Andrès Bello

"Yes, Bello was born in Caracas in the 1780s. He was Simon Bolivar’s tutor. He then came to London in 1810 as part of a diplomatic mission to try and persuade the British to support the Venezuelans in their recent struggle with Spain for independence or at least self-government. He then stayed for nearly 20 years in London, living in Euston in conditions of some penury, working with James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. After that he went to Chile where he lived the rest of his life. He died in 1865. While he was in Chile he effectively ran the Foreign Ministry single-handed and established the University of Chile. So he is generally considered the intellectual founding father of the Chilean Republic. This excellent biography shows – not unlike the Cañizares volume – how ideas were shared to an appreciable degree across North and South Atlantic worlds. Bello’s inaugural speech in Santiago, for instance, is very similar in approach to that of Cardinal Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’. I think that Latin America is a sort of ‘in between’ continent in that it has always been partially European since 1492. Much of the present profile was built from white European settlers. So it still seems to be something of a shadow of Spain and Portugal particularly, with the suppressed indigenous Aztec and Inca Empires continuing to play a subordinate part in the profile. The independence struggle was really led by European settlers, even if it was largely won by subaltern social forces. Secondly, independent Latin America did not display a consistently successful pattern of economic development, in contrast, say, to the USA and Canada. There are a number of different explanations for that. One of which is institutional. The colonial institutions left by the Spanish and the Portuguese did not favour individual entrepreneurship or initiative. They preferred more collective forms of economic organisation, which often barred real growth and capitalist development. But there are times, as is happening now, when the Latin American performs really rather well. The other argument is that, often for reasons of geography and natural resources, Latin America has relied on primary exports, which means that it has become prey to the lottery of primary export prices. And that might be true even today because Latin America’s growth rates today are very much dependent on the Chinese markets."