[Migrated, see pinned post] Casual Conversation

Open Veins of Latin America. Finished reading it today. It's a 1973 book that explains some of the reasons for the massive underdevelopment of Latin American colonies. The general gist can be summed up as "it is a place full of riches, and the colonizers only want to extract everything and send it back to their masters" - that still applied to the industrialization efforts funded by foreign capital.

Although Spain and Portugal were the nominal masters, they, too, were fucking themselves over with debts to Dutch and English bankers back in 16th and 17th centuries, not to mention bad trade deals, effectively killing their own industries and those of their colonies.

EDIT: Galeano also exposed a lot of the shady deals made mainly by USA companies with governments in order to "develop" the southern countries, like ensuring that they'd get less taxes, better exchange prices and better credit options, that their goods would only be shipped by USA owned ships, etc. Not to mention that, during 1950-1970, the price of the commodities sold by Latin American countries kept falling (probably growing below inflation) and the income from the exports kept getting lower, despite larger volumes.