Rieff, de Waal, Cambridge History of Latin America

I've read volumes 3 and 4 of the Cambridge History of Latin America. I am finding the answers to the questions I had, about why the countries had failed to develop their economies and political systems. There are a number of reasons, but two are the fact that the Spanish/Portuguese metropolis never developed passed a feudal political or economic system, so that at independence the many Latin American countries could hardly have moved beyond that point. Second, the Spanish and Portuguese states had no legitimate governments when independence was achieved by the colonies, so that it was the equivalent of the Belgians abandoning the Congo all of a sudden, leaving them with state apparatus that was completely inadequate to the tasks.

I also read David Rieff's cri du coeur, A Bed for the Night. This, and Alex De Waal's Famine Crimes, round out a half dozen books I've read about international aid. I have to say that these recent spate of books about international aid don't hold a candle to Waal's prescient, excellent, illuminating work. I have concluded that as international aid got to be Big Business, so to speak, a way of life, it became what the welfare state actually is in Canada -- a machine that benefits those that are employed by it, rather than the people intended to be helped. And so international aid organizations fall prey to politics, and claim more than they accomplish, and cater to the media, and make only the most marginal of differences. I believe all of it, I find it follows the pattern of most organizations originally created to help.