispanic and African-American legacies. They see globalization (economic and cultural) as threatening that abundance and thus form part of the international antiglobalization movement, centered on the World Social Forums held in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Unlike dependency theory, these ideas emphasize an encompassing cultural vision of radical economy and ecology, drawing on 1960s forebears in liberation theology and Paulo Freire's "conscientization" approach to collective self-education. Fragmented as these tendencies are, there is no single intellectual spokesperson, but one might start with the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar. We look hopefully for a synthesis of the penetrating critique of political-economic power characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s and the richer attention to culture and nature characteristic of recent Latin American thought.