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conservative, change-resisting, even reactionary force in Latin America, or
a force for change, democracy, and human rights? Or both? Are the
answers to these questions the same or different when one focuses on
U.S. government action and when one focuses on U.S. economic and
cultural activities, which are mainly in the private sector?
Veliz's book on the centralist tradition suggested that liberalism was
out of place in Latin America. Moreover, when it appeared in 1980 the
facts - the predominance of authoritarian regimes even in countries such
as Chile or Uruguay that had democratic traditions - seemed to be with
him. As he wrote then, " [ am convinced that the proliferation of au–
thoritarian regimes during the past few years is not an aberration of
moral and political taste, but a manifestation of a style of political
behavior, a secular disposition of Latin American society that under
different forms - of which the military may prove the most transient -
will be with us for some time yet."
Today, fourteen years later, except for Cuba, virtually every Latin
American country is much closer to having a democratic regime than it
was in 1980. Never before has so much of Latin America been ruled
democratically. To be sure, in varying degrees and ways these democratic
regimes are imperfect and precarious. The so-called third wave of
democracy may recede, leaving who knows what. But at the political
level liberalism does appear to be more feasible and desirable now than it
did in 1980, and one sees this more clearly through a universalistic per–
spective, rather than using Veliz's rich but more idiosyncratic one. Of
course, let it be conceded that to say which perspective is clearer is not
necessarily to say which is truer.
Veliz's earlier book has relatively little to say about the influence of
the U.S. government as either a conservative or a change-promoting
force in Latin America . It has more to say about the alleged influence of
U.S. and other First World intellectuals in setting the agenda for these
countries and determining the prestige hierarchies of Latin American in–
tellectuals. Indeed, from that book alone one might judge that the
biggest influence the U.S. had on Latin America was that of its radical
intellectuals on Latin American intellectuals. I would say much more
about the ways the Latin American intellectuals influenced North
American intellectuals, and even officials. I would also give more weight
than Veliz does to the influences of the U.S. government in both
change-resisting, illiberal directions and in change-promoting, liberal di–
rections, in Latin American development.
But if Veliz did not perceive the degree to which liberal politics
could sprout from Latin American soils in the eighties and nineties, nei–
ther did much of the U.S. social-science scholarship on the region.
