States,elites, and inequality in Latin America

In this article, I review the literature on elites and inequality in Latin America with a focus on the emergence of uneven state structures and how they came to foster the needs of elites for protection. States in Latin America are traditionally thought of as facilitating processes of top‐down modernization that transformed traditional agrarian economies into complex urban polities, while maintaining extreme inequality. The state is thus central in the genealogy of inequality and elite privilege in Latin America. The synergy between states and elites continues to mark Latin American societies, and it helps us to understand how major economic and political changes occur without significant changes in inequality. For the most part, Latin America's current uneven states emerged as the result of exclusionary projects of citizenship during the first half of the 20th century and were advanced by the advent of repressive regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. After democratic transitions during the 1980s and 1990s, Latin American states came to be characterized, on the one hand, by procedural democratic institutions and on the other, by high levels of state violence, exclusion, and segmented citizenship. The present situation is one of a problematic equilibrium between states, elites, and inequality.