James Petras: Latin America and the Paradoxes of Anti-Imperialism and Class Struggle

(...) For example, among the most prominent ‘anti-imperialist regimes’ in Latin America today, Bolivia and Ecuador are big promoters and supporters of a development model which relies on foreign multi-national corporations exploiting mining and energy sectors. Moreover both regimes, in pursuit of extractive capital accumulation have dispossessed local Indian and peasant communities (the so-called Tipnis reserve in Bolivia). (...)

The key to the classification of Latin American countries is the scope and depth of land grants which regimes have made to large foreign and domestic multi-national corporations. Over the past two decades Latin America has experienced re-colonization by  invitation : government grants of
millions of acres of territory under the quasi-exclusive jurisdiction of giant mining and plantation consortiums. These land grants are accompanied by mineral exploitation and water rights, license to contaminate and the free use of the state to evictlocal inhabitants, to repress rebellious communities and to construct transport grids centered in the colonial land grant. The phrase ‘capital accumulation via dispossession’ is too narrow and vague. The concept ‘recolonization’ captures more accurately the large scale long term transfer of sovereign wealth, natural resources and special ‘colonial’ laws and regulations, that exempt this huge holdings from what previously passed for ‘national sovereignty’. (...)

The leading colonial-extractive regimes are found in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Central America. This cluster conforms to the all-around criteria for a pro- imperial regime: closely integrated to the US centered geo-political order, as well as containing vast colonial agro-mineral enclaves.
Mexico under President Enrique Péna Nieto, Colombia under Presidents Uribe and Santos and Peru under President Ollanta Humala have granted millions of acres to giant mining corporations and savagely repressed and dispossessed communities, farmers and local enterprises to “make room” for the colonial mining operations.
These regimes compete to lower labor costs – with Mexico heading the list with the lowest minimum wage, the most repressive anti-trade union practices and the weakest regulations of environmental contamination. (...)

L'article complet: http://petras.lahaine.org/b2-img/petras_paradoxes.pdf

Motif stylistique traditionnel ("pachacuti"), en forme de S couché, sur une "manta" bolivienne. En quechua et en aymara, pachacuti signifie le chaos, le désordre entre deux périodes d'ordre. Photo: Pierre-Olivier Combelles (2012). C'est le symbole de la situation dans laquelle se trouvent les pays d'Amérique dite "latine" depuis 1492.

http://pocombelles.over-blog.com/article-ollanta-humala-tasso-pachacuti-110471982.html