What Happened to Latin America?

Gwynne Dyer

Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk wannabe who became president of Argentina two years ago, is now in deep trouble with the voters, and the mid-term elections are due this month. He shares the same political agenda as Donald Trump, give or take a folly or two, so he asked his populist big brother for help and Trump delivered.

Milei faces $20 billion in foreign debt repayments next year, and there was no money in the kitty so Trump bailed Argentina out with a $20 billion currency swap. But Argentines still seemed quite cross at Milei’s huge cuts in jobs and public services and they needed a bigger incentive to vote for him.

Sitting in the White House with Milei last Tuesday, Trump told the Argentine people, “You know, our approvals are somewhat subject to who wins the election. If (Milei) loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina.” Or as the real mafia used to put it: “Nice little country you’ve got here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

Shamefully, Milei did not reject that blatant intervention in his country’s elections. When Trump treated Brazil in a similar way, demanding that convicted ex-president Jair Bolsonaro not go to jail for his attempted coup and threatening to impose a 50 percent tariff on all the country’s exports to the U.S., the Brazilians told him to go ahead and be damned.

There’s an equally humiliating show going on off Venezuela’s coast, where speedboats manned by a few young men are being destroyed from the air almost every week by the U.S. Navy. Washington claims that they are carrying drugs and some of them may be, but killing the crews without warning is a deliberate demonstration of U.S. contempt for Venezuela.

Those boats cannot carry enough fuel to get even halfway to the United States. They are not armed, and it would be easy to stop and search them instead. Venezuela is ruled by an unattractive regime, but it is so weak that it would dare not intervene in such stop-and-searches, which would take place outside its territorial waters.

Using missiles on these kids, who are probably getting paid a couple of hundred dollars for making the run, is just performative cruelty for the home audience. The Pentagon puts out video of each kill.

We have become inured to these American displays of contempt for Latin American countries and lives, but there is a bigger question here. Why are Latin American countries so weak, poor and disrespected, with the partial exceptions of Brazil and Mexico?

By population, Latin America is more than one-third of "the West." The main languages it speaks are derived from Latin and, in most cases, are almost mutually comprehensible (Spanish and Portuguese). The great majority of the population is culturally Christian, regardless of their specific beliefs or lack thereof.

The natural resources available to these 600 million people are no less abundant than those enjoyed by North Americans or other European-derived populations like Australia and New Zealand. Immigration was not later or less than it was to other "Western" destinations in the originally non-European parts of the world.

Yet there is a history of economic and political failure in most Latin American countries that stretches back centuries and has left them weak and poor compared to the rest of the West — so much so that they scarcely figure in the discussion when other western nations choose their goals or consider their options.

Various people have claimed that the answer lies in that Latin American countries have bigger populations of indigenous people and more descendants of enslaved people than those in other parts of the West, but this is simply wrong.

Two of the most economically successful countries in the region are Mexico (19 percent indigenous and 40 percent mixed race) and Brazil (10 percent black and 45 percent mixed race). By contrast, the most spectacular long-term political failure is Argentina, which is almost entirely white European by descent. You can’t just play the race card here.

It is in Argentina that the debate about what went wrong historically is most intense, and I have heard most of those debates at one time or another because I have family connections in the country. I regret to inform you that they have reached no consensus on the answer either, although they are almost obsessed with the question.

Milei is Argentina at its worst and his gamble will very probably end in tears. It will be about the thirtieth time in the past century that an Argentine government has ended in tears. While Latin America is not just Argentina writ large, the question remains unanswered: Why is per capita income in Europe at least twice as high as per capita income in Latin America?

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is “Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers.” The previous book, "The Shortest History of War," is also still available.