In urban settings the most important social development in the short run was the steady expansion of middling white-collar and professional groups. The extent to which these can be termed a “middle class” is open to question, for, while “middle” by the economic indicators of property and income, they were often ambivalent about their place in society—uncertain whether to embrace the work and savings ethic conventionally associated with the middle class of the Western world (or, later, of East Asia) or to try to emulate traditional elites. The middle sectors were, in any case, the chief beneficiaries of the expansion of educational facilities, which they strongly supported and used as means of upward mobility. Urban workers, for their part, had access to primary education but rarely secondary; at least they were now mainly literate, whereas most rural Latin Americans still were not.
Lack of formal education had long reinforced the relative isolation of the peasantry from political currents at their nations’ centres, not to mention from new fads and notions from abroad. Yet, starting in the 1920s, the rapid spread of the new medium of radio throughout Latin America exposed even illiterate people to an emerging mass culture. Additions to transportation infrastructure also contributed to greater integration of isolated population clusters. The most essential rail lines had already taken shape by 1910, but the coming of automotive transport led to a major upgrading and extension of highways, and the airplane introduced an entirely new mode of transportation. One of the oldest airlines in the world is Colombia’s Avianca, whose founding (under a different name) in 1919 was of particular importance for a country where railroad and highway building had lagged because of difficult topography. Air travel similarly played a key role in knitting together far-flung sections of Brazil previously connected by coastal steamer. Transport improvements of all kinds favoured the creation not only of national markets but of shared national cultures, in the latter respect reinforcing the effects of popular education and radio. Challenges to the political order
The economic and social changes taking place in Latin America inevitably triggered demands for political change as well; political change in turn affected the course of socioeconomic development. As the 20th century opened, the most prevalent regime types were military dictatorship—exemplified by that of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico and after 1908 Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela—and civilian oligarchy—as in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia. Even in Díaz’s Mexico the constitution was not entirely meaningless, while civilian governments commonly used some combination of electoral manipulation and restricted suffrage to keep control in the hands of a small minority of political leaders allied with landed and commercial elites. Neither dictatorial nor oligarchic regimes gave due representation to the majority of inhabitants.
Porfirio Díaz.Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The Mexican Revolution
The immediate challenge to existing regimes in country after country usually came from disaffected members of the traditional ruling groups and from the expanding middle sectors resentful of their exclusion from a fair share of power and privilege. This was evident at the outset of Latin America’s bloodiest 20th-century civil conflict, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when a dissident member of the large landowning class, Francisco Madero, challenged Díaz for reelection, lost, and rose in rebellion, promising to bring genuine political democracy to Mexico. The dictatorship, decaying from within, collapsed, but it was many years before the country settled down, since Madero’s uprising unleashed forces that neither he nor anyone else could control. Miners, urban workers, and peasants saw an opportunity to seek redress of their own grievances, while rival revolutionaries bitterly fought against each other. The end result was a system built around an all-powerful political party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), as it ultimately called itself—that skillfully co-opted labour and peasant organizations. More benefits accrued to labour leaders than to the rank and file, and implementation of the land reform proclaimed by the new constitution of 1917 was mostly halfhearted until the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). But it superficially appeared that almost everybody received something, and after Cárdenas Mexico became a model of political stability in Latin America. Broadening of political participation
The Mexican Revolution evoked widespread admiration elsewhere in Latin America, especially for its commitment to socioeconomic reform, but the Mexican political system had few imitators. In the Southern Cone, a common pattern was the broadening of participation within a more conventional democratic system where at least the middle sectors gained a meaningful share of power and benefits. This happened in Argentina following an electoral reform of 1912 that made universal male suffrage effective for the first time and paved the way for the Radical Civic Union party, with strong middle-class support, to take power four years later. In Chile a reformist coalition won the election of 1920, but strife between president and parliament brought a relapse into instability and short-lived military dictatorship. By the time Chile returned to stable political life in 1932, it had been equipped with a new constitution that was less susceptible to oligarchic obstructionism and an apparatus of social legislation that benefited both the middle class and urban workers, though it largely ignored the peasantry. However, Uruguay outstripped all others both in political democratization and as a pioneer welfare state, with minimum-wage legislation, an advanced social security system, and much else, even before 1930.
Elsewhere the record was mixed. Costa Rica came close to approximating the pattern of the Southern Cone, and in Colombia the Liberal Party, after its return to power in 1930, went partway toward incorporating labour as an actor on the national scene. Ecuador in 1929 became the first Latin American nation to adopt woman suffrage, though it still required literacy to vote (and far fewer women than men could read). Within four years Brazil, Uruguay, and Cuba—of which only the first retained a similar literacy test—had followed suit. But in Peru a president who flirted too far with social and political reform at the time of World War I was ousted by military coup. In the following decade the banner of reformism in Peru was taken up by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, founder of the Aprista party and heavily influenced by the example of the Mexican Revolution. The Apristas’ program combined economic nationalism with Latin American solidarity and called for incorporation of the Indians into the mainstream of national life, but the party never gained control of government until the 1980s, by which time it had lost much of its original character. In Venezuela, thanks to oil revenue and effective use of the military, Juan Vicente Gómez stayed firmly in control as dictator until his final illness in 1935; and in Brazil the oligarchic regime of the so-called Old Republic held on until the economic crisis of the Great Depression through careful sharing of power among political factions of the largest states. Expanding role of the state
The world depression—which saw governments changed by irregular means in every Latin American country except Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Honduras—temporarily ended the progress being made toward political democracy. Even where constitutional rule was not interrupted, chief executives felt the need (as also in the United States) to take emergency measures, and the enlargement of government functions in dealing with the economy outlasted the emergency itself. At the same time, leaders everywhere were coming to the conclusion that social ills must be ameliorated, if only to ward off revolutionary threats from below. Various countries (such as Colombia in 1936 and Cuba in 1940) adopted constitutional reforms incorporating the principle already enshrined in Mexico’s constitution of 1917, of expressly subordinating property rights to social need.