It looked for a time that Latin America finally got it and was going in the direction of free markets and democracy, but then along came Chavez and the Peronists. Now, Chavez is weakening and maybe it will start to swing again.
Meanwhile, Asia is fixing to leave Latin America in its dust.
A guy named Hernando de Soto, “The Mystery of Capital” has an excellent argument for why Lat. Am. and some of the African/ME countries remain “backward.” He argues it is not because of lack of wealth, but because of lack of legal instruments that allow people to capitalize their wealth (i.e., title deeds, property titles, etc.) In Egypt, for ex., it took 7 years and 156 separate steps to get legal title to property that a family CLEARLY owned for generations. Without legal title, he notes, you can’t borrow, and therefore can’t capitalize your equity for investment purposes.
A paternalistic tradition rooted in both medieval Catholic thought and Bonapartism (Napoleon was a hero to many Latin American independence figures), to say nothing of the strong ethnic divisions in certain countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Peru in particular) are but a few factors that retarded the development of the nations to our south. Of course, I like to emphasize the lack of clearly defined and consistent property rights, and the embrace of import substitution (ie protectionist nationalism) along with corporatism over free market capitalism, but it would take a whole 'nother thread to address that issue.
LS, have you read any of David Rock's works on Argentina? How about Krauze's "Biography of Power" about Mexico?