Unlike peru's coast ecuador's coastland consists of

5 REGIONS

THE NORTH THE WEST THE SOUTH BRAZIL

CONCEPTS, IDEAS, AND TERMS

● The growing power of indigenous peoples: “Latin” America no more ● Democracy gains, but not without setbacks ● Tentative efforts toward economic integration: China lends a hand ● Chile: Star of the realm ● The poor performance of rich Argentina ● Brazil: Superpower in the making?

In This Chapter

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1 Altiplano 2 Land alienation 3 Plural society 4 Commercial agriculture 5 Subsistence agriculture 6 Free Trade Area of the Americas

(FTAA) 7 Urbanization 8 Rural-to-urban migration 9 Megacity

10 “Latin” American City model 11 Informal sector 12 Barrio (favela) 13 Insurgent state 14 Failed state 15 Von Thünen model 16 El Niño 17 Forward capital 18 Cerrado

19 Growth-pole concept

Photos: © H. J. de Blij

FIGURE 5-1 © H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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OF ALL THE continents, South America has themost familiar shape—a giant triangle con- nected by mainland Middle America’s tenuous land bridge to its neighbor in the north. South America also lies not only south but mostly east of its northern coun- terpart. Lima, the capital of Peru—one of the conti- nent’s westernmost cities—lies farther east than Miami, Florida. Thus South America juts out much more prominently into the Atlantic Ocean toward southern Europe and Africa than does North America. But lying so far eastward means that South America’s western flank faces a much wider Pacific Ocean, with the dis- tance from Peru to Australia nearly twice that from Cal- ifornia to Japan.

As if to reaffirm South America’s northward and eastward orientation, the western margins of the con- tinent are rimmed by one of the world’s longest and highest mountain ranges, the Andes, a gigantic wall that extends unbroken from Tierra del Fuego near the continent’s southern tip in Chile to northeastern Venezuela in the far north (Fig. 5-1). The other major physiographic feature of South America dominates its central north—the Amazon Basin; this vast humid- tropical amphitheater is drained by the mighty Ama- zon River, which is fed by several major tributaries. Much of the remainder of the continent can be classi- fied as plateau, with the most important components being the Brazilian Highlands that cover most of Brazil southeast of the Amazon Basin, the Guiana Highlands located north of the lower Amazon Basin, and the cold Patagonian Plateau that blankets the southern third of Argentina. Figure 5-1 also reveals two other note- worthy river basins beyond Amazonia: the Paraná-

1. South America’s physiography is dominated by the Andes Mountains in the west and the Amazon Basin in the central north. Much of the remain- der is plateau country.

2. Almost half of the realm’s area and just over half of its total population are concentrated in one country—Brazil.

3. South America’s population remains concentrat- ed along the continent’s periphery. Most of the interior is sparsely peopled, but sections of it are now undergoing significant development.

4. Interconnections among the states of the realm are improving rapidly. Economic integration has become a major force, particularly in southern South America.

5. Regional economic contrasts and disparities, both in the realm as a whole and within individ- ual countries, remain strong.

6. Cultural pluralism exists in almost all of the realm’s countries and is often expressed regionally.

7. Rapid urban growth continues to mark much of the South American realm, and urbanization over- all is today on a par with the levels of the United States and Western Europe.

South America

MAJOR GEOGRAPHIC QUALITIES OF

Defining the Realm South America is a realm in dramatic transition, and it is not clear where this transition will lead. During much of the twentieth century, South American countries were in frequent political turmoil. Dictatorial regimes ruled from one end of the realm to the other; unstable gov- ernments fell with damaging frequency. Widespread poverty, harsh regional disparities, poor internal surface connections, limited international contact, and econom- ic stagnation prevailed.

Entering the second decade of the twenty-first centu- ry, things were quite different. Democracy had taken hold almost everywhere. Long-isolated countries were becom- ing more interconnected through new transport routes

and trade agreements. New settlement frontiers were being opened. Energy resources, some long exploited and others newly discovered, boosted national economies when world prices rose. Foreign states and corporations appeared on the scene to buy commodities and invest in infrastructure. The pace of globalization increased from Bogotá to Buenos Aires.

But these exciting developments must be seen against a backdrop of persistent problems. The realm’s giant, Brazil, is embarked on a program of land reform, a cam- paign against poverty, and an effort to maintain financial rigor that have all run up against endemic corruption in government. The economy of Argentina is just recover-

Paraguay Basin of south-central South America, and the Orinoco Basin in the far north that drains interior Colombia and Venezuela.

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1

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“From this high vantage point I got a good perspective of a valley near Pisac in the Peruvian Andes, not far from Cuzco. This was part of the Incan domain when the Spaniards arrived to overthrow the empire, but the terraces you can see actually predate the Inca period. Human occupation in these rugged mountains is very old, and undoubtedly the physiography here changed over time. Today these slopes are arid and barren, and only a few hardy trees survive; the stream in the valley bottom is all the water in sight. But when the terrace builders transformed these slopes, the climate may have been more moist, the countryside greener.” © Courtesy Philip L. Keating.

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builders whose stone structures (among which Machu Picchu near Cuzco is the most famous), roads, and bridges helped unify their vast empire; they also proved themselves to be efficient administrators, successful farmers and herders, and skilled manufacturers; scholars

ing after an implosion that shook the country to its core. Whereas Chile is the realm’s success story, emerging from the horrors of the Pinochet era as a stable and vibrant democracy with a thriving economy, neighbor- ing Bolivia is in the grip of a social revolution arising in part from the realization of its energy riches. And on the north coast lies Venezuela, its oil reserves among the largest in the world (and by far the largest in the realm) and its political life dominated by a one-time coup leader whose closest ideological ally is Cuba’s communist ruler and whose major adversary is the U.S. government.

Today, the United States hopes to foster democracy and encourage regional economic integration, but many South Americans remember past U.S. toleration of, and even support for, the realm’s former dictators. Venezuela’s populist leader champions the poor and uses oil income to counter American influence, campaigning vigorously against the notion of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and warning South American governments against capitalist plots. Such advice finds a ready market because the great majority of South Americans remain mired in poverty. By some measures, the disparity be- tween rich and poor is wider in this realm than in any other, and wealth is disproportionately concentrated in the hands of a small minority (the richest 20 percent of the realm’s inhabitants control 70 percent, while the poorest 20 percent own 2 percent). The question of the day is whether South America can sustain its progress against political, ideological, and economic odds.

STATES ANCIENT AND MODERN

Thousands of years before the first European invaders appeared on the shores of South America, peoples now referred to as Amerindians had migrated into the conti- nent via North and Middle America and founded soci- eties in coastal valleys, in river basins, on plateaus, and in mountainous locales. These societies achieved differ- ent and remarkable adaptations to their diverse natural environments, and by about one thousand years ago, a number of regional cultures thrived in the elongated val- leys between mountain ranges of the Andes from pre- sent-day Colombia southward to Bolivia and Chile. These high-altitude valleys, called altiplanos, provided fertile soils, reliable water supplies, building materials, and natural protection to their inhabitants.

The Inca State

One of these altiplanos, at Cuzco in what is now Peru, became the core area of South America’s greatest indige- nous empire, that of the Inca. The Inca were expert

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America, but the great majority of the settlers stayed on or near the coast, as is reflected in the current map (Fig. 5-3). Almost all of the realm’s major cities have coastal or near-coastal locations, and the current pop- ulation distribution map gives you the impression of a continent yet to be penetrated and inhabited. But look carefully at Figure 5-3, and you will see a swath of population well inland from the coastal settle- ments, most clearly in Peru but also northward into Ecuador and southward into Bolivia. That is the lega- cy of the Inca Empire and its incorporated peoples, surviving in their mountainous redoubt and still num- bering in the millions.

studied the heavens, and physicians even experimented with brain surgery. Great military strategists, the Inca integrated the peoples they vanquished into a stable and well-functioning state, an amazing accomplishment given the high-relief terrain they had to contend with.

As a minority ruling elite in their far-flung empire, the Inca were at the pinnacle in their rigidly class-structured, highly centralized society. So centralized and authori- tarian was their state that a takeover at the top was enough to gain immediate power over all of it—as a small army of Spanish invaders discovered in the 1530s. The European invasion brought a quick end to thousands of years of Amerindian cultural development and changed the map forever.

The Population Map— Then and Now

If we were able to reconstruct a map of South America’s population before the arrival of the Europeans (a “pre- Columbian” map, as it would be called), it would look quite different from the current map (Fig. 5-2). Indigenous Amerindian societies in- habited not only the Andes and adja- cent lowlands but also riverbanks in the Amazon Basin, where settlements numbering in the thousands subsisted on fishing and farming. They did not shy away from harsh environments such as those of the island of Tierra del Fuego in the far south, where the fires they kept going against the bitter cold led the Europeans to name the place “land of fire.”

Today the map looks quite differ- ent. Many of the indigenous soci- eties succumbed to the European invaders, not just through warfare but also because of the diseases the Hispanic conquerors brought with them. Geographers estimate that 90 percent of native Amazonians died within a few years of contact, and the peoples of Tierra del Fuego also are no longer there to build their fires. From one end of South Amer- ica to the other, the European arrival spelled disaster.

Spanish and Portuguese colonists penetrated the interior of South

V I C E RO YA LT Y

O F

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CHIBCHA 1200–1538 A.D.

CHAVIN 1000–500

B.C.

Machu Picchu Cuzco

INCA 1200–1535 A.D.

Bogotá

Quito

Tumbes

Bahia

Rio de Janeiro São Paulo

Buenos Aires

Belém

Lima

Santiago

Tordesillas Line (1494)

Caracas

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1000–147 1

A.D.

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MOCHICA 1000 A.D.

Pernambuco

Spanish Portuguese

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INDIGENOUS AND COLONIAL DOMAINS OF

SOUTH AMERICA Peoples of the Caribbean fringe

Andean peoples

Peoples of the tropical forest

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Route of Spanish penetration

Route of Portuguese penetration

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© H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 5-2

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Amerindian Reawakening

As we note in the regional discussion, South America’s long-downtrodden Amerindians are staging a social, political, and economic awakening. They are not alone in this—in Chapter 4 we saw the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico’s Chiapas State achieve national atten- tion—but they have begun to realize their potential in several South American countries where their numbers translate into strength. Mexico’s Amerindian population represents less than one-third of the total, but Peru’s Amerindians constitute about 45 percent, and in Bolivia they are in the majority at 55 percent.

Today, Amerindian political lead- ers are emerging to bring the plight of the realm’s indigenous peoples not only to local but also to interna- tional attention. Amerindians were conquered, decimated by foreign di- seases, robbed of their best lands, subjected to forced labor, denied the right to grow their traditional crops, socially discriminated against, and swindled out of their fair share of the revenues from resources in their tra- ditional domains. They may still be the poorest of the realm’s poor, but they are now asserting themselves. For some states in this realm, the consequences of this movement will be far-reaching.

The Iberian Invaders

The modern map of South America (Fig. 5-4) started to take shape when the Iberian colonists began to understand the location and eco- nomies of the Amerindian soci- eties. The Inca, like Mexico’s Maya and Aztec peoples, had accumulat- ed gold and silver at their head- quarters, possessed productive farmlands, and constituted a ready labor force. Not long after the de- feat of the Aztecs in 1521, Francis- co Pizarro sailed southward along the continent’s northwestern coast, learned of the existence of the Inca Empire, and withdrew to Spain to organize its overthrow. He returned to the Peruvian coast in 1531 with

183 men and two dozen horses, and the events that fol- lowed are well known. In 1533, his party rode victori- ous into Cuzco.

At first, the Spaniards kept the Incan imperial struc- ture intact by permitting the crowning of an emperor who was under their control. But soon the breakdown of the old order began. The new order that gradually emerged in western South America placed the indige- nous peoples in serfdom to the Spaniards. Great hacien- das were formed by land alienation (the takeover of indigenously held land by foreigners), taxes were insti- tuted, and a forced-labor system was introduced to max- imize the profits of exploitation.

Longitude East of Greenwich

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SOUTH AMERICA: POPULATION DISTRIBUTION, 2010

One dot represents 50,000 persons 1200 Kilometers6000

0 300 600 Miles

© H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 5-3

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a Portuguese sphere of influence because Spain and Portugal had signed a treaty in 1494 to recog- nize a north-south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands as the boundary between their New World spheres of influ- ence. This border ran approxi- mately along the meridian of 50°W longitude, thereby cutting off a sizeable triangle of eastern South America for Portugal’s exploitation (Fig. 5-2). But a brief look at the political map of South America (Fig. 5-4) shows that this treaty did not limit Portuguese colonial territory to the east of the 50th meridian. Instead, Brazil’s boundaries were bent far inland to include almost the entire Amazon Basin, and the country came to be only slightly smaller in territorial size than all the other South Am- erican countries combined. This westward thrust was the result of Portuguese and Brazilian penetra- tion, particularly by the Paulistas, the settlers of São Paulo who needed Amerindian slave labor to run their plantations.

The Africans

As Figure 5-2 shows, the Spaniards initially got very much the better of the territorial partitioning of

South America—not just in land quality but also in the size of the aboriginal labor force. When the Portuguese began to develop their territory, they turned to the same lucrative activity that their Spanish rivals had pursued in the Caribbean—the plantation cultivation of sugar for the European market. And they, too, found their labor force in the same source region, as millions of Africans (nearly half of all who came to the Americ- as) were brought in bondage to the tropical Brazilian coast north of Rio de Janeiro. Not surprisingly, Brazil now has South America’s largest black population, which is still heavily concentrated in the country’s poverty-stricken northeastern States. With Brazilians of direct or mixed African ancestry today accounting for nearly half of the population of 201 million, the Africans decidedly constitute the third major immi- gration of foreign peoples into South America.

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

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Caribbean Sea

Sã o

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cis co R

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Orinoco R.

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Goiânia SalvadorCuiabá

Belo Horizonte

Santa CruzArequipa

Antofagasta

IquitosGuayaqu il

Cali

Manaus

Pôrto Velho

Fortaleza

Belém São Luís

Teresina Recife

Maceió

Maracaibo Maracay Barquisimeto

Valencia

Pôrto Alegre

Tucumán

Rio de Janeiro

Bahía Blanca

Rosario

Mendoza

Concepción

Valparaíso Córdoba

Falkland Islands (U.K.)

Punta Arenas

Buenos Aires MontevideoSantiago

ARGENTINA

CHILE

La Paz

Lima

Quito

Bogotá

Caracas

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ECUADOR

Sucre

B R A Z I LPE RU

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VENEZUELA GeorgetownSURIN AM

E

GUYAN A FRENCH GUIANA

Asunción

URUGUAY

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Barranquilla Cartagena

Medellín

Brasília

100°

Callao

Campinas

Grande Campo

São Paulo Santos

São José dos CamposCuritiba

Bucaramanga

National capitals are underlined

POPULATION

SOUTH AMERICA: POLITICAL UNITS AND MODERN REGIONS

The North

The West

The South

Brazil

REGIONS Under 50,000

50,000–250,000

250,000–1,000,000

1,000,000–5,000,000

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200 1000 Miles0

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600 800400

© H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 5-4

Lima, the west-coast headquarters of the Spanish con- querors, soon became one of the richest cities in the world, its wealth based on the exploitation of vast Andean silver deposits. The city also served as the cap- ital of the viceroyalty of Peru, as the Spanish authorities quickly integrated the new possession into their colonial empire (Fig. 5-2). Subsequently, when Colombia and Venezuela came under Spanish control and, later, when Spanish settlement expanded in what is now Argentina and Uruguay, two additional viceroyalties were added to the map: New Granada and La Plata.

Portuguese Brazil

Meanwhile, another vanguard of the Iberian invasion was penetrating the east-central part of the continent, the coastlands of present-day Brazil. This area had become

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S T A T E S A N C I E N T A N D M O D E R N 239

Longstanding Isolation

Despite their adjacent location on the same continent, their common language and cultural heritage, and their shared national problems, the countries that arose out of South America’s Spanish viceroyalties (along with Brazil) until quite recently existed in a considerable degree of isolation from one another. Distance and phys- iographic barriers reinforced this separation, and the realm’s major population agglomerations still adjoin the coast, mainly the eastern and northern coasts (Fig. 5-3). The viceroyalties existed primarily to extract riches and fill Spanish coffers. In Iberia there was little interest in developing the American lands for their own sake. Only after those who had made Spanish and Portuguese Amer- ica their home and who had a stake there rebelled against Iberian authority did things begin to change, and then very slowly. Thus South America was saddled with the values, economic outlook, and social attitudes of eigh- teenth-century Iberia—not the best tradition from which to begin the task of forging modern nation-states.

Independence

Certain isolating factors had their effect even during the wars for independence. Spanish military strength was always concentrated at Lima, and those territories that lay farthest from their center of power—Argentina and Chile—were the first to establish their independence from Spain (in 1816 and 1818, respectively). In the north Simón Bolívar led the burgeoning independence move- ment, and in 1824 two decisive military defeats there spelled the end of Spanish power in South America.

This joint struggle, however, did not produce unity because no fewer than nine countries emerged from the three former viceroyalties. It is not difficult to understand why this fragmentation took place. With the Andes inter- vening between Argentina and Chile and the Atacama Desert between Chile and Peru, overland distances seemed even greater than they really were, and these obstacles to contact proved quite effective. Hence, from their outset the new countries of South America began to grow apart amid friction and even wars. Only within

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“Salvador is one of Brazil’s oldest and most vibrant cities. Magnificent churches, public buildings, and mansions were built during the time when this was, by many measures, the most important city in the Southern Hemisphere. Long the capital of Brazil, Salvador was the point of entry for tens of thousands of Africans, and the fortune-making plantation economy, augmented by the whaling industry, concentrated enormous wealth here, some of which went into the construction of an opulent city center. But fortunes change, Salvador lost its political as well as economic advantages, and the city fell into disrepair. Walking the streets of the old town in 1982, I noted the state of decay of much of Salvador’s architectural heritage and wondered about its survival: weathering in this tropical environment was destroying woodwork, façades, and roofs. But then the United Nations proclaimed Salva- dor’s old town a World Heritage site, and massive restoration began (left). By the late 1990s, much of the district had been revived (right), and tourism’s contribution to the local economy was on the rise.” © H. J. de Blij.

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the past two decades have the countries of this realm finally begun to recognize the mutual advantages of increasing cooperation and to make lasting efforts to steer their relationships in this direction.

CULTURAL FRAGMENTATION

When we speak of the interaction of South American countries, it is important to keep in mind just who does the interacting. The fragmentation of colonial South America into ten individual republics, and the subsequent postures of each of these states, was the work of a small minority that constituted the land- holding, upper-class elite. Thus in every country a vast majority—be they Amerindians in Peru or people of African descent in Brazil—could only watch as their European masters struggled with each other for su- premacy.

Using the Land

South America, then, is a continent of plural societies, where Amerindians of different cultures, Europeans from Iberia and elsewhere, Africans mainly from west- ern tropical Africa, and Asians from India, Japan, and Indonesia cluster in adjacent areas. The result is a cul- tural kaleidoscope of almost endless variety, whose internal divisions are also reflected in the realm’s eco- nomic landscape. This is readily visible in the map of South America’s dominant livelihood, agriculture (Fig. 5-5). Here commercial or market (for-profit) and subsistence (primarily for household use) agriculture exist side by side to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world. The geography of commercial agricultur- al systems (as shown by areas of soybean and non-soy grain production) was initially tied to the distribution of landholders of European background, while subsis- tence farming (such as highland mixed subsistence-mar- ket, agroforestry, and shifting cultivation) is associated with the spatial patterns of indigenous peoples as well as populations of African and Asian descent. Nonethe- less, these patterns are changing in this era of global- ization.

Cultural Landscapes

The cultural landscape of South America, similar to that of Middle America, is a layered one. Amerindians cul- tivated and crafted diverse landscapes throughout the continent, some producing greater impacts than others.

When the Europeans arrived, the cultural change that resulted from depopulation severely impacted the envi- ronment. Native peoples became minorities in their own lands, and Europeans introduced crops, animals, and ideas about land ownership and land use that changed South America irreversibly. They also brought in Africans from various parts of Subsaharan Africa. Europeans from non-Iberian Europe also started immigrating to South America, especially during the first half of the twentieth century. Japanese settlers arrived in Brazil and Peru dur- ing the same era. All of these elements have contributed to the present-day ethnic composition in this realm.

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SOUTH AMERICA: AGRICULTURAL SYSTEMS

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Dairy Products and Flowers for Export

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Figure 5-6 shows the distinct concentrations of Am- erindian and African cultural dominance, as well as areas where these groups are hardly present and people of European ancestry dominate.

ECONOMIC INTEGRATION

As noted above, the separatism that has so long charac- terized international relations in this realm is giving way as South American countries discover the benefits of forg- ing new partnerships with one another. With mutually advantageous trade the catalyst, a new continentwide spir- it of cooperation is blossoming at every level. Periodic flareups of boundary disputes now rarely escalate into open conflict. Cross-border rail, road, and pipeline pro- jects, stalled for years, are multiplying steadily. In south- ern South America, five formerly contentious nations are developing the hidróvia (water highway), a system of river locks that is opening most of the Paraná-Paraguay Basin to barge transport. Investments today flow freely from one country to another, particularly in the agricul- tural sector. Similar ideas have been proposed to connect the Paraná-Paraguay rivers to the Amazon River system.

6

ARGENTINA

CHILE

ECUADOR

B R A Z I L PERU

COLOMBIA

VENEZUELA SURINAM E

GUYAN A

URUGUAY

PARAGUAY

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SOUTH AMERICA: DOMINANT ETHNIC

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7

Recognizing that free trade could solve many of the realm’s economic-geographic problems, governments are now pursuing several avenues of economic suprana- tionalism. In 2010, South America’s republics were affil- iating with the following major trading blocs:

• Mercosur/l (Mercosur in Spanish; Mercosul in Por- tuguese): Launched in 1995 by countries of the South- ern Cone and Brazil, this Common Market established a free-trade zone and customs union linking Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and now Venezuela. Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru are asso- ciate members. This organization is becoming the dominant free-trade organization for South America.

• Andean Community: Formed as the Andean Pact in 1969 but restarted in 1995 as a customs union with common tariffs for imports, this bloc is made up of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Venezuela was a member until it withdrew in 2006.

• Union of South American Nations (UNASUR): Founded in 2008 in Brasília, Brazil, the 12 independent countries of South America signed a treaty to create a union envisioned as similar to the European Union (see Chapter 1) with the goal of a continental parliament, a coordinated defense effort, one passport for all its cit- izens, and greater cooperation on infrastructure devel- opment. However, significant disagreement between member-states about details still puts these efforts years into the future. UNASUR had been preceded by the South American Community of Nations.

• Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA): The Unit- ed States and other NAFTA proponents have tried to move this hemispheric free-trade idea forward, but it has been resisted by peasants and workers in South Amer- ica, and formally opposed by Mercosur/l. As long as the terms of trade remain set by the North, the Southern partners will be reluctant to participate in this initiative.

URBANIZATION

As in most other realms, South Americans are leaving the land and moving to the cities. South America started rela- tively early in this urbanization process, which intensified throughout the twentieth century. With South America’s urban population now at 81 percent, the realm ranks with those of Europe and the United States. The urban popula- tion of South America has grown annually by about 5 per- cent since 1950, while the increase in rural areas was less than 2 percent. These numbers underscore not only the dimensions but also the durability of the rural-to-urban migration from the countryside to the cities.

FIGURE 5-6

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*As noted on page 20, a cartogram is a specially transformed map in which countries and cities are represented in proportion to their populations. Those containing large numbers are blown up in popu- lation space, while those containing lesser numbers are shrunk in size accordingly.

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“Two unusual perspectives of Rio de Janeiro form a reminder that here the wealthy live near the water in luxury high-rises, such as these overlooking Ipanema Beach, while the poor have million-dollar views from their hillslope favelas, such as Rocinho.” © H. J. de Blij.

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Regional Patterns

The generalized spatial pattern of South America’s urban transformation is displayed in Figure 5-7, which shows a cartogram of the continent’s population.* Here we see not only the realm’s countries in population- space relative to each other, but also the proportionate sizes of individual large cities within their total nation- al populations.

Regionally, southern South America is the most high- ly urbanized. Today in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, almost all of the population resides in cities. Ranking next in urbanization is Brazil. The next highest group of countries borders the Caribbean in the north. Not sur- prisingly, the Andean countries constitute the realm’s least urbanized zone. Figure 5-7 tells us a great deal about the relative positions of major metropolises in their countries. Three of them—Brazil’s São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and Argentina’s Buenos Aires—rank among the world’s megacities (cities whose populations exceed 10 million). But even in the Amazon Basin the population is now 70 percent urban.

Causes and Challenges of Cityward Migration

In South America, as in Middle America, Africa, and Asia, people are attracted to the cities and driven from the poverty of the rural areas. Both pull and push fac- tors are at work. Rural land reform has been slow in com- ing, and for this and other reasons every year tens of thousands of farmers simply give up and leave, seeing little or no possibility for economic advancement. The cities lure them because they are perceived to provide opportunity—the chance to earn a regular wage. Visions of education for their children, better medical care, up- ward social mobility, and the excitement of life in a big city draw hordes to places such as São Paulo and Caracas.

But the actual move can be traumatic. Cities in devel- oping countries are surrounded and often invaded by squalid slums, and this is where the urban immigrant most often finds a first—and frequently permanent— abode in a makeshift shack without even the most basic amenities and sanitary facilities. Unemployment is per- sistently high, often exceeding 25 percent of the avail- able labor force. But still the people come, hopeful for a better life, the overcrowding in the shantytowns wors- ens, and the threat of epidemic-scale disease (and other disasters) rises.

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The “Latin” American City Model

The urban experience in the South and Middle American realms varies because of diverse historical, cultural, and economic influences. Nonetheless, there are many com- mon threads that have prompted geographers to search for useful generalizations. One is the model of the intraurban spatial structure of the “Latin” American city proposed by Ernst Griffin and Larry Ford (Fig. 5-8).

Model and Reality As noted in Chapter 1, the idea behind a model is to create an idealized representation of reality, displaying as many key real-world elements as possible. In the case of South America’s cities, the basic spatial frame- work of city structure, which blends traditional ele- ments of South and Middle American culture with modernization forces now reshaping the urban scene, is a composite of radial sectors and concentric zones.

10

Rio de Janeiro

Buenos Aires

São Paulo

Lima

Bogotá

Santiago

Belo Horizonte

La Paz

Santa Cruz

Guayaquil

Quito

Cali

Medellín

CaracasMaracaíbo

Bucaramanga Barquisimeto

Barranquilla

Cartagena Valencia

Belém

Fortaleza

Recife

Maceió

Salvador

Brasília

Manaus

São Luís

Teresina

Goiânia

Campo Grande

Montevideo (Uru.)

Córdoba

Rosario

Campinas

Curitiba Santos

São José dos Campos

Pôrto Alegre

Mendoza

Maracay

Asunción

Valparaíso

Concepción

Arequipa

ARGENTINA

GUYANA SURINAME

FRENCH GUIANA

VENEZUELA

COLOMBIA

BRAZIL

BOLIVIA

PARAGUAY

CHILE URUGUAY

PERU

ECUADOR

5,000,000

1,000,000

Urban-Area Population

10,000,000

25,000,000

Country Population

500,000

5,000,000

POPULATION CARTOGRAM OF SOUTH AMERICA

Modified after Wilkie, 1984.

© H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 5-7

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Dis am

en ityDisamenity

Sp in

e

CBD

Zone of In Situ Accretion

Zone of Peripheral Squatter Settlements

Central Business DistrictCBD

Commercial/Industrial

Elite Residential Sector

Zone of Maturity

A GENERALIZED MODEL OF LATIN AMERICAN CITY STRUCTURE

After Griffin and Ford, 1980.

© H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 5-8

F R O M T H E F I E L D N O T E S

“At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the Plaza de San Martín, flanked by impressive buildings but, unusual for such squares in Iberian America, carpeted with extensive lawns shaded by century-old trees. Getting a perspective of the plaza was difficult until I realized that you could get to the top of the ‘English Tower’ across the avenue you see in the foreground. From there, one can observe the prominent location occupied by the monument to the approximately 700 Argentinian military casualties of the Falklands War of 1982 (center), where an eternal flame behind a brass map of the islands symbolizes Argentina’s undiminished determination to wrest the islands from British control.” © H. J. de Blij.

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Anchoring the model is the CBD, which is the prima- ry business, employment, and entertainment focus of the surrounding metropolis. The CBD contains many modern high-rise buildings but also mirrors its colonial

beginnings. As shown in Figure 4-4, by colonial law Spanish colonizers laid out their cities around a cen- tral square, or plaza, dominated by a church and gov- ernment buildings. Santiago’s Plaza de Armas, Bogotá’s Plaza Bolívar, and Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo are classic examples. The plaza was the hub of the city, which later outgrew its old center as new commercial dis- tricts formed nearby; but to this day the plaza remains an important link with the past (photo below).

Radiating outward from the urban core along the city’s most prestigious axis is the commercial spine, which is adjoined by the elite residential sector (shown in green in Fig. 5-8). This widening corridor is essen- tially an extension of the CBD, featuring offices, retail facilities, and housing for the upper and upper-middle classes.

The three remaining concentric zones are home to the less fortunate residents of the city, with income level and housing quality decreasing as distance from the CBD increases. The zone of maturity in the inner city contains housing for the middle class, who invest sufficiently to keep their aging dwellings from deteri- orating. The adjacent zone of in situ accretion is one of much more modest housing interspersed with un- kempt areas, representing a transition from inner-ring affluence to outer-ring poverty and taking on slum characteristics.

The outermost zone of peripheral squatter settle- ments is home to the millions of relatively poor and unskilled workers who have recently migrated to the

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Regions of the Realm

11

12

● Mercosur/I, the South American common market, supposedly stands for open trade and democracy. Venezuela’s (pending) accession raises questions about the organization’s future direction.

● Colombian cocaine comes to North American con- sumers from staging points in remote parts of the country. On its way to Brazil, much of it is redistrib- uted from interior French Guiana, where it may account for one-fifth of the territorial economy.

● President Evo Morales of Bolivia is campaigning for a 10-kilometer (6-mi) stretch of Chilean Pacific coastline to end his country’s landlocked situation. His ally, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, proclaims that he would “like to swim on a Bolivian beach.”

● Watch for Argentina’s leadership to revive Argenti- na’s claim to the (British) Falkland Islands. Hugo Chávez has told the United Kingdom that the islands belong to Argentina and should be “turned over.”

POINTS TO PONDER

ponent of demography and culture. Brazil in some ways is a bridge between the Americas and Africa, which is why we discuss it last in this chapter, just before we turn to Subsaharan Africa.

M A J O R C I T I E S O F T H E R E A L M

City Population* (in millions)

Asunción, Paraguay 2.1 Belo Horizonte, Brazil 5.9 Bogotá, Colombia 8.1 Brasília, Brazil 3.8 Buenos Aires, Argentina 13.0 Caracas, Venezuela 3.2 Guayaquil, Ecuador 2.7 La Paz, Bolivia 1.7 Lima, Peru 8.3 Manaus, Brazil 1.9 Montevideo, Uruguay 1.5 Quito, Ecuador 1.8 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 12.2 Santiago, Chile 5.9 São Paulo, Brazil 26.2

*Based on 2010 estimates.

city. Here many newcomers earn their first cash income by becoming part of the informal sector, in which workers are undocumented and money transactions are beyond the control of government. The settlements consist mostly of self-help housing, vast shantytowns known as barrios in Spanish-speaking South Ameri- ca and favelas in Brazil. Some of their entrepreneur- ial inhabitants succeed more than others, transforming parts of these shantytowns into beehives of activity that can propel resourceful workers toward a middle-class existence.

A final structural element of many South American cities forms an inward, narrowing sectoral extension of the zone of peripheral squatter settlements and is known as the zone of disamenity. It consists of undesirable land along highways, rail corridors, riverbanks, and other low- lying areas; people are so poor that they are forced to live in the open. Thus this realm’s cities present enormous contrasts between poverty and wealth, squalor and comfort—harsh contrasts all too frequently seen in the cityscape.

South America divides geographically into four rather clearly defined regions (Fig. 5-4):

1. The North consists of five entities that display a com- bination of Caribbean and South American features: Colombia, Venezuela, and those that represent three historic colonial footholds by Britain (Guyana), the Netherlands (Suriname), and France (French Guiana).

2. The West is formed by four republics that share a strong Amerindian cultural heritage as well as pow- erful influences resulting from their Andean phys- iography: Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and, transitionally, Paraguay.

3. The South, often called the “Southern Cone,” in- cludes three countries that actually conform to the much-misused regional term “Latin” America: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (all with strong Euro- pean imprints and little remaining Amerindian influ- ence) plus aspects of Paraguay.

4. Brazil not only is South America’s giant, accounting for just about half the realm’s territory as well as pop- ulation, but is fast developing into the Western Hemi- sphere’s second superpower. In Brazil the dominant Iberian influence is Portuguese, not Spanish, and here Africans, not Amerindians, form a significant com-

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THE NORTH: FACING THE CARIBBEAN

As Figures 5-5 and 5-6 remind us, the countries of South America’s northern tier have something in common besides their coastal location: each has a coastal tropi- cal-plantation zone on the Caribbean colonial model. Especially in the three Guianas, early European planta- tion development entailed the forced immigration of African laborers and eventually the absorption of this ele- ment into the population matrix. Far fewer Africans were brought to South America’s northern shores than to Brazil’s Atlantic coasts, and tens of thousands of South Asians also arrived as contract laborers and stayed as set- tlers, so the overall situation here is not comparable to Brazil’s. And it is also distinctly different from that of the rest of South America.

Today, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana still display the coastal orientation and plantation dependen- cy with which the colonial period endowed them, al- though logging their tropical forests is penetrating and ravaging the interior. In Venezuela and Colombia, how- ever, farming, ranching, and mining drew the population

inland, overtaking the coastal-plantation economy and creating diversified economies.

Figure 5-9 shows that not only Venezuela but also Colombia is Caribbean in its orientation: in Venezuela, coastal oil and natural gas reserves have replaced plan- tations as the economic mainstay, and Colombia’s An- dean valleys open toward the north where roads, railways, and pipelines lead toward Caribbean ports such as Cartagena and Barranquilla. Colombia’s Pacific coast is hardly a factor in the national economy despite the out- let at Buenaventura. But, as we will see, the North’s loca- tional advantages are countered by physical, economic, and political obstacles that continue to prevent the real- ization of their full potential.

Colombia

Imagine a country more than twice the size of France, not at all burdened by overpopulation, with an environ- mental geography so varied that it can produce crops ranging from the temperate to the tropical, possessing world-class oil reserves and other natural resources. This

Lake Maracaíbo

Orinoco R .

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Guajira Peninsula Margarita

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ARUBA

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Santa Marta

Barranquilla

Cartagena

Cúcuta

San Cristóbal

Maracaíbo Lowlands

Ciudad Bolívar Ciudad Guayana

Georgetown

Paramaribo Cayenne

Kourou

SURINAME

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FRENCH GUIANA

Guiana Highlands

Cerro Bolívar

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80° 70°

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Longitude West of Greenwich

T H E

G U I A N A S

NETH. ANTILLES

LESSER ANTILLES

Maracay

Bucaramanga

Maracaíbo

Guayaquil Cuenca

Quito

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CAÑO LIMÓN OILFIELD

CUSIANA- CUPIAGUA OILFIELD

Pue rto C

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Oilfield

Gasfield

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Mountains and highlandsClaimed by Venezuela

Oil pipeline

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Under 50,000

50,000–250,000

250,000–1,000,000

1,000,000–5,000,000

Over 5,000,000

POPULATION

National capitals are underlined

400

0 400 600 800

0 600 Miles

1000 Kilometers200

200

© H. J. de Blij, P. O. Muller, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.FIGURE 5-9

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(see photo above) and seems to be centrally situated, but in fact it lies in the southeastern quadrant of Colombia’s most densely peopled sector.

We noted earlier that Colombia’s population clusters, of which there are about a dozen, are not well intercon- nected. Several of these lie on the Caribbean coast, cen- tered on Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Santa Marta, old colonial entry points. Others are anchored by major cities

Looking over the CBD of Bogotá, Colombia in a southeasterly direction, where high relief curtails building, you are reminded of the formidable and divisive topography of this large country. The airport (Eldorado International!) lies behind us to the northwest, and the larger and less prosperous suburbs occupy the hilly area to the west (to the right of this view). With more than 8 million inhabitants, metropolitan Bogotá is larger than Colombia’s next seven urban areas combined and is the country’s primate city— but terrain, distance, and persistent insurgencies erode the capital’s supremacy. © Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images, Inc.

country is situated in the crucial northwest corner of South America, with 3200 kilometers (2000 mi) of coast- line on both Atlantic (Caribbean) and Pacific waters, closer than any of its neighbors to the markets of the north and sharing a border with giant Brazil to the south. Its nation uses a single language and adheres to one dom- inant religion. Wouldn’t such a country thrive, near the very center of the burgeoning economic geography of its hemisphere?

The answer is no. Colombia has a history of strife and violence, its politics unstable, its economy damaged, its future clouded. Colombia’s cultural uniformity did not produce social cohesion. Its spectacular, scenic physical geography also divides its population of 45.7 million into clusters not sufficiently interconnected to foster integra- tion; even today, this huge country has less than 800 kilo- meters (500 mi) of four-lane highways. Its proximity to U.S. markets is a curse as well as a blessing: at the root of Colombia’s latest surge of internal conflict lies its role as one of the world’s largest producers of illicit drugs.

History of Conflict

Colombia’s current disorder is not its first. In the past, civil wars between conservatives and liberals (based on Roman Catholic religious issues) developed into con- flicts pitting rich against poor, elites against workers. In Colombia today, people still refer to the last of these wars as La Violencia, a decade of strife beginning in 1948 during which as many as 200,000 people died. In the 1970s, disaster struck again. In remote parts of the country, groups opposed to the political power structure began a campaign of terrorism, damaging the develop- ing infrastructure and destroying confidence in the future. Simultaneously, the U.S. market for narcotics expanded rapidly, and many Colombians got involved in the drug trade. Powerful and wealthy drug cartels formed in major cities such as Medellín and Cali, with networks that influenced all facets of Colombian life from the peasantry to the politicians. The fabric of Co- lombian society unraveled.

People and Resources

As Figures 5-1 and 5-9 show, Colombia’s physiography is mountainous in its Andean west and north and com- paratively flat in its Llanos (Plains) interior. Look at Fig- ure 5-3, and you can see how Colombia’s scattered population tends to cluster in the west and north, where the resources and the agricultural opportunities (including the coffee for which Colombia is famous) lie. On the map, the capital of Bogotá (elevation: 2700 meters [8500 ft]), forms the largest and most important of these clusters

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such as Medellín and Cali. What is especially interest- ing about Figure 5-9 in this context is how little devel- opment has taken place on the country’s lengthy Pacific coast, where the port city of Buenaventura, across the mountains from Cali, is the only place of any size. The map suggests that Colombia’s Pacific Rim era, already in full force in Chile, Peru, and Ecuador, has yet to arrive.

The map also shows that Colombia and neighboring Venezuela share the oil and gas reserves in and around the “Lake” Maracaibo area (“Lake” because this is real- ly a gulf with a narrow opening to the sea), but Venezuela has the bigger portion. Recent discoveries, however, have boosted Colombia’s production along the base of the easternmost cordillera, and our map shows a growing system of pipelines from the interior to the coast. Mean- while, the vast and remote interior proved fertile ground for that other big money-maker in Colombia: drugs.

Cocaine’s Cost

With its energy, mineral, and agricultural productivity, Colombia might have been on the fast track toward pros- perity, but the rise of the narcotics industry, fueled by outside (especially U.S. but also Brazilian and Euro- pean) demand, and coupled with its legacy of violence, crippled the state for decades and threatened its very sur- vival. In a country as large and physiographically diverse as this, there are many opportunities to avoid detection and evade law enforcement, ranging from farming coca plants to smuggling weapons (see box titled “The Geog- raphy of Cocaine”). Drug cartels based in the cities con- trolled vast networks of producers and exporters; they infiltrated the political system, corrupted the army and police, and waged wars with each other that cost tens of

thousands of lives and destroyed Colombia’s social order. The drug cartels organized their own armed forces to combat attempts by the Colombian government to control the illegal narcotics economy, and kidnapped and killed citizens at will even as the Colombian gov- ernment appealed to the United States for help in its ineffective campaign. Meanwhile, the owners of large haciendas in the countryside hired private security guards to protect their properties, banding together to expand these units into what became, in effect, private armies. Colombia was in chaos as narcoterrorists com- mitted appalling acts of violence in the cities, rebel forces and drug-financed armies of the political “left” fought paramilitaries of the political “right” in the coun- tryside, and Colombia’s legitimate economy, from cof- fee growing to tourism, suffered fatally. To further weaken the national government, the rebels even took to bombing oil pipelines.

State of Insurgency

What happened in Colombia beginning in the 1970s and escalating in the three decades following was not unique in the world—states have succumbed to chaos in the past—but this was an especially clear-cut case of a process long studied and modeled by political scientists. By the turn of this century, certain parts of Colombia were beyond the control of its government and armed forces. There, insurgents of various stripes created their own domains, successfully resisting interference and de- manding to be left alone to pursue their goals, illegiti- mate though they might be. Leaders of some of these insurgent domains even sent emissaries to Bogotá to ne- gotiate their terms for “independence.”

When it comes to energy resources, Venezuela is in the lead in South America, but Colombia has formidable reserves as well, the most extensive of which lie in the central north on the inland side of the Andes’ easternmost range. This example of the industry’s environmental impact shows what is reputedly the largest oilfield in South America, based on reserves in the Cusiana river basin, about 250 kilometers (150 mi) east of Bogotá in the heart of the country. © Gamma Presse, Inc.

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The Geography of Cocaine

AN Y G E O G R A P H I C A L D I S C U S S I O N of northwestern South America today must take note of one of its most widespread activities: the production of illegal narcotics. Of the enormous flow of illicit drugs that enter the United States each year, the most widely used substance is cocaine—all of which comes from South America, mainly Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. Within these three countries, cocaine annually brings in billions of (U.S.) dollars and “employs” tens of thousands of workers, constituting an industry that functions as a powerful economic force. Those who operate the industry have accumulated con- siderable power through bribery of politicians, kidnappings and other forms of intimidation, threats of terrorism, and alliances with guerrilla groups in outlying zones beyond gov- ernmental control. The cocaine industry itself is structured within a tightly organized network of territories that encom- pass the various stages of this drug’s production.

The first stage of cocaine production is the extraction of coca paste from the coca plant, a raw-material-oriented activity that is located near the areas where the plant is grown. The coca plant was domesticated in the Andes by the Incas centuries ago; millions of their descendants still chew coca leaves for stimulation and brew them into coca tea, the leading beverage of high-altitude South America. The main zone of coca-plant cultivation is along the east- ern slopes of the Andes and in adjacent tropical lowlands in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Today, five areas dominate in the growing of coca leaves for narcotic production (see Fig. 5-11): Bolivia’s Chaparé district in the marginal Ama- zon lowlands northeast of the city of Cochabamba; the Yun- gas Highlands north of the Bolivian capital, La Paz; north-central Peru’s Huallaga and neighboring valleys; south-central Peru’s Apurimac Valley, southeast of Huan- cayo; and the green-colored zones (in Fig. 5-10) around the guerrilla-controlled territories of southern Colombia. These areas, which can produce as many as nine crops per year, are especially conducive to high leaf yields thanks to favor- able local climatic and soil environments that also allow plants to develop immunity to many diseases and insect rav- ages. Despite government efforts to aerially spray herbicides and manually eradicate plants in the field, all of these areas continue to thrive as coca cultivation has become a full- fledged cash crop. Operations in guerrilla-controlled por- tions of Colombia have reached the scale of plantations, inducing thousands of local subsistence farmers (sometimes at gunpoint) to join the more lucrative ranks of the field workforce. In Peru and Bolivia, the specialized coca-cul- tivation zones have lured an even larger peasant-farmer pop- ulation to abandon the less profitable production of food crops (coca’s per-acre income is now seven times greater than cocoa’s), thereby further reducing the capability of these nutrition-poor countries to feed themselves.