Political Factors in Human Geographical Change in Latin AmericaAuthor(s): Colin ClarkeSource: Area, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec., 1987), pp. 370-373Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20002516 .

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370 Conference reports

Conference reports

Regional Government with reference to Spain

Report of a meeting held at the Institut d'Estudis Catalan, Barcelona, 26-30 August 1986 by the IGU Study Group in 'Geography and Public Administration'

This meeting immediately preceded the IGC in Barcelona. Attendance was fairly small at 17 but participants enjoyed an unrivalled opportunity to discuss developments in regional government in Spain, and particularly in Catalonia, with some of the leading experts in the field. The papers presented fell into two groups. The first group included the leading Spanish commentators in this field. These included Jose Victor Sevilla-Segura (former advisor to the Mini'stry of

Economics), Pedros Abello, Antoni Castells and Joaquim Sole Villanova (all from Barcelona University Economics department and leading advisors and commentators on public finance aspects of regional government), Jose Ramon Lasuen Sancho (MP for Barcelona), and Antoni Bayona (Generalitat de Catalunya). The second group of papers were by non-Spanish specialists in regional government and these included Mike Hebbert (LSE) on the development of regionalism in Spain, Bob Bennett (LSE) on the problem of tax assignment between levels of government in Spain, Tom Clegg (LSE) on the problems of metropolitan government in a regional context in Catalonia, Russell King (Leicester) on regional government in Italy, Ingaborg Tommel (Nijmegen) on the EEC regional policy with respect to regions, Karl Stiglbauer (Wien) on regional agencies and legal systems in Austria, Dick Morrill (Washington State) on regional government experience in the USA, and Maria Ciechosinska (Warsaw) on spatial policy in Eastern European planning. The discussion revealed the unique character of Spanish regionalism with very different powers flowing to different regions. It also emphasised the present fiscal imbalance in Spain in which the regions have insufficient revenues to support their expenditure responsibilities. Also important is the extent to which the new Spanish

Constitution has drawn on German and Italian examples; this made the comparative perspective of the meeting most apposite. The main papers from this meeting are to be published in 1987 in Government and Policy: Environment and Planning: C.

R J Bennett London School of Economics

Political factors in human geographical change in Latin America

Report on a British-Mexican symposium devoted to the above topic held at the School of Geography, Oxford University and the School of Geography, Manchester University, 14-21 September 1986

This symposium, the second in the series, was supported jointly by the Institute of British Geographers, the British Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council, and was organised by Silvana Levi de Lopez and Colin Clarke with the assistance of David Fox. Eleven British- and nine Mexican-authored papers were presented and discussed: they are grouped here into five themes geopolitics, politics and rural areas, urban issues and national policy, public health, and the weakness of government as an agent for change.

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Conference reports 371

Geopolitics

The international context of Middle-American foreign relations since Reagan's election to the Presidency in 1980 was set by Colin Clarke (Oxford) in his paper' The geopolitics of US foreign policy in the Caribbean Basin'. He emphasised the convergence, in US eyes, of East-West and

North-South relationships in 'the American Mediterranean', so that Central America and the Carribean has emerged as a single zone of conflict. In response, the US has deployed a multi faceted policy of destabilisation-culminating in the armed invasion of Grenada-to gain its policy objectives: the purification of Middle America from contamination by Soviet- or Cuban inspired Marxism; and the recapturing by the U.S. of the world geopolitical initiative lost during the Carter administration.

Shorn of its dominant US dimension, Latin-American geopolitics has a very special flavour, as Arthur Morris (Glasgow) revealed in 'Geopolitics in South America-some geographical aspects '. Contrary to the claims of its apologists, it is close to the pre-World War II German organicist school of thought, though it also draws upon the locational geopolitics of Mackinder. Thus the kind of geopolitics espoused in Latin America sidesteps the issue of dependency by looking instead at spatial relationships and emphasising tendencies towards growth and decline.

Given the predilection for military governments (now mercifully on the wane) to make security, defence and offence into key national issues, geopolitical thinking seems destined to be linked to territorial disputes, especially in Brazil, which shares a land border with so many neighbours.

In his paper' Disorder on the anti-penultimate last frontier: geopolitics, politics and academ.ic politics in Amazonia', John Dickenson (Liverpool) drew out three major conclusions from his survey of Brazilian exploration and use of the tropical forest. First, a tendency on the part of Latin-American professional geographers as distinct from politicians and the military-to ignore geopolitical considerations; secondly, a general neglect of the role of the state with regard to its territory, its resources and the development process; and thirdly, the paucity of reference in the geographical literature either to the environmental impact of policy decisions or to the recognition that the state may have environmental policies.

Politics and rural areas

A long-run view of the processes of rural depopulation and the decline in agricultural employ ment, in the context of Mexico's post-war policy of industrialisation, was provided by Consuelo Soto Mora (Institute of Geography, National Autonomous University) in 'The politics of agricultural development in Mexico'. The proportion engaged in agriculture fell from 54 to 26 per cent between 1960 and 1980, but has been matched only by a commensurate expansion in urban marginal activities. Moreover, commercialisation of agriculture and the emphasis since 1970 on export-orientated agribusiness has created a crisis in the supply of basic staples-maize and beans, so that both commodities have to be imported. A new political strategy is required to mobilise human and physical resources more efficiently to meet the food needs of Mexico without recourse to imports.

This pattern of polarisation between modern and traditional rural economies in Mexico was echoed by Raquel Guzman Villanueva and Juan Carlos G6mez Rojas (Faculty of Geography, National Autonomous University) in their detailed account of' Agrarian policy in the State of Morelos '. Exploring the impact of the revolution and the post-revolutionary period on this tiny state, they concluded that the rural bourgeoisie has either maintained its control over rump haciendas or has moved into the wholesaling of peasant produce. Thus their control over the rural scene has been preserved, making a new agrarian reform socially desirable. Under different socio-political and ecological circumstances, however, Patrick Hamilton (Aberdeen) was able to paint a rosier picture in his account of ' The Mexican ejido: a case of conditional stability '. He showed that with relatively low levels of population pressure and with crucial state support for inputs and marketing, the semi-collective peasant farming system of Tamaulipas shows promising signs of prosperity and stability.

The impact of the individual leader on agrarian change in Michoacan was detailed by Silvana Levi de L6pez (Institute of Geography, National Autonomous University) in her paper ' Rural

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372 Conference reports

caciquismo and its direct and indirect influence '. She revealed how, in one community, a boss had emerged as the intermediary between the locality and the regional political authorities, direct ing local agricultural and infrastructural changes, and thereby displaying himself as a disinter ested benefactor when he was, in reality, benefitting personally from the developments he had engineered. The consequence of this cacique's activities, which are repeated extensively in other parts of rural Mexico, is that capital is accumulated in few hands, and that the community at large benefits less fully from change than it might.

Urban issues and national policy

The way in which uneven development keys into national and international structures was made manifest in the paper by Alan Gilbert (UCL) entitled ' Urbanisation at the periphery; reflexions on the changing dynamics of housing and employment in Latin American cities'. Focussing on the link between the new international division of labour and the process of urban change, he argued that the internationalisation of capital has not brought to Latin-American cities the profound transformations that have remodelled the urban scene in Western Europe and East Asia: indeed, Latin America is now coping with economic recession not expansion.

Lack of profound change as a theme also ran through the paper by Stella Lowder (Glasgow) in which she examined 'The impact of development policy on secondary cities of Ecuador'. She showed that national investments made in accordance with Ecuador's development plans were limited to improving the infrastructure and neglected the funding of structural changes that

might have sponsored spontaneous developments, ostensibly desired by the government. Dependent development merely speeds population shifts from highland peripheral economies to coastal and capitalist ones, and is expressed in the high growth rates of secondary cities.

The impotence of the Mexican government, faced with massive population growth, cityward migration to the US frontier area and the influx of Central American refugees, was the theme of 'Political crises and migratory movements in Mexico' by Mercedes Cardenas, Orlando Chac6n

L6pez and Guillermo Gonzalez (Autonomous University of the State of Mexico). They described the government's new policy of population retention, reorientation and relocation, but showed that real political control in each instance is minimal, largely because of entrenched rural-urban inequalities. Only in the case of decentralisation from Mexico City is policy likely to be efficacious.

In a similar vein, Boris Graizbord (El Colegio de Mexico), in 'Urban growth in Mexico: recent changes ', pointed to the continued importance of population shifts, but argued that

Mexico City was no longer the outstanding destination it had been between 1950 and 1970. Medium- and small-sized centres have emerged as foci for internal migration: by 1980 over half

the Mexican population lived in settlements having more than 15,000 inhabitants. However, in 'Regional policy and central place theory in Mexico', Sofia Puente Lutteroth (Institute of

Geography, National Autonomous University) showed that Mexico has yet to witness an adjust ment to the infrastructural and servicing needs of suburban and rural areas: decentralisation of metropolitan-based facilities is essential to regional balance.

Health policy

Reviewing the policy of the last three administrations in 'Health care and inequality in Mexico' Peter Ward (Cambridge) showed that the focus had remained on curative medicine and there had been no concerted attempt to emphasize preventive care by improving water and sewerage provision at the community level or by deliberately upgrading levels of living and training in hygiene. Moreover, the majority of Mexicans fell outside the various tiers of health care offered by the principal security agencies. This multiplicity of structures is a direct outcome of the political system and facilitates manipulation by the government of one group of the population against another. The system co-opts the most powerful groups in society, while the poor are simply blamed for lacking the formal sector employment that guarantees good medical care.

The right of all citizens to receive the benefits of modern medicine was the starting point of 'The politics of health and traditional medicine in Mexico' by Luis Fuentes Aguilar

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Conference reports 373

(Geography Institute, National Autonomous University). Concentrating on the problems of the Indian-language speakers, who number 10 million, divided into at least 70 ethnic groups, he argued that it was crucial to offer modern medicine without destroying the culture, values and

medical traditions of the 'indigenous' population. So far government has not addressed this problem.

A rural case-study of onchocerciasis was presented by Deborah Freeman and Mansell Prothero (Liverpool) in ' The geography of health in South-East Mexico'. River blindness is a chronic, slow-evolving disease with high prevalence but low incidence; in Chiapas it is associated with migrant labourers to the coffeefincas of Soconusco. The authors demonstrated that because it is difficult to disentangle the aetiology of the disease, it is extremely problematic to frame a policy for eradication.

Government weakness

Several of the previous papers pointed to the failure of governments to intervene effectively in the developmental process in Latin American countries, but here the emphasis is on government's powerlessness in the face of international or national vested interests. The intractability of Latin American economies to national decision making was demonstrated by David Fox (Manchester) in' Commodity prices and geographical change'. He showed that half of Latin-America's total export earnings have been provided by primary commodities, two of which, tin and oil, have experienced plummeting world-market prices in the last year. The collapse of the Bolivian tin

mines has been beyond the government's control, and so, therefore, is Bolivia's reliance on the illicit trade in cocaine. Jane Benton (Hertfordshire College of Higher Education) detailed similar government passivity in her paper, ' The impact of national politics and the monetary system on agricultural development in Bolivia'.

Less pessimism attached to the small mineral industry discussed by Alvaro Sanchez-Crispin (UCL-Geography Institute, National Autonomous University) in' Issues worth investigating in contemporary Mexican mining'. Although employing less than 1 per cent of the national labour force and therefore attracting little government attention, metallic mining is important because it provides the economic base of a wide range of communities. A similar statement about government inertia could not be made about the tourist industry. According to Luis Felipe Cabrales (University of Guadalajara) in' Mexican tourism in times of crisis: a case of cost benefit polarisation ', it is not government inactivity that is so problematic, but its concentration on infrastructure (leaving capitalists to cream accumulated earnings) plus the cost to the nation of environmental degradation.

In keeping with the pervading note of pessimism, John Cole (Nottingham) in 'Peru 1955-1985-2015: performance and prospects' argued that geographers ought to give more attention to things that do not change rather than to things that do. Examining population growth and a range of economic variables, he concluded that in Peru in thirty-years time he expected to find more of the same-irrespective of which political parties had been in power.

Each presentation stimulated discussion in Spanish and English. The interchange of ideas was judged by all participants to have been a great success, and, as in 1984, it is hoped to publish the papers in Mexico.

Colin Clarke Oxford University

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