The Europeans were advanced than
other races in terms of science and technology. They invented electricity,
machinery and revolutionized the hitherto manual processes of production. The
Industrial Revolution of 1848 was no less a watershed in the evolution of
mankind towards progress and civilization. So all these days, I was assured
that all the wealth and pomp by which Europe dazzled the rest of the world was
a result of an extraordinarily ‘European’ scientific temper combined with a
commitment to unrivalled hard work. But how much weight does my assumption hold
now that I have been exposed to the revelatory disquisition named ‘Open Veins
of Latin America’(1971) written by Eduardo Galeano.
The POTOSI model:
Galeano’s work lingers for quite
a long time on a city named Potosi that belongs to Bolivia. The city reportedly
had a mountain which was discovered by Spanish travelers in the 1500s to have
one of the largest deposits of silver the world had ever seen. It was estimated
that the city had silver reserves to last for more than five centuries. The
city till then was a land of tribal inhabitants who were making livelihoods
perfectly in harmony with nature and its infinite wealth. Spanish mining
enterprises landed on the area and raced against time to devour what Nature had
denied them in their homeland. The local population was coerced to mine the
silver for them with the help of local tribal heads who had no qualms in
accepting monthly pittances out of the humongous Spanish earnings. Those who
opposed the sudden Spanish hegemony were fortunately shown their places in
heaven and those who complied were condemned to work for more than 14 hours a
day without holidays. Needless to say, they were paid below subsistence wages
and the jaws of exploitation had managed to pierce into the flesh of each
native so deeply that no man could cross the age of 35 in his lifetime.
Meanwhile Spanish silver enchanted Europe throughout and the Spanish companies
with their legislators were reveling in their intoxication of unprecedented
wealth. Hotels, palaces and clubs sprang everywhere in Potosi within a decade
and even they could not offer them enough chances to squander their wealth that
was burgeoning in their hands to monstrous proportions.
Potosi exhausted almost 70
percent of its reserves in another century while Spain’s GDP doubled and
trebled during that time. Potosi was reporting an alarming decrease in the
population as, on the one hand, overworked men were working themselves to death
on a slow daily basis. On the other hand, mothers were killing their infants
and destroying their unborn children in their wombs with thousands of men committing
suicide. As the local population dwindled, the Spanish began to exploit the
Latin American slave market and transported people from nearby territories to
work in the mines. Spain employed missionaries to assure and pacify the workers
with stories that linked all their troubles in their present life to the sins
they had committed in their previous births.
By the end of 16th
century, the Potosi party was over as the quality of available silver declined
steadily and the Spanish by then had accumulated enough to party at a different
location thereon.
The colonial structure of exploitation:
I would like to add that the
POTOSI chronicle was not an isolated incident without any significance in the
whole history of Latin America that could be brushed under the carpet. The
POTOSI model was a grand success and thankfully for the Europeans, Latin
America had more to offer other than silver. Gold, copper, tin, bauxite, etc.
were in abundant proportions at various places throughout the continent and a
replication of the POTOSI model was no less tempting. Millions of native
Americans were either exterminated on account of their defiance to their new
‘Masters’ through sophisticated methods of mass destruction. The colonial
enterprises applied the same labor models and sometimes more cruel forms to
achieve their ends. Galeano mentions multiple instances of the company
supplying each employee with a stimulating drug to prolong his duration of
effective work every day. The cost of the drug was deducted from his already
meager wages, as a substantial number of years was fast being eroded from his
lifespan.
Along with Spain, England,
France, Portugal and Germany split the huge Latin American continent among
themselves and by the end of the 17th century no mineral was left
unearthed. The minerals produced through freely acquired mines with cheap labor
were processed into finished articles that were sold at extravagant prices to
various markets of the world including those of Latin America. These colonial
enterprises funded their national military campaigns and no war that took place
during these periods was fought without the objective to multiply the earnings
of these enterprises.
The exploitation did not end with
the exhaustion of mineral wealth as Latin America boasted of one of the most
fertile soils in the world. Millions of hectares of land were acquired by
driving out or exterminating the inhabitants for planting tobacco, sugarcane,
bananas, etc. Indiscriminate cultivation of cash crops for a prolonged period
of time drained soil fertility and rendered the land uncultivable within a few
decades. The sugarcane enterprises formed cartels to maintain worldwide sugar
prices high all the time. Whenever there was an internal uprising in the
plantations, the armies would be called for and local taxes would be raised to
finance the concomitant military expenditure after ruthlessly smothering the
uprising. Galeano narrates chilling stories of rebel leaders being tied to four
horses at the same time and each one pulling the leader’s body in a different
direction as one of the forms of punishment.
The colonial model was simple-
cheap labor closely resembling slavery, free raw materials from the colonies to
be processed at Europe, finished products sold at high prices, heavy taxation
in the colonies to maintain huge, ruthless armies and pliant local governmental
heads.
Galeano provides startling
statistics to establish his argument that the entire Industrial Revolution that
Europe is so proud of orchestrating was totally financed by its Latin American
colonies.
Bye Europe, Welcome US :
After describing more than four
centuries of pillage of the continent by European powers, Galeano reserves the
last hundred pages to how US succeeded its Western neighbours. The United
States by the middle of the nineteenth century had grown up to become an
independent industrial power and could not help bowing to the demands of its
rapacious business community for further market expansion. The United States
allowed its concerns to expand to Latin America as Europe was slowly losing its
hold on the continent.
Galeano provides accounts of how
American coffee companies fixed global prices for coffee cultivated in Latin
American plantations and how coffee rewrote histories of Latin American
politics. Rubber, tea, oil, fruit, etc. were added to the list of commodities
that Latin America could churn out from within itself for global consumption.
US organized and funded military coups in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and
other countries whenever these countries tried to nationalize their natural
resources. Defiant national presidents were either arrested or killed and
whenever a democratically elected government threatened to dismantle the
existing structures of exploitation, the US rushed with its money and arms to
dismantle the government itself.
As years passed, the US sought
trade agreements among Latin American countries to secure and perpetuate the
balance of trade that was tilted strongly in favor of the former. The trade
agreements wanted Latin American governments to remove custom duties for
imported foreign goods. Most of the
governments complied with these trade agreements and opened the floodgates to
allow the deluge of imported products into Latin American markets. To finance
these imports, the governments needed dollars and international institutions
like IMF and World Bank rushed to the aid of them. These institutions gave huge
dollar loans with more instructions to the government on how to run the
economy. Most of the governmental spending was channeled towards repayment of
its loans and to finance its imports. The government was therefore deprived of
any means of spending towards national health and education.
The FDI model:
Galeano offers valuable insights
into the functioning of the Latin American neocolonial economy. The Foreign
Direct Investment model that originated in Latin America gives rise to an
industry that works as follows. The foreign capitalist gets loans from the
local national bank to finance his machinery and equipment, gets free or cheap
land from the government for setting up the factory, hires the local cheap
labor and legally bars him from forming trade unions, reduces wages or fires
him at his whim, obtains cheap raw material from local natural resources for
processing, makes finished products and sells at extravagant costs back to the
local market, repatriates his profits to his homeland with legally sanctioned
tax exemption and intensifies mechanization of his industry to reduce the labor
requirement.
Subsistence wages to the employed
workforce nullified its purchasing power and increased mechanization led to
only a miniscule percentage of the population getting jobs. This
underemployment ensured that the wages were kept perpetually low due to an
expanding labor market. Galeano adds that Latin America allows more than five
times the sum of the incoming FDI to return to the countries of its investors.
What does Foreign Direct ‘Investment’ mean when all that happens actually is a
virtual drain of local available wealth? Another chilling statistic Galeano
offers is that out of every 100 rupees of FDI that is claimed to have been obtained,
only 12 rupees arrives from the investor country(US most of the time) and the
rest is covered through local bank loans and profits derived from pre-existing
local business.
Conclusion-Is India listening?
Galeano’s book was published in
1971 and many changes have happened in the continent ever since. There have
been rebellions and wars and repressions whenever the continent has tried to
show signs of life against the overpowering neo-colonial hegemony. Even after securing
political independence from Europeans, economic independence remains elusive and
hence the continent continues to remain underdeveloped solely to develop its
masters.
Almost every international
private enterprise you would have come across is indicted with incontrovertible
evidence by Galeano to have made wealth only through either frivolous means or
by pursuing even more ruthless methods of exploitation in Latin America. Standard
Oil, Citibank, United Fruit Company, Shell, Siemens, German Volkswagen and the
list is endless.
“We shall never be happy, never…
Never” were the words of Simon Bolivar, a Venezuelan revolutionary who was
poisoned by his traitors. A land that is blessed by nature shall be cursed by
history. This is what happened to Latin America, Africa and needless to say, to
even us.
I took two months to finish this
book and by the time I did, I could no longer believe that the world is unequal
only because God willed it to be so. I recently read in an essay that only the
ways of application of science and technology to methods of warfare
distinguishes the colonizer and colonized. Did Europe and US create wealth on
their own to attain financial supremacy that the rest of the world ended up
queuing behind them for alms? Certainly not. Science and technology is assumed
to help man so as to create better ways of sustenance and improve his quality
of life. Even now it is widely believed that science shall play an important
role in the development of human civilization by bringing economic prosperity
to everyone. But what did science end up doing? The scientifically sound
Europeans had superior means of destruction at their disposal and to put it
simply, only military superiority favored the whites to colonize the rest of
the planet. As time passed, by the 20th century, when Philosophy and
new economic theories had evolved and had taken societies to a higher intellectual
plane as a sign of remarkable human progress, it is fair to expect the world to
have shunned at least some of its barbarous predatory instincts. But had the
world become a better place to live by then? The United Fruit Company of the US
organized the Great banana massacre on 2000 Colombian workers who demanded
basic rights of eight hour work days and six-day work weeks in 1928. The US
backed Pinochet Government of Chile organized purges to eliminate thousands of
dissenters who demanded asset nationalization and worker rights. Almost every
country of the continent had its share of US backed military coups and
dictatorships that left thousands of people getting killed or arrested and
tortured without trial, only for the crime of questioning the existing system. Science
continued to serve only the evil.
When elders during conversations
begin to talk about the past, I used to either frown to silence them or
question the significance of listening to the past. The Latin American past
narrated by Galeano is not only important but indispensably crucial if we are
interested in knowing our own future. We know we are slowly embracing a highly
liberalized global market economy before the embrace is returned, let us remind
ourselves of the Dhritarashtra myth.
- JEEVA P
- JEEVA P
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