Bulmer-Thomas V., Coatsworth J., Cortes-Conde R. The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 2, The Long Twentieth Century

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372 Otto T. Solbrig

which they depend, creating water pollution, beach erosion, and destruc-

tion of mangrove vegetation.

Coastal resources are also being endangered by the development of the

shrimp-breeding industry, especially in Ecuador. For this purpose, inlets are

enclosed and fertilized, thereby altering nutrient relations and endangering

coastal vegetation, especially the very unique and fragile coastal mangrove

thickets. Mangroves are not only biologically unique, they also play a very

important role as protectors of coastal areas from sea encroachment and

erosion, and are breeding grounds for many important commercial ﬁsh

species. It is estimated that half of the mangrove areas are threatened by

human activities.

Latin America is singularly well provided in freshwater resources. At a

time when shortages of fresh water are a serious threat to many develop-

ing and some developed countries, all Latin American countries, with the

exception of some Caribbean islands, have enormous reserves. Mexico is the

Latin American mainland country that uses the largest percentage (19%)

of its freshwater resources. Yet, although there is no real threat of overall

shortages, there are problems in distribution, and many watercourses are

seriously polluted.

Indiscriminate commercial ﬁshing on some of the large rivers such as the

Amazonas and the Paran

a and pollution are threatening the rich ictiological

fauna of many of these rivers. So, for example, in the lower Paran

a sixty

thousand tons of ﬁsh were extracted in 2000, half of them of one species,

the s

abalo, which is exported mostly to Brazil. The lower Paran

a has more

than three hundred species, some of which, like the dorado, attract sport

ﬁshermen from all over the world, an important economic activity.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF MINING

AND OIL EXPLORATION

Latin America is an important producer and exporter of minerals. It is also

a major producer of petroleum and contains the largest reserves outside

of the Middle East. It furnishes about one-ﬁfth of the world’s supply of

copper and holds about one-third of the world’s reserves of this mineral. In

addition, it has about 15 percent of the world’s reserves of tin, 34 percent

of molybdenum, 60 percent of lithium, 23 percent of silver, 20 percent of

H. Hamilton and S. Snedaker, Handbook for Mangrove Area Management (1984).

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Economic Growth and Environmental Change 373

Table 9.7. Total indigenous energy production (thousand metric tons of oil

equivalent)

Country 1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1997

Argentina 30,557.931,039.839,452.041,748.648,584.480,133.5

Bolivia 2,119.34,123.24,456.54,751.34,989.05,953.1

Brazil 49,445.454,218.263,931.196,569.498,880.5 120,235.8

Chile 4,730.75,051.46,073.96,878.47,867.28,167.9

Colombia 19,370.216,922.319,114.533,344.849,404.567,524.5

Costa Rica 663.1718.5784.1987.31,055.91,157.1

Cuba 3,428.73,474.54,214.34,859.75,959.87,254.7

Dominican

Republic

1,217.41,340.91,568.41,393.81,064.01,423.3

Ecuador 1,342.110,887.212,051.116,383.317,221.122,791.8

El Salvador 1,254.91,900.62,147.91,825.92,100.12,648.9

Guatemala 1,934.52,595.52,510.52,992.53,366.54,433.1

Haiti 1,378.01,623.21,569.01,222.61,267.91,298.3

Honduras 1,012.21,135.71,334.31,478.71,702.22,003.4

Mexico 45,500.069,863.5 173,859.0 183,630.6201,923.4223,132.3

Nicaragua 736.4888.3923.51,267.71,541.31,528.5

Panama 344.3 403.8 558.1603.7 573.0807.7

Paraguay 1,171.11,312.71,623.42,780.44,857.56,959.5

Peru 7,608.78,576.214,763.115,039.711,590.912,225.0

Uruguay 519.0534.5835.51,262.61,112.01,085.7

Venezuela 198,855.8 136,550.7130,511.8 119,146.5146,291.1203,978.6

Latin America 373,189.7 353,160.7 482,282 538,167.5611,352.3 774,742.7

Sources: IEA, Energy Balances of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

(OECD) Countries, 1960–1997, and Energy Balances of Non-OECD Countries, 1971–1997 (IEA,

1971–1997)inﬁve-year intervals (WRI).

iron ore, and lesser amounts of other minerals, such as lead (9%), uranium

(9%), zinc (7.5%), nickel (6.1%), and gold (5.8%).

Energy, principally liquid fuels and gas, is one of Latin America’s prin-

cipal exports and source of foreign exchange (Table 9.7). From Venezuela

to Argentina, the foot of the Andes is a large geosincline that contains vast

reserves of petroleum. In 1996, Latin America produced 508,093,000 mil-

lion tons of petroleum. Mexico and Venezuela were the largest producers,

followed by Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Cuba, and Chile,

U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, The Environmental Dimension

in Development Planning (Santiago, 1985).

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374 Otto T. Solbrig

in that order. Oil exploration and extraction that used to be a major envi-

ronmental disruption is done today with minimum environmental impact.

Nevertheless, building roads into remote areas can open them up for colo-

nization, ashas been the case in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Furthermore, spills

attributable to pipeline and tanker accidents can create serious local envi-

ronmental problems, particularly in times of civil violence. Both Venezuela

and Colombia have had their pipelines blown up repeatedly by guerrillas,

creating serious oil spills.

Exports of copper provide some 5 percent of the region’s foreign

exchange, a share surpassed only by the exports of petroleum, coffee, and

sugar. Copper is mined in ten Latin American countries, but only in three –

Chile, Mexico, and Peru – is copper mining of importance. In Chile, the

copper industry is a major element in the economy, accounting for some

60 percent of exports, 13 percent of government revenues, and 4 percent of

GNP.

The open-pit iron mine in Carajas, Brazil, is the largest one of its kind.

The mineral is exported largely to Japan. Brazil uses charcoal to produce

pig iron and steel. The Carajas mine is a model of providing for minimum

environmental impact. However, the pig-iron industries that have grown

up along the Carajas-San Luis railroad are a major source of deforestation

because they convert native forests into charcoal

used in smelting.

Mining can be very contaminating, especially if there are no good envi-

ronmental controls. The environmental problems associated with mining

involve all stages from the extraction of mineral ores from the ground

to their ﬁnal processing. One of the most serious problems is the release

into watercourses of untreated or only partially treated efﬂuents, from the

discharge of solid residues, and especially from the discharge of chemical

wastes resulting from the oxidation of ores containing sulfur. Most of the

metals mined in Latin America are extracted as sulfur salts (copper, zinc,

lead, silver, mercury, and arsenic). The release of these wastes is a principal

reason for the contamination of rivers, some of which serve as sources of

drinking water for large populations, such as the Rimac that provides the

drinking water to the city of Lima.

Avery serious problem in many areas, but especially in the Amazon

basin, is the contamination of watercourses by mercury, a byproduct of gold

A. B. Anderson, “Deforestation in Amazonia: Dynamics, Causes, and Alternatives,” in A. B.

Anderson, ed., Alternatives to Deforestation: Steps Towards Sustainable Use of Amazon Rain Forest

(New York, 1990), 3–23.

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Economic Growth and Environmental Change 375

extraction from auriferous sands. Some of this is produced by thousands

of very poor individual miners who pan gold in Amazonian rivers, but a

signiﬁcant part comes from organized dredging by larger enterprises. The

mercury in these waters is a cause of ﬁsh kills and mercury poisoning of an

undetermined number of local inhabitants, especially Indians.

CONCLUSIONS

Latin America possesses some of the most enchanting landscapes in the

world. Beautiful tropical beaches with sand like sugar compete in mag-

niﬁcence with splendid snow-capped mountain peaks from Cerro Bol

ıvar

in Venezuela to Cerro Fitzroy in Patagonia. The majesty of the Beagle

Canal in Tierra del Fuego, with imposing glaciers reaching to the very

sea, can only be compared with the sublime beauty of the Cataratas de

Iguaz

uonthe Argentine–Brazilian border, Salto del Angel in Venezuela,

or the towers of Torres del Paine National Park in Chile. The tropi-

cal jungles of the Amazon basin are unique, but so is the vegetation of

the dry Quebrada de Humahuaca in Argentina or the Sonoran desert in

Mexico.

That these and all the other witnesses to the vigor of nature in Latin

America must be preserved for coming generations should be obvious to

everyone. It is also obvious that natural resources must be developed to

improve the welfare of the population, and that this must be done so as to be

sustainable. Yet the growth of the population, their undisciplined quest

for economic betterment, and the greed of some and the incompetence

of many are endangering these objectives. Tourists, developers, erroneous

government policies, greedy and incompetent politicians, and negligence

all combine to create environmental disasters.

Yet the history of the environment in Latin America in the twentieth

century is not only one of deterioration; it also shows a growing awareness

that the path of development pursued at present is nonsustainable. If the

patterns described in this chapter were to continue as in the past, not only

does it threaten the beauty of the area, it also seriously puts in question the

ability of the ecosystem to deliver the services on which humanity relies. To

change course means a change in perception and in development strategy,

not only by Latin Americans, but also by the entire economic system,

especially the developed world that has been sucking natural capital from

Latin America for more than a century.

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376 Otto T. Solbrig

More environmentally friendly technologies, such a No-Till agriculture,

integrated pest management, sustainable logging practices, and more care-

ful attention to dam location, must be adopted. For this to happen, atten-

tion must be paid to the proﬁtability of the new technologies. Govern-

ments must adopt policies that encourage sustainable use of the rich trove

of natural resources that Latin America possesses. We see some of this

starting to happen, but the rate of adoption of sustainable practices must

increase considerably if further environmental deterioration is to be reduced

signiﬁcantly.

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LABOR AND IMMIGRATION

blanca s

anchez-alonso

The role of Latin America in the international economy has changed in

many ways when we compare the late nineteenth century and the late

twentieth century, but in no other aspect has Latin America changed more

that in its position in the international labor market. Around 1900, Latin

America was the destination of millions of immigrants, particularly for

millions of Europeans, and some Latin American countries were competing

for labor in the international market. By the end of the twentieth century,

Latin America had experienced a “population explosion” in the 1960s and

the 1970s and today the region is no longer a destination for immigration.

On the contrary, one of the main features of almost all Latin American

countries nowadays is the high volume of emigration to the United States

and Europe.

This chapter concentrates on the period in which Latin America was

a major receiving area of European immigration – that is, the so-called

age of mass migration between the years of 1880 and 1930.Needless

to say, immigration was not a new phenomenon in the 1880s. Scattered

immigrants had been arriving in the region since the 1830s and in the

middle decades of the nineteenth century there were a substantial number

of immigrant colonies in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Mexico.

The slave trade had also been a traditional source of foreign population,

particularly in Brazil and the Caribbean, and Latin America had been well

integrated into the international labor market through the Atlantic slave

I would like to thank the editors for their comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to Alejandro

azquez and Bruce Sacerdote for their data on passage fares and to all participants in the London

and Buenos Aires meetings for their suggestions, particularly to Carlos Marichal for his very insightful

comments. Tim Dore gave me very useful references.

377

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378 Blanca S

anchez-Alonso

trade. Chinese immigrants were also relatively important in Peru and Cuba.

Butitwas not until the 1870s and the 1880s that immigration, mainly from

Europe, reached massive proportions and changed the social and economic

evolution of several major Latin American countries.

Although many countries in the region tried to attract immigrants, for-

eign labor concentrated in a few destinations: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba,

and Uruguay. Over the period 1880–1914, only a few countries in Latin

America were integrated into the free international labor market. The chap-

ter focuses mainly on the River Plate countries, Brazil, and Cuba, although

brief overviews of other countries such as Chile and Mexico are included.

It deals with national units, though some migration scholars have argued

that the regional approach is more appropriate because immigrants concen-

trated in speciﬁc regions and cities. This chapter considers Latin America

in the international labor market from a global perspective. The general

aim of the chapter is to survey existing knowledge and to open possible

new lines for future research.

The ﬁrst section surveys migration trends in the main receiving coun-

tries. It focuses on the national origins of the ﬂows and discusses the evolu-

tion of real wages. The section makes comparisons among Latin American

countries and other areas receiving immigrants in the same period, partic-

ularly the United States. The second section deals with policy issues. An

explicit comparison between Brazil and Argentina, the two big competi-

tors for foreign labor, is carried out with references to immigration policies

in other countries, such as Australia and Canada. The third section con-

centrates on the immigrants as laborers: the selectivity of the migration

process, where the immigrants concentrated, and their contribution to the

labor force in the receiving countries. The section also deals with the issue

of the human capital brought in by immigrants (proxied by literacy and

occupations) and also with immigrants’ contributions to social capital in

the receiving countries. The fourth section explores the consequences of

immigration in the long run for some Latin American countries. The focus

is mainly on changes in the composition of the labor force and long-run

impacts on demographic structure, paying special attention to age distri-

bution. A ﬁnal section concludes.

1.MIGRATION TRENDS

The nineteenth century’s improvements in transport and communica-

tion and the progressive elimination of institutional barriers to commerce

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Labor and Immigration 379

induced an impressive increase in commodity and factor mobility. The

opening of economic relations affected both sides of the Atlantic economy,

promoting a rise in international commerce and an extraordinary increase

in factor mobility as some 60 million Europeans emigrated to the New

World in the century following 1820.Inbroad terms, the economies of the

NewWorld were characterized by dual scarcity – capital and labor – and

by cheap and abundant land. Latin American countries needed to augment

the supply of labor and capital to exploit natural resources. However, not

all countries shared this labor scarcity. Mexico had a relatively large native

population, and Brazil had both a large slave labor force and a large native

population. In 1870, the Argentine population was less than 2 million,

the Cuban population stood at 1.3 million, and Uruguay had a little more

than 350,000 inhabitants. In contrast, the Brazilian population was nearly

10 million and Mexico had around 9 million. Resource abundance and

scarcity of labor was characteristic of the River Plate area and the Brazilian

hinterland.

Nevertheless, almost all Latin American governments tried to attract

foreign labor after independence. Some countries needed to increase the

labor force because of the scarcity of the native population. Others tried

to prevent labor shortages in certain sectors. Some governments thought

that the immigration of a culturally “superior” European population would

contribute to economic and social modernization.

From 1850 onward, Europe was the main supplier of both capital and

labor to the world, but European countries were not the only sources

of immigration into Latin America. Chinese “coolies” were employed in

the Peruvian guano, sugar, and cotton industries (around 75,000 Chinese

contract laborers were transported to Peru before 1880 and the inﬂow con-

tinued afterward), in the sugar plantations of Cuba and the Caribbean, and

in railway construction in Mexico and some Central American countries.

The inﬂux of Asian and other indentured laborers was particularly

important in the Caribbean. The British, French, and Dutch plantation

economies in the region found their supply of labor in British India or in

the Dutch colonies in Asia. It is interesting to note that at the same time

that the indenture system was ﬁnally disappearing from the United States,

the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies produced a renewed

demand for indentured labor. The arrival of Asians and Chinese bound to

servitude to the Caribbean had very different implications from the arrival

of Europeans free to choose their jobs and places of residence, but the expla-

nation of this migratory ﬂow can be found in the same powerful economic

forces (to enlarge the labor supply and lower labor costs) as the arrival of

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380 Blanca S

anchez-Alonso

Europeans to the Brazilian plantations. Servitude remained legal in the

British Caribbean until its abolition in 1917. These migratory ﬂows from

China and Asia were not massive compared with the European stream, but

in the century up to 1916, more than 700,000 indentured laborers from

Asia were transported to the region. In addition, after 1907, the state of S

Paulo became a major destination for Japanese immigration.

African slaveswere also part of the world supplyof labor to Latin America.

In terms of immigration alone, America was an extension of Africa rather

than Europe until late in the nineteenth century. Eltis calculates that it was

not until 1840 that arrivals from Europe surpassed those from Africa. In

the course of the nineteenth century, 600,000 to 700,000 African slaves

reached Spanish America and almost twice that number were transported

to Brazil up to 1870, when the slave trade was ﬁnally suppressed. Despite

the rising cost of slaves and the increasing risks of the trade because of

British pressure, in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, the volume

of forced African slave migrations to Latin America tended to follow the

pattern of growth and decline in labor demand. This labor demand was, in

turn, related to the European demand for sugar, coffee, and cotton, which

increased throughout the nineteenth century. The African slave population

concentrated mainly in Brazil and the Caribbean.

According to the invaluable work of Ferenczi and Willcox,

the main

trends in international migration are well documented. The majority of

European immigrants went to the United States (Table 10.1). Until the

last quarter of the nineteenth century, Latin America remained almost out

of the free international labor market. Various colonization projects had

brought more or less numerous European groups to some countries in the

central decades of the nineteenth century, but most plans failed miserably.

The German colonies were the most successful in southern Brazil and

Chile; the Welsh in Patagonia are another example, as are some French

colonies in the Southern Cone. Italians contributed to various successful

colonies in Argentina. But it was not until the 1880s that Argentina, Brazil,

and Uruguay started receiving a massive inﬂow of European immigrants.

There are various reasons for this delay: the political instability in the

new republics, for example, in Argentina and Uruguay; the low demand

for labor in the majority of the Latin American countries either because

of a large native population, as in Mexico, or because of the use of slave

labor, as in Brazil or Cuba; the high cost of the passage and the duration

See the bibliographical essay corresponding to this chapter for works mentioned in the text.

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Labor and Immigration 381

Table 10.1. Gross intercontinental immigration into selected areas, 1871–1940

(in thousands)

United States Canada Argentina Brazil Cuba Uruguay

1871–80 2,433 220 261 219 112

1881–90 4,852 359 841 525 140

1891–1900 3,684 231 648 1,129 90

1901–10 8,666 947 1,764 671 243 21

1911–20 4,775 1,154 1,205 798 367 57

1921–30 2,723 987 1,397 840 21

1931–40 443 82 310 239 57

Sources: William Woodruff, Impact of Western Man. A Study of Europe’s Role in the World

Economy, 1750–1960 (London, 1966), 108; and Imre Ferenczi and Walter F. Willcox, Inter-

national Migrations,vol. 1 (New York, 1929).

of the trip to those countries where labor was scarce, wages high, and

natural resources abundant, such as Argentina or Uruguay; natural dis-

advantages attributable to geography and climate in the Latin American

hinterland; and “some political and cultural characteristics not attractive for

immigrants of different ethnic origins” as the United Nations reported in

explaining why Latin America lagged behind the United States in attracting

immigrants.

The situation changed for many countries after the 1870s. Political sta-

bility and a ﬁrm political will to attract foreign immigration that had been

growing in the 1850s and 1860s led Latin American governments to look

for foreign immigrants mainly from Europe. Institutional factors such as

religious freedom, the right of private ownership, respect for civil rights,

and a friendly atmosphere toward foreigners also played a role. The 1853

Argentinean constitution even gave foreigners some advantages over nation-

als such as exemption from military service.

From an economic perspective, the most powerful force for change was

that Latin America experienced a boom in its traditional role as a supplier

of primary goods. Exports rose, capital ﬂows from Europe began to arrive,

and investment in the transport system (railways) allowed the exploitation

of the abundant natural resources to become a real possibility. The combi-

nation of declining transport costs, rising exports and capital inﬂows, new

United Nations, The Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends (New York, 1953).