LESSONLESSON 4 Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental Challengesg … · 2020. 3. 12. · LESSON 4 Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental Challenges 555

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The year 1899 was important for Honduras. For one thing, for the fi rst time in decades, the Central American country had transitioned peacefully from one president to another. General Terencio Sierra Romero had succeeded Policarpo Bonilla Vásquez as president.

But something else happened that year that probably mattered more for Honduras in the long run. The Vaccaro brothers of New Orleans shipped their fi rst boatload of bananas from Honduras to New Orleans.

Bananas are probably as familiar to you as apples. But Americans weren’t really used to eating bananas at the turn of the last century. The Vaccaros were bringing in something new. This yellow tropical fruit was a big hit with the public. The banana trade boomed. Within a few years railroad lines were under construction along the Caribbean coast to help haul the fruit to the banana boats.

Soon bananas were Honduras’s main export. They were just about its only export, in fact, since its mines had largely played out. The Honduran government was eager to do what it could to support the new industry. It gave the banana companies—the Vaccaros and their competitors, also based in the United States—tax breaks. The businesses got permission to build wharves and roads. The government let them go ahead with improvements to interior waterways and gave them charters to build new railroads.

What advantages do you think the banana trade brought to Honduran people? Do you think it brought any disadvantages?

• how reliance on commodities versus manufactured goods impacts poverty

• the impact of racial and socioeconomic divisions in Latin America

• how poor education, urban overcrowding, and high population growth contribute to poverty

• the challenges of environmental pollution and deforestation

75162_C5L4_p550-571_AFJROTC_FINAL.indd 550 11/14/09 10:36 AM

VocabularyVocabulary

LESSON 4 ■ Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental Challenges 551

• maquiladora• subsistence farming• social mobility

How Reliance on Commodities Versus Manufactured Goods Impacts Poverty

“How can we bring more value to the marketplace?” That’s a fundamental question that businesses ask themselves as they think about what goods and services to offer their customers.

It’s also a question that governments have to consider. As you have read in other chapters, their countries can do better, and their people can climb out of poverty, as they fi nd ways to produce higher-value goods. That means not just raw materials but fi nished goods. Even a simple product like a bar of soap embodies the labor of those who made it. More-sophisticated products may refl ect highly skilled labor, leading-edge technology, good design, and even a good sense of which colors are really “hot” just now.

In this section you’ll read about Honduras as an example of a country that’s had trouble fi nding ways to add value. It’s a pattern found in other parts of Latin America and the developing world as a whole.



Honduras as a Nation Historically Dependent on One Commodity

Honduras is one of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest countries. After independence, its economy languished for years. Hondurans couldn’t fi gure out how to produce things that the world needed.

The country’s limited success has rested in exporting commodities, such as agricultural products and minerals. For a century and a half, Honduras has been largely dependent on exports of one commodity or another.

Minerals came fi rst: principally silver but some gold, too. Miners dug ores containing gold, silver, lead, zinc, and cadmium out of the earth and shipped them to the United States and Europe for refi ning. But the ore didn’t last forever—



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the New York and Honduras Rosario Mining Company, the main operator there, shut down its works in the 1950s. By the early 1990s minerals accounted for only 2 percent of Honduras’s gross domestic product.

Around 1900 another commodity became important: bananas. The country’s fortunes rise or fall with the world price for bananas. It’s not a good position to be in. The government has tried to get its farmers to diversify—to grow other crops. But this hasn’t worked well. There have also been efforts to develop manufacturing in Honduras. But they have been only moderately successful. The country lacks a dependable source of economic growth.

Why Bananas and Coffee From Honduras Have Been Unreliable Sources of Income

Like all farmers, banana growers have to contend with drought, disease, and disaster. In 1974, for instance, Hurricane Fifi destroyed about 95 percent of the banana crop, as well as killing thousands of people. Like any agricultural commodity, bananas are subject to price variations. Even more important for Honduras, international corporations grow and market most of its bananas. They keep most of the wealth this generates, too. That’s another reason bananas aren’t the best foundation for Honduras’s economy.

Coffee is the other main commodity that Hondurans grow. In the mid-1970s coffee moved past bananas as the country’s leading export earner. But its prices vary more wildly than those of bananas. A steep price decline around 2000 underlined the risks of building a national economy on coffee beans.

Part of the problem was that many countries saw coffee as an extremely popular product and therefore a crop they would like to grow. But coffee was a mature industry. People around the world, including Europeans and North Americans, have been drinking it for centuries. Yes, demand was strong—coffee is the second most valuable commodity in the world after oil. But plenty of growers were already supplying this demand.

Many of those who wanted to get into the business didn’t see this, however. Or else they failed to see how prices could fl uctuate. Many small farmers in Vietnam, for instance, started growing coffee when prices were strong in the mid-1990s. They briefl y made Vietnam the world’s No. 2 coffee producer. But when prices collapsed a few years later, these farmers were left in a diffi cult position.

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Why Honduras Has Never Developed a Manufacturing or Industrial Sector

It’s not that Honduran governments haven’t understood the basic problem. After 1950 they pushed modernization of the country’s farm sector. They also tried to encourage the development of a richer mix of national exports. They urged Honduras to deliver more than just bananas to the world marketplace. To this end, they spent heavily on better roads, telephone lines, and other infrastructure. They increased credit to farmers, and they provided technical assistance of various kinds. With help from strong prices on world markets, these efforts began to pay off.

Then during the 1960s the Central American countries banded together to form the Central American Common Market, or CACM. They lowered tariffs between member countries but erected a high external tariff. The CACM was meant to encourage trade among its members. It also stimulated Honduras’s industrial sector. Some Honduran manufactured goods, such as soaps, sold well in other Central American countries.

But the industrial sectors of El Salvador and Guatemala were bigger, stronger, and more effi cient. So Honduras bought more goods from these trade partners than it sold to them. Nobody would call El Salvador or Guatemala industrialized countries. Yet both were more industrialized than Honduras, which just couldn’t compete with them. After fi ghting a war with El Salvador in 1969, Honduras effectively withdrew from the CACM.

In more recent years, Honduras has experienced some strong economic growth—more than 6 percent annually for 2004 through 2007. A bright spot has been its maquiladoras, or export-reprocessing centers. These factories take raw materials from elsewhere and turn them into fi nished goods such as textiles for export. The centers employ about 130,000 Hondurans, out of a workforce of 2.8 million.

But the maquiladoras have another effect. The manufacturing sector in Honduras is tiny. And the small companies that make up the country’s manufacturing sector have been under stress the past few decades. The foreign-owned maquiladoras

In times past, a maquiladora was a gristmill. Farmers could bring their corn or other grain to be ground there. Once it was turned into fl our they’d collect and sell it. Nowadays, maquiladora has come to mean primarily assembly plants in Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America. The idea is that like the workers at the gristmill, those at the assembly plant do one phase of the work, and then return the goods to those who brought them. For example, maquiladora workers assemble garments—sewing together pieces of fabrics made elsewhere. Or they may make wiring harnesses, as another example. Wiring harnesses are tedious to produce but are a necessary part of automobiles and other vehicles.

From Grinding Stones to Wiring Harnesses



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contribute to this stress. They can afford to pay relatively high wages. The small Honduran fi rms have to match them or risk losing workers. Unable to pay the costs, many of these fi rms have folded.

The Effect of National Economic Weakness on the Honduran People

One way to look at a country’s economy is to consider what opportunities it provides to its people to add value. An economy with a large manufacturing sector needs a lot of people to do a lot of high-value work. If these high-value sectors are big enough, they lift up even people who hold jobs outside the manufacturing sector.

The engineers and other high-skilled—and highly paid—employees of an aircraft-manufacturing plant, for instance, can afford comfortable homes, expensive cars, well-made clothing, and good food. The money they spend “turns over” in their communities. It creates opportunity for homebuilders, auto dealers, clothing salespeople, and supermarkets and restaurants—even the dishwashers and the parking valets.



But Honduras doesn’t have that kind of base, despite efforts to diversify its economy. What it does have is too many unskilled and uneducated laborers. The farm sector accounts for more than half the labor force. In the United States, the comparable fi gure is less than 3 percent.

Honduras has a large population of subsistence farmers. Subsistence farming is a type of farming in which the farmers and their families eat most of what they produce and sell very little. More than half of the rural population gets by on farms of only about fi ve acres. Such people have few economic opportunities.

In addition, skilled laborers are generally scarce in Honduras. About a third of the workforce is in the service sector or the “urban informal sector.” This informal sector consists of street vendors, poorly paid household servants, and other “off the books” jobs.

Because there is so little economic opportunity in Honduras, many Hondurans are drawn to the United States. The money they send back to their families accounts for almost one-quarter of the country’s gross domestic product—the total of goods and services a country produces.

Like other countries in its situation, until Honduras fi nds a way to move its economy away from commodities and into manufactured goods, such challenges will continue.

The Impact of Racial and Socioeconomic Divisions in Latin America

Race plays a part in the Latin American economy as well. It means generally lower incomes for blacks and indigenous people. Race and ethnicity lead to gaps in opportunity, including education and other benefi ts. A look at Brazil and Colombia illustrates the issues.

The Social Stratifi cations Between the Wealthy and Poor

A stratifi ed society is one with “layers.” Colombia and Brazil are two good examples of such societies.



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ColombiaTraditions brought over from Spain four centuries ago remain a strong infl uence in Colombia. The social “layers” are clearly separate from one another. Individuals’ occupation, income, family background, education, and power determine people’s social class. These align with race to a large degree. The more European or white one is, the more likely that person is to belong to the upper class.

Colombians know it can be hard to move up into a higher social class. Social mobility is the expert term for this ability of individuals or groups to move up or down within a class structure according to changes in income, education, or occupation. As elsewhere, social mobility is somewhat greater in the cities.

A study done during the 1980s found that the upper class made up 5 percent of Colombia’s population. The middle class made up 20 percent. The lower class accounted for 50 percent. The bottom 25 percent were called simply “the masses.”

These groups included a couple of important subgroups. The “new rich” were those who had made enough money to get a toehold in the upper class. Blue-collar workers who had the protection of membership in a trade union belonged to the oddly named “upper lower class.” And so did poorer white-collar workers. You might say these two groups were the “top of the bottom.”



As Colombian society developed, it was so tightly based on Spanish culture that any other infl uence was seen as “un-Colombian.” This attitude made it hard for indigenous people to fi nd a place in Colombian society.

You might think, then, that the African slaves would have had an even harder time. But in fact, blacks in Colombia were actually more fully part of national society, and left a greater mark on it, than the indigenous people. This was true even though the native peoples had been in Colombia for thousands of years. But Africans had worked as household servants in Spain since the Middle Ages. Unlike the indigenous people, they didn’t seem “alien” to the Spanish. And black slaves had no “homeland” in the New World to retreat to. That made it harder for them to preserve African culture, and easier for them to adopt Spanish culture. And their relationship as servants or slaves put them into close contact with their masters.

The Paradox of Colombian Blacks



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BrazilBrazil is another highly stratifi ed society. Among its particular features—slavery in Brazil lasted for nearly three generations after independence in 1822. The country’s income distribution—one of the worst in the world—is also highly skewed. In other words, its gap between rich and poor is extreme, even by regional standards.

Brazil’s relatively high per capita income masks this deep inequality. An estimated one-fi fth of the people suffer extreme poverty. And, especially if they live in rural areas, these poor people are almost invisible to their better-off fellow citizens.

However, another feature of Brazilian society is “vertical” relationships—close ties between people of property and prestige and those who may both work for them and depend on them. In the countryside, this was known as coronelismo, or “colonelism.” The idea was that a wealthy landowner (often a former military offi cer, hence the term) would “take care” of the poor. This was seen as necessary in the absence of effective education and other public services. The relationship was rather like that of a European feudal lord and the servants he protected. And the tradition lives on today.



The Lack of Adequate Educational Opportunities for the Working Poor

Such arrangements highlight the fact that public primary and secondary schools in Latin America tend to be underfunded and of poor quality. They fail to teach basic skills in mathematics, language, and science. Poor school funding leads to poorly trained and motivated teachers. Fewer than 30 percent of students in the region fi nish high school. And many who do fi nish lack skills to compete in the workplace.

In Brazil, for instance, public education is free, in theory at least. It’s also required for children ages 7 to 14. But coverage is incomplete and uneven. The lower classes attend public schools, while the middle and upper classes turn to private education. This changed somewhat during the economic squeeze of the 1990s, which led many middle-class parents to move their children from private to public schools.

One of Brazil’s biggest problems is children who don’t go to school at all. Enrollment varies from richer to poorer states, and between black and white children. But the dropout rate after the second year is about 25 percent.

In 1994 UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s fund, ranked countries by per capita income compared with the rates of school absence in the fi rst fi ve grades. Given its position as a vibrant emerging country, Brazil should have been a winner in that competition. Instead it came in dead last.



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Colombia has done better at getting children to school, but it, too, has high dropout rates. The average Colombian adult has received only 5.3 years of schooling. The average Brazilian has only 4.9 years.

In Mexico, by contrast, the number is 7.2 years. In recent decades, Mexico has made some impressive gains in enrollment. Between 1950 and 1995, for instance, the number of students enrolled increased eightfold. Still, many of Mexico’s education problems are typical of the region. Instruction is of poor quality. Dropout rates are high. Laws that require children to attend school are largely ignored. And the system fails to prepare students for the global economy.

The Patterns of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in Latin America

About 10 percent of those who live in Latin America are indigenous, or native, people—about 40 million to 50 million. They lag behind other Latin Americans in both income levels and other measures:

• education• health• access to water• access to sanitation.

Experts see this gap as evidence of discrimination against Latin America’s indigenous people. A United Nations offi cial has called this discrimination a “structural problem”—something that’s built into the way a society works. Governments do not devote enough resources to indigenous peoples’ problems.

In Panama, for instance, 95 percent of the indigenous population is poor. Among the nonindigenous, only 37 percent are poor. In Mexico, the corresponding numbers are 80 percent and 18 percent. The same pattern prevails elsewhere in the region. In 2000 three of the world’s highest rates of child mortality were in Latin American countries with relatively large indigenous populations: Bolivia, Guatemala, and Peru. Experts see this pattern as likely to hold Latin America back from meeting its development goals and from overcoming poverty.



How Poor Education, Urban Overcrowding, and High Population Growth Contribute to Poverty

Besides class and racial divides, other factors contribute to high poverty levels in Latin America. These include the state of education, overcrowding in the cities, and the size of the population.

Not only are Latin American schools poor, as the last section illustrates—the region lags behind much of the world in education. A study by the Inter-American Development Bank in 1999, for instance, found that in Southeast Asia, 80 percent of young people got a high school education. In Latin America, the fi gure was only about 33 percent.

Lack of opportunity in rural areas pushes many of these poorly educated people into Latin America’s cities. At times, more newcomers arrive than the cities can employ. The newcomers often overwhelm the cities’ ability to provide housing, schools, hospitals, police protection, and other services.



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The brightest news in this poverty mix is that high population growth is now less of a problem than it was. Latin America used to be known for its high rates of population growth. But these have fallen signifi cantly. On the US Central Intelligence Agency’s 2009 list of estimated population growth rates for 234 states and territories around the world, most of Latin America was somewhere in the middle.

Latin America’s giant, Brazil, had an annual growth rate of 1.20 percent. This put it ahead of the world average rate, 1.17 percent, by just a whisker. Mexico, with a rate of 1.13 percent, was just a few places behind.

However, those fi gures are for countries as a whole. As with the income statistics mentioned above, a single fi gure that represents a national average can mask a wide disparity. Experts say that in Latin America, richer, better-educated, city-dwelling women are far likelier to have smaller families than poorer, poorly educated women in the countryside.

The Lack of Skilled Job Opportunities for Those Who Have Little or No Education

It’s as true in Latin America as it is anywhere on the globe—the future belongs to those with an education. But even if the region’s young people manage to fi nish school, many are still unprepared for the demands of the modern workplace.

A consultant gave this grim assessment as the twentieth century drew to a close: “We are creating two urban classes: those who are prepared to lead, with broad technological and scientifi c knowledge, and their subordinates, who have a defi cient education and are ill-prepared for the challenges of the next century.”



Attitudes are changing, however. Brazil, for instance, is home to some fi ne universities. Literacy rates in its big cities match those of the developed world. Brazilian parents have noticed the economic and social changes going on around them. This has led them to more highly value education for their children. As in the United States, school availability has become an important factor for Brazilians in deciding where to live and how to make a living. It’s even helping people decide how many children to have.

The Effects of Mass Migration From Rural to Urban Areas

Urbanization has been one of the great trends across Latin America over the past few decades. Two-thirds of the region’s people once lived in rural areas, with the rest in cities. Now those proportions have been reversed. In some countries the cities account for an even larger share of the population.



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Brazil, for instance, saw some 20 million people move from rural to urban areas during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This migration was one of the largest of its kind in history. By 1991 city-dwellers were 75 percent of the population.

What are the effects of such mass migrations? For individuals, a move to the city is likely to mean more opportunity for education and work. People can acquire the skills that make them more valuable to employers. But the city is a demanding environment. The cost of living is higher. And to survive in an urban economy you must have cash to survive. In the country, people can live off the land, growing their own food.

Urban growth requires governments to do a lot of building. They’re not always up to the task. Roads, power lines, telephone cables, and water and sewer lines have to be installed. People also need schools, hospitals, and police stations. The result of uncontrolled growth is the overcrowding mentioned earlier.

Mexico, for instance, became much more urban over the course of the twentieth century. The share of the population living in towns or cities with at least 15,000 inhabitants increased more than fi vefold. It went from 10.5 percent around 1900 to 57.4 percent in 1990. This dramatic growth, much of it concentrated in three of the country’s biggest cities—Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey—strained the federal government’s ability to build urban infrastructure. Housing was in especially short supply.

Affordable housing for low-income people has been a problem in Mexico since World War II. The government had some success in fi nancing new apartment complexes, but the units tended to end up occupied by government employees. For most of the urban lower class, “self-help housing” has become the only real option.

Such a community starts when investors buy a tract of land on the outskirts of a city. The tract is typically acreage too poor to farm and not well suited for more upscale development. The investors slice up the property into many small lots. They sell them to poor families who jump at the chance to become landowners. They put up simple brick structures—sometimes just a single large room. On paper, the investors are required to put in water and sewer lines and streets. In fact, though, they often do little more than mark the lots for sale.

“Self-Help Housing”



The growth of cities tends to bring with it the development of an urban middle class. These people make their way in the world on the strength of what they know, or know how to do, rather than what they own. They tend to be white-collar workers, technicians, civil servants, unionized workers. They also tend to be politically active. The rising middle classes have helped bring in, or bring back, more democratic rule in many parts of Latin America over the years.

Unemployment Patterns in Large Urban Areas

It’s an ancient tale, told throughout history around the world—a young person from the country arrives in the big city, full of hope. And then he discovers its streets are not paved with gold.

Moving to the city doesn’t always lead people to success. Many arrive and fi nd no jobs. Or they may discover that they lack the right skills for the jobs available.

In either case, they will be unemployed, a situation much more common in the city than in the country. That’s because in Latin America unemployment is largely an urban phenomenon. Joblessness in the cities generally averages 15 percent—about fi ve times the rural unemployment rate.

That’s a dramatic difference. But to understand why that should be, remember that to be “unemployed,” someone must be actively looking for work. Rural people who may work a few months at a time but then don’t actively look for other jobs—perhaps because they know there aren’t any—aren’t “unemployed.” They’re considered out of the labor force altogether.

But in the city people have no choice but to be in the labor force. They have to pay rent and buy food at a grocery store. There’s no garden out back as there is in the country. Therefore, city dwellers who lose their jobs must fi nd new ones quickly,

For Latin Americans, leaving the countryside for the city is a matter of leaving a relatively low-risk, low-reward situation for a high-risk, high-reward one. As the numbers you’ve seen throughout this lesson indicate, it’s a move that millions have made.

The Challenges of Environmental Pollution and Deforestation

As you might imagine, this kind of urban growth greatly affects the environment. With all its social and economic challenges, Latin America boasts some of the greatest environmental treasures on the planet. Its biodiversity is one of its strengths. But the region has some of the worst environmental problems on the planet, too. Fortunately, it’s made remarkable progress cleaning up certain trouble spots, especially recently.



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Efforts to Fight Air Pollution in Places Such as Mexico City

It used to be that when the children of Mexico City drew pictures with their crayons, they reached for their brown crayons when they colored in the sky. Cyclists routinely wore surgical masks to keep from breathing in too much soot on the road. Birds fell dead from the sky. Ozone in Mexico City reached unsafe levels 97 percent of the year.

That’s how serious the air pollution was. In 1992 a United Nations report called Mexico City the most polluted metropolis on earth.

Mexico City’s air-quality challenges are unique. It’s a megacity of 20 million people. Its high altitude means the air is thin. Fuels burn less effi ciently and cleanly there. And volcanoes ring the city, spewing gases into the air.

But in recent years the city has made a dramatic turnaround. Though ozone remains a problem, some of the worst contaminants have been cut back by three-fourths.

Mexico has cleaned up its act with new technology and new laws. It has phased out leaded gasoline. It has required new cars to have catalytic converters, as they do in the United States. Environmental police have started ticketing drivers of smoke-belching old cars. The government leaned on power plants to switch from burning oil to natural gas.



Other Latin American cities are fi ghting smog, too. For instance, São Paulo, Brazil, the largest city in South America, cut the number of the largest soot particles in the air by 21 percent between 2000 and 2004. São Paulo, Mexico City, and the region’s other major cities are part of the Clean Air Initiative for Latin American Cities, formed by the World Bank. The Clean Air Initiative seeks to improve air quality in Latin American cities by developing or improving city clean-air action plans in which everyone with an interest participates. This includes governments, the private sector, and the public in general.

The Region’s Attempts to Provide Clean Drinking Water and Sanitation

Water extraction—the pumping of water out of the ground—increased tenfold in Latin America over the twentieth century. A major share of this water—71 percent—goes to irrigate crops. But a lot goes to quench people’s thirst, too. And there are some hopeful statistics. In 1990, 82.5 percent of Latin Americans had access to improved drinking water. By 2004, 91 percent did. Access to safe water in urban areas rose from 93 percent to 96 percent during this time. In rural areas, the number rose from 60 percent to 73 percent. Even so, some 50 million people in Latin America still lack access to safe drinking water. Of these, 34 million are in rural areas.



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Sanitation services—the safe removal of sewage, including human waste—reached 77.4 percent of Latin Americans in 2004. This was up from 67.9 percent in 1990. But only 14 percent of the sewage was adequately treated. As a result, both surface and groundwater are subject to serious pollution. And some 127 million people still lack access to sanitation services.

Effects of Deforestation and Desertifi cation on the Region’s Biodiversity

Latin America is one of the world’s most important regions for biodiversity. The Amazon River basin alone is home to about 50 percent of the planet’s biodiversity. Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela are in a league of their own, even within Latin America. Each one has more plant and animal species than most of the rest of the world.

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But this biodiversity is under threat. Deforestation leads to habitat loss. When land is cleared for farming or building new roads and housing and shopping centers, plants and animals end up with fewer places to live. This can endanger species.

A study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) identifi ed 170 eco-regions within Latin America, including the Caribbean. Of these, only eight are relatively intact, and another 27 relatively stable. Another 82 are endangered, 31 of those critically so. Still another 55 are vulnerable.

Latin America contains about a quarter of the world’s forest cover, but these forests are disappearing rapidly. About two-thirds of the loss of forest cover that occurred in the world between 2000 and 2005 took place in Latin America. The largest net loss happened in the Brazilian rainforest. There people have cleared forests to grow crops for biofuels, such as ethanol.

When an area loses its forests, it loses at least some of its ability to keep its rainwater. Soil washes away and clogs rivers and other bodies of water. Emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the major greenhouse gases, increase.

Unchecked deforestation can lead to desertifi cation, which affects some 25 percent of this region. Just as Mexico has made a rapid reduction in its air pollution, so, too, the region is beginning to address deforestation. Paraguay stands out as a positive example—a 2004 law has helped reduce deforestation by 85 percent.

Latin America faces some diffi cult and unique economic, social, and environmental issues. While many of these are left over from the colonial period, others result from current government policies. Whatever their cause, the conditions that result affect not only the people of the region—they often deeply affect the United States and its relations with its Latin American neighbors. You’ll read about this in the next lesson.



Latin Am





✔ POINTSO SOOOOOOOOOOOOO SSSSSSSSSSSSSPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSCHECKCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCLesson 4 Review Using complete sentences, answer the following questions on a sheet of paper.

1. Since 1900 Honduras has been economically dependent on what?

2. Why was Honduras unable to compete against El Salvador and Guatemala within the Central American Common Market?

3. What are the “vertical” relationships typical in Brazilian society?

4. Indigenous people lag behind other Latin Americans in terms of income and what other measures?

5. How are attitudes toward education changing in Brazil?

6. How is unemployment in the cities different from joblessness in rural areas?

7. Cyclists in Mexico City used to wear surgical masks on the road. Explain why.

8. What is Paraguay’s recent standout achievement in environmental protection?

Applying Your Learning 9. Maquiladoras have been good for Honduras’ economy as a whole but

a problem for the country’s small manufacturing fi rms. Explain why.


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LESSONLESSON 4 Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental Challengesg … · 2020. 3. 12. · LESSON 4 Poverty, Educational Limitations, and Environmental Challenges 555