the elite would make huge fortunes while the rest were
excluded. When the elite invested, the economy would grow
a little, but such economic growth was always going to be
disappointing. It also came at the expense of those lacking
rights in this new order, such as the Yaqui people of
Sonora, in the hinterland of Nogales. Between 1900 and
1910, possibly thirty thousand Yaqui were deported,
essentially enslaved, and sent to work in the henequen
plantations of Yucatán. (The fibers of the henequen plant
were a valuable export, since they could be used to make
rope and twine.)
The persistence into the twentieth century of a specific
institutional pattern inimical to growth in Mexico and Latin
America is well illustrated by the fact that, just as in the
nineteenth century, the pattern generated economic
stagnation and political instability, civil wars and coups, as
groups struggled for the benefits of power. Díaz finally lost
power to revolutionary forces in 1910. The Mexican
Revolution was followed by others in Bolivia in 1952, Cuba
in 1959, and Nicaragua in 1979. Meanwhile, sustained civil
wars raged in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Peru. Expropriation or the threat of expropriation of assets
continued apace, with mass agrarian reforms (or attempted
reforms) in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala,
Peru, and Venezuela. Revolutions, expropriations, and
political instability came along with military governments
and various types of dictatorships. Though there was also a
gradual drift toward greater political rights, it was only in the
1990s that most Latin American countries became
democracies, and even then they remain mired in
instability.
This instability was accompanied by mass repression
and murder. The 1991 National Commission for Truth and
Reconciliation Report in Chile determined that 2,279
persons were killed for political reasons during the
Pinochet dictatorship between 1973 and 1990. Possibly
50,000 were imprisoned and tortured, and hundreds of
thousands of people were fired from their jobs. The
Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification Report
in 1999 identified a total of 42,275 named victims, though
others have claimed that as many as 200,000 were
murdered in Guatemala between 1962 and 1996, 70,000