Institutions and Inequality in Latin America: Text and Subtext

Abstract

of assorted populist political parties and movements. By the 1960s, participatory development had become almost a zeitgeist, and distributional concerns had ostensibly come to suffuse many of the development programs launched during that first United Nations Development Decade, including the Alliance for Progress. It is relevant to recall that, quite early in the postwar flowering of development studies, Viner (1952) had suggested that the chief aim (and test) of development should be the reduction of mass poverty. Both the US Agency for International Development (AID) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), for example, took up an interest in land tenure reform and peasant organizations, encouraging new programs to modify agrarian structure, while community development efforts and credit cooperatives were initiated under the auspices of the Peace Corps among others. Programs designed to strengthen labor unions were instituted in an effort to repair industrial relations systems long subordinated to the directives of political parties and/or governments. The Social Progress Trust Fund, set up under the aegis of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the Social Development division of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) became increasingly active, and the Employment Programme of the