This week’s lectures by Professor Holt were on Latin America. The main focus was the colonial legacies of Latin America; economic, political and social factors that set the stage for the entrenched structural inequalities that characterize Latin America today. She discussed the ‘logic’ of colonialism one point being Disease after contact with Latin America. This is well elaborated in an article on Epidemics in the Americas where they describe how disease provided the avenue for easier colonization in Latin America. “Similar catastrophes unfolded across the hemisphere. The most precipitous decline is thought to have occurred in the Caribbean, where the precontact indigenous population of several millions had been all but exterminated by the 1550s.
Such diseases spread rapidly in all directions, preceding and accompanying military incursions, weakening indigenous polities, and facilitating the process of conquest and colonization in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Andes, Brazil, New England, and beyond. This process of demographic catastrophe, an unintended consequence of the European encounter with the Western Hemisphere, affected every aspect of the subsequent history of the Americas.”
Another Logic of Colonialism is the Atlantic Slave trade where she discussed how slaves were more profitable especially in areas like Southeast Brazil because of the climate; the climate was suitable enough for working and harvesting on a plantation for crops such as sugar cane which was a very crucial crop at the time due to its major use in food items.
There is also discussion on tools of colonial control. These included casta paintings which were to demonstrate racial hierarchy and the relationship between race and parentage even though the white population was relatively smaller than the Africans. There is also use of the Catholic Church to sort of tame the Africans from their ‘uncivilized’ ways and used as the key to heaven; if the Africans resorted to Christianity they could go to heaven.
Emphasis was also placed on three Latin American countries namely: Cuba, Chile and Venezuela. For Venezuela, a major turning point was in 1808 when Napoleon occupied the Iberian Peninsula, deposed the French Bourbon dynasty and appointed his brother Joseph Bonaparte King of Spain. Two years later they would declare independence. In Cuba and Chile, there was no exact type of ideology or government but rather a modeled form of democracy.
In ‘Upside Down’ by Eduardo Galeano, he gives a snapshot of the modern world as we know it as he says ” A desolate, de-souled world that practices the superstitious worship of machines and idolatry of arms.” There was global hope that the World would reach an equilibrium of peace, freedom and progress but according to Galeano it was all a facade