ABSTRACT
This chapter examines, from the perspective of the national development process, some aspects of the treatment of sociocultural issues characteristic of Latin America. It emphasizes some elements of the Latin American process that contrast significantly (regarding sociocultural issues) with those of Europe. National life in colonial Latin America was constructed under conditions very different from those prevailing in Europe. The colonial process, instead of developing a socioeconomic structure and an internal market that would have generated integration, created conditions to prevent this from happening. In Latin America, the construction of nation-states was linked not only to the suppression of state privileges and servile relations but also to the formal dissolution of colonial bonds. Federal decentralization sought to destroy conservative power by developing "urban nuclei" in the various provinces that would operate as allies of the central power in its effort to annul the economic relations and forms of property inherited from the colony.
