So why does Latin America remain the most unequal region in the world?
I think much of this is rooted in a powerful historical structure inherited from the colonial era. But today, the World Bank talks about the 2000s as being a decade of inequality reduction, due to social and redistributive policies. We had the economic boom, and economies grew, but nevertheless, this broad structure of inequality – class and racial inequalities inherited form the colonial period – remains. Through processes of industrialization, and the regions' entry into global markets, new opportunities have emerged in the private and public sector, but it has also created large, exclusionary informal markets formed around these inequalities. And while they change over time, they remain powerful, persistent inequalities.
It also bears emphasis that when we talk about Latin America, we’re talking about a very different reality in terms of inequality. It’s not homogenous across the region. Every single country has a different historical structure, and different political histories that have produced different patterns and levels of inequality.
We can see these historical legacies in at least two ways. Firstly, Latin American societies emerged with strong elites, or oligarchies, whose power has historically been challenged, but never truly eliminated. As a consequence patterns of class inequality and structures of labour and production have changed, but are still present in forms of social exclusion. For example, the plantation economies may have disappeared, but they have transformed into informal economies of exclusion, or migration. Secondly, there are racial inequalities that are pervasive in the region, which again have changed but were never eliminated. The only real example of real change with racial inequality is Bolivia.
