Reading this week’s material was very interesting and I think chapter 9 may be my favourite chapter so far! \u00a0I found it was the chapter that had the most obvious relevance to today’s\u00a0world and \u00a0referenced issues I was more familiar with. For a while now I have been particularly interested\u00a0in the United States’ foreign intervention in Latin America\u00a0and the kind of impact it has had on various different countries, and in this chapter Dawson brings up many intriguing ideas.<\/p>\n
Dawson explores the banana industry and explains how the United Fruit Company (UFCO) earned massive economic power as it became the largest banana company in the world. In this segment of the chapter, what stood out to me was the amount of power both politically and economically UFCO was able to gain as they acquired a complete monopoly over the banana business in Guatemala. In the situation with UFCO, I see a reoccurring\u00a0narrative in which foreign investors and businesses, primarily from the U.S, abuse severe inequalities in Latin America to obtain this aforementioned power and wealth.<\/p>\n
More than a hundred years after UFCO’s inception, many Corporate giants are still using Central and South America as nothing more than an easy business venture — filled with raw resources, cheap labour, and a working population they can treat as inferior. One must look no further than the multi-billion dollar industry that is mining in Latin America, many companies of which are Canadian. Simultaneously\u00a0making absurds amount of money and devastating the lives of many residents in countless countries by contaminating drinking water and causing social and environmental tragedy, the mining industry is, like the Banana industry and UFCO, an entity that has gained massive power.<\/p>\n
Beyond the trauma and Oppression created by these sorts of companies in relation to worker conditions and inequalities, \u00a0I think the biggest issue is that once these businesses become economically and politically well established in a country, it can become almost impossible to progress without them and countries become reliant on foreign companies to advance economically. Huge economic redevelopment to change this reliance would be costly and take time and it is for this reason that i am skeptical on when and if changes will happen.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, in the near future, we will see an improvement, but in the meantime, I find myself wondering what Latin America would’ve looked like if American\u00a0companies such as UFCO never infiltrated the region at all. Perhaps we would be looking at a much healthier Latin America?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reading this week’s material was very interesting and I think chapter 9 may be my favourite chapter so far! \u00a0I found it was the chapter that had the most obvious relevance to today’s\u00a0world and \u00a0referenced issues I was more familiar with. For a while now I have been particularly interested\u00a0in the United States’ foreign intervention …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44638,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44638"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jorgelast100\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}