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Latin America is by no means one homogeneous unit, with uniform sociopolitical conditions from one part to another. Rather it is an immense and varied region, that stretches from Florida and the U.S.-Mexican border to the southernmost tip of South America. It includes twenty different republics plus the free associated state (estato libreasociado), or "commonwealth" of Puerto Rico.

Languages include Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), French (Haiti), and the several Indian tongues of Mexico, Central America, and the Amazon and Andean regions of South America. In Peru the Quechua language of the Incas shares official status with Spanish; and in Paraguay, the melodious Guarani tongue is spoken as much as Spainsh.

There are deserts, high mountain ranges as in parts of Mexico and in Andean South America; deep jungles, as in the Amazon regions of equatorial South America; fertile valleys, agrarian plains and highlands as in Mexico, Central America, and large parts of all the South American republics, including especially the rich black soils of the vast Argentine pampa; and at the tips of Chile and Argentina, there are the Antarctic ends of the habitable earth.

Poverty and Land Monopoly

Despite these and many other differences, two socio-economic features are to be found almost throughout the region.

Poverty

The first of these is a very visible, widespread poverty that afflicts half or more of the Latin American people. One does not need statistical reports, though there are plenty of them, to know that where streets swarm with wretched walls, begging amputees and ragged mothers, poverty is a widespread plague. In any Latin American metropolis, be it Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Lima, Mexico City, Managua or some other, one can be sure that at least a third of its population is living in one of its wretched shanty towns, suffering from inadequacies or even complete absence of clean water, minimally decent housing, sewage disposal, transportation, medical attention. heat or electricity; but enduring an abundance of sickness, pollution, dirt, violence and ignorance. Visitors to Latin America who do not just travel on guided tours, remark about how country after country seems to be overwhelmed by poor, ragged, miserable people.

In a few countries, such as Argentina, Chile or Uruguay, higher levels of technologically advanced urban commercial enterprise combine with better educational norms to increase the role of capital investment in production; and poverty, while still widespread, is not so visible as in even less fortunate pans of Latin America; but in no Latin American republic does per capita gross domestic product (GDP), a rough equivalent of income, even approach those of the United States, Canada, or any country of Western Europe.

Thus, Argentina boasts an annual per capita GDP of $3,400, the highest in Latin America outside Puerto Rico ($6,360) -- by comparison with only $1,100 in Ecuador, $1,300 in Guatemala, and $1,090 in Honduras; but for the United States the figure is $23,000; Canada, $19,600; and France, $18,900. In Western Europe, the poorest countries (Portugal, $9,0000; Greece, $8,200), report per capita GDPs about 2.5 times as high as the most fortunate republic of Latin America. It must be borne in mind that the very low per capita GDPs of Latin America are derived from totals divided by population numbers -- so, in effect, are averages drawn from both the most opulent and the poorest segments of their societies. Thus, it takes but little imagination to speculate on the abysmal poverty that must afflict half or more of the people of Latin America.

Land Monopoly

Because we are dealing here with Latin America, where agriculture is often a prime mainstay of economic life, our stress must be on agrarian land. This is in no way to imply that only agrarian land is fundamental to human life. In any event, except for information on oil and mineral resources, there is little or no readily available data on ownership patterns outside rural areas.

There follow a few examples of a condition that prevails almost throughout the whole of Latin America.

In Argentina, the great pampa, or plains area, is about the size of Texas, occupies a huge arc to the north, west and south of Buenos Aires, and is covered by some of the richest black soil on earth. Directly or indirectly, the pampa is the basis for most Argentine economic activity. Considering its potential productivity, one would expect to find intensive agriculture based on a variety of crops. While some such crops are grown, the pampa is largely given over to the raising of livestock, especially some 50 million cattle and 23 million sheep. This type of soil utilization explains the overall sparsity of Argentine population, only 31 per square mile (U.S., 69), with over a third concentrated in metropolitan Buenos Aires. Outside Buenos Aires and other scattered cities and towns, Argentina is almost an empty country.

Land monopoly goes far to explain this anomaly. Some 2.5 per cent of the total farms or estates (estancias) cover up to two-thirds of the cultivable land of the country. A very few families monopolize most of the land, and are satisfied to use it inadequately, usually for extensive livestock grazing. With but small investment per hectare, they can accumulate enormous wealth.

In Brazil, whose area (3,286,000 sq. mi.) is almost that of the United States (3,787,000), about one per cent of farms occupy roughly half the tillable land. According to the International Federation of Human Rights, over 100,000 Brazilians on the big estates (fazendas) live in abject conditions only comparable to serfdom or slavery. There has always been the system of extraordinary monopoly of most of the countryside by a very few owners, so that its victims must either escape to the slums (favelas) of the big cities, or to inhospitable places like the Amazon region. Rather than offend the sensibilities of the big land monopolists in the more temperate southern regions of their country, during the past generation Brazilian governments have encouraged their deprived masses to colonize the Amazon jungles. This says nothing about the fate of their aboriginal inhabitants, their rich plant and animal life, nor of the oxygen they have helped provide to the world's inhabitants.

Throughout almost all of Latin America, other examples abound. In much of Central America outside Costa Rica, the chaos of civil war has disrupted familiar patterns of land tenure, without, however, firmly establishing other systems that can be depended onto be permanently viable. It can be said that in the four countries in question (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua), 80 per cent of the cultivable land has been either occupied by enormous estates (haciendas) employing multitudes of peasants at minimal compensation in pay or shelter; or by tiny plots (minifundia), insufficient for families to keep body and soul together.

An exception to this dismal pattern was traditionally to be found in Costa Rica, where a wider distribution of land among more proprietors than elsewhere was for historical reasons a feature of this small Central American republic. The country has also been noted for lower levels of poverty and greater achievement of democratic stability than are to be found in most of the rest of Latin America. Today, however, contemporary agrobusiness influences seem intent on moving Costa Rica into more monopolized landholding patterns; but so far, economic standards (per capita GDP, $2,000), educational levels (literacy, 93%) and political practices of the country remain higher than those of any other parts of Central America. Per capita annual GDP of Central America ranges from $l,300 in Guatemala to $425 in Nicaragua; and educational levels are correspondingly low.

In El Salvador, it used to be said that fourteen families owned the entire country and consequently, controlled most of the commercial and political affairs of the republic. Less fortunate individuals had to solve their problems by coming to terms with one of the landowning families, or by robbing, or begging, or going elsewhere, or jumping into the Pacific Ocean - or revolting, as Marxist rebels did, in the bitter civil war that tore the country apart from the late 1970s to 1992.

El Salvador, with 8,124 square miles, is about the size of Massachusetts (7,838). Though not an island, its conditions remind one of the famous passage by Henry George:

Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either to him or to them. In the one case, as the other; the one will be the absolute master of the ninety-nine - his power extending even to life and death, for simply to refuse them permission to live upon the island would be to force them into the sea. [Progress and Poverty, p. 347]

Almost throughout Latin America, whether contemporaneously, historically or both, one can find much truth in George's dictum that "Everywhere, in all times, among all people, the possession of land is the base of aristocracy, the foundation of great fortunes, the source of power." [Progress and Poverty, p. 296]

Of course Latin American leaders of social conscience are quite aware of the defects of their system of concentrated land ownership; and in many instances (e.g., Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru), have taken office to try to rectify such conditions. Usually, their reforms have included some kind of break-up of the big estates, and the distribution of their parts to needy peasants. To one degree or another, as especially in Cuba and Mexico, such reforms have involved a high degree intrusion by governmental officials into the work and lives of the agrarian classes. Thereby, government bureaucrats come to play many of the roles of the former powerful landlords (hacendados).

In Mexico with its cooperative ejidos, bureaucrats and the official bank of credit (banco ejidal) came to fill many supervisory functions previously performed by wealthy private owners and their foremen. Now, however, even the ejido system itself is being jettisoned in favor of "freemarket" reforms that is, a return to the old private ownership, perhaps eventual monopolization, of rural land.

Cuba, where the official Institute of Agrarian Reform took over administration of agricultural production, provided the most extreme case. Agrarian workers simply transferred one type of land monopolist for another -- except that intrusive government bureaucrats purported themselves to be the same as "the people" or the workers". This problem afflicts all Marxist-inspired programs of "public" or "popular" ownership and operation of the means of production, including land, where administrative bureaucracies come to replace the former private monopolists. In passing, the same might be said of certain extremist "Georgist" proposals that surface from time to time.

Such "reforms", born of the elusive notion that government is "public" and therefore the same as "the people", have usually produced results quite opposite to their intent. Unprepared peasants could not obtain either their tools nor the training they needed to manage "their" plots or market their products; and, as in Bolivia, Cuba or Mexico, often found themselves to be as much under the thumbs of self-seeking, corrupt bureaucratic officials as they had previously been controlled by exploitative landlords and their lackeys.

On this subject, a new book by William C. Thiesenhusen, Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995) throws much light on a subject that is too little understood.

Application of the Georgist Remedy to Latin America

It would seem apparent to Georgist readers that the solution most needed in Latin America is application of a single tax to unearned land values, thus replacing all current systems of public revenue.

There are features of Latin America thought that should be favorable to acceptance of the Georgist solution. Ever since the Mexican Revolution of the second decade of this century and the Bolivian National Revolution of 1952-1964, as well as Central American turbulence during recent decades, the idea of land reform has been very much in the air. True enough. the wider distribution of agricultural land and government expropriation of mineral and oil deposits, refining and distrihution, were the principal motifs; but at least the importance of land and of popular access to it were significant stated objectives -- influenced though they were by quasi-Marxist rather than Georgist principles.

Physiocracy

There is an undercurrent of physiocratic thought that; at least in informed circles, is better known in Latin America than in the U.S. The physiocrats of l8th century France (Francois Quesnay, 1694-1774; Robert Turgot, 1727-1781), reacted to restrictive mercantilist policies of the time by advocating the freeing of trade from tax burdens, and the raising of public revenue from a tax to be levied on agricultural and mineral land, which they considered to be the source of all wealth.

The Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in the early 19th century brought physioeratic concepts to educated individuals in Spain and Portugal; and certain Latin American scholars studying in those countries fell under physiocratic influence. Today in Spain, as also in parts of Latin America, individuals of Georgist persuasion are likely to call themselves fisiocratas georgistas -- Physiocratic Georgists - as recognition of their debt to the two sources. An example of this would be the Iberian Georgist leader, Josep Soler Corrales of Barcelona, as was his predecessor, the late Emilio Lemos Ortega of Sevilla. The physiocratic idea was clearly in the mind of Bernardino Rivadavia, who served briefly as president of Argentina during 1826-1827. Before that as Minister of Government (equivalent to to U.S. Secretary of the Interior), he tried to prevent establishment of great private estates by keeping ownership of land in custody of the nation (i.e. ,the government), which would have rented out parcels to individuals and companies who would use them. The political chaos that prevailed at that time in the country prevented his measures from ever taking effect.

The point is that there is both a revolutionary and a traditional body of thought in much of Latin America that should he receptive to the idea of applying a single tax to unearned land values; but in contemporary times such ideas have become imbued with Marxist insistence on confiscation and domination by organs of the state.

Marxism

At first glance, the prevalence of the Marxist influence in Latin Ametican radical thought may seem helpful to the acceptance of Georgist proposals in the region. Alter all, the very first of the ten central proposals of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 called for "Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes."

However, Marxists are never satisified to just distribute land to needy peasants, much less to only collect its economic rent and to free productive elements from burdensome taxation. They much prefer that there be a high degree of state intervention in the process, including govemment ownership and operation of the means of production and distribution as in Cuba, where there had to be a central political agency (Institutode Reforrna Agraria, IRA), to control collectives and state farms.

The Castro revolution in Cuba was led by young university students, fired with radical Marxist ideas picked up from books and professors; and the same was true of the leaders of the Nicaraguan sandinista movement. Reformist as well as revolutionary leadership in much of Latin America, has been in the hands of young people, almost all of them from economically privileged sectors of their societies, but whose idealism is much influenced by Marxist teachings.

Today, however, the pendulum in much of Latin America is swinging away from radical, Marxist-style reform and toward privatization of state-run industries and de-regulation of economic life. When these measures have gone to their logical extremes, and make even worse the lot of technologically unprepared classes while further enriching the few who are in positions of ownership and management, the clamor for reform will again intensity as it has already in radicalized southern Mexico. It is conceivable that under such conditions, a new approach, basing its orientation on physiocratic memories still in place and refined by the later thinking of Henry George, could have a new impact in Latin America.

Taxes and Corruption

In most Latin American republics, direct taxes on income or property take in no more than a quarter of total public revenue; and in several countries, direct property taxes are unknown.

The remainder of government incomes derive from indirect taxes. Very much in the pre-physiocratic, mercantilist spirit, these especially include customs duties (both import and export!), which provide the most revenue; and taxes on food processing, sales, and a multitude of other commercial activities.

With only the partial exceptions of a few countries (e.g., Costa Rica, Chile, Uruguay), evasion of all kinds of taxes, especially such direct taxes as exist, make such things as income or property taxes largely unknown to most sectors of the population - except where officials must be paid off to avoid them. In such an environment, successful application of a program of land value taxation, much less its replacement of all the current welter of indirect taxes, would require intensive training of both assessors and collectors, and a radical reversal of current relaxed attitudes toward probity in government.

Indeed, even if a program of land value taxation were to be adopted by some Latin American government, it is quite likely that the most daunting obstacle to its successful application would be public corruption. Of course this problem may be found anywhere; but in most Latin American republics, it is a dominant element in the political process. This arises, not so much from any special cupidity on the part of Latin Americans, but from historical features of the Spainish and Portuguese colonial systems, where public offices were concessions from the crown, to be bought and sold among claimants for their possession.

Moreover, corruption was encouraged by the distance of these rich possessions in the Americas from the centers of authority in Madrid and Lisbon. Distances and delays in communication over the Atlantic were great enough; but the territories within the American possessions of Spain and Portugal were far more vast than were the thirteen English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. Correspondence and instructions between officials of Mexico City, or Santiago, or Buenos Aires, or Babia (later Rio de janeiro) and those of their outlying territories, could take weeks and months to travel back and forth.

In such circumstances, when things had to get done, the simpler thing to do was to pay off local officials. Later, this became corruption pure and simple, to not only accomplish normal tasks, but also to get around the law. So it is that restaurant proprietors can pay off health inspectors, and customers become ill with impure food or water. Traffic violations and even the smuggling of contraband across borders can be easily resolved by bribery. Drivers pay off emission inspectors, and in Mexico City create the highest levels of air pollution in the world, including even TokyoYokohama.

The point of all this is that an effective Georgist system requires equitable and informed assessment procedures, freedom from coercion by owners of the land, impartial preparation of tax notices, collection which is impervious to threats, bribes or other pressures; and finally, that the money collected go into the public treasury, not into private pockets. This is a stupendous problem that lies in wait to thwart the best efforts of single-tax reformers.

Oligarchies and Drugs

It must be acknowledged that the very wealthy and powerful oligarchies that Georgist reforms would challenge, would post the most threatening obstacles to their implementation. Such individuals can threaten or bribe officials and, as we have witnessed in Colombia and Central America, and are now seeing in Mexico, are not above murder if it is thought to suit their designs.

It must be pointed out that in many parts ofLatin America today -- notably Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, parts of Central America and increasingly Mexico -- drug trafficking is becoming a dominant plague. It is fired by an apparently insatiable U.S. market, and stops at nothing to achieve its objectives of self-enrichment. In certain Latin American republics (e.g., Colombia, Mexico), the narcotic trade feeds on a system of corruption already in place; and comes to involve the highest public officials, including attorneys general, presidents, ex-presidents and their families.

In such an atmosphere, the entire society and its beliefs become entangled in the labrynthian struggle for and against the traffic in drugs. Proposals for the taxation of land values, or for the elimination of other forms of taxation, can easily seem quite irrelevant to the dominant concerns of a brutalized and terrified population.

Conclusion

In the thinking and experiences of Latin America, one can find many elements that should favor the approval of Georgist proposals. There is a physiocratic tradition that is well known to Latin American scholars. Reformers below the border widely regard land monopoly as a special social blight that traditionally afflicts their region. During most of this century, reformist and revolutionary movements have directed special allention to the need for land reform of one type or another.

However, one cannot but wonder whether profound differences of history, culture and practice must limit the potentiality for meaningful adoption of Georgist Ideas in LatinAmerica -- or for that matter, in Outer Mongolia or Lower Slobbovia. It is hard enough to find comprehension, much less active support, right where we live.

(Author's footnote: In preparation of this materiaL I drew some ideas and phraseology from two previous sources for which I was also responsible. These are (1) a monograph, Prospects fo the Social Transformation of Latin America, published in 1985 by the Economic and Social Science Research Association, Ltd., of London; and (2) a chapter, "Conflict, Ideology and Hope in Central America," included in Richard Noyes, ed., Now the Synthesis, published in 1991 by Shepheard-Walwyn of London and Holmes & Meyer of New York.)