His co-written critique of dependency theory, http://www.reason.com/news/show/27774.html
Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Alvaro Vargas Llosa, translated by Michaela Lajda Ames, New York Madison Books, 218 pages, $24.95
>...No wonder. Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot does not dissect the region's populist-nationalist thinkers--it goes at them the way slash-and-burn peasant farmers go after an overgrown field. Consider a few examples:
* Liberation theology, which portrays Jesus as a Marxist revolutionary and sucked a whole generation of Latin American priests and nuns into active support for communist guerrilla movements, is not about liberation at all, the authors write. Rather, it is "a Christian reflection of Moslem fundamentalism....The logical consequence of this thesis would be theocracy, a political dictatorship based on the divine word interpreted exclusively by a platonic elite of the all-knowing, `chosen' priests."
* Argentina's Juan Peron was not a humanitarian liberal who eventually succumbed to the temptations of power after achieving great things for the nation's poor but a paternalistic fascist who utterly destroyed one of the world's most modern and prosperous economies in order to create a cult of personality. "If every Argentine has a Peron in the depths of his soul, it must be excised," the authors write, "with a benign cross if possible, and if not, then with a sharp scalpel."
* The nationalism Latin American politicians flaunt so proudly, say the authors, is a mutant import from Europe that has produced leaders who are "grotesque and solitary figures, and dangerous mental midgets." Academics and journalists who elevate bandits like Pancho Villa into anti-imperialist heroes are engaging in nothing less than gangster worship: "To attribute to Pancho Villa the sublime principles of politics and economy is like saying that Attila the Hun was a manicurist....If Pancho Villa is Mexico's dignity incarnate, the country's apotheosis, the Mexicans should start fleeing toward Tierra del Fuego."
Thus does Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot trample through nearly every political garden in the region. The authors--three journalists, former leftists all--wrote the book after sharing a cab back to the hotel at the end of a conference in Bogota during which they lampooned the speakers as, well, idiots, prattling the same stupid and discredited theories that have been disfiguring Latin America's politics and economies ever since it won independence from Spain at the beginning of the 19th century. The cab ride ended with a decision to write an intellectual history of the region's politics.
The authors argue that the seeds the Spaniards planted in Latin America--of mercantilism, church-state dictatorialism, and general opposition to the Enlightenment--bloomed almost immediately after independence, plunging the region into chaos and poverty. By the end of the 19th century, most Latin American political thought was devoted to figuring out why Spain's former South American colonies were so poor and backward compared to England's former North American colonies, even though both regions had been liberated at roughly the same time and South America had a huge head start in development.
The answer the Latin Americans came up with was: because the gringos robbed us. Economics is a zero-sum game; wealth is not created but distributed. If we have less, and they have more, obviously it was stolen from us.
The beauty of this argument is that it's outcome-based, so you needn't be bothered with explaining exactly how the battle of the Alamo is responsible for the fact that the average Paraguayan makes less than $3,000 a year. Latin American sociologists and political scientists write huge, soul-numbing tomes that consist of nothing but several hundred pages of comparative economic statistics, followed by, "See?"
The most infamous expression of this approach is so-called dependency theory (though I must admit I prefer the name Apuleyo Mendoza, Montaner, and Vargas Llosa give it: "We're Poor; It's Their Fault"). In dependency theory, Latin American countries have been forced--first by Europe, later by the United States --to build their economies around the export of one or two major crops or minerals. This not only supplies the gringos with cheap commodities and industrial inputs but leaves Latin America dependent upon the whim of an international marketplace controlled by the Illuminati--the industrialized nations. And it keeps Latin Americans from planting crops that could be used in local diets. Like vampires, the gringos grow fat and happy as the Latin Americans waste away. Hence the title of one of the most famous expositions of dependency theory, the Uruguayan Ed-uardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America.
The problem with dependency theory is that, in point of fact, Washington doesn't give a rat's ass about Latin America from an economic standpoint. Trade with Latin America represents about 3 percent of the United States' gross national product. Everything south of Laredo, Texas, could be sucked up by a passing UFO one night and nobody in Washington would notice, although Justice Department lawyers would probably scurry to and fro trying to find a way to make it one more count in the antitrust suit against Microsoft.
To put it more concretely, it may be very important to Costa Rica to sell coffee to the United States, but it is not at all important to the United States to buy it. And that's why the U.S. Marines did not land in Costa Rica when that country, seeking to protect its economy from the vagaries of the commodities market, forged into other industries during the past decade. (Manufacturing microchips for Intel is now the country's top moneymaker. Tourism is number two.)
Dependency theorists make much of Washington's military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean during the past half-century, but the fact is that, except for Bill Clinton's bizarre nation-building experiment in Haiti, they were all aimed at protecting what were perceived--rightly or wrongly--as U.S. security interests, not economic ones. Had Salvador Allende's government in Chile stuck to nationalizing the property of American companies, the Nixon administration never would have sent the CIA mucking about. In fact, Allende's Christian Democratic predecessor, Eduardo Frei, had seized U.S. copper companies without getting into trouble. The United States took note primarily because Allende permitted Cuban intelligence to establish a major theater of operations in his country.
Not surprisingly, dependency theory is the target of some of the most pulverizing blows in Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot. The theory, the authors note, could just as easily be turned around to indict Latin Americans for making their gringo wage slaves stay up around the clock making luxury items that Latins consume but don't produce. If trade is theft, they say, why not launch "passionate accusations against Latin Americans for stealing computers and planes from the gringos, televisions and automobiles from the Japanese....Since Latin America imports more than it exports, it's the rest of the world's circulatory system that is at the mercy of the bloody Latin American sting."
And damn those handmaidens of imperialism, the rapacious multinational corporations, and their incomprehensibly devious ways: "It's a mystery why these thieves in search of others' fortunes spend so much money performing studies, building factories, transporting machinery, technology, and managers, promoting products, distributing goods, and employing workers, not to mention paying the customary bribes....Why don't they just avoid all these costly charades and send in their military forces and carry off our cornucopia once and for all?"
Of course, as the authors acknowledge, these days there's an equal clamor for more trade between Latin America and the United States. Even Fidel Castro, who once claimed that U.S. economic exploitation was the source of all of Cuba's problems, has reversed fields, whining constantly that the American embargo is what keeps his country poor.
If anything, Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot may seem faintly anachronistic to some readers. With Latin America governed almost exclusively by democratic governments that publicly pledge allegiance to the market, why bother beating a dead horse? Since the book was published in Spanish almost four years ago, many of the idiots in Idiot have recanted and are trying to do penance. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the sociologist who in 1969 coauthored Dependency and Development in Latin America--a seminal dependency text that the authors of Idiot recommend to anyone "who wants to join the clan of mental retardation"--is now president of Brazil and architect of an ambitious plan to liberalize one of the most protectionist economies in the world. Ariel Dorfman, co-author of 1972's How to Read Donald Duck, which purported to find coded imperialist messages in the incomprehensible ravings of an animated, speech-impaired waterfowl ("God! How can one be so stupid and not die in the process?" wonder the authors of Idiot), recently apologized in his autobiography for his role as chief propagandist in the Allende government. <SNIP>