spoken critic of the regime in El Salvador, who
was shot dead while administering mass in a hos-
pital chapel. Where military regimes suppressed
opposition, the Church became the sole national
voice of freedom. It was itself deeply divided in
some Latin American states, where the hierarchy
might be more ready to support the fight against
communism than criticise authoritarian govern-
ments. In others, as in Brazil and El Salvador, the
Church was more united in opposition. On the
whole the Church was not revolutionary in
action, but where it took a clear spiritual stand
against injustice and economic exploitation it
became a force that weakened the standing of
repressive authoritarian regimes and tore aside
the veil of secrecy with which these regimes
attempted to hide their crimes. In the longer term
the Church functioned as an opposition which,
because of the international respect it enjoyed,
undermined Western, especially American, supp-
ort for regimes whose human-rights records had
become indefensible. Other organisations, such as
Amnesty, trade unions and resistance groups, also
highlighted the practices of torture and murder,
but the majority of the church representatives
when they spoke out enjoyed the inestimable
advantage of not being identified as part of the
left of politics, despite the attempts by regimes
seeking to silence them to slander and misinter-
pret their motives.
In the early 1990s the Church was still making
great efforts to improve the lot of the poor
masses. But on the crucial issue of population
control Pope John Paul’s pronouncements were
uncompromising. The only means of birth
control permitted by the Church, the rhythm
method, was too unreliable and was anyway not
effectively practised. Millions of women suffered
the dangers and misery of repeated abortions. But
high rates of infant mortality and poverty were
also responsible for the poor desiring large fami-
lies. So there were multiple reasons for high birth
rates. Whatever its cause, the galloping popula-
tion growth undermined progress. It is charac-
teristic of regions with high birth rates for the
young to predominate, and boys and girls from
the shanty towns surrounding many of Latin
America’s major cities turned to begging, stealing
and prostitution. Young lives became cheap, for
instance in Rio de Janeiro, where vagrant children
and petty criminals were found shot dead by vig-
ilante groups. Moreover, millions of peasants and
urban poor in Latin America were malnourished.
Much of the increase achieved in agricultural pro-
duction, including coffee, was sent for export – it
did not feed the peasants, who were landless or
eking out a living on the small areas of arable land
divided between them. Most of the land was
allotted to the larger estates. Only two Latin
American countries had low rates of birth in the
early 1990s and these were the two with pre-
dominantly European populations, Argentina and
Uruguay. Without population control, moderni-
sation would do little to help the urban poor or
the peasants.
With an average annual rate of increase of 3.4
per cent, the population doubled every twenty-
one years. Population growth in different coun-
tries varied enormously. Cuba under Marxist
policies cut its increase to just 1 per cent; the high-
est rates, above 3 per cent, were to be found in
Central America and Mexico. More than half the
population of the continent lived in two countries,
Brazil and Mexico, with a growth rate above 2 per
cent in Brazil and 3.5 per cent in Mexico.
Generalisations about Latin America tend to
require many qualifications. For instance, it is
true that only two languages predominate, Por-
tuguese in Brazil and Spanish in the remainder of
Latin America (except for French in Haiti), but
numerous Indian languages are still spoken,
such as Quechua and Aymará, derived from the
Incas and Maya and Guarani. Cultural traditions
originate not only from the indigenous Indians
but from the waves of immigrants through the
centuries: Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British,
French, slaves from Africa and, in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, labourers from Italy,
Germany, North America and Asia.
1
THE WORLD OF LATIN AMERICA 685
Population (millions)
1880 1947 1962 1980 1989 2000
Brazil 30.6 46.4 75.3 126.4 147.3 170.4
Mexico 14.2 22.8 37.2 70.0 84.6 98.9
