South America has long been the victim of the creeping paralysis that is threatening the rest of the world. In fact it seems that South America has been used as the blueprint for the control of world trade.
When first "discovered" in the sixteenth century it was inhabited by indigenous populations who had civilisations of their own that varied in their level of development. None however used either the plough, the wheel, glass, iron or gunpowder. Hence the ease with which they were conquered.
The adventurers from the western world were seeking an Eldorado and they found it. The discovery of the fabulous treasure of the Aztecs and the gold of the Incas was the beginning of a rape that continues still.
The gold of the Incas and the silver of Potosi was shipped to Europe where it supplied the motive power for western industry and filled the coffers of those banks (notably Fuggers') which had helped finance the expeditions.
Not only did the conquerors find riches beyond their imagination but also an indigenous population they could use as cheap labour. In three centuries it is reckoned that the silver of Potosi cost eight million lives.
By the 18th century the financial centre of Europe had shifted from Amsterdam to London and the production of gold in Brazil exceeded the amount that Spain had taken from its colonies during the previous two centuries.
The gold had started to flow at the moment when Portugal signed the treaty of Methuen in 1703 with England. In exchange for certain advantages for their wines in the English market, Portugal opened her own market and that of its colonies to the British manufactured goods.
Given the difference in the industrial development of the two countries it meant the ruin of local products. Added to which the payment for the goods was not in wine but in gold.
Up until Christopher Colombus brought the first sugar canes from the Canary Islands and planted them in what is now Dominica, sugar cane was cultivated on a small scale in Sicily, the Cape Verde Islands and Madera and was so valuable a commodity that it figured in dowries of queens.
Sugar plantations appeared in the humid coast of northern Brazil, and later in Barbados, Jamaica, Haita, Dominica, Guadalupe, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Vera Cruz and the coast of Peru.
Up until the 17th century Brazil was the major producer in the world of sugar. And the principal market for slaves, because the indigenous population was unable to survive the rigorous labour of sugar cultivation.
The land was devastated for this plant that invaded the New World.
The sugar plantations covered huge areas of land with the best soils, yet produced no foodstuffs, reducing the native population to starvation level whilst the clearance of forests, to produce more land, impoverished the soil.
Subordinated to the needs of foreign capital, the plantation, born from the demand for sugar overseas, was a business and it was the international market that was at the centre of the constellation of power.
In less than three centuries after the discovery of America, there was no commercial product of equal importance on the European market.
In Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century there still existed 230 tribes. Ninety have since disappeared, erased by disease and the exploitation of the voracious appetite of capitalist North America.
North-eastern Brazil, once the richest area, is now the poorest.
Up until the end of the eighteenth century, rubber was used to erase the marks of pencil on paper. Following the discovery of the process of vulcanisation of rubber, Brazil, which possessed almost all the world reserves of rubber, experienced a rubber boom with Manaus as the centre. But by l914 the price fell due to competition from Ceylon and Malaysia, and Brazil, that had held virtual monopoly, now only supplied one eighth of the world market. Half a century later Brazil bought half the rubber she needed.
In the begining of the fifties, South America produced four fifths of the world's coffee. But the world market for soluble coffee is in the hands of Nestle and Brazil, once the major producer of coffee, is not allowed to export its own soluble coffee.
Coffee, a native of the highlands of Ethiopia, has assumed an important position in world economics. Powerful corporations have realised it is easier to dispense with the burdens of actual colonisation and use modern trans national institutions such as the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF to impose their will from the boardrooms of Manhattan, Paris and Berlin. With the result that coffee farmers are tied to a small number of trans -national buyers under conditions that prevent any internal national controls on the trade. The corporations have profited hugely whilst the farmers' share has diminished from 40 per cent in 1991 to 14 per cent at the present time.
The consequences of US hegemony reads like litany of human rights abuses, death squads and impoverished citizens in a southern sweep through Central and South America. Any left wing insurgency in all these countries has been countered ruthlessly by the army or police, themselves often trained at the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Georgia.
All the countries of South America with the exception of Uruguay and Chile produce coffee.
Enormous quantities of Colombian coffee are exported to the US. Until recently the Federacion Nacionale de Cafeteros, a non-governmental organisation that controls the coffee industry in Colombia, was a model of good order and the envy of exporting countries the world over. However all that is under threat, as civil war is escalating as US seeks to defend its oil interests. World Bank strictures have led to a doubling of unemployment in the last ten years and there has been a thirty per cent drop in real terms in national average income.
Coffee farmers in the Zona Cafetera are abandoning previously flourishing coffee farms or taking to coca and poppy planting to supplement their income. In the south US planes spray them from the air with Monsanto's Round-up or Round-up Ultra on all and any crops, polluting the rivers and causing widespread problems.
The US "war on drugs" has frightening implications for the Colombian eco-system and, if coca and poppy planting continue to move into the areas where coffee is grown, the effect of this spraying could be felt globally.
Packaging technology paved the way for the corporisation of coffee. The science associated with coffee is quietly falling victim to the interests of coffee corporations.
On the fourth floor in 8th arrondissement of Paris lies the heart of coffee science. The Secretariat of ASIC (Association Scientifique Internationale du Cafe) administers the organisation that co-ordinates the semination of scientific research dedicated to the world's most valuable agricultural commodity.
It was founded in 1966 by Rene Coste as a research branch of a French government department. Today ASIC has ceased to be a French government body at all, although Coste remains its Honorary President. Although ASIC proudly maintains that it is the only completely independent organisation in the world specifically devoted to the coffee tree, the coffee bean and the coffee drink, a glance at the 2002 board proves the strong representation of the international corporations, Nestle, Kraft and Sarah Lee.
Brazil produces a quarter of the world's cotton, Mexico a fifth. Latin America produces a fifth of the cotton used in industrial textiles in the world. (Cotton is native to the Americas)
Venezuela, Brazil and Equador were identified with Cacao another plant indigenous to the Americas.
Guatamala, Honduras and Costa Rica - the original "banana" republics - were subordinated to the growth of the banana, where the United Fruit Company owned and controlled everything: the railways, the port, the customs and the politics. The dollar became the national money of Central America.
Mono culture on a grand scale in the hands of agricultural firms that deal in the products causes not only the poverty of the population but also attracts disease and insect pests which in their turn require the existence of firms like Monsanto whose chemicals only increase the disaster.
This is the key to the strangulation of economic development in Latin America and one of the fundamental reasons for the poverty of the Latin American masses. South America had become the power house for the west, whose bankers and traders slowly but surely assumed control of everything she possessed, exporting her raw materials, using her cheap labour, and giving back nothing in return.
Brazil opened up its agricultural markets to competition in the 1990s. Between 1985 and 1995 the number of small family farms in Brazil dropped by a fifth. Multinational corporations moved into the fundamental basis of farming: seed. In came Monsanto, DuPont Dow, AgrEvo and other biotechnology giants. By 1999 they controlled 90 per cent of Brazil's seed market.
The Brazilian subsidiary of Alcoa, the world's leading aluminium producer is in discussion with the government for the construction of a new aluminium factory and the construction of the largest hydroelectric complex in Amazonia.
In July 2000 the political party that had been in power in Mexico for seventy-one years since the revolution headed by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, was defeated in the elections - heavily rigged - by Vicente Fox - ex-head of Coca Cola Mexico, an ardent freemarketeer committed to "globalisation".
Ecuador's government was ordered by the I. M. F. to raise the price of cooking gas by 80 percent by November l 2000, eliminate 26000 jobs, cut wages by 50 percent, transfer ownership of its biggest water system to foreign operators and to grant British Petroleum rights to build and own an oil pipeline over the Andes
The bulk of South America's riches now goes north to the stronghold of internationalism, the United States. Supposedly the stronghold of democracy with the words "Freedom, Equality and Fraternity" its talisman. The United States has the worst record for mal-treatment of aboriginal inhabitants in both North and South America, which shows how shallow these words really are.
In Bolivia in 1965 the money lenders would not allow a cent to be spent on allowing tin to be processed in the country, and their supposed help gave rise to a parasitical bourgeoise whilst the rest of the country had the highest rates of infantile mortality after Haiti.
The United States and their international organisations refused to allow Bolivia to take advantage of the offers of Russia, Czechslovakia and Poland to create a petrochemical industry and exploit zinc and iron. Instead Bolivia was obliged to deal exclusively with the United States.
The iron the United States receives from Brazil and Venezuela is cheaper than its own product. The need to capture and control the mines outside of its frontiers is more than a business, it is imperative for the national security. Steel is an essential component of the American economy. Steel is produced in the rich countries of the world and iron in the poorest. Steel pays the salaries of the rich and iron pays at subsistence level.
On the slopes of the Andes Chile possesses the best reserve of copper, a third part of the world total. The owners of the copper were the owners of Chile. When Salvador Allende wanted to nationalise copper, the Nixon/Kissinger administration responded by economic and political subversion and destablisation of the Allende government. The covert operations by the CIA in contact with Kissinger and the Forty Committee resulted in the legal and elected government of Chile being replaced by Pinochet.
A this point it is worth mentioning that a study conducted by a major Jewish organisation in the United States revealed that in 2006 214 Jews were serving as lawmakers and parliamentarians in countries worldwide while Chile had the dubious distinction of having the most "Jewish" government (after Israel) in the world with three Jewish ministers, and one deputy minister.
Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) and Royal Dutch Shell:
With petrol the same thing happened, as with coffee and with meat, the rich countries gained control.
Mexico in the 1940s suffered an international embargo instigated by Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell.
Uruguay created the first state refinery and the cartel immediately set in motion a ferocious campaign.
Argentina suffered the same fate. Petrol has provoked not only governmental changes but even a war.
Standard Oil provoked and financed the conflict between Bolivia and Paraguay in order to push through an oil pipeline from Bolivia towards the river. What is made clear is that dissent from the new world order will be punished.
The history then of South America has been, right from the beginning: exploitation of its land, its people and its riches.
All this has been structured by the development of world capitalism with its headquarters, first in Amsterdam, then in London, and, now, in New York.
Once in the grip of the bankers and the monopolist corporations it became more and more difficult to escape the pincer grip of their exploiters. Any attempt at escape was treated with utmost savagery and only the dictators who were willing to bow to the will of the master were and are allowed to survive.
The international corporations do not belong to the countries where they operate . They do not need to export capital to finance the expansion of their business. The gains that they usurp from the poor countries are more than enough to cover their costs of operation.
The structure of the cartels allows control of numerous countries and the penetration into numerous governments. Petrol enthrones presidents and dictators and destroys the structure of the societies where it has dominion. These cartels decide with a pencil over the map of the world what areas to exploit and when. The natural riches of the Latin American countries are the victims of organised rape and are the principal cause of their political servitude and social degradation.