{"id":280,"date":"2007-01-24T19:03:10","date_gmt":"2007-01-24T19:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/166.62.41.2\/~holaamericanews\/2007\/01\/24\/if-latin-america-had-been-a-british-enterprise\/"},"modified":"2022-07-16T11:40:26","modified_gmt":"2022-07-16T16:40:26","slug":"if-latin-america-had-been-a-british-enterprise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/if-latin-america-had-been-a-british-enterprise\/","title":{"rendered":"If Latin America Had Been A British Enterprise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"jorge_majfud\"<\/a>In the process of conducting a recent study at the University of Georgia, a female student interviewed a young Colombian woman and tape recorded the interview.\u00a0 The young woman commented on her experience in England and how\u00a0 the British were interested in knowing the reality of Colombia.\u00a0 After she detailed the problems that her country had, one Englishman observed the paradox that England, despite being smaller and possessing fewer natural resources, was much wealthier than Colombia.\u00a0 His conclusion was cutting: \u201cIf England had managed Colombia like a business, Colombians today would be much richer.\u201dThe Colombian youth admitted her irritation, because the comment was intended to point out\u00a0 just how incapable we are in Latin America.\u00a0 The lucid maturity of the young Colombian woman was evident in the course of the interview, but in that moment she could not find the words to respond to the son of the old empire.\u00a0 The heat of the moment, the audacity of those British kept her from remembering that in many respects Latin America had indeed been managed like a British enterprise and that, therefore, the idea was not only far from original but, also, was part of the reason that Latin America was so poor \u2013 with the caveat that poverty is a scarcity of capital and not of historical consciousness.Agreed: three hundred years of monopolistic, retrograde and frequently cruel colonization has weighed heavily upon the Latin American continent, and consolidated in the spirit of our nations an oppositional psychology with respect to social and political legitimation (Alberto Montaner called that cultural trait \u201cthe suspicious original legitimacy of power\u201d).\u00a0 Following the Semi-independences of the 19th century, the \u201cprogress\u201d of the British railroad system was not only a kind of gilded cage \u2013 in the words of Eduardo Galeano -, a strait-jacket for native Latin American development, but we can see something similar in Africa: in Mozambique, for example, a country that extends North-to-South, the roads cut across it from East-to-West.\u00a0 The British Empire was thus able to extract the wealth of its central colonies by passing through the Portuguese colony.\u00a0 In Latin America we can still see the networks of asphalt and steel flowing together toward the ports \u2013 old bastions of the Spanish colonies that native rebels contemplated with infinite rancor from the heights of the savage sierras, and which the large land owners saw as the maximum progress possible for countries that were backward by \u201cnature.\u201dObviously, these observations do not exempt us, the Latin Americans, from assuming our own responsibilities.\u00a0 We are conditioned by an economic infrastructure, but not determined by it, just as an adult is not tied irremediably to the traumas of childhood.\u00a0 Certainly we must confront these days other kinds of strait-jackets, conditioning imposed on us from outside and from within, by the inevitable thirst for dominance of world powers who refuse strategic change, on the one hand, and frequently by our own culture of immobility, on the other.\u00a0 For the former it is necessary to lose our innocence; for the latter we need the courage to criticize ourselves, to change ourselves and to change the world.<\/p>\n

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In the process of conducting a recent study at the University of Georgia, a female student interviewed a young Colombian woman and tape recorded the interview.\u00a0 The young woman commented […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/holaamericanews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}