Scarcity and Latin America Abundance

In the 1960s and 1970s "dependency" theorists (including, among others, Teotonio Dos Santos, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Anibal Quijano, and Andre Gunder Frank) argued that as Latin America entered into relationships with dominant economies like Spain and Portugal, and later Britain and the United States, it became poorer rather than richer. Various enterprises, from sugar plantations and silver mines to automobile assembly plants and pharmaceutical factories, did not advance Latin America but rather removed its wealth and stunted its own, self-determining progress. Furthermore one could identify elite classes and dominant areas within Latin America not as modernizers but as doing the work of extraction and control for outsiders. Backwardness thus was imposed from outside on a potentially self-sufficient, abundant region.

Dependency theory at its most radical called for class revolutions in Latin America. It identified a carrier of change in the peasantry seen as a class (rather than as indigenous cultures) and, to a lesser extent, in the urban poor and workers in new industries. These classes were seen as the creators of abundance but the sufferers of scarcity because the surplus product of their labor was taken away in unequal exchange with the world centers of capitalism (a heterodox Marxism focusing on relations of exchange rather than production). In spite of this radical diagnosis, however, dependency theory overlapped in practice with nationalist-capitalist industrialization and urbanization guided by the central state, which envisioned scarcity and abundance in conventional economic terms.