Hemispheric history

What is “American international law”? It is Grandin’s name for the legal doctrines that Latin American governments gradually developed to protect themselves from invasion. Its initial ideas, according to Grandin, began when de las Casas and like-minded clerics denounced how the quest for gold and other riches led to the slaughter of Indigenous peoples. Las Casas’s most famous tract, published in 1552, remains the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (which is typically, if less evocatively, translated as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies). He rejected the claim that abuse and murder of Indigenous peoples posed no moral quandaries. De las Casas argued for the fundamental equality of all peoples—and he argued that Europeans owe native Americans reparations for the theft of their lands.

For all the criticism that the Spanish got for their treatment of native Americans, Grandin notes that no comparable theological or philosophical movement emerged in the English-speaking world to contest the legitimacy of English colonialism. “Few” English “philosophers and theorists of political or economic freedom were interested in challenging the institution [e.g., slavery] the way, say, Las Casa[s] or Vitoria confronted the Conquest” (114), Grandin insightfully notes. “If influential Spanish priests had been denouncing the slave trade” (114) since the mid-1500s, he adds, “Locke, Smith, and Hume—tribunes of tolerance, skepticism, human sympathy, and freedom—had little to say on the topic.” Inhabitants of the thirteen colonies justified their theft of native American lands through the doctrine of terra nullius, the notion that lands having been emptied of their native inhabitants meant that no one owned them. And it became the organizing principle for what later became the United States in its conquest of much of North America. It was the perfect vehicle for a slave-owning, industrial plantation economy that reached west as well as south.

At least some Spanish American independence leaders, Grandin tells us, were aware of the inconsistency of claiming that the Spanish king had no right to rule them and their own claims for home rule. If the conquest was illegitimate, as de las Casas reasoned, then their own rule over the new world’s peoples was equally illegitimate. Pedro Gual, a Caracas-born Foreign Minister of Gran Colombia (and later President of Venezuela), appealed to another doctrine, this one from Roman law, to justify their rule: uti possidetis, ita possideatis, or, “as you possess, so shall you possess” (228; biographical details are not from Grandin’s book). So, even if the territories that became independent republics were defective in origin, Gual argued that they were legitimate in operation and thus equally sovereign. Uti possidetis provided the justification for state sovereignty, which, more than de las Casas’s theory of the equality of peoples, became the basis of the Latin American defense against encroachments by European colonial empires and by the United States. Sovereignty thus became the cornerstone of the Latin American contribution to American international law.

State sovereignty, along with the fundamental equality of peoples, became the legal doctrines Latin Americans used to solve at least two political problems. In the first place, it protected them from one another; uti possidetis became a way for new states not to become rival states. In the second place, both notions—state sovereignty and the equality of nations—became a way to protect themselves from the colossus of the north. It did not take long for América to realize that “America,” as the Anglo-Saxon emigrants from the thirteen colonies (and later states) called themselves, were moving to expand a slave-based plantation order that, in the nineteenth century, conquered Florida, the lands east of the Mississippi, then west of the Mississippi, 55 percent of Mexican territory, several large islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific, and what would become the Panama Canal.

It is a grand story that Grandin tells in a fast-paced brick of a book. His canvas covers many topics, including the history of racism, the expansion of the US, and especially its political theories, making America, América a newfangled diplomatic history of the Americas. It is, perhaps better put, a transnational history of the development of a zeitgeist—American international law—set against the backdrop of the international relations of the Western Hemisphere. For America, América suggests that the former colonies of Spain developed legal doctrines to protect themselves from one another and especially from the United States and European powers. These juridical tools became the foundation for international law in the twentieth century, which Grandin argues is a Latin American contribution to the development of the broader conception of human emancipation and world peace.

America, América is curiously silent on several key topics. The first is about the production of the law, even as I emphasize that Grandin, unlike most historians of the region, pays a lot of attention to the law. For all the talk of the development of American international law, however, Grandin writes little about who wrote the doctrines he celebrates. We get the names of a handful of the lawyers who wrote about international law—Santiago Vaca Guzmán, a Bolivian novelist and jurist who spent the last part of his life in exile in Buenos Aires, is one whose work Grandin cites.Footnote ¹ But Grandin writes little about the circumstances that led Vaca Guzmán and other thinkers to develop their ideas about sovereignty and about how these percolated into foreign ministries to effect what he claims became a major innovation in international law.

A second area that Grandin might have written more about is the republican experiments of the Americas. “Wars, civil wars, insurgencies, interventions, coups and dictatorships roiled domestic politics” (302) is the way Grandin characterizes, I think, the Latin American nineteenth century—but it is unclear because he does not indicate whether this generalization applies to this or the next century (or both?). On the eve of World War II, he writes that only four of the twenty-one republics of Latin America, “perhaps Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, and Mexico could be said to uphold some sort of electoral democracy” (476). And, in 1944, Grandin adds Uruguay to the list before noting that, two years later, most countries, with the exception of “Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic,” could be considered some kind of democracy (515). Grandin is not the first to note the change in political fortunes, even if he offers the reader little in the way of an explanation for this trend.Footnote ²

In the last section of America, América, Grandin notes that post–World War II regime change was short-lived. In the aftermath of the 1948 assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, Colombia “looked a lot like the 1930s in Germany” (564), with “Nazis holding public assemblies in Medellín” (564). This, to say the least, is a provocative claim; there is little argument to persuade the reader that Hitler’s regime “looked a lot like” President Laureano Gómez’s autocracy in Colombia. Gaitán’s assassination, which occurred on the eve of the ninth and last Pan-American Conference in Bogotá, is pivotal for Grandin because it signaled Washington’s shift from working with Latin America to throttling its development. Again, Grandin does not explain the transition to more closed regimes, even if he notes that Gaitán’s assassination marks US support for the spread of military governments in Cold War Latin America—whose exact role or decisiveness Grandin does not discuss. And, like earlier parts of the book, Grandin has little to say about the diversity of political experiences in the region and, understandably given Grandin’s interest in the development of a region-wide zeitgeist, little about the origins of different regime types.

A third lacuna is about how violent or peaceful Latin American international relations have been since independence in the 1820s. The Chaco War (1932–1935) between Bolivia and Paraguay, and the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras certainly pale in comparison with European wars of the twentieth century. But there were enough interstate wars in the nineteenth century to make the postindependence period a violent one indeed. Luis Schenoni concludes that Latin America’s international relations were even more violent than Europe’s according to various metrics of warfare, including average duration of conflicts, battle deaths relative to the population, and total fatalities to population.Footnote ³

How Latin American governments pulled off a major diplomatic conquest, if we are to believe Grandin’s riveting account of the development of American international law, is a puzzle that America, América does not resolve. The absence of a discussion of the internal dynamics of these republics means that we remain in the dark about how and why new states were manufacturing legal instruments for the defense of the patria. I suspect that violence, both between nation-states and within them, was the furnace in which lawyers and politicians forged the doctrines that allowed them to protect themselves from the encroachments of old and new world empires—as well as from each other.

Northern republics at war

Erika Pani’s Torn Asunder: Republican Crises and Civil Wars in the United States and Mexico, 1848–1867 explains how war changed constitutional politics in both countries. What is innovative about her approach is the juxtaposition of developments in Mexico and the United States; each republic addressed regime-threatening crises during the same decades of the nineteenth century. Mexico lost half its territory to the United States by 1848 and saw a republican experiment fall to the French Intervention (1862–1867). The United States saw a long-term conflict about slavery turn into the Western Hemisphere’s bloodiest civil war (1861–1865) before the triumphant North outlawed slavery and expanded suffrage rights in the subsequent decades.

The trick of pulling off this comparison is to tell the reader something new. For social scientists, the aim of macropolitical comparison is to uncover a set of causal factors to explain convergences and divergences on the North American continent. For historians, in contrast, the goal seems to be to juxtapose national-level experiences to encourage us, as Pani does in Torn Asunder, to rethink the received wisdom about Mexico and the United States. When practiced by historians, comparative history is more about interpretation—about what it can tell us about each society in question—than it is about causality.Footnote ⁴

Pani’s central conclusion is that mid-nineteenth-century wars vanquished threats to modern republican rule in both countries. The Union’s defeat of the Confederacy weakened plantation owners long enough to make freedmen, as the formerly enslaved were called, citizens of the United States. And mid-nineteenth-century wars liquidated conservatism in Mexico; their ill-fated attempt to restore monarchy ended in defeat once the French Army withdrew from Mexico. Emperor Maximilian’s capture and death by firing squad in 1867 not only ended the civil wars that had pitted conservatives against liberals since independence but also led to the restoration of the Liberal Republic.

Pulling off this comparison requires knowing when and how to summarize complex sequences of events. This task is even harder because many of Torn Asunder’s readers know more about the United States than about Mexico. And so, it is not a surprise that Pani does not always succeed. For example, her paragraphs on how Confederates used “maneuvers that were not unusual in US politics” to exit the federation fail to explain how these worked (83). Another on why Mexican Liberals offered “fierce resistance” to Juárez’s decision to submit “constitutional amendments to the voters” is also too brief (104). Unless they are already familiar with the relevant facts, readers lack the knowledge necessary either to understand these complex chains of events or to appreciate Pani’s typically thoughtful interpretation of their significance.

Comparing post–civil war trajectories in Mexico and the United States suggests another outcome. While the North’s victory in the civil war promised the amplification of citizenship rights and of democracy in the United States, Reconstruction ended in 1877, when federal troops left the South and signaled the end of the US Republican Party’s support for freedmen. The result was violence and conflict that established one-party autocracies in southern states, which were based on stripping Black Americans of their suffrage rights. This outcome made for something less than a competitive democracy in the United States—and something that bears more than passing resemblance to the regime that developed in the aftermath of the Liberal Restoration in Mexico. While no Mexican leader took anyone’s right to vote away, Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (1876–1911) made a mockery of the universal manhood suffrage rights promised by the 1857 constitution. Voter turnout rates fell as antidemocratic regimes calcified north and south of the Río Grande.

Dictatorship and instability in Peru

Two volumes examine the unstable and authoritarian politics of Peru. In Los años de Leguía (1919–1930), Paulo Drinot examines the political life and times of Augusto B. Leguía, whose eleven-year dictatorship marks the shift from civilian to military governments in Peru. In Modern Peru: A New History, Paulo Drinot and Alberto Vergara compile a set of chapters that analyze, in their words, “how Peru has dealt with the curse of freedom—that is, the extent to which it has been able to address the many challenges that its independent or postcolonial history has produced” (4).

Books like Drinot’s are in short supply. Scholars, Drinot suggests, have largely ignored Leguía and his regime, which is regrettably the case for all too many dictatorships in Latin America. Los años de Leguía (1919–1930), I should add, is not strictly an academic book; it is part of a series, “Historias mínimas republicanas,” published by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos that aims to introduce readers to important figures in the country’s history. While Drinot’s book, as a result, does not have endnotes, Drinot refers to key scholarship to produce an up-to-date and accessible volume on a dictator whose regime ended decades of partisan warfare dominated by the Civil Party.

Among Peruvians, Leguía is either celebrated as a modernizer or reviled as a corrupt dictator. The initial chapters of Drinot’s book provide evidence for both sides of this debate. Leguía’s regime did expand the country’s road network and build ports. Its new constitution, enacted in 1920, created executive agencies to lift the position of the Indigenous population of the Andes and improve the condition of the urban working class. But Leguía’s policies did little to change the export-oriented nature of the economy, and large-scale borrowing from New York banks also kept the Peruvian economy tethered to decisions made in foreign markets and capitals. Drinot cites research to the effect that Leguía may not have personally profited from kickbacks and illegal transfers of income, but that his government was one of the most corrupt in Peruvian history (138–144).Footnote ⁵

From a political perspective, Leguía is interesting because he repeatedly won elections. In 1908 and 1919, he won competitive elections, though ones in which only literate males could vote. In 1924 and 1929, he won consecutive and uncompetitive reelection, which, as Drinot points out, violated his own constitution’s ban on the consecutive reelection of the president, whose justifications and politics Drinot might have explored. The 1920 constituent assembly, which established direct elections of elected offices (104), also makes Leguía a bit of an institutional modernizer, even if a new constitution was more of a ploy to remain in power—hence the increase of the president’s term from four to five years in length (102–104). The assembly replaced biennial elections for a third of the deputies with the simultaneous election of the president and the legislature to prevent the opposition from converting disenchantment with the government into control of Congress. When Peruvian presidents did not have majority support in Congress, gridlock and open confrontation with Congress were the result, as José Luis Rénique alludes to in his chapter on the 1879–1919 period in Modern Peru: A New History.

Drinot could have been clearer about how Leguía pulled off the feat of returning to the presidency in 1919. He writes little about how, in the aftermath of the 1919 elections, Leguía outflanked his Civil Party rivals, who were plotting to decertify his election in Congress. By combining street protest, especially by university students, and sedition, he managed to persuade no one less than the executive palace guard to overthrow outgoing President Pardo.Footnote ⁶ But Drinot explains why Leguía lasted so long: He exiled his rivals and his critics, censored the press, and otherwise used the security forces to restrict civil liberties. And he points out why the collapse of the Peruvian economy after the 1929 stock market crash was, at most, the proximate cause of the dictator’s fall. As Drinot insightfully notes, public opinion had been turning against Leguía since the late 1920s. Critics pounced on him for agreeing to a treaty with Chile that left its more powerful neighbor with two provinces lost in the War of the Pacific (Chile only returned Tacna; 189). Labor unrest was important, and so was the impact of several natural disasters in the mid-1920s (191–193). Moreover, Leguía had been unable to co-opt the army (172–175), which, despite Leguía’s creation of a rival security force, the Civil Guard, in 1921 (176–179), apparently did not come to his rescue in late August 1930 when officers, led by Lieutenant Colonel Luis Sánchez Cerro from the barracks in distant Arequipa, started an uprising that unexpectedly toppled Leguía in a matter of days.

The six chapters in Modern Peru: A New History offer an up-to-date and chronologically based history of Peru since the late colonial period. Each chapter covers politics, economic development, social, and intellectual history. The chapters provide a wealth of information (although tables and charts of comparable political and economic data would have helped them identify changes and continuities), including citations to the latest research on Peru (much of it published in Peru, which I find invaluable) that allow the reader to ruminate on why a resource-rich country has been unstable and remained underdeveloped. They usefully bundle political developments into historical periods and discuss their signature characteristics, even if they do not offer an explanation for the persistence of instability and dictatorship (could it be the resource curse?). A conclusion is that violence, in the form of either civil wars or military coups d’état, has been how rival coalitions, until the start of the twenty-first century, gained and retained control of the presidency. A constant has been that state policy has favored exporters and largely adopted their laissez-faire approach to economic and social policy.

In chapter 1, Charles Walker emphasizes the bloodiness of the struggle for independence. He also makes the point that competition among caudillos was more than civil war and destruction; conflict also pitted different ideologies about the political and economic organization of the country, from federalism, Incan revivalism, and radical liberalism to monarchism and even popular royalism (!). In chapter 2, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea notes how the revenue from guano allowed the state to recentralize politics between 1840 and 1880, when Liberals and Conservatives competed for control of a state that provided multiple opportunities for graft and personal enrichment. In chapter 3, Rénique examines the four decades after Bolivia and Peru’s defeat in the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), which resulted in widespread death and destruction by Chilean forces and the loss of its three southernmost provinces. Much of this chapter revolves around the struggle for power and how it became institutionalized in what Jorge Basadre, the great encyclopedic historian of Peru, calls the Aristocratic Republic (1895–1919) because elites fashioned a republican system that excluded military men from the presidency, even if it restricted suffrage rights to literate men.

But this experiment failed to institutionalize the alternation of power, which began to break down when a civil-military coalition led by Benavides overthrew President Guillermo Billinghurst in 1914. A rival civil-military coalition toppled outgoing President José Pardo in 1919, ending this opportunity for its political class to effect a constitutional salida out of the coup trap. The legacy of unstable republican rule was the militarism that characterized Peru for much of the twentieth century. In chapter 4, Paulo Drinot briefly covers Leguía’s oncenio, how it fell apart in the early 1930s, and, most importantly, how President Sánchez Cerro’s assassination by a militant from the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) created a decades-long, often brutal rivalry between APRA and the armed forces and their elite supporters, well into the 1960s. In chapter 5, Eduardo Dargent Bocanegra analyzes the period of military reformism in Peru (1968–1994), which began with another military coup and ended two years after Alberto Fujimori’s military-backed takeover of the state. The junta led by Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975) expropriated large landowners, nationalized foreign and domestic firms, and otherwise sought to reform Peru from above.

Economic depression, inflation, and a brutal war of counterinsurgency against the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas followed the return of civilian rule in 1980. The near collapse of political order led an exhausted and embittered society to withdraw from the organizations it had used to articulate its demands and defend its collective interests, a process that Dargent Bocanegra refers to as “disarticulation.” By the end of Fujimori’s regime (1990–2000), voters had shifted to demanding “good governance”—personal security and economic stability—instead of political representation, according to Alberto Vergara in chapter 6, which covers the 1992–2021 period. Cynthia McClintock offers a brief balance sheet of development, noting that “sixty years ago Peru was a feudal country” and that “now, for more than forty years, every Peruvian has had the right to vote and overwhelming majorities have exercised that right” (325).

The second theme is about the perils of development based on exporting commodities. While revenue from guano exports created “great wealth,” according to Sobrevilla Perea, much of it was spent on physical infrastructure—and not on providing education and public health for a population that Lima-based elites ignored or disparaged. Public contracts for infrastructure led to the embezzlement of tax revenues or foreign loans, advanced on the basis of guano exports, in the form of padded contracts or under-the-table payments to politically connected engineering firms. A large share of guano revenues also went to compensate slave owners when Liberals got Congress to abolish slavery in 1852. But the bust in the 1870s, aggravated by the destructive war with Chile, did not break the hold of merchants and landlords on the state; it instead led to the search for new exports, the use of public policy to fuel their development, and the contracting of foreign loans that kept the state focused on serving the export sector up to the present.

The liberal economic order favored commodity exporters and ignored the needs of most Peruvians; the Indigenous population, most of whom lived in the Andes until well into the twentieth century, has received scant resources for education and public health. This is an outcome that appears in most chapters, especially in Walker and Drinot’s. The bias in policy began to diminish only during Leguía’s dictatorship, when his regime took limited steps to address the needs of the Indigenous population and lower-income Peruvians.

Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal

Alternatives existed if republicanism failed to provide a blueprint for stability and the rule of law. One was corporatism, which its proponents claimed could outperform liberalism with its emphasis on property rights, elections, and the division of powers. This is the topic that Melissa Teixeira explores in her book, A Third Path: Corporatism in Brazil and Portugal, which investigates transnational networks of policymakers and intellectuals that forged corporatist ideology in Portuguese-speaking countries.

What is corporatism? This turns out not to be an easy question to answer, in part because its advocates were better at rejecting the liberal market alternatives and because they did not agree on a single blueprint. From Teixeira’s book, I gather that a corporatist political and economic order includes replacing territorially based legislatures with functionally organized chambers. Having individuals represent functional sectors of the economy like peasants, urban labor, agrarian landlords, and industrial capital in constitutionally recognized bodies is the most important departure from the standard liberal democratic framework. A second is the use of law, especially of the administrative state, to organize the production and sale of goods and services. Teixeira points out that corporatism was not centrally planned economics; it advocated the use of state authority to reach binding agreements with relevant interest groups that would facilitate economic development. Finally, corporatists were in favor of strengthening the executive branch of government, which is where they forged the capacity to plan and administer the economy for national greatness.

In both Brazil and Portugal, the inspiration for corporatist schemes came from several quarters. Anti-Bolshevism was by far the most important. Fighting communists is how Getúlio Vargas, for example, managed to eliminate the last trappings of liberal democracy in Brazil; he trumped up the threat of a Communist revolt to close Congress and set up the Estado Nôvo in 1937. Another inspiration was Roman Catholicism, both in its reactionary and its more progressive guises. Reactionaries saw corporatism as a way to institutionalize natural hierarchies among social classes and interest groups; reformers believed that its doctrines could empower the state to improve the plight of workers and their families. In rather different ways, both saw it as an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism, one that would replace the anarchy and injustice of the marketplace with collaboration and administration in the interests of national development and social justice. And a final source for the development of corporatism was authoritarianism, which liked the centralization of policy-making, both to reward peak organizations (and their leaders!) and to lower the price of goods that would attract popular support for their rule.Footnote ⁷

While Teixeira makes the point that corporatism and dictatorship—and much less fascism—were not the same thing, it is no accident that right-wing dictatorships borrowed from corporatist transnational networks of ideas and policies. Fascism, an even more difficult term to define, also drew on corporatism in its critiques of market capitalism and used interest-based representation in the legislative chambers. But, as Teixeira reminds us, fascists also glorified violence and built mass political movements (8). The 1933 Portuguese constitution was the most corporatist of the interwar constitutions. But even then, it became mere parchment for what turned out to be a highly centralized and personalist dictatorship led by Antonio Salazar.

It would have been great to have read more about two related topics in Teixeira’s book. First, she might have written about the operation of corporatist institutions. Chapter 2 concentrates on the motives for and some of the institutions of the 1934 and 1937 Brazilian constitutions and the 1933 Portuguese constitution. How these charters differed from prior ones, what they left in subsequent constitutions, and how the institutions they created operated are topics that this and subsequent chapters could have explored more systematically. Second, the book does not explain why corporatism lasted longer in Portugal than in Brazil. Vargas’s corporatist experiment was over by 1945, when military factions and conservative groups demanded an end to the Estado Nôvo. Salazar’s dictatorship, however, lasted until 1974, when it became one of the first to fall in the third wave of democracy.

Capitalists and policy-making

The preferences of business have shaped the trajectories of the Americas, as Grandin’s book and those on Peru show. It is therefore fitting that this essay considers two recent books on capitalists. Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America, by Belén Fernández Milmanda, investigates how agribusiness protects its interests in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. And Business Power and the State in the Central Andes: Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru in Comparison, by John Crabtree, Francisco Durand, and Jonas Wolff, chronicles how businessmen pressed for the shift from state-led development to neoliberal reform since the 1980s in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Fernández Milmanda’s informative contribution convinced me that we should spend more time studying policy-making—and return to her study for ideas and insight.

Both books begin by acknowledging the structural power of business. Capitalists, whether exporters of commodities or domestic suppliers of foodstuffs or manufactures, command attention because their investment decisions shape economic growth rates—and thus tax revenue. These sectors are powerful, in other words, because their expected behavior encourages states to factor their interests into their own decision-making. But these books suggest that the study of capitalists must move beyond just analyzing their structural power. These books tell us that businessmen tend to be anxious about the behavior of the state, especially by governments anywhere on the left—and that capitalists do occasionally lose in struggles over public policy.

Business Power and the State in the Central Andes provides an overview of relations between businessmen and the state in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. It is self-consciously a continuation of the book Unsettling Statecraft, by Catherine Conaghan and James M. Malloy, published in 1994, which pioneered the comparative study of business-state relations in these countries.Footnote ⁸ Chapter 2 covers the period during the heyday of state-led development, noting only that Peru, with its larger internal market, saw significant industrialization in consumer goods (government policy in Bolivia and Ecuador concentrated on encouraging exports; 73). Chapter 3 examines how businessmen lobbied for the neoliberal changes that opened domestic economies to international competition during the “lost decade” of the 1980s. Presidents Víctor Paz Estenssoro (1985–1989) and Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000) stabilized inflation-wracked economies while a succession of governments in Ecuador, starting in the 1990s, did so more slowly in Ecuador. Chapter 4 discusses how left-wing governments during the “pink tide” increased labor regulations and expanded social programs that reduced the power of businessmen for much of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Chapter 5 discusses how the downturn occasioned by the end of the commodities boom in the mid-2010s “involved a return to neoliberal precepts of privatization, encouragement of foreign investment, and trade liberalization” (150).

If Crabtree, Durand, and Wolff explore the context and the behavior of industrialists (which is unclear, especially because they do not provide data on the number and types of firms whose organizations they appear to want to study), Fernández Milmanda systematically tests several hypotheses that she develops to explain why agrarian capitalists choose either electoral or nonelectoral strategies to defend their interests. She argues that agribusiness invests in building parties if its members perceive governments to be an “existential threat” and can coordinate their interests to extract favorable policies from state officials. The behavior of agribusiness in Chile, the first of three cases she examines, illustrates her arguments. In chapter 3, she relies on interviews with agriculturalists, analysis of their publications, and an examination of key legislation to show that agrarian reform under both the Christian Democratic (1964–1970) and the Popular Unity (1970–1973) governments turned agrarian capitalists into opponents of democratization and of the Concertación governments, the post-Pinochet alliance between the Christian Democrats and Socialists who governed Chile until 2010. In the aftermath of the 1990 democratic transition, the National Renovation and the Independent Democratic Union reactivated the networks built by their conservative predecessors in the decades prior to the 1973 military coup.

Fernández Milmanda’s two other case studies show what happens when hypothesized conditions change. Extensive talk of land reform in the 1987–1988 Constituent Assembly alarmed Brazilian agribusiness, which prompted its members to organize to protect its interests, as Fernández Milmanda discusses in chapter 4. Unlike their Chilean brethren, however, agro-exporters opted to organize a multiparty legislative caucus because, according to Fernández Milmanda, the size and diversity of agricultural interests throttle the formation of a common agricultural front. But open-list proportional representation (PR) in Brazil has been in place since 1947, decades before the transition to democracy in the 1980s. And Fernández Milmanda neither investigates the origins of Brazil’s candidate-centered electoral system nor confronts Barry Ames’s arguments to dismiss an institutional explanation of why they have not organized an agrarian-oriented party.Footnote ⁹ Ames’s book remains the canonical study of how open-list PR (e.g., letting voters cast ballots for particular candidates, regardless of how a party ranks them on its slate of legislative aspirants) undermines party discipline and turbocharges pork-barreling—and thus increases the difficulty of forming cohesive parties to promote the often conflictual interests of agriculture.

Chapter 5 of Agrarian Elites and Democracy in Latin America examines what happens when agrarian capitalists do not see democracy as a threat to their interests. Informal access had served Argentine agro-exporters well, Fernández Milmanda points out, even if non-Peronist governments let them keep a larger share of export revenues than Peronist ones (166). And, unlike in Brazil and Chile, no threat of land reform existed during the transition to democracy in the 1980s. A hike in export taxes promulgated by President Néstor Kirchner in 2008 was a surprise; and it came on top of policies and regulations that led agribusiness to strike to protest a decree that, in a crucial legislative vote, the government lost (173–174). But Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who won election to the presidency in 2007, continued to extract resources from the agricultural sector, which led agribusiness to form a united front in support of the formation of a multiparty caucus. When a Brazilian-type strategy of interest intermediation, however, failed to reverse these policies—Argentina’s closed-list PR discouraged enough legislators from the government’s party from ignoring administrative dictates—Argentine capitalists shifted to supporting parties of the right.

How powerful are capitalists? From these two books, especially from Fernández Milmanda’s systematic monograph, I gather that capitalists, as owners of property and capital, were and are highly influential. Her introductions to each of her case studies, especially those on Brazil and Chile, document how beneficial state policy has been toward agribusiness. Crabtree, Durand, and Wolff note that state policy, even during the heyday of state-led development, favored the production of export commodities in the central Andes. Their book would have benefited from tables and charts on who benefits from tax and other key legislation; Fernández Milmanda, I note, provides this information and also analyzes property rights, land use, and export taxes. Data on asset concentration, the profitability of businesses, and the shares of income going to capital and labor would have strengthened Crabtree, Durand, and Wolff’s book.

A reflection

One conclusion I draw from this review is about the enduring power of commodity-producing, typically agrarian, interests of both North and South America. If Latin America has its coffee and soybean farmers, the US has its cotton and wheat exporters. Both sets of interests set the rhythm for development, for who controls and who benefits from the riches extracted from the earth. In the absence of industrial sectors that could dramatically increase productivity and reshape society, most Latin American economies—and southern and western states of the northern federation—have revolved around the production of agricultural and mineral exports. Their political systems, as a result, cater to these interests, as several books, especially Fernández Milmanda and Crabtree, Wolff, and Durand’s, show.

Several of the books in this review also underscore the importance of comparing the republics of North and South America. Pani’s book, in particular, is the rare monograph that compares and contrasts the fate of republican experiments in two North American states. All too often, comparison centers around contrasting the alleged vices of all nineteen Latin American republics with the putative virtues of US history and its constitutional experiment. But, as Grandin’s opus reminds us, each emerged from the wreckage of European colonialism. Each, I would add, inherited a slave-based economy, even if only one underwent a devastating civil war to break the grip of slave owners; and each saw repeated challenges to the construction of the rule of law with equal rights for all. For specialists on the US as well as on Latin America, this means using comparison to identify the causes and consequences of similarities and differences in political trajectories.