LAUSR

Ever since the search for the elusive El Dorado began in the sixteenth century, 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 production. 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 emergence of a global market and rose together with tea, colonial slavery, and the machine era. Researchers also reported resistance to these realities: for example, June Nash (1979) considered how Bolivian miners drew on their indigenous 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