Apologies right out front: This brief summary is ONLY my understanding of what I have seen and read from the Simon Bolivar 60 episode series, the documentary on Mexico's history I wanted last night, and various other informal and short sources.
This is meant only as backdrop for the reading and reviewing of the novels I mentioned previously by famous Latin American authors.
As I see it, England, France, Spain (and less importantly for my purposes - Belgium, Holland and Portugal) great empires of the 17th and 18th centuries, began initiating trade with the indigenous people of the Americans in the 1600's. - Spain and France via the Caribbean and then South America, France also in Canada (the fur trade) and Britain in what is now US.
IN THE BEGINNING
1.My impression is that Spain wasn't initially about colonizing, mostly they went to the Carribbean and South America to extort gold and silver from the indigenous people through hostage taking and conquest. At the same time, they brought diseases from Europe to which the indigenous population had no immunity and hence wiped them out in untold numbers.
2.Second phase, the Spanish invaders realized there were crops to be made profitable and they established plantations and turned the peasants into forced labor and also imported vast numbers of African people into slavery on the plantations.
Primogeniture: Since only the eldest son could inherit according the long tradition in Europe, second sons often were forced to go into the military or the church. Here was a whole new avenue for these second and third sons - they could run the hugely profitable plantations - sugar, coffee, cocoa.
Along with the Spanish aristocrats running plantations, Spain sent the church to convert the survivors of the epidemic of European diseases, to Catholicism. And along with the church came the traders and bureaucrats to control the import and export of these new plantations and the colonies developing around them Interesting note: Because the church was so prevalent and powerful, the church records became the ONLY records of births, deaths, marriages, and were vitally important in social organizing.
IN THE MIDDLE
Eventually, even beaten down people reach a point where they can no long go on with the existing system and so the slaves, tired of murder, rape, exploitation and discrimination while doing all the hard work, rebelled. Let me interject here that we rarely learn about the very many slave rebellions that were occurring in the Caribbean and South American, or for that matter in our own South in America. There were many!
The overtaxed, exploited and restricted village peasants (made up of indigenous people and Spanish who fell down the financial ladder, as well as small merchants and artisans) joined with the slaves under the leadership of Simon Bolivar. His personal charisma, gifts of rhetoric, and personal beliefs were enough to pull all these angry factions together to form an army with the purpose of 1.Kicking the Spanish out of South America, 2.gaining control of the markets, trade, and the bureaucracy, 3.bringing a more equitable system to serve the largest number of people, a kind of Socialist system, 3.Uniting the different colonies into one South America.
THE END
Against all odds and anyone's predictions, Simon Bolivar and the peoples' army succeeded through super human effort and infinite dedication to the cause, to drive out the Spanish rulers. Soon, Columbia, Venezuela, Bolivia (named for Bolivar), Peru, all the coastal colonial port city colonies, were cleared of Spanish forces.
But new destructive forces came into play: Greedy merchants saw this as an opportunity to take over with them at the top and continue squeezing the population to afford their wealth accumulating efforts. They took over the old bureaucracy and used it to defraud people of inheritance, to steal property from widows and elderly vulnerable people, and to tax again the peasants and the poor to support the separate units of military that were developing under individual war lords.
In the end, the states were never brought together, and instead became autonomous countries, each with its own economic and political system, which is the state of these countries today. The war between rapacious capitalist business practices and the need to provide for the needs of society at large are still at war. And you can see the results of this continuing struggle in what has happened in Venezuela today.
Indeed this is very instructive to understand what is going on with most of the countries that were colonies and that took back their land and expelled the colonial overlords. A very similar pattern emerged in Mexico (Benito Juarez the emancipator) with a succession of profit motivated leaders followed by leaders who promised social reforms and a socialist system to serve the needs of the people. These two forces seem to alternate back and forth. Much the same has happened in Cuba.
Needless to say, we could examine this pattern in Africa as with the Algerian take back from France, but I don't want to get off topic.
So, all this constant flux and disorder made opportunities for ambitious criminals such as the drug cartels which came in and, in some cases, took over entire countries such as Columbia. Drug trafficking, building on those ancient trade routes, has become the new national economy of Columbia and is swiftly trying to take over other countries as well. Now drug lords force peasants to grow the crops they need for the drug trade, and they kidnap and enslave the youth of the peasants to work in their criminal gangs.
If the peasants/farmers resist, they kill them and destroy whole villages. Hence our huge population of Hondurans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Colombians attempting to escape and come to Norte America.
None of this in any way suggests that I have ideas about how this could be fixed. I do not. It takes a lot of money to support a Socialist system and people must be altruistic enough to be willing to pay into taxes more than they may realize they are getting back.
If people don't want to pay into the pot, then big money cannot be amassed to support public needs such as highways, bridges, a defense army, police forces, a bureaucracy to keep the records and make strategy. Any successful Socialist/Democracy requires a heavy tax load, which in successful S/D republics like Sweden, the people are willing to pay because they see that they reap the rewards of their sacrifice in a better society.
Now you know roughly what I know and with that in mind, I begin my next phase of exploring Latin American literature. I am going to read Sandra Cisneros THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET.
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com
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