The prescriptive propositions of the United Nations for Latin America read in the light of the writings of Rodolfo Stavenhagen and Pablo González Casanova

Abstract

The object of this analysis are the diagnoses about the obstacles in the social, economic, political, and cultural areas that hinder the processes of construction of improvements for the continent's poorest populations.
These diagnoses were made by the Regional Reports on Human Development (RRDHs) on Latin America, which
are commissioned by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). We consider that a documentary analysis, anchored in each historical and spatial context, makes it possible both to systematize the prescriptive propositions made in the RRDHs to indicate paths capable of overcoming such blockages and to detect the strength and weaknesses of such proposals. A historical-hermeneutic documentary research demands the unveiling of the social context that gives meaning to the diagnoses and prescriptions made within the documents. In light of the writings of two social scientists (Rodolfo Stavenhagen and Pablo González Casanova) who sought to unveil the economic, social and political obstacles historically constituted on the continent, we will try to investigate to what extent the prognoses for opening doors to human development do or do not highlight the fact that there are social groups in Latin America that have been rejected and forgotten for centuries by governments, technicians and planners. The search for ethnodevelopment, as proposed by Stavenhagen, would encompass human development, but would go beyond it, because it intends to fight internal colonialism.