Young, pissed off, feeling the need to be radically active. Same reason the communists and others recruit in universities all over the world.

I agree, but why? I am interested to hear opinions as to why this is the group so ripe for revolutionary ideals.

In my recent reading, a generalized classification was made that most LATAM countries are still fashioned in a modified 16th century two-class social system. Even with a recently emerging economic "middle class", this third group has tended to show little collectiveness as a politically moderate social class and actually tended to be more politically conservative than the aristocrat class. The newly formed economic middle class tends to despise the lower class(just like the upper class) and isolate themselves from them even though they themselves just came from that background. This serves to further perpetuate the distinction and animosity between the two classes (wealthy/peasant). Therefore, even though there has been some economic creation of a middle class, there is no real middle class "society" with its moderation, virtues, political pragmatism, and democratic social and political ideas. It leaves the country in what K. Silvert has called a "conflict society". No safe middle of the road society, just a constant on-again, off-again class warfare primed territory(unstable).

As to why they recruit in the Universities:
Obviously, social mobility/interaction has been very restricted between the classes in a system like this. In the last few decades, new avenues for social advancement have begun to open up. University and technical training both provide the lower class ways for mobility within in the social scale. Therefore, the people already looking for social change/struggling against the current barriers are frequently found in the Universities. These are the people that are already self-motivated and taking personal action to alter the existing "social status quo" for themselves and their loved ones.... IMO, it wouldn't take much to alter their perceptions to that of a revolutionary perspective to end the class struggle once and for all.

That is one of the reasons I think it is fertile ground. Does that make any sense to you? If not, I will retry on more sleep tomorrow. This stuff intriques me, yet I admit I am very ignorant on the issues.

Must have confused everyone so much with my jibberish, their so crossed up they can't even tell me I am full of crap. :p

Yep. LOL

No, I'll be back. I'm thinking about this still.

Ok. I disagree with the concept as stated of the middle class. I also disagree that it is newly formed. So here's my .02 pesos.

What you have are the very poor, the very rich, and everybody else. I don't know what the percentages are and they very from country to country. This is not new and I would bet, when looked at objectively, most people fall in the "everybody else" or what could be considered middle class in this place, at this time, with these people.

Now to me, a big problem in LATAM is urbanization. Its one thing to be broke in the rural areas, its another thing entirely to be broke in the urban areas. The very concept of broke is different. To me, being broke is having electricity, water and telephone shut off for failure to pay. And no food. A campesino may not care that much if his one light bulb doesn't work, he gets his water from a well and the phone is at the post office. Plus, he can live for a month on yucca and rice.

With urbanization, the relative lack of wealth is much more noticeable. You see street people begging in front of the mansion. Since its easier to see, it offends people more. It facilitates them protesting about it. It facilitates the studies on the inequalities as a theme for a thesis. The reasons for urbanization are varied - in Colombia, it is mostly displacement to escape the violence. In many others it is economically driven. People know more about what is going on - technology, etc., and they want their share. So they move to town thinking that's the way to get it.

Bogota was designed and has infrastructure, by my eye, for about 2-3 million people. It has a rough population of 8 million. Quito, Caracas, Rio, etc. have the same problem. So you have an overcrowded prison with all the associated conflicts and issues. Plus, they spend everything they have to get there. When it doesn't work, they have no way to leave. In comes the criminal element to pray on them, exacerbating the situation, followed by the political element to recruit them.

In Colombia, there is a big problem with absentee landowners. They can't run the risk of living and working on the farms because of the violence. So they let them go to seed. What benefits they provided to the campesino class are erased, as the campesinos don't have the education level to operate the farms at a level to be competitive in today's world market. So the campesinos hate the landowners who are never there because they can't be. And the Gs are whispering in their ears the whole time.

I do agree that a class tends to shy away from accepting a "lower" class. Human nature - one does not wish to be reminded of where "There but for the Grace of God..." Doesn't the same thing happen in the US? You been hangin' out with donald trump lately? I don't think there is a a society that isn't in conflict. Everybody is always trying to get what the next group has.

Social mobility - given what we have above, where are they going to move to? If they become land owners, they will face the same problems the current land owners do and have to move to the city to survive. In the city, if you have infrastructure for 3MM, doesn't it follow that there will only be opportunities for 3MM? Where do we get jobs for the other 5MM that shouldn't be there in the first place? So mobility in this case is not restricted by lack of training, its restricted by lack of opportunity. They are competing with 5MM others just as qualified for 3MM jobs. And they are not competing nation-wide, because the nation is shrinking due to the violence or urbanization. 99% of the population lives on 1% of the land (I made those numbers up). In all these countries, there are vast areas uninhabited - violence, lack of infrastructure, "Save the Rainforest", etc. And the population is growing by leaps and bounds, not least due to the Catholic stance on birth control.

Its like Ethopia - you can be the best farmer in the world, but if it doesn't rain, its better to go into the UHaul rental business.

I agree to an extent about the recruiting in the universities. What you have are mostly the middle class (its not that hard to go). They see that they will still have a struggle when they graduate, they are offended by the poverty they see (without really knowing why it is that way). They are idealistic, like all young people. They are away from home for the first time. Then they listen to professional academics all day, many of them communists, tell them it is the fault of the US, the puppet government, the IMF, capitalism, whatever. Then add in the romance - Che, will I get to wear a beret, unite! Professional agitators giving them incentive. Plus, most universities are off limits to police and the military except under martial law, so there's no real fear of punishment. Its rather like Jane F in the '60s. She knew, no matter what she did, nobody was going to really screw with her. Her daddy was an icon, the movement had some popular support, especially among academics, judges, lawyers, etc. She was a young, famous, pretty actress. Where's the risk? Old, poor, ugly campesinos go to jail, not people like her.

At the end of the day, most of them don't even know why things are the way they are. And I don't think they really care. They rebel becuase they are at a rebellious age, and others take advantage of that to steer them in a given direction.

There are poor people! Get your beret and AK and take to the hills!

Its really fun to talk to them when they can't get away. I have a niece, young, pretty. Boys like this used to come around like hounds. So I would sit them down and make them voice the whys and wherefores of their political philosophies. Make them tell me who the guy on the T Shirt was. Yes, some of them had Che T Shirts. LOL. They would do really well, regurgitating the standard doctrine, until we got past the part they had memorized. Very disconcerting to have a gringo tell you more about your country's history than you know.

My wife studied psychology. She used to bring her study group home. They once picked terrorism as a topic for a dissertation and invited me to participate. LOL. Great days those were.

Now you need to get Jimbo to tell you about liberation theology. LOL

I'm collecting my thoughts (aka researching my___ off on Colombia's specifics:D ). As the governator sais... " I'll be back"

Colombia is fairly easy to figure out. The violence dispaces the campesino, who overloads the system. Get rid of the violence and put the campesino back in the campo and a lot of it goes away. Of course you may have to force the campesinos back to the campo at gunpoint, especially the young ones. Which would cause another round.

That is where I disagree. I've had company all afternoon and can't get to my computer/study long enough to write it out. I will post later tonight why I disagree with that solving the problems.

First of all, that is an obvious over simplification.

Second, I'll be waiting, novato.

Okay, after reviewing Colombia specifically, I see that it does not fit my classic LATAM generalizations nearly as well as some of the other countries. It happens to have a fairly strong history of two party politics (liberal + conservative) and of course the interesting side bar years of the National Front.

After closer evaluation, it still shows the remnants of a society that has strong underlying bias towards the two class society I talked about earlier. Your comments about absentee landowners and the compesinos losing their faith in the landowners shows just how structured and biased their culture has remained towards the old spanish authoritarian ideals.

This landowner to worker dynamic you describe was the typical expectation that formed the ideology during the 1800's hacienda structured period. The self contained (social,economic, political, and religious) units based on a feudal type, two level hierarchy of the wealthy landowner and the worker class(slave/indian peasants). Even in that system, there was still an economic middle class of soldier/clergy/skilled that aligned with and supported the wealthy. However, to gain this higher position of standing, the middle class never blossomed into a separate and politically independent force. It was either assimilate or be repressed by the powers that be. Therefore, the rich and middle class supported each other exclusively and exploited the large mass of workers as a single entity. The poor compesinos eaked out a living (accepted it as if it was God's intention-which was told to them by the clergy) and in return expected to be minimally "provided for" by the elites/wealthy. Isn’t this the very attitude you described when you talked about the compesinos not really caring if they would have just been looked after by the absentee landowners?

That type of exploitive system is what leads to the revolutionary ideas from the educated and young disillusioned populace. I don't think the future for Colombia is to return the compesinos back to the large farms and out of the cities. What would help to begin to solve the problem?

Of course, it is far more complex than this one small issue. I realize that. Just trying to focus in small portions or the topics get to broad to discuss efficiently.

But see, that's the thing, there aren't the really huge farms like there were before. And in Colombia at least, the landowners aren't absent by choice, as a group. Yet the campesinos, who don't have it any better, refuse to see that the very people claiming to fight for them are the ones causing the problem.

Everybody says Agrarian reform! Give the land to those that work it! My question is what the hell will they do with it? Giving a farmer 5, 10 even 500 hectares of land isn't going to solve his problems. He's not going to lay railroad tracks, import machinery, bring in chemicals, buy ships, open new markets overseas. It takes corporations are at least rich dudes to do that. What good does 1,000 hectares of bananas do me without United Fruit? I can't eat bananas 3 meals a day, my kids can't read bananas.

You're right, the clergy and soldiers aren't middle class, they're more slaves than the campesinos.

Most LATAM countries have two parties, those in power and those about to be in power.

What hope is there for them in the cities? They only chance they have is to go on welfare. Why do you think they keep electing populist Presidents? They promise them hand outs. The cities in most of these places are like NYC, they can only expand so far because of geography. Most of the capitals were chosen in the mountains to be defensible. And most of them don't really produce anything. Hell, Quito isn't even the largest city in Ecuador.

This will sound bad, but most Latino governments and in my experience individuals, don't think ahead too well. Maybe its ingrained because there's no use it in it when the President may be gone tomorrow morning. But planning for the long term is almost unknown. They don't foresee problems very well.

They need foreign investment and foreign markets, but they don't want the foreigners.

Speaking of the growing middle class... I came across this in my reading.

Many people writing about LATAM used to assume that there was a kind of progressive spirit inherent in the individual members of the middle class and that this spirit could be defined in terms of a desire for economic development and political democracy. This assumption was based on an idealized version of what the middle class had done in the United States and Western Europe. The evidence now suggests that in some cases, certainly not all, the growth of the middle class movements in LATAM might retard economic development and impede liberal democracy, encouraging military rule instead.

Until recently it could be safely concluded that the growth of the middle sectors did not necessarily lead to democracy. Jose Nun, writing in the 60's, pointed out the middle sectors fear of "premature democratization", that is, a democratic procedure that the middle sectors could not control. In some cases,- certainly in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay- this fear led the civilian middle sector members to call on the military for a coup to keep the lower income sectors out of power. But by the late 1980's the military rulers had been replaced by civilian governments, in part because of the growth and frustration of the middle sectors. Only time will tell if the middle sectors will act differently because of the years of bureaucratic authoritarianism: whether the middle sectors will serve as a new invigorated social base for democracy or whether they will continue to ape and imitate the upper class and thus perpetuate an essentially two-class and polarized social structure.

This was one of the many passages that got me thinking on this issue. I see this as a drastic difference in their beliefs and what we base our fundamental understandings of the causes of radical behavior.

To Americans, its is almost instinctive to think of the middle class as being the pragmatic/controlled/majority voting power section of society. In the LATAM culture, the middle class actually serves as the minority/potentially radical instigator due to its delicate lack of social stability caused by being pulled towards supporting the aristocrats in power verses maintaining control/appeasement over the majority of the population in the worker/labor class. Agree/disagree/or inconsequential to the politics of Colombia?

I agree and will add that the problem is almost insurmountable because the middle sector is the bureaucracy. They have no place in either a kingdom or a truly democratic government and they know it.