ABSTRACT
Diverse times along the same tectonic fault Emerging after a century of tectonic change from its traditional agrarian identity, Latin America (LA) still seems to be in full transition. According to a CELADE (Centro Latinoamericano de Demografía)3 classification of demographic transition, about 10 per cent of the Latin American population are still at the early or moderate stage, while 75 per cent are in full transition. Only the remaining 15 per cent have already achieved an advanced level in this process (CELADE 1998). Moreover, when many other indicators are displayed alongside population data, they seem to suggest that this classification captures much more than demographic transition. In most cases, it may well be a quite precise indicator of the current state of evolution of the overarching socio-economic transformation process. Countries in the full transition group, for example, show levels of per capita productivity, and public social expenditure, which are five times and fourteen times higher, respectively, than those observed in the early stage. In the case of public expenditure on social security, this ratio rises to over thirty times (see Tables 6.1-6.6). The region harbours two of the four largest urban centres in the world, each of them approaching twenty million inhabitants, and it also has several in the ten million range. However, over 42 per cent of the population are still peasants, according to the most recent World Bank (WB) estimates (World Bank 2004). Every day in Latin America sees people living and working in ways that present a microcosm of almost every social formation recorded in history. They range from the high-qualified professionals employed by large LA private multinationals, one of which is owned by the second richest man in the world, to indigenous American peasants tending their alpacas in the magnificent Andean highlands, and even aboriginals deep in the Amazonian rain forests. The vast majority, however, will descend before sunrise by the tens of millions into packed metros, or ride for hours in noisy buses that inch through the tortuous traffic of congested streets, on their way to salaried jobs somewhere in the huge factories that bustling LA cities have become. They will work long, strenuous hours, even on Saturdays, Sundays and fiestas de guardar,4 mostly in small or medium-sized private shops and firms, increasingly in the service sector.
