Bello
Relearning old
lessons
Latin America’s enduring need for the rule of law, education
and openness
The Economist (01-II-2014)
WE HAVE long taken notice of Latin America. The leading
article in The Economist’s very first issue, in 1843, called on Britain to
slash tariffs on the import of Brazilian sugar and cotton. Our coverage of the
Mexican Revolution of 1910-17 is cited by historians. More recently, in 1997,
we recognised the progress of Latin America in establishing (or
re-establishing) democracies and in overcoming hyperinflation and debt crises
by creating a separate Americas section (in which we included Canada).
This week sees the start of a new column, which will give
further depth to our coverage of Latin America. It is tribute to the region’s
expanding weight in the world. Brazil and Mexico now count among the ten
biggest economies by purchasing power. Latin America is of critical importance
in energy (it has a fifth of the world’s oil reserves), food production and the
environment (with half the surviving rainforest). Cuba excepted, democracy
holds sway throughout the region, though it is under threat in some places.
Thanks to faster growth, 60m Latin Americans have left poverty since 2002;
income inequality, a perennial problem, has fallen.
Latin America’s leaders constantly proclaim their unity.
They did so again this week in Havana at a meeting of the Community of Latin
American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a regional organisation formed in 2011
solely to distinguish “our America” (in the phrase of José Martí, a Cuban
patriot) from the United States and Canada.
The reality is rather different. Brazil seeks global
influence in its own right; Mexico’s close economic ties to the United States
will be reinforced by its recent energy reform; and the free-trading countries
of the Pacific seaboard look to Asia, in tacit despair at the archaic statism
of places like Venezuela and Argentina.
Politics and trade are not the only faultlines. Latin
America is fragmented by huge distances, by peculiarities of history, and even by
language—not just Spanish, but also Portuguese in Brazil, French in Haiti, and
English in several Caribbean islands. Such diversity made this column very hard
to name. Brazil and Mexico, the region’s two giants, share no heroes and few
points of cultural or historical reference with each other, or with
Spanish-speaking South America.
After much head-scratching, we opted to name the column
after Andrés Bello (1781-1865), a Venezuelan-born polymath, educator, writer
and diplomat. If Simón Bolívar and the other 19th-century liberators provided
the ramshackle hardware of Latin American independence, it was Bello
(pronounced “BAY-yo”) who did more than anyone to create the software of
nation-building.
His biography is an early testament to globalisation. Having
spent 19 years in London as an often-unpaid envoy for independence, he moved to
Chile, where he ran the foreign ministry and was the founding rector of the
University of Chile. He drew up the country’s civil code, which proclaimed the
equality of citizens before the law. It was quickly copied in half a dozen
countries in the region, and had a significant impact in others—including
Brazil and Mexico. He also wrote an influential treatise on international law,
which argued for the equal status of nations, as well as a bestselling Spanish
grammar for Latin Americans.
Bello was a liberal, but a realistic one, who believed that
strong political institutions were essential to thwart anarchy and for liberty
to flourish. Whereas Bolívar argued that the new republics needed the
discipline of top-down authority, Bello thought that to succeed they needed to
create citizens, through universal public education and, above all, the rule of
law (“our true patria”, he once wrote). In addition, he was an advocate
for trade and an internationalist, insisting that the new republics should
remain open to the ideas and products of the world.
The causes espoused by Bello—the rule of law, education and
openness—are enduring ones. They loom especially large in Latin America today,
as the great commodity boom wanes. Populists peddling an inward-looking
nationalism, who have ruled by state diktat and political favour rather than by
law, are being found out at last, as this month’s devaluations in Argentina and
Venezuela show.
The region once again has to pay attention to education,
productivity and competitiveness if it is to sustain growth, and to the rule of
law it is to turn back the tide of criminal violence that threatens its
citizens’ quality of life. In 21st-century Latin America the teachings of the
region’s greatest 19th-century public intellectual are more relevant than ever.
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