{"content":[{"text":"Why Poverty and Starvation \n In Latin America? \n In “Open Veins of Latin America” Eduardo Galeano shows his \n readers how over the last 500 years first the Native American \n Indians, and then the poverty stricken populace of Central and \n South America, first by enslavement, and then by the enslaving \n plantation system has brought about great poverty, sickness, \n starvation and death for the vast majority of inhabitants, both \n Native Americans and the Spanish or Portuguese general \n populace. Proper land-reform, fair distribution of farmland to \n the general populace would end all of this. But the wealthy, \n both local and from abroad, first Spanish and Portuguese, and \n then from the United States, supporting the owners of sugar \n and coffee plantations, prevent this. From the creation and \n ownership of coffee and sugar plantations, to copper and iron \n mines and the mining of all the rest of Latin America’s precious \n resources, this exploitation from sources abroad has, as \n Galeano so expertly documents in detail, brought about this \n cycle of poverty, starvation and death which has devastated the \n masses of Central and South America. To quote, “The demand \n for sugar produced the plantation, an enterprise motivated by its \n proprietor’s desire for profit and placed at the service of the \n international market Europe was organizing. Internally, \n however---since it was to a considerable extent self-sufficient--- \n the plantation was feudal in many important aspects, and its \n labor force consisted mainly of slaves. Thus three distinct \n historical periods---mercantilism, feudalism, slavery---were \n combined in a single socioeconomic unit. But in the \n constellation of power developed by the plantation system, \n the international market soon took the center of the stage. \n Subordinated to foreign needs and often financed from \n abroad, the colonial plantation evolved directly into the \n present-day latifundio, one of the bottlenecks that choke \n economic development and condemn the masses to poverty \n and a marginal existence in Latin America today. The \n latifundio as we know it has been sufficiently mechanized to \n multiply the labor surplus, and thus enjoys an ample reserve of \n cheap hands. It no longer depends on the importation of African \n slaves or on the ‘encomienda’ of Indians; it merely needs to pay \n ridiculously low or in-kind wages, or to obtain for nothing in \n return for the laborer’s use of a minute piece of land. It feeds \n upon the proliferation of minifundios---pocket-sized farms--- \n resulting from its own expansion, and upon the constant internal","bbox":{"left":0.235294,"top":0.089188,"width":0.6180370000000001,"height":0.811598}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}