ABSTRACT
The debate over the causes of Latin America’s economic failures relative to the success of Canada and the United States has been a recurrent focus of Latin American intellectuals, and there are enough explanations to suit everyone. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they blamed their Iberian and Catholic roots. Around the middle of that century, the shortcomings were attributed to the demographic weight of a native population that was supposedly opposed to progress. At the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly around the time of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, it was said that poverty and underdevelopment were caused by an unfair distribution of wealth, above all by the peasants’ lack of access to land. Starting in the 1920s and accelerating thereafter, “exploitative imperialism” was blamed.
