ABSTRACT

The high demand for natural resources – minerals, petroleum, and agricultural products – at the beginning of the current millennium has led to a new boom in economies “rich” in natural resources. Focusing on a primary-product export model, which has existed since the beginning of colonization, countries exporting raw materials have doubled down on their efforts to achieve this chimera called “development.” However, by not using all of this time to promote structural changes to this accumulation mode and to dismantle the predominant capitalist thinking, when international demand for commodities decreased a short time later (along with commodity prices), these economies were embroiled in a new crisis that sent them back to the old and pernicious “curse of plenty”: countries rich in natural resources with impoverished societies. As time has proven, this extractivist-dominated reality produces rentier economies and states and client societies and authoritarian regimes in which wealth concentration goes hand in hand with violence and corruption.