ABSTRACT
Latin America, predominantly urban, boasts or frets of several of the world’s largest cities. Latin American economies have long suffered from fluctuations in world prices for a limited number of minerals or agricultural products and from deterioration in the terms of trade for such primary products. Attempts by Latin American nationalists to regain control of their economies have often been undertaken at great cost. Such attempts generally have the effect of adding the great weight of the multinational corporate community and the US government to the ever-present schemes against popular governments. Modernization, in Latin America as in the United States, has meant increasingly capital-intensive—as opposed to labor-intensive—industry, resulting in chronic unemployment. In the 1960s and 1970s, much of Latin America experienced the rise of a new and very modern kind of military dictatorship—institutional, technocratic, self-confident, and ruthless. Politics in Latin America has often been associated, in the minds of Anglo-Americans, with violence and petty corruption.
