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550 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
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4444444444444444 Poverty, Educational Limitations, and
Environmental
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The year 1899 was important for Honduras. For one thing, for the
fi rst time in decades, the Central American country had
transitioned peacefully from one president to another. General
Terencio Sierra Romero had succeeded Policarpo Bonilla Vásquez as
president.
But something else happened that year that probably mattered
more for Honduras in the long run. The Vaccaro brothers of New
Orleans shipped their fi rst boatload of bananas from Honduras to
New Orleans.
Bananas are probably as familiar to you as apples. But Americans
weren’t really used to eating bananas at the turn of the last
century. The Vaccaros were bringing in something new. This yellow
tropical fruit was a big hit with the public. The banana trade
boomed. Within a few years railroad lines were under construction
along the Caribbean coast to help haul the fruit to the banana
boats.
Soon bananas were Honduras’s main export. They were just about
its only export, in fact, since its mines had largely played out.
The Honduran government was eager to do what it could to support
the new industry. It gave the banana companies—the Vaccaros and
their competitors, also based in the United States—tax breaks. The
businesses got permission to build wharves and roads. The
government let them go ahead with improvements to interior
waterways and gave them charters to build new railroads.
What advantages do you think the banana trade brought to
Honduran people? Do you think it brought any disadvantages?
• how reliance on commodities versus manufactured goods impacts
poverty
• the impact of racial and socioeconomic divisions in Latin
America
• how poor education, urban overcrowding, and high population
growth contribute to poverty
• the challenges of environmental pollution and
deforestation
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VocabularyVocabulary
LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 551
• maquiladora• subsistence farming• social mobility
How Reliance on Commodities Versus Manufactured Goods Impacts
Poverty
“How can we bring more value to the marketplace?” That’s a
fundamental question that businesses ask themselves as they think
about what goods and services to offer their customers.
It’s also a question that governments have to consider. As you
have read in other chapters, their countries can do better, and
their people can climb out of poverty, as they fi nd ways to
produce higher-value goods. That means not just raw materials but
fi nished goods. Even a simple product like a bar of soap embodies
the labor of those who made it. More-sophisticated products may
refl ect highly skilled labor, leading-edge technology, good
design, and even a good sense of which colors are really “hot” just
now.
In this section you’ll read about Honduras as an example of a
country that’s had trouble fi nding ways to add value. It’s a
pattern found in other parts of Latin America and the developing
world as a whole.
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552 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
Honduras as a Nation Historically Dependent on One Commodity
Honduras is one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest countries.
After independence, its economy languished for years. Hondurans
couldn’t fi gure out how to produce things that the world
needed.
The country’s limited success has rested in exporting
commodities, such as agricultural products and minerals. For a
century and a half, Honduras has been largely dependent on exports
of one commodity or another.
Minerals came fi rst: principally silver but some gold, too.
Miners dug ores containing gold, silver, lead, zinc, and cadmium
out of the earth and shipped them to the United States and Europe
for refi ning. But the ore didn’t last forever—
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 553
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the New York and Honduras Rosario Mining Company, the main
operator there, shut down its works in the 1950s. By the early
1990s minerals accounted for only 2 percent of Honduras’s gross
domestic product.
Around 1900 another commodity became important: bananas. The
country’s fortunes rise or fall with the world price for bananas.
It’s not a good position to be in. The government has tried to get
its farmers to diversify—to grow other crops. But this hasn’t
worked well. There have also been efforts to develop manufacturing
in Honduras. But they have been only moderately successful. The
country lacks a dependable source of economic growth.
Why Bananas and Coffee From Honduras Have Been Unreliable
Sources of Income
Like all farmers, banana growers have to contend with drought,
disease, and disaster. In 1974, for instance, Hurricane Fifi
destroyed about 95 percent of the banana crop, as well as killing
thousands of people. Like any agricultural commodity, bananas are
subject to price variations. Even more important for Honduras,
international corporations grow and market most of its bananas.
They keep most of the wealth this generates, too. That’s another
reason bananas aren’t the best foundation for Honduras’s
economy.
Coffee is the other main commodity that Hondurans grow. In the
mid-1970s coffee moved past bananas as the country’s leading export
earner. But its prices vary more wildly than those of bananas. A
steep price decline around 2000 underlined the risks of building a
national economy on coffee beans.
Part of the problem was that many countries saw coffee as an
extremely popular product and therefore a crop they would like to
grow. But coffee was a mature industry. People around the world,
including Europeans and North Americans, have been drinking it for
centuries. Yes, demand was strong—coffee is the second most
valuable commodity in the world after oil. But plenty of growers
were already supplying this demand.
Many of those who wanted to get into the business didn’t see
this, however. Or else they failed to see how prices could fl
uctuate. Many small farmers in Vietnam, for instance, started
growing coffee when prices were strong in the mid-1990s. They
briefl y made Vietnam the world’s No. 2 coffee producer. But when
prices collapsed a few years later, these farmers were left in a
diffi cult position.
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554 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
Why Honduras Has Never Developed a Manufacturing or Industrial
Sector
It’s not that Honduran governments haven’t understood the basic
problem. After 1950 they pushed modernization of the country’s farm
sector. They also tried to encourage the development of a richer
mix of national exports. They urged Honduras to deliver more than
just bananas to the world marketplace. To this end, they spent
heavily on better roads, telephone lines, and other infrastructure.
They increased credit to farmers, and they provided technical
assistance of various kinds. With help from strong prices on world
markets, these efforts began to pay off.
Then during the 1960s the Central American countries banded
together to form the Central American Common Market, or CACM. They
lowered tariffs between member countries but erected a high
external tariff. The CACM was meant to encourage trade among its
members. It also stimulated Honduras’s industrial sector. Some
Honduran manufactured goods, such as soaps, sold well in other
Central American countries.
But the industrial sectors of El Salvador and Guatemala were
bigger, stronger, and more effi cient. So Honduras bought more
goods from these trade partners than it sold to them. Nobody would
call El Salvador or Guatemala industrialized countries. Yet both
were more industrialized than Honduras, which just couldn’t compete
with them. After fi ghting a war with El Salvador in 1969, Honduras
effectively withdrew from the CACM.
In more recent years, Honduras has experienced some strong
economic growth—more than 6 percent annually for 2004 through 2007.
A bright spot has been its maquiladoras, or export-reprocessing
centers. These factories take raw materials from elsewhere and turn
them into fi nished goods such as textiles for export. The centers
employ about 130,000 Hondurans, out of a workforce of 2.8
million.
But the maquiladoras have another effect. The manufacturing
sector in Honduras is tiny. And the small companies that make up
the country’s manufacturing sector have been under stress the past
few decades. The foreign-owned maquiladoras
In times past, a maquiladora was a gristmill. Farmers could
bring their corn or other grain to be ground there. Once it was
turned into fl our they’d collect and sell it. Nowadays,
maquiladora has come to mean primarily assembly plants in Mexico or
elsewhere in Latin America. The idea is that like the workers at
the gristmill, those at the assembly plant do one phase of the
work, and then return the goods to those who brought them. For
example, maquiladora workers assemble garments—sewing together
pieces of fabrics made elsewhere. Or they may make wiring
harnesses, as another example. Wiring harnesses are tedious to
produce but are a necessary part of automobiles and other
vehicles.
From Grinding Stones to Wiring Harnesses
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 555
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contribute to this stress. They can afford to pay relatively
high wages. The small Honduran fi rms have to match them or risk
losing workers. Unable to pay the costs, many of these fi rms have
folded.
The Effect of National Economic Weakness on the Honduran
People
One way to look at a country’s economy is to consider what
opportunities it provides to its people to add value. An economy
with a large manufacturing sector needs a lot of people to do a lot
of high-value work. If these high-value sectors are big enough,
they lift up even people who hold jobs outside the manufacturing
sector.
The engineers and other high-skilled—and highly paid—employees
of an aircraft-manufacturing plant, for instance, can afford
comfortable homes, expensive cars, well-made clothing, and good
food. The money they spend “turns over” in their communities. It
creates opportunity for homebuilders, auto dealers, clothing
salespeople, and supermarkets and restaurants—even the dishwashers
and the parking valets.
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556 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
But Honduras doesn’t have that kind of base, despite efforts to
diversify its economy. What it does have is too many unskilled and
uneducated laborers. The farm sector accounts for more than half
the labor force. In the United States, the comparable fi gure is
less than 3 percent.
Honduras has a large population of subsistence farmers.
Subsistence farming is a type of farming in which the farmers and
their families eat most of what they produce and sell very little.
More than half of the rural population gets by on farms of only
about fi ve acres. Such people have few economic opportunities.
In addition, skilled laborers are generally scarce in Honduras.
About a third of the workforce is in the service sector or the
“urban informal sector.” This informal sector consists of street
vendors, poorly paid household servants, and other “off the books”
jobs.
Because there is so little economic opportunity in Honduras,
many Hondurans are drawn to the United States. The money they send
back to their families accounts for almost one-quarter of the
country’s gross domestic product—the total of goods and services a
country produces.
Like other countries in its situation, until Honduras fi nds a
way to move its economy away from commodities and into manufactured
goods, such challenges will continue.
The Impact of Racial and Socioeconomic Divisions in Latin
America
Race plays a part in the Latin American economy as well. It
means generally lower incomes for blacks and indigenous people.
Race and ethnicity lead to gaps in opportunity, including education
and other benefi ts. A look at Brazil and Colombia illustrates the
issues.
The Social Stratifi cations Between the Wealthy and Poor
A stratifi ed society is one with “layers.” Colombia and Brazil
are two good examples of such societies.
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 557
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ColombiaTraditions brought over from Spain four centuries ago
remain a strong infl uence in Colombia. The social “layers” are
clearly separate from one another. Individuals’ occupation, income,
family background, education, and power determine people’s social
class. These align with race to a large degree. The more European
or white one is, the more likely that person is to belong to the
upper class.
Colombians know it can be hard to move up into a higher social
class. Social mobility is the expert term for this ability of
individuals or groups to move up or down within a class structure
according to changes in income, education, or occupation. As
elsewhere, social mobility is somewhat greater in the cities.
A study done during the 1980s found that the upper class made up
5 percent of Colombia’s population. The middle class made up 20
percent. The lower class accounted for 50 percent. The bottom 25
percent were called simply “the masses.”
These groups included a couple of important subgroups. The “new
rich” were those who had made enough money to get a toehold in the
upper class. Blue-collar workers who had the protection of
membership in a trade union belonged to the oddly named “upper
lower class.” And so did poorer white-collar workers. You might say
these two groups were the “top of the bottom.”
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558 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
As Colombian society developed, it was so tightly based on
Spanish culture that any other infl uence was seen as
“un-Colombian.” This attitude made it hard for indigenous people to
fi nd a place in Colombian society.
You might think, then, that the African slaves would have had an
even harder time. But in fact, blacks in Colombia were actually
more fully part of national society, and left a greater mark on it,
than the indigenous people. This was true even though the native
peoples had been in Colombia for thousands of years. But Africans
had worked as household servants in Spain since the Middle Ages.
Unlike the indigenous people, they didn’t seem “alien” to the
Spanish. And black slaves had no “homeland” in the New World to
retreat to. That made it harder for them to preserve African
culture, and easier for them to adopt Spanish culture. And their
relationship as servants or slaves put them into close contact with
their masters.
The Paradox of Colombian Blacks
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 559
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BrazilBrazil is another highly stratifi ed society. Among its
particular features—slavery in Brazil lasted for nearly three
generations after independence in 1822. The country’s income
distribution—one of the worst in the world—is also highly skewed.
In other words, its gap between rich and poor is extreme, even by
regional standards.
Brazil’s relatively high per capita income masks this deep
inequality. An estimated one-fi fth of the people suffer extreme
poverty. And, especially if they live in rural areas, these poor
people are almost invisible to their better-off fellow
citizens.
However, another feature of Brazilian society is “vertical”
relationships—close ties between people of property and prestige
and those who may both work for them and depend on them. In the
countryside, this was known as coronelismo, or “colonelism.” The
idea was that a wealthy landowner (often a former military offi
cer, hence the term) would “take care” of the poor. This was seen
as necessary in the absence of effective education and other public
services. The relationship was rather like that of a European
feudal lord and the servants he protected. And the tradition lives
on today.
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560 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
The Lack of Adequate Educational Opportunities for the Working
Poor
Such arrangements highlight the fact that public primary and
secondary schools in Latin America tend to be underfunded and of
poor quality. They fail to teach basic skills in mathematics,
language, and science. Poor school funding leads to poorly trained
and motivated teachers. Fewer than 30 percent of students in the
region fi nish high school. And many who do fi nish lack skills to
compete in the workplace.
In Brazil, for instance, public education is free, in theory at
least. It’s also required for children ages 7 to 14. But coverage
is incomplete and uneven. The lower classes attend public schools,
while the middle and upper classes turn to private education. This
changed somewhat during the economic squeeze of the 1990s, which
led many middle-class parents to move their children from private
to public schools.
One of Brazil’s biggest problems is children who don’t go to
school at all. Enrollment varies from richer to poorer states, and
between black and white children. But the dropout rate after the
second year is about 25 percent.
In 1994 UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s fund, ranked
countries by per capita income compared with the rates of school
absence in the fi rst fi ve grades. Given its position as a vibrant
emerging country, Brazil should have been a winner in that
competition. Instead it came in dead last.
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
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Colombia has done better at getting children to school, but it,
too, has high dropout rates. The average Colombian adult has
received only 5.3 years of schooling. The average Brazilian has
only 4.9 years.
In Mexico, by contrast, the number is 7.2 years. In recent
decades, Mexico has made some impressive gains in enrollment.
Between 1950 and 1995, for instance, the number of students
enrolled increased eightfold. Still, many of Mexico’s education
problems are typical of the region. Instruction is of poor quality.
Dropout rates are high. Laws that require children to attend school
are largely ignored. And the system fails to prepare students for
the global economy.
The Patterns of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in
Latin America
About 10 percent of those who live in Latin America are
indigenous, or native, people—about 40 million to 50 million. They
lag behind other Latin Americans in both income levels and other
measures:
• education• health• access to water• access to sanitation.
Experts see this gap as evidence of discrimination against Latin
America’s indigenous people. A United Nations offi cial has called
this discrimination a “structural problem”—something that’s built
into the way a society works. Governments do not devote enough
resources to indigenous peoples’ problems.
In Panama, for instance, 95 percent of the indigenous population
is poor. Among the nonindigenous, only 37 percent are poor. In
Mexico, the corresponding numbers are 80 percent and 18 percent.
The same pattern prevails elsewhere in the region. In 2000 three of
the world’s highest rates of child mortality were in Latin American
countries with relatively large indigenous populations: Bolivia,
Guatemala, and Peru. Experts see this pattern as likely to hold
Latin America back from meeting its development goals and from
overcoming poverty.
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562 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
How Poor Education, Urban Overcrowding, and High Population
Growth Contribute to Poverty
Besides class and racial divides, other factors contribute to
high poverty levels in Latin America. These include the state of
education, overcrowding in the cities, and the size of the
population.
Not only are Latin American schools poor, as the last section
illustrates—the region lags behind much of the world in education.
A study by the Inter-American Development Bank in 1999, for
instance, found that in Southeast Asia, 80 percent of young people
got a high school education. In Latin America, the fi gure was only
about 33 percent.
Lack of opportunity in rural areas pushes many of these poorly
educated people into Latin America’s cities. At times, more
newcomers arrive than the cities can employ. The newcomers often
overwhelm the cities’ ability to provide housing, schools,
hospitals, police protection, and other services.
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 563
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The brightest news in this poverty mix is that high population
growth is now less of a problem than it was. Latin America used to
be known for its high rates of population growth. But these have
fallen signifi cantly. On the US Central Intelligence Agency’s 2009
list of estimated population growth rates for 234 states and
territories around the world, most of Latin America was somewhere
in the middle.
Latin America’s giant, Brazil, had an annual growth rate of 1.20
percent. This put it ahead of the world average rate, 1.17 percent,
by just a whisker. Mexico, with a rate of 1.13 percent, was just a
few places behind.
However, those fi gures are for countries as a whole. As with
the income statistics mentioned above, a single fi gure that
represents a national average can mask a wide disparity. Experts
say that in Latin America, richer, better-educated, city-dwelling
women are far likelier to have smaller families than poorer, poorly
educated women in the countryside.
The Lack of Skilled Job Opportunities for Those Who Have Little
or No Education
It’s as true in Latin America as it is anywhere on the globe—the
future belongs to those with an education. But even if the region’s
young people manage to fi nish school, many are still unprepared
for the demands of the modern workplace.
A consultant gave this grim assessment as the twentieth century
drew to a close: “We are creating two urban classes: those who are
prepared to lead, with broad technological and scientifi c
knowledge, and their subordinates, who have a defi cient education
and are ill-prepared for the challenges of the next century.”
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564 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
Attitudes are changing, however. Brazil, for instance, is home
to some fi ne universities. Literacy rates in its big cities match
those of the developed world. Brazilian parents have noticed the
economic and social changes going on around them. This has led them
to more highly value education for their children. As in the United
States, school availability has become an important factor for
Brazilians in deciding where to live and how to make a living. It’s
even helping people decide how many children to have.
The Effects of Mass Migration From Rural to Urban Areas
Urbanization has been one of the great trends across Latin
America over the past few decades. Two-thirds of the region’s
people once lived in rural areas, with the rest in cities. Now
those proportions have been reversed. In some countries the cities
account for an even larger share of the population.
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
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Brazil, for instance, saw some 20 million people move from rural
to urban areas during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This migration
was one of the largest of its kind in history. By 1991
city-dwellers were 75 percent of the population.
What are the effects of such mass migrations? For individuals, a
move to the city is likely to mean more opportunity for education
and work. People can acquire the skills that make them more
valuable to employers. But the city is a demanding environment. The
cost of living is higher. And to survive in an urban economy you
must have cash to survive. In the country, people can live off the
land, growing their own food.
Urban growth requires governments to do a lot of building.
They’re not always up to the task. Roads, power lines, telephone
cables, and water and sewer lines have to be installed. People also
need schools, hospitals, and police stations. The result of
uncontrolled growth is the overcrowding mentioned earlier.
Mexico, for instance, became much more urban over the course of
the twentieth century. The share of the population living in towns
or cities with at least 15,000 inhabitants increased more than fi
vefold. It went from 10.5 percent around 1900 to 57.4 percent in
1990. This dramatic growth, much of it concentrated in three of the
country’s biggest cities—Mexico City, Guadalajara, and
Monterrey—strained the federal government’s ability to build urban
infrastructure. Housing was in especially short supply.
Affordable housing for low-income people has been a problem in
Mexico since World War II. The government had some success in fi
nancing new apartment complexes, but the units tended to end up
occupied by government employees. For most of the urban lower
class, “self-help housing” has become the only real option.
Such a community starts when investors buy a tract of land on
the outskirts of a city. The tract is typically acreage too poor to
farm and not well suited for more upscale development. The
investors slice up the property into many small lots. They sell
them to poor families who jump at the chance to become landowners.
They put up simple brick structures—sometimes just a single large
room. On paper, the investors are required to put in water and
sewer lines and streets. In fact, though, they often do little more
than mark the lots for sale.
“Self-Help Housing”
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566 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
The growth of cities tends to bring with it the development of
an urban middle class. These people make their way in the world on
the strength of what they know, or know how to do, rather than what
they own. They tend to be white-collar workers, technicians, civil
servants, unionized workers. They also tend to be politically
active. The rising middle classes have helped bring in, or bring
back, more democratic rule in many parts of Latin America over the
years.
Unemployment Patterns in Large Urban Areas
It’s an ancient tale, told throughout history around the world—a
young person from the country arrives in the big city, full of
hope. And then he discovers its streets are not paved with
gold.
Moving to the city doesn’t always lead people to success. Many
arrive and fi nd no jobs. Or they may discover that they lack the
right skills for the jobs available.
In either case, they will be unemployed, a situation much more
common in the city than in the country. That’s because in Latin
America unemployment is largely an urban phenomenon. Joblessness in
the cities generally averages 15 percent—about fi ve times the
rural unemployment rate.
That’s a dramatic difference. But to understand why that should
be, remember that to be “unemployed,” someone must be actively
looking for work. Rural people who may work a few months at a time
but then don’t actively look for other jobs—perhaps because they
know there aren’t any—aren’t “unemployed.” They’re considered out
of the labor force altogether.
But in the city people have no choice but to be in the labor
force. They have to pay rent and buy food at a grocery store.
There’s no garden out back as there is in the country. Therefore,
city dwellers who lose their jobs must fi nd new ones quickly,
For Latin Americans, leaving the countryside for the city is a
matter of leaving a relatively low-risk, low-reward situation for a
high-risk, high-reward one. As the numbers you’ve seen throughout
this lesson indicate, it’s a move that millions have made.
The Challenges of Environmental Pollution and Deforestation
As you might imagine, this kind of urban growth greatly affects
the environment. With all its social and economic challenges, Latin
America boasts some of the greatest environmental treasures on the
planet. Its biodiversity is one of its strengths. But the region
has some of the worst environmental problems on the planet, too.
Fortunately, it’s made remarkable progress cleaning up certain
trouble spots, especially recently.
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
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Latin Am
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Efforts to Fight Air Pollution in Places Such as Mexico City
It used to be that when the children of Mexico City drew
pictures with their crayons, they reached for their brown crayons
when they colored in the sky. Cyclists routinely wore surgical
masks to keep from breathing in too much soot on the road. Birds
fell dead from the sky. Ozone in Mexico City reached unsafe levels
97 percent of the year.
That’s how serious the air pollution was. In 1992 a United
Nations report called Mexico City the most polluted metropolis on
earth.
Mexico City’s air-quality challenges are unique. It’s a megacity
of 20 million people. Its high altitude means the air is thin.
Fuels burn less effi ciently and cleanly there. And volcanoes ring
the city, spewing gases into the air.
But in recent years the city has made a dramatic turnaround.
Though ozone remains a problem, some of the worst contaminants have
been cut back by three-fourths.
Mexico has cleaned up its act with new technology and new laws.
It has phased out leaded gasoline. It has required new cars to have
catalytic converters, as they do in the United States.
Environmental police have started ticketing drivers of
smoke-belching old cars. The government leaned on power plants to
switch from burning oil to natural gas.
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568 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
Other Latin American cities are fi ghting smog, too. For
instance, São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in South America, cut
the number of the largest soot particles in the air by 21 percent
between 2000 and 2004. São Paulo, Mexico City, and the region’s
other major cities are part of the Clean Air Initiative for Latin
American Cities, formed by the World Bank. The Clean Air Initiative
seeks to improve air quality in Latin American cities by developing
or improving city clean-air action plans in which everyone with an
interest participates. This includes governments, the private
sector, and the public in general.
The Region’s Attempts to Provide Clean Drinking Water and
Sanitation
Water extraction—the pumping of water out of the
ground—increased tenfold in Latin America over the twentieth
century. A major share of this water—71 percent—goes to irrigate
crops. But a lot goes to quench people’s thirst, too. And there are
some hopeful statistics. In 1990, 82.5 percent of Latin Americans
had access to improved drinking water. By 2004, 91 percent did.
Access to safe water in urban areas rose from 93 percent to 96
percent during this time. In rural areas, the number rose from 60
percent to 73 percent. Even so, some 50 million people in Latin
America still lack access to safe drinking water. Of these, 34
million are in rural areas.
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 569
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Sanitation services—the safe removal of sewage, including human
waste—reached 77.4 percent of Latin Americans in 2004. This was up
from 67.9 percent in 1990. But only 14 percent of the sewage was
adequately treated. As a result, both surface and groundwater are
subject to serious pollution. And some 127 million people still
lack access to sanitation services.
Effects of Deforestation and Desertifi cation on the Region’s
Biodiversity
Latin America is one of the world’s most important regions for
biodiversity. The Amazon River basin alone is home to about 50
percent of the planet’s biodiversity. Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador,
Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela are in a league of their own, even
within Latin America. Each one has more plant and animal species
than most of the rest of the world.
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570 CHAPTER 5 Latin America
But this biodiversity is under threat. Deforestation leads to
habitat loss. When land is cleared for farming or building new
roads and housing and shopping centers, plants and animals end up
with fewer places to live. This can endanger species.
A study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) identifi ed 170
eco-regions within Latin America, including the Caribbean. Of
these, only eight are relatively intact, and another 27 relatively
stable. Another 82 are endangered, 31 of those critically so. Still
another 55 are vulnerable.
Latin America contains about a quarter of the world’s forest
cover, but these forests are disappearing rapidly. About two-thirds
of the loss of forest cover that occurred in the world between 2000
and 2005 took place in Latin America. The largest net loss happened
in the Brazilian rainforest. There people have cleared forests to
grow crops for biofuels, such as ethanol.
When an area loses its forests, it loses at least some of its
ability to keep its rainwater. Soil washes away and clogs rivers
and other bodies of water. Emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the
major greenhouse gases, increase.
Unchecked deforestation can lead to desertifi cation, which
affects some 25 percent of this region. Just as Mexico has made a
rapid reduction in its air pollution, so, too, the region is
beginning to address deforestation. Paraguay stands out as a
positive example—a 2004 law has helped reduce deforestation by 85
percent.
Latin America faces some diffi cult and unique economic, social,
and environmental issues. While many of these are left over from
the colonial period, others result from current government
policies. Whatever their cause, the conditions that result affect
not only the people of the region—they often deeply affect the
United States and its relations with its Latin American neighbors.
You’ll read about this in the next lesson.
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LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental
Challenges 571
Latin Am
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4 Review Using complete sentences, answer the following questions
on a sheet of paper.
1. Since 1900 Honduras has been economically dependent on
what?
2. Why was Honduras unable to compete against El Salvador and
Guatemala within the Central American Common Market?
3. What are the “vertical” relationships typical in Brazilian
society?
4. Indigenous people lag behind other Latin Americans in terms
of income and what other measures?
5. How are attitudes toward education changing in Brazil?
6. How is unemployment in the cities different from joblessness
in rural areas?
7. Cyclists in Mexico City used to wear surgical masks on the
road. Explain why.
8. What is Paraguay’s recent standout achievement in
environmental protection?
Applying Your Learning 9. Maquiladoras have been good for
Honduras’ economy as a whole but
a problem for the country’s small manufacturing fi rms. Explain
why.
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