Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America
by Nicole Fabricant and Linda Farthing
Ever since the search for the elusive El Dorado began in the sixteenth century, the history of Latin America has been a tale of resource extraction. Key resources (such as silver, gold, tin, and copper) drew foreign investment but left local populations deeply impoverished. As Eduardo Galeano (1973: 29) described it, “the Spanish colonies’ economic structure was born subordinated to the external market and thus centralized around the export sector, where profit and power were concentrated.” Five centuries later, this overall pattern remains unchanged.
Its persistence propelled twentieth-century social scientists to use Marxist analytic frames, Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer’s theories on declining terms of trade, and dependency theory more generally to explain how resource extraction created geographic and historic asymmetries between nation-states and peoples.....
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