Population, territory and sustainable development

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theory coming out of the region was that rural-urban migration would continue even under adverse or
uncertain scenarios for the migrants leaving rural areas. Even further, the outcome for the migrants was
systemically regarded as irrelevant, insofar as the aggregate functionality of migration was based on
“maintaining an abundant labour reserve in the capitalist industrial society” (Martine, 1979, pp. 15–16).
This pointed to a natural, albeit sometimes hidden, interest on the part of the region’s dominant social
actors in continuing to promote urbanization driven by migration from the countryside, even under
precarious conditions for the new city residents.
One of the contributions of the so-called Latin American approach to internal migration, which
came to be very influential and widely recognized in the 1960s and 1970s, was to question the potential
for retaining the rural population through modernization programmes and improvements in living
conditions in the Latin American countryside (CLACSO, 1972), because such programmes ultimately
reinforced the tendency to migrate by generating expectations in terms of employment, education and
cultural opportunities that could only be satisfied in the cities. Conceptual and policy ambivalence in the
face of rural-urban migration, plus the complexity of any attempt at intervention, were behind the
imbalance between robust policy discourse and academic research and weak policies and programmes.
The most promising initiatives (albeit with no guaranteed impact as to retention), such as those oriented
toward improving land distribution via agrarian reform and strengthening the role of communities and
producer associations by promoting agricultural cooperatives, were fostered and implemented to serve
other objectives related to social transformation and revolution, and they were very dependent on the
correlation of political forces within the countries. For different reasons, their implementation fell short
on a number of levels, which ultimately eroded the results not only in terms of agricultural output and
productivity, but also with regard to the formation of a dynamic rural sector. Worse still, almost all the
military coups staged in the region before the 1980s (after which time there were very few) were
conservative in nature. One of their first measures was to reverse these policies, curtailing their long-term
effect on rural emigration.
Beyond the conceptual debate, the actual experience of the region’s countries and cities began to
make the pessimists look right as the signs of strain became increasingly visible and the cities outgrew
their capacity to productively absorb their endless expansion, in large part driven by immigrants from
rural areas. These concerns snowballed, and they were magnified when two interrelated events shook the
region in the early 1980s. The first was the so-called debt crisis, which had a severe effect on all
economic and social actors by jeopardizing the solvency of the State and was followed by a widespread
economic crisis and a sharp contraction in sectoral and social spending. The second was the response of
most countries to this crisis, which consisted of abandoning the earlier development strategy and
replacing it with one geared towards economic deregulation, privatization of public assets and export
promotion in sectors with immediate comparative advantages, typically commodities. This change was
accompanied by severe structural adjustments marked by budgetary restrictions, wage freezes, rate
increases, a decrease in investment in public services, government payroll cut-backs and the sell-off of
State-owned enterprises.
The development model underpinning urbanization thus came to a crisis and was replaced by a
model with a very different sectoral focus (tradable commodities over manufactures) and what would
seem to be a shift in territorial preferences. The locus of the promoted sectors —basically, the
countryside, mines, forests and aquifers located in rural areas— was far from the large cities and the
urban environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that metropolises, cities, and the urban setting in general
underwent a weakening that was both objective and symbolic. It was objective in that metropolises and
cities were hit especially hard by the economic crisis as unemployment and poverty levels rose,
government budgets were slashed and social services shrank even more (IDB, 2011; Rodríguez and