To this day, most college textbooks about modern Latin American history still refer to the decades between the emergence of the liberal-positivist, developmentalist-authoritarian governments in the 1870s and the Wall Street crash in 1931 as belonging either to the so-called Neocolonial Period—from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 to the United States’ replacement of Britain as the dominant “neocolonial” power in the region—or the Export Economy period. Common wisdom would thus have us believe, in line with 1960s Marxist dependency theory, that the Latin American oligarchies provided stability after decades of a much exaggerated chaos by thrusting their countries into the global economy. Thus, they facilitated the arrival of foreign businesses, such as the United Fruit Company, that dictated production, often at the expense of local, essential subsistence crops. The haciendas expanded, and the dependency of Latin America’s export economies on British and U.S. economic interests deepened.
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