What If Latin America Ruled the World?

What If Latin America Ruled the World? How the South Will Take the North into the 22nd Century, by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, Bloomsbury RRP£20, 480 pages

For a moment in July Latin America almost ruled the world, when four of its football teams looked set to make the World Cup semi-finals. What made the prospect even more thrilling was that this seemed of a piece with the region’s other successes, particularly Brazil’s.

Unlike its Bric peers – Russia, India and China – Brazil combines a fast-growing economy with democracy and respect for human rights; has renounced nuclear arms; enjoys a high degree of racial harmony with no border conflicts; and has one of the world’s cleanest energy systems. It has also lifted 30m people out of poverty over the past decade and its economy is on track to grow seven per cent this year.

This is an enviable combination – especially compared to stagnation in the west, religious conflict in the Gulf, or authoritarianism in the east. But it is also an experience echoed throughout Latin America where economic growth has largely continued through the financial crisis, even as the western financial system and much of its intellectual underpinnings have seemed to crumble.

Such resilience, and the confidence that accompanies it, explains why some believe the 2010s will be the decade of Latin America. The “forgotten continent”, seen as little more than “a man with a moustache, a guitar and revolver” as Nobel prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez put it, is now an emerging power and important global market. All this makes promising terrain for an exploration of what might happen if Latin America really did rule the world. But it is not quite the approach taken by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera in his prodigiously researched, often engaging but ultimately frustrating tour of the region and its history.

A Colombian philosopher, who teaches at the University of London, Guardiola-Rivera picks up where Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America leaves off. He explores the Spanish conquest, ponders the development of European capitalism, recalls the indigenous inhabitants of Colombia who created extraordinary irrigated agricultural systems, and posits that their communities of mutual aid hold relevant lessons for today. He dwells on the struggle for independence, and then delves into development theory, praising Raúl Prebisch – “Latin America’s Keynes” and an economist, whose work is enjoying a re-rating. One of the book’s most interesting themes revolves around a demographic forecast: by 2040 the US will have a Latino majority. The US’s future is therefore more linked with Latin America than many think.

What if Latin America Ruled the World? is at times a radical academic tract, at others a beat travelogue. It is hard not to like an author who listens to Iggy Pop while driving south on the 29,800 miles of the Pan-American highway, riffing about Túpac Amaru, Simón Bolívar and Pablo Neruda. But it is also wearing to read the word “neoliberal” repeated so tirelessly.

That’s another problem. “Latin America no longer specialises in losing,” Guardiola-Rivera writes. It is also doubtful that Hugo Chávez’s socialist revolution, kept afloat by Venezuelan oil, is a desirable model for anywhere else.

In late June, when Latin American football teams were still doing well, Chávez gloated that “even Europe’s football teams are sinking, like their economies”. His endorsement was a sure signal it was all about to go wrong.

Irony of ironies, in the end Spain – the mother country or first despoiler of Latin America depending on your view – took the cup. A more critical appreciation of Latin American heroes, past and present, would have lent more weight to the points Guardiola-Rivera makes so well.

John Paul Rathbone is the FT’s Latin America editor and author of ‘The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba’s Last Tycoon’ (Penguin Press)