Open Veins of the Amazon
by John Johnson
History 177
英文学习网站
Professor John Chasteen
元旦晚会小品
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汽车音响安装, 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. Galeano's 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 asrts that this is an entrenched pattern, that "[o]ur part of the world… was precocious: it has specialized in losing ever since tho remote times when Renaissance Europeans ventured across the ocean and buried their teeth in the throats of the Indian civilizations." In a very broad n, Latin American national economies have always been extractive, focud on the export of natural resources or monoculture crops from large plantations, an orientation that does not lend itlf 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 themlves.
The extractive, export-oriented focus has remained an important, lasting legacy of the Portugue colonial period in Brazil. From the very beginnings of the brazil wood trade with the Tupian peoples on the northeastern coast of Brazil, the Portugue were much more interested in collecting and lling the natural resources of their soon-to-be-colony than well organized development and ttlement. Of cour, colonial powers have no int
erest in developing autonomous economies in their territories becau they wish to maintain their hegemony over the regions, but the extractive pattern did not disappear with Brazil's independence from Portugal in 1822. Britain and other emerging industrial powers pounced on the opportunity for cheap resources. The costly War of the Triple Alliance, among other events, incread Brazil's debt to Britain and partly explains why Brazil remained a peripheral contributor to European development. Today Brazil remains dependent. To quote just one statistic, Brazil's foreign debt nearly doubled in the last decade of the twentieth century.
Today, the Amazon River basin is recognized as an important region containing much of nature's wealth and biodiversity. The rainforest offers what at one time emed like an endless supply of lumber. The region is full of mineral resources, too, including silver, diamonds, bauxite, titanium, mercury and other precious or industrial metals. For the very reasons, the Amazon, which once was looked upon as a mysterious, terrifying black hole, is now one of the regions on earth that is most coveted by large corporations, both Brazilian corporations and multinationals, a phenomena termed by Galeano as "mankind'
s poverty as a conquence of the wealth of the land."里约奥运会中国金牌 In general, the corporations have little interest in prerving the biodiversity of Amazonia, illustrated by the well-known track record of the devastation of the region wreaked by deforestation. The Amazon basin, then, ems to fit very easily into Galeano's concept of the "open veins of Latin America." This region who wealth was not recognized earlier in Brazil's history now has the full attention of both business and their opposition, including environmental groups and intellectuals like Galeano. To further understand the situation facing the Amazon basin today, we must turn to earlier attempts at harvesting the wealth of the region.
英译汉词典下载Rubber in the Amazon
Industrialization in European and United States created a large demand for Amazonian rubber in the late 19th and early 20th如何开贸易公司 centuries. Rubber was needed primarily for the making of tires for automobiles and other vehicles. Becau a single worker could accomplish the collection and processing of rubber in a large area, the most cost-effectiv
e method of extracting the resources was not large-scale ttlement of the Amazon by workers and their families. Instead, rubber companies carried individual workers hundreds of miles upriver and dropped them off by themlves, where they stayed alone for months on end, tapping sap from trees and boiling it into large, solid balls.leave the door open At its height in 1910, rubber constituted forty percent of the profit made from Brazil's exports. The profits of the "rubber barons" began to decline after 1910 when the British established more cost-effective rubber plantations in East Asia.
cashfiestaThe nature of rubber harvesting did not destroy the Amazon or even scar it, becau there was no need for large, intrusive ttlements or the destruction of the trees themlves. Before the resurgence of interest in the Amazon, one could fly over the basin in an airplane and obrve the area virtually unchanged from the pre-Columbian era.chastitybelt In human terms, however, the trade was far from benign. The profits from the rubber trade did not benefit tho who did the lonely, dangerous work. Rubber profits were virtually thrown away on luxury items by the wealthy owners of the companies; the building of the ornate Amazonas Theater in Manaus put nothing back into the new econo
拿破仑英文简介my of the Amazon basin, attracted few people to the area, and was the "chief symbol of that vertigo of wealth at the beginning of our century." Meanwhile, rubber harvesters faced the hardships of distance, debt and dia. The workers often ended up in debt to the corporations that employed them, becau they were paid "in kind" - with food and liquor - not in legal tender. Rubber harvesters surely faced psychological distress from their isolation in unfamiliar territory with little hope of escape. Probably the worst hardship was dias such as malaria and tuberculosis, which may have killed as many as five hundred thousand workers. Future business ventures into the Amazon might not cau the same human suffering, but the destructive effects on the land would be much greater.
