Juan Bautista Alberdi, an Argentine constitutionalist and liberal, noted in 1837 that “Nations, like men, do not have wings; they make their journeys on foot, step by step”.
Latin America, long susceptible to the utopian mirages of revolutionaries and caudillos and still not immune to them, has struggled to absorb this truth. But, as Michael Reid observes in his book, Forgotten Continent, durable mass democracies have emerged across the region.
In recent years, these democracies have rolled the dice with an extraordinary variety of leaders, including Michelle Bachelet in Chile; Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the metalworker who rose to govern Brazil; and Venezuela’s barracks-bred Hugo Chavez.
As they journey on foot, nations also dream. Democracies are inventive and averse to entitlement. Their imperfections are manifold, but so are their self-renewing mechanisms. They demand hope. The dynamic, over time, trumps the dynastic.
The Brazilian journey has often faltered, giving rise to the nostrum that this was a country with a great future condemned to its eternal contemplation. Annual murder figures in the tens of thousands testify to enduring social problems.
Brazil’s future is now. There are five reasons: land, raw materials, energy, the environment and China. Vastness defines Brazil; the agricultural use of its territory is nowhere near exhaustion. Already the world’s largest exporter of coffee, beef, sugar and orange juice, it is fast increasing exports of other foodstuffs, including chicken and soya.
Another fast-rising export is iron ore. China, which is investing heavily in Brazil, wants all it can get, just as it wants food (as does India) and energy. Brazil has an abundance of the latter, and could have much more. Set aside for a moment Brazil’s vast hydroelectric resources and its recent discovery of a huge deepwater oil field off the southeastern coast. As Reid writes, “If China was becoming the world’s workshop and India its back office, Brazil is its farm.
Latin America’s transformation in recent decades has been underestimated. It has been political and economic but also cultural. Deep prejudices against indigenous, mestizo and mulatto populations have been confronted and, if not defeated, undermined.
The New York Times
