 I'm Salvatur Babonis and today's lecture is the peripheral countries of Latin America. The peripheral areas of Latin America are distinctive for being based on the continuing subjugation of indigenous peoples. Central America and the Andean region are relatively small in size and population compared to other peripheral areas like Africa and South Asia, but their level of social problems is similar. Some of the peripheral Caribbean countries, Haiti in particular, also have structural problems that are similar to those found in Central America. In a way, all of these countries experience continuing colonialism, but that colonialism has been internalized into the social structures of the countries themselves. There are two main peripheral regions of Latin America and both of them are relatively sparsely populated. One is Central America with roughly 40 million people. The six Spanish-speaking countries of Central America are Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama. The second region is the Andes region of South America, roughly 55 million people in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru. A third peripheral region of the Americas may be constituted by the poor islands of the Caribbean, but since these are individual islands, each with a very distinctive history, and except for Haiti with relatively small populations, I'm not going to cover them in this lecture. Latin America was the first part of the world to be colonized by Europeans, and the natives of the region were ruthlessly exploited. We have to remember that most of the indigenous people of Latin America were simply killed in the wave of European pandemics, like smallpox and influenza, that swept over the continent in the early 1500s. Now, the Spanish conquerors didn't help anything. They were extremely ruthless in exploiting and killing the native populations, but most of the killing was done by the wave of diseases that spread in advance of the conquistadors. Many of the remaining populations of the region were virtually enslaved, whether in tropical plantations in Central America or in the silver and copper mines of the Andes. At one time in history, the richest place in the world in the 1500s was Peru, but all of that wealth was generated by native slave labor in the silver mines of Peru. Lima, the capital, had beautiful opera houses and fancy buildings, but all of that was floating on the slave labor of indigenous peoples. Indigenous cultures were destroyed and indigenous languages were suppressed to be replaced by Spanish throughout the entire region. Central America and the Andes region both gained independence from Spain in the 1820s, along with the rest of Latin America, but a form of colonialism still persists in both regions. Now these two regions were the regions of Latin America with major indigenous populations descended from pre-Columbian peoples. The reason the indigenous people survived in these areas, and not in others, is first in Central America Spanish had trouble settling because of the tropical conditions, and second in the Andes region Spanish had difficulty settling because of high altitude. Both of these regions were also home to major, well-organized, large-scale pre-Columbian civilizations, the Mayan civilization in Central America and Aztec civilization in the Andes. Both of these groups put up strong resistance to Spanish conquest. They were defeated by Spain mainly because they were weakened by disease, not because they lacked the political organization to conduct their own defense on a large scale. Indigenous languages and indigenous institutions still persist in these regions. In some places they even form the majority of the population. Listeners from North America and Australia who usually think of indigenous populations as small, tiny groups making up one or two percent of the population have to change their frame of reference when thinking about Central America and the Andes. In some countries, like Honduras and Bolivia, indigenous peoples are even in the majority of the population. Indigenous languages are widely spoken in many towns and cities. Everybody speaks indigenous languages and relatively few people speak Spanish. There are vibrant indigenous cultures that trace their roots well back to pre-Columbian days. In fact, in 2006, Bolivia elected its first indigenous president, Evo Morales, over the very strong opposition of the Spanish-speaking elite minority in the country. Social problems in Central America and the Andes region are entirely patterned on racial, ethnic, linguistic lines. The indigenous populations of all of these countries are highly marginalized and excluded from public services, just as they are in North America and Australia. The difference is that those excluded populations in North America and Australia make up only a tiny fraction of the population. Thus, severe poverty on U.S.-Indian reservations or among Canadian First Peoples or among Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, that deprivation is severe among those groups, but since those groups make up only a tiny percentage of the total population, the total statistics for countries in North America and in Australia are basically good. The difference is in Central America and the Andes regions, these excluded groups may make up anywhere from 20 to 60 or even in the case of Bolivia, close to 80 percent of the population. As a result, these countries have very poor social indicators overall, since the indigenous populations in these countries are virtually excluded in many cases from state services. Compounding the social exclusion of indigenous populations are the same factors that facilitated their survival in the first place. Indigenous populations live in remote jungle areas and remote mountain communities that are very isolated. It's difficult to build roads to these communities, and without roads, other services cannot be provided at anything approaching a reasonable cost. Linguistic divides can also be a barrier to social inclusion and the provision of routine government services. It's difficult for indigenous children to go to school if they don't speak the language in which school is conducted. Compounding all of this are highly unequal patterns of land ownership. When the Spanish conquered America, they took all the land. As a result, a very small number of people own the vast majority of the agricultural land in the countries of Central America and the Andes. This creates communal tensions that are very hard to overcome with national institutions. It's very difficult for indigenous people to feel that they have a stake in the nation itself when the nation doesn't speak their language and has taken their land and won't give it back. Key takeaways. Latin America was the region first occupied by European colonizers in the early 1500s. This predates the colonization of the rest of the world in some cases by centuries. Nonetheless, indigenous languages and indigenous institutions are still very strong in much of Central America and the Andes region. Linguistic divides and unequal land ownership generate the major fault lines on which social problems rise in the 21st century. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvaturba Bonas. You can find out more about me at my website, salvaturbabonas.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter on global social issues.