Research Paper on:
20th Century Answer from Latin America

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
role in the global economy. As a result, Latin America established opportunities and constraints for itself, forcing them to develop political responses to the problems of underdevelopment and poverty in  the region. In the end it cannot be said that the Europeans offered the Latin Americans any kindnesses by their gentle mentorship of a third world country. Yes, they  brought them electricity and all the latest gadgets of every century of occupation, but what was traded was their identity, culture, heritage and method of surviving, a method that nearly  five centuries later, they are still struggling to find. E. Bradford Burns, in his book, The Poverty of Progress, agrees with this assessment.  He argues that the progress that was brought into the country only benefited the wealthy minority all the while causing great suffering by the rest of the population. What is  immediately evident when reading Burns book is that the usual definition of modernization equating to a better way of life is challenged. Here was a country which was upgraded and  updated quickly, yet because it did not benefit the majority, Burns shows how it served to divide Latin America between cultures. Interestingly enough, Burns does not believe that the  ensuing struggles resulted from a clash of the elitists with the poor, but rather was a collision of belief systems(Burns, 1984). Early on in the book he shows how the  capitalists (mainly elitists) came into direct conflict with the traditions which had worked for the country for centuries. The traditionalists felt threatened and the capitalist ideas of individuality and market  competition endangered the previously held ideas of community and communal living. This is why globalization has had an opposite effect. Most of the capitalists had come from elsewhere and had