Читать книгу The New Latin America - Manuel Castells - Страница 20

Extractivism is one of the main economic and cultural characteristics of Latin America and the Caribbean, one that has determined the place of our economies and societies in the world. We are, and we are seen as, countries with extractive economies and cultures, despite various efforts at industrialization, import substitution, and social integration.

Argentina’s name comes from the silver mined in Potosí, and Brazil is named for a type of wood (pau brazil). Sergio Almaraz Paz’s El poder y la caída (Power and the Fall from Power) is a magnificent book that recounts the political and economic drama of tin mining in Bolivia. Fernando Ortiz considers the economies and cultures that center on tobacco and sugar in Cuba. For his part, Gabriel García Márquez shows in The Autumn of the Patriarch how a tyrant ends up selling off the Caribbean Sea, leaving only sand. Manuel Ugarte’s essays highlight the emancipatory hopes associated with the idea of the Patria Grande or Great Homeland, and in Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano considers the frustrations, pains, and obstacles that the region has faced. All are associated with extraction.

A great deal of literature in sociology and economics hinges on the question of how to characterize extractivism, and how to leave it behind in order to industrialize Latin America. The works of Torcuato Di Tella, Alain Touraine, and others on coal and iron mining, or on the trade unions in Lota and Huachipato, Chile, are classics in the field. Fernando Fajnzylber’s proposals for productive transformation “with equity,” promoted by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, represent efforts to overcome a primarily extractive system.

Natural resources – land, mines, oil, and water – and the forms of social organization that first arose under colonialism to manage them – including the hacienda system first and foremost – together created a prison, a place for the exercise of domination and the confinement of resistance. This is the history that weighs on all of Latin America, despite national differences.

Calderón’s study Navegar contra el viento: América Latina en la era de la información (Sailing against the Wind: Latin America in the Information Age, 2018) suggests, among its main conclusions, that the region has witnessed the emergence of a new type of extractivism in recent decades, one that the author calls “informational.” That study suggested that this constitutes the primary way in which Latin America’s economies participate in globalization. In effect, the region was undergoing a sort of transition from industrial to informational extractivism, but to note that this was not to deny the importance of organized labor or of the world of informal work, statistically the most significant type of work in the region. For their part, communities of indigenous and African descent constituted a resource for, but also a source of resistance to, these new economies.

This new economic and techno-informational dynamic, built and dependent for its functioning on the web, became widespread in all Latin American countries. Countless corporations were established or reestablished along these lines, and as many forms of negotiation and resistance arose in response. These new extractive corporations are marked by particular characteristics, which vary according to the historical and cultural experience of various countries. They differ widely depending on the types of transnational business in which they participate and, of course, the types of activities they undertake, whether these relate to mining, oil, agriculture, or infrastructure. The types of organization that corporations, states, and regional and local societies adopt are another factor. The dynamics of informational extraction thus vary widely between and even within countries.

Our analysis in this book assumes that “informational extractivism” is inseparable from land. Indeed, the two are not only indissociable; together they produce a new field for historical conflicts that are also expressed in international social networks, given that the environmental impact of extractive forms of exploitation is as global as the corporations that engage in them.