Throughout Latin America the position of rural workers came under attack from the large plantations, ranches, and estates that were expanding to take advantage of potential profits from the export economies. In south-central Brazil coffee plantations spread westward, pushing back small foodstuff production; in Argentina the ranching frontier pressed southward, displacing indigenous groups. Peasants and indigenous communities had resisted encroachment by neighbouring estates throughout the early national period and continued to do so into the 20th century. Nevertheless, the balance of power was shifting in favour of the large landowners. Early liberal moves to break up communal landholding paled beside the more energetic initiatives of the later 19th century. Although indigenous communities survived in the Andes, Mexico, and Central America, they commonly lost land, access to water and other resources, and some of the limited autonomy they had enjoyed.
The Roman Catholic Church also was the target of ever more aggressive liberal attacks after mid-century. In much of Latin America the church had been the preeminent source of capital and a major property owner. As in the case of indigenous communities, the justification for those assaults was based in liberal ideology; politicians argued that property had to be placed into the hands of individuals because they would be more likely to develop it efficiently and thus contribute to economic progress. In Mexico, governments began large-scale appropriations of church holdings. This inspired the Cristero Rebellion (1926–29), in which communities rose up in violent defense of the church without the support of the bishops. Oligarchies in power
Along with the export economies came political transitions. The increased revenues that burgeoning commerce provided allowed elites to consolidate more orderly political systems in some countries. Political unrest continued, however, in others; Colombia, for instance, experienced a series of civil wars toward the end of the 19th century.
Across the region, groups tied to the export economies came to dominate politics in this era. In 1871 Guatemalan liberals linked to the rising coffee sector ousted the conservative regime that had controlled the country since 1838. The years 1876–1911 in Mexico, meanwhile, marked the iron-fisted rule of Porfirio Díaz, who began his career as a liberal fighting under a banner of election for one term only and ended up as a dictator who customarily manipulated his country’s political structures to ensure that he and his allies would remain in power. That regime, known as the Porfiriato, was a particularly clear example of the late 19th-century regimes’ ties to the new economic order. The Díaz government, like other progressive dictatorships in Latin America, worked to promote railroad construction, to force reluctant peasants and indigenous groups to work on rural estates, to repress popular organizing, and in other ways to benefit the dominant elites. Through such initiatives the governments of the day diverged from pure liberal tenets according to which the market alone determines the shape and nature of economic change. In many countries ruling groups began to adopt the ideas of positivism, an ideology stressing a scientific analysis of human history and efforts to accelerate progress. In Brazil the decentralized old republic, dominated by rural elites, replaced constitutional monarchy in 1889 and took as its motto the positivist slogan “Ordem e progresso” (“Order and progress”). That phrase summed up what the ruling groups in Brazil and across Latin America sought in the mature age of export-oriented transformation—the maintenance of the hierarchies that they dominated and the achievement of prosperity and a “civilization” that represented an approximation of North Atlantic models. Thus both oligarchic republics and liberal dictatorships evolved as part of the new order of the 1870–1910 period. Roger A. Kittleson David Bushnell New order emerging, 1910–45
The advances in economic growth and political stabilization that were evident in most of Latin America by the early 20th century came up against an array of challenges as the century wore on. The forward momentum was not necessarily lost—although Mexico experienced negative economic growth along with great political turmoil during the first decade of the Mexican Revolution beginning in 1910—but some partial changes of direction occurred, and new problems kept emerging. The challenges were of both internal and external origin, ranging from steady population increase for the region as a whole to the consequences of Latin America’s ever-closer incorporation into the world economy. The external factors are generally easier to identify, if only because of the suddenness of their impact. Economic and social developments World war and world trade
Few Latin Americans felt strong emotional identification with either of the contending alliances in World War I (1914–18), except for the immigrant communities in southern South America and the ranks of generally Francophile liberal intellectuals. Of the major countries, only Brazil followed the example of the United States in declaring war on Germany, while Mexico and Argentina, which respectively saw the United States as a bullying neighbour and a hemispheric rival, vied for a leadership role in behalf of Latin American neutrality. Yet all countries were affected by the wartime disruption of trade and capital flows, particularly those that had in recent years most successfully penetrated European markets with their own exports and become important consumers of European goods and financial services. Argentina was an obvious example. The outbreak of war brought a sharp decline in its trade as the Allied powers diverted shipping elsewhere and Germany became inaccessible. Although exports soon recovered, mainly in the form of meat to feed Allied troops, imported manufactures were scarce because overseas factories were devoted to war production, and scarcity drove up prices.
Wartime disruptions were only temporary, and they gave way to a frenzied boom in the immediate postwar period as Latin American exporters cashed in on pent-up demand in the former warring powers. An extreme case was the “dance of the millions” in Cuba, where the price of sugar reached a peak of 23 cents per pound in 1920, only to fall back to 3.5 cents within the space of a few months, as European production of beet sugar returned to normal. Similar postwar booms and busts occurred elsewhere, even if less sharply, and demonstrated some of the hazards of Latin America’s increasing dependence on the world economy. Those hazards were underscored again by the costly program Brazil felt compelled to undertake to support the price of coffee, buying up surplus production and keeping it off the market. First tried in 1906 and briefly repeated during the war, this “valorization” policy was reinstated during the 1920s in the face of persistent weakness of the world coffee price. Yet one reason for the latter was the expansion of cultivation in other Latin American countries, above all Colombia, which by the end of World War I had emerged as the second leading producer—encouraged by, among other things, the Brazilian price support efforts.