Awakening continent; Latin America in new perspective
Awakening continent; Latin America in new perspective
The average traveller leaves for Latin America convinced by what he has read and heard that he will find onehalf of the population dancing the samba, the rumba, the bamboco or whatever the local variation may be while the other half sleeps under trees.
The average traveller is always disappointed. A new wind is blowing through Latin Americathrough a continent of many contrasts, with its mountain-tops under perpetual snow and - sweating tropical lowlands, with its great modern metropolises and its hinterland villages, with its famous writers, poets and thinkers and its more than 70,000,000 illiterates.
The phrase Latin America alone is a handy one, but it is misleading. It tends to make an outsider place, let us say, Colombia and Mexico within the same pigeonholes; and that is as false as saying that Frenchmen and Yugoslavs are exactly alike because they are continental Europeans. Latin America's common language (with the exception of Brazil) and common historical heritage are a tremendous advantage today in modernizing a continent. But national differences remain great; in the past, they were so great that it was quite normal for a country to be in closer relations with Europe or North America than with its own neighbours.
Our average traveller is bound to return home convinced that Latin America stands poised on the brink of an economic revolution. The vagaries of world markets have taken the easy profit out of one-crop economies. World War II shut Latin America off from its traditional sources of everything from type-writers to vacuum cleaners. Many a country was, forced to choose between building its own industries or do without and chose to build. In the Brazil of fifty years ago, the rubber industry meant a naked Indian tapping a tree somewhere in the Amazon for crude rubber to be shipped immediately abroad. Modern Brazil makes 1,500,000 tyres a year. Colombia is now the fourth Latin American country to produce its own iron and steel and it is producing it on a site where ten years ago campesinos ploughed the soil with oxen.
Latin America cannot be judged by the book standards of "economic underdevelopment." The statisticians can prove that production and standards of living are low and must be raised, but their statistics cannot show one salient fact: Latin America has, on its own soil, sizeable islands of modern economies. The situation in many of these countries is that of a colony, but with the "mother country" also placed within the same borders.
In such a situation, technical assistance rendered by the United Nations can make a tremendous impact on Latin America. First there is the "blast furnace" of economic potential which is merely waiting to be tapped. Secondly, the "international expert" finds himself at home the moment he steps off his airliner. A Mexican working in South America or a Peruvian in Central America speaks the same language and in many respects thinks the same way as the people he is working with. There is the barrier of national differences, true, but when it is overcome by men of goodwill the results are often dazzling.
In Latin America, the United Nations and its agencies have been able to undertake a wide range of missions (conducted in many places by Latin Americans) to attack the immediate and profound problems that hamper economic development. Their work ranges from research in nuclear physics to teaching adults to read and write. After a period of five years, its fruits are worth a close examination.
In this issue, the Unesco Courier presents a few examples of some of the results achieved. There are scores of others, all of them exciting and fraught with significance. The following pages are an attempt to help readers 'get a glimpse of an old continent in new perspective.