OpenVeinsoftheAmazon.docVIP

Open Veins of the Amazon by John Johnson History 177 Professor John Chasteen 5 April 2002 Nearly thirty years ago, influential Latin American historian and social critic Eduardo Galeano wrote, [t]he division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. In his landmark book, Open Veins of Latin America, Galeano argues that the natural resources of Latin America have been plundered with little, if any, beneficial economic development in return – first by the colonial powers of Spain and Portugal, and later by industrial powers such as Britain and the United States. Galeanos imagery of the open veins of Latin America is a powerful illustration of this concept of the division of labor. Natural resources, the true economic lifeblood of Latin America, flow out and over its borders, draining the vitality of Latin American nations and enriching others, the winners. Galeano asserts that this is an entrenched pattern, that [o]ur part of the world… was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since those remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations. In a very broad sense, Latin American national economies have always been extractive, focused on the export of natural resources or monoculture crops from large plantations, an orientation that does not lend itself toward democratization of wealth or the development of powerful, autonomous national economies. This free-trade orientation in underdeveloped countries almost inevitably benefited the foreign recipients more than the exporting nations themselves. The extractive, export-oriented focus has remained an important, lasting legacy of the Portuguese colonial period in Brazil. From the very beginnings of the brazil wood trade with the Tupian peoples on the northeastern coast of Brazil, the Portuguese were much more interested in collecting and selling the natural r