The Great Depression in Latin America ed. by Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight (review)

The essays in this new book edited by Paulo Drinot and Alan Knight provide new perspectives on the impact of the Great Depression on Latin America. They do not question the centrality of the economic slump for Latin American economic and political history. Instead, they seek to go beyond the traditional focus on economics and politics – related to the rise of import-substitution industrialization schemes, political unrest, and rise of populist regimes in the region – to consider “the broader social, institutional, and political history of the slump while paying attention to the ways in which regional transformations interacted with global processes.” (9) Another related, central theme that runs through the book is that the impact of the Great Depression was not the same across the region. It varied according to each country, and within each country it affected different social groups, economic sectors, and geographical areas in particular ways.

Approached in this manner, the previous generalizations that had dominated the study of the Great Depression give way to a deeper and richer understanding of its process across the region. Composed of an introduction by Drinot, a conclusion by Knight, and seven chapters on different national cases, the book offers a comprehensive, nuanced picture that takes into account common regional patterns as well as specific developments in each country, grounded in current regional and national historiographies and illuminating continuities and changes between the periods before and after the Great Depression.

The varied impact of the Great Depression is revealed in different manners. In the case of Argentina, Roy Hora not only shows that the country emerged relatively quickly from the worst of the economic decline but also that the crisis had a differential impact on middle classes, who recovered quite rapidly, and lower classes, who suffered a significant decrease in wages and heightened state repression. In Colombia, analyzed by Marcelo Bucheli and Luis Felipe Sáenz, the Great Depression affected the three export sectors – coffee, banana, and oil – differently, in relation to each sector’s distinct configuration of local bourgeoisies and relationship to foreign capital. In Central America, Jeffrey Gould explains that the Great Depression deepened trends already in motion in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, leading to increased mobilization of Indigenous communities and lower classes and their repression by military regimes that later adapted ideologies of mestizaje and indigenismo to co-opt Indigenous sectors. Like in the case of Colombia, Gould pays attention to developments at the sub-national, regional, and local levels.

The uneven influence of the Great Depression was clear in other cases as well. Chile, Cuba, and Mexico were particularly affected by slump given the nature of their export economies, as studied, respectively, by Gillian McGillivray, and Alan Knight. At the other end of the spectrum is Venezuela, where Doug Yarrington shows that although the export economy was impacted, recovery was also rapid due to the availability of significant oil resources and the main political and economic changes in the 1930s were not due to the economic crisis but to the death of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez in 1935. In the case of Peru, Drinot and Carlos Contreras argue that the impact was indirect, in that the economic crisis created economic dislocations and social tension that eventually resulted in a more interventionist state and policy innovations.

The Peruvian case brings attention to the topic of the degree of change and continuity in terms of state intervention as reflected in new economic and social policies. The essays dismiss the idea that the Great Depression provoked an abrupt change from export-oriented economies, based on laissez-faire economics, to industry-based models under increasing state regulation. Instead, they reflect the current consensus, in that it accelerated trends in those areas that were already under way, and that state interventionism was far from consistent or was completely achieved. In both Colombia and Brazil, export protectionism had already been advanced before 1929. In the latter case, Joel Wolfe shows...