During the past fifty years, three views have defined the debate on the causes of Latin America’s history of authoritarianism, injustice, and poverty, a history that contrasts so starkly with the evolution of Canada and the United States: (1) the dependency view, driven largely by ideology, which dominated universities in the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Europe for two decades and is now rarely mentioned; (2) the view that Latin America’s modernization largely depends on magnanimous U.S. policies, a view driven in part by guilt feelings about our wealth and power; and (3) the view that Latin America’s problems are substantially of its own making, a view that is least popular in U.S. universities but one that is gaining currency in Latin America, and is advocated by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Mariano Grondona, among others.
Mark Falcoff, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has been...
