[Urbane Guerrilla]

SamIAm, give thought to Latin America's manner of colonization, contrasted with North America's. Here you will find a great deal of root cause, all of it predating the nineteenth century to say nothing of the early twentieth.

North America got a flood of smallholders and working-class types and young apprentices, out to have a small to fairish (occasionally vast) piece of land of their own and to carve out their bit of what became the American Dream. All these smallholders, all roughly similar in their resources and likewise similar in both their stake in the society they made and the political power they possessed, ended up with a penchant for the general equality. What is the result? A working Republic, downright bursting at the seams with functionality.

From Mexico southwards, there wasn't a flood. There was a sparse settlement instead by wealthy aristocrats, impoverished aristocrats brimful of personal ambition, and adventurers of similar ambition but socially humbler antecedents. These were united in pursuit of grandee status and condition, and damned little else mattered for long. So what they did was recreate the latifundian, plantation economy of late medieval Spain. Given who they were and what society they sprang from, it is hard to imagine them doing anything else -- it was what they knew. So there you are: a latifundian economy in a colonial relationship with developing Europe, exporting raw materials and importing finished goods, a very small minority of gentlefolk owning the entirety of the land and the exploitable resources, and everybody else is hired labor, landless, resourceless, and hapless -- and the teensiest middle class you ever saw, if indeed it were visible to the naked eye at all. Damned little in the way of small employers or self-employers. And in the end, not enough of these. Latin America's systemic problem is it lacks a middle class. A large middle class would have solved the systemic problem and likely it can yet, for it is doing so now. But it was the nature of the colonization of this continent that engendered the troubles seen since, right down to, as the joke has it, "thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute" -- most of them just enough to be typical but not so prolonged as to get boring.

Look into it further, Sam.