THE GREAT DEPRESSION The Wall Street crash reduced demand for Latin American products and caused a recession that ended the neocolonial order by forcing countries to reconsider their dependence on the world

This chapter explores the recent history of Latin America from the Great Depression of the early 1930s, through the development of modernizing states overseeing rapid change in the postwar era and the military clampdown of the 1960s and 70s, to the dawn of a new democratic era in the 1980s. The Great Depression that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929 had a significant impact on the form of economic development that would be pursued in much of Latin America and, as a result, upon the shape of the region’s political systems. It initiated a process of industrialization that gathered pace after the Second World War in which large state bureaucracies controlling public enterprises were created, and workers and middle-class professionals and bureaucrats were incorporated in new governing coalitions overseeing the region’s own form of industrial revolution. However, the economic and political tensions generated by accelerated change, the constant threat of unrest among the main losers in this process such as the peasantry, and the waning fortunes of Latin America’s first industries in the context of the tense Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, contributed to the return of authoritarianism. Military regimes seized control in many Latin American countries from the 1960s until the 1980s, often employing repression to maintain control and purge the Learning outcomes