The Most Important Country in Latin America
Economically, the most important country in Latin America today is Brazil. The "economic miracle" there faded in 1974. Since then, there has been continual talk about changing the economic model to one that would give renewed emphasis to the expansion of the internal market. But the feasibility of such a change is doubtful for both national and international economic and political reasons. Marini observes that Brazil’s present model of capital accumulation and participation in the international division of labor is based on luxury consumption, exports, and state purchases. Only the second and third categories offer any significant or substantial escape from the renewed crisis of Brazilian capital accumulation; and part of the first may have to be sacrificed to the other two. But ultimately, the extent to which exports remain an important motor force of accumulation and economic activity in the Third World depends not only on how much anyone in the Third World wants to export, but also on how much the rest of the world wants to import.
In Africa military regimes are the rule and in 1978 only three countries ( Gambia, Botswana, and Mauritius) out of the fifty members of the Organization of African Unity were said to have had functioning multiparty governments. Military coups have been commonplace since independence. But recently there have been some moves in the direction of "democratization" or institutionalization of state rule in Africa, especially in western Africa. Senegal is "edging toward a multiparty state." Referendums and other moves toward elections and civilian (or civilianmilitary or military-backed "civilian") governments took place in 1979 in Upper Volta, Ghana, and Nigeria. But all these states have imposed severe limitations on their "democracy." In Upper Volta the number of political parties is limited by the constitution. Before the coup by Lieutenant Rawlins in Ghana the military government presented voters with a Hobson’s choice between a civil-military "union government" without political parties and an alternative that left its own perpetuation or parliamentary choices undefined. After fraudulent balloting in which the military government supposedly received a 54 percent majority, opposition leaders were rounded up and put in jail. The progressive Rawlins coup altered the pre-electoral power alignment in Ghana, and yet the government that emerged from the elections continues the same export promotion policy as its predecessors. In Nigeria electoral plans were designed to exclude regional or tribal parties, and other restrictions and prospects made some labor union leaders fearful that they and their worker constituents would fare even worse after elections. The elected civilian government has pursued essentially the same economic policies as its military predecessors, except of course that economic circumstances no longer permit the previous spending spree. Thus, despite deceiving appearances, there "is no sudden blossoming of democracy in Africa" after all.
The third question posed above was what alternative international division of labor may be in the offing and what prospects it may offer for the modification of political regimes and state forms in Third World countries. One of these alternatives is a renewed turn to protectionism by the industrial nations.
