Open Veins Revisited: Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours of the New Extractivism in Latin America

• Author: Nicole Fabricant,Linda Farthing
• Date: 01 September 2018
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18785882
• Subject Matter: Introduction

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 222, Vol. 45 No. 5, September 2018, 4–17

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18785882

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

4

Open Veins Revisited

Charting the Social, Economic, and Political Contours

of the New Extractivism in Latin America

by

Linda Farthing and Nicole Fabricant

Ever since the search for the elusive El Dorado began in the sixteenth cen-

tury, 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. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1973) described

how the European quest for resources in Latin America led to the penetration

of foreign capital and fueled early European industrialization while generating

highly unequal labor relations and differential access to the means of produc-

tion. Eric Wolf (1982) traced the movement of goods, capital, and people in

concert with expanding capitalism in the Old and New Worlds. Sidney Mintz

(1985) showed that sugar production in the Caribbean was basic to the emer-

gence of a global market and rose together with tea, colonial slavery, and the

machine era. Researchers also reported resistance to these realities: for exam-

ple, June Nash (1979) considered how Bolivian miners drew on their indige-

nous roots to advocate for more adequate wages, health care coverage, and

schooling for their children.

Forty years later, in our current era of advanced capitalism and after 30 years

of neoliberal restructuring, it is time to revisit these themes and explore new

frameworks for understanding how expanded global interconnectedness and

technological improvements have facilitated transnational capital’s expansion

in Latin America today. The region still possesses 66 percent of the world’s

Linda Farthing is a writer, researcher, and educator who has written three books on Bolivia. She

writes for the Guardian, the Nation, Al Jazeera, and Indian Country Today and is a contributing edi-

tor for the North American Congress on Latin America. Her latest policy report is The Left in Power:

Perspectives on Effective Progressive Governance—the Case of Bolivia (2018). Nicole Fabricant is an

associate professor of anthropology at Towson University in Baltimore. She has published several

books and articles on resource extraction and landless politics in contemporary Bolivia and has

been working on a long-term participatory action project in South Baltimore on environmental

injustice. Both are participating editors of Latin American Perspectives. The collective thanks them

for organizing this issue.

785882LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18785882Latin American PerspectivesFarthing and Fabricant / Introduction

research-article2018

Introduction