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Latin America: cut blood vessels
The author of Latin America: The Cutting of the Veins, Eduardo Galeano, is a Uruguayan-born writer. A Uruguayan-born writer, Galeano offers a critical account of five hundred years of Latin American history, detailing how the region, under the influence of Europe and the United States, went from being an exploited colony to being an independent nation with a strong dependence on powerful nations, a fragile economy, and political turmoil. This is the truth, according to the author, but it is just not very convenient for the West. For us foreign readers, this is at least a good book to help us understand how to look at the past 500 years of Latin American history from the Latin American point of view.
This book had another hit ten years ago, when Venezuelan President Chavez publicly presented it to then U.S. President Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in 2009. The preface is well written:
This is truly a special moment in history, when a Latin American leader asks a U.S. President to look into their cut veins, who created the bloody wound of history?
Rich resources create poverty
From the discovery of the American continent to the present day, everything in this region has been transformed first into European capital and then into American capital, accumulating in distant centers of power.
What is now Latin America began with the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, and before that there was no such thing as the Americas. The Europeans sailed to the Americas with the sanctity of the Church on their backs and saw the pagans of the world as a people to be conquered. With no guns, ammunition, wheels or resistance to disease, Latin America was quickly colonized by the Spanish and later the Portuguese.
The Europeans first seized the rich deposits of gold and silver in Latin America, not only seizing them, but also forcing the local Indians into mining. Under Spanish rule, the colonies were mines, and the natives were mining slaves. It is said that from 1503 to 1660, 185,000 kilograms of gold and 16 million kilograms of silver were transported, which was more than three times the amount of silver reserves in Europe. The Spanish aristocracy simply squandered and borrowed on silver mortgages. Eventually Spain fell, but the wealth brought back stimulated the economies of other European countries. The little capital that remained in the Americas was used to build palaces and provide luxury, not to develop the industries and commerce of the colonies. The Portuguese followed a similar path to that of the Spaniards, after which the British Empire emerged and took Brazil from the Portuguese, using the gold mined in Brazil to create the Industrial Revolution and to fight Napoleon.
Mineral deposits will be exhausted one day, but Latin America also has agricultural products in addition to mineral deposits. Under the later rule of Holland, France, and Britain, agricultural products such as sugar, coffee, cotton, rubber, cocoa, and so on, were the driving force of the Latin American economy as a whole. Growing only cash crops without development had a profound effect on the state of poverty in Latin America in later years. In the beginning, plantations required a lot of labor, so Latin America supported a large population. But in the era of mechanization, too much labor was replaced by machines, and a large number of poor people emerged. Unplanned predatory farming led to the loss of fertility and the abandonment of large areas of land. While the colonial powers made a lot of money from industrial development, Latin America only exported its natural resources cheaply.
In contrast, the New England region of North America, which in the eyes of the world was far less rich in natural resources than Latin America, did not receive much attention from the British, but was only used as a port for transportation, which gave the region a chance for self-governance, and eventually the United States took over from the United Kingdom.
The Modern Pillage of Free Trade
And so the blood flows through all these pipes. This is how today's developed countries developed in the past: the underdeveloped countries have become even more underdeveloped since then.
After the liberation from colonial rule, Britain, which first replaced Spain, raised an oligarchic political class. By providing the ruling class with the economic benefits of the minority, the great powers were in essence replacing colonial rule with economic and trade means, but the nature of the operation of the economy remained unchanged. What is more, Britain, which had just crossed the threshold of the Industrial Revolution and was eager to find larger overseas markets, poured mechanized British industrial products into Latin America, directly strangling the unprotected local industries.
Latin America's trade was based on natural resources, with the main products coming from the previously mentioned agricultural products, which under the control of the great powers were monocrops produced for the benefit of the great powers. It started with sugar, then rubber, cocoa, and coffee, depending on the industrial and consumer needs of the great powers. The problem, however, was that the farmers on the front line were only paid for the raw materials they sold to satisfy their basic needs, but had to bear the direct brunt of the risk of changes in international demand.
The mono-crop economy left the peasantry defenseless against large fluctuations in international crop prices, while the vested interests of landowners and tycoons continued to live comfortably without risk, resulting in frequent revolutions and riots. Economic vulnerability led to political instability, and political instability reinforced economic vulnerability. The rulers needed the assistance of the big powers even more, and the domination of the economic interests of the big powers could only foster an economic structure unfavorable to the local economy, making it difficult to break such a vicious cycle. It is easy to see that the main cause of unrest is the gap between the rich and the poor and the corruption of those in power. It is unfortunate how governments change, and it seems that the new ones keep repeating similar problems. Socialist slogans are easy to appeal to in such an environment, and it is hard not to hate capitalism in such a political environment.
The history of Latin America in the last two centuries has been almost a history of capital control of political power. After the fall of Britain, U.S. multinational corporations controlled Latin American governments in the same and more civilized way. U.S. multinationals merged or competed with local firms, governments signed treaties with the U.S. that did not allow for tariff barriers in the relevant industries, either for investment or for aid, and U.S.-managed international money funds, which had access to much-needed Latin American lending, had the power to demand a tightening of domestic lending, which in turn made it more difficult for the local firms to compete with the U.S. firms. Merged companies or subsidiaries operating in the region often pay high prices to import production equipment, but most of the proceeds go into the pockets of the parent company, and the local government needs more foreign currency.
Looking at Latin America in 1970 to Reflect on International Relations in 2021
This book was written in the 1970s, forty years ago, and the situation in Latin America has certainly changed in recent years. The reason why I still read this book is that it is a classic, and exposure to its contents helps us to better understand the political views of at least a previous generation of Latin Americans, and helps us to reflect on the current international situation.
The means of control used by rich countries against poor countries were not only used in Latin America decades and centuries ago, but can still be seen in different countries today. The Belt and Road Initiative that China started a few years ago, and the lending of money to African countries, are not exactly a variation of what the United Kingdom and the United States used to do back then. Seeing the political and economic environment caused by the failure to develop industries, we can understand that two years ago, China and the United States began to compete with each other and the tariff war also seems to come from the same way of thinking. And is the level of development of our own countries robust enough to one day fall into a modified version of the single product/industry economic vulnerability? Latin America: Cutting the Veins is a collection of examples from five hundred years of Central and South American history that is worth chewing on and reflecting on from all angles.
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