ABSTRACT
In many ways, Latin America’s role in the global capitalist economy has changed little from the late 19th century, when the region’s export-oriented growth model was established alongside the development of its raw materials sector – notably reliant on foreign capital and effectively solidifying the dependent relationships between Latin American export economies and the foreign interests and markets that both control these export industries and rely on them for their own economic flourishing (Skidmore and Smith, 2005: 44). While these dependent relationships became increasingly diversified with the complexities of modernity and industrialization, they can be traced as an evolutionary outgrowth of the colonial period when the economic grandeur of the Iberian Peninsula relied on the extraction of the Earth’s riches in the form of silver and gold and agricultural goods, made possible by the exploitative slave labour of the New World’s native peoples. In the decades following formal independence from Spain in the early 19th century, any remaining whispers of hope for the Bolivarian dream of a “liberated and unified” Latin America (Ali, 2006: 127) dissipated northward into silent resignation as the region saw its economic dependence on the Peninsula replaced by that of the “free markets” of the United States and Europe. As modern industrialization required more and more raw materials from the South, Latin America’s position as supplier of natural resources, commodities, and cheap labour to the globalized capitalist system was all but set in stone. While formally free from colonial domination, market imperialism ensured a new round of neocolonialism for at least a century to come.
