Gold, Oil and Avocados
A Recent History of Latin America in Sixteen Commodities
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The past decade has seen major political upheaval in Latin America--from Brazil to Chile to Venezuela to Bolivia--but to understand what happened, ask first where your quinoa and lithium batteries came from...
The 21st century began optimistically in Latin America. Left-leaning leaders armed with programs to reduce poverty and reclaim national wealth were seeing results—but as the aughts gave way to the teens, they began to fall like dominos. Where did the dreams of this "pink tide" go? Look no further than the original culprits of Latin American disenfranchisement: resource-rich land and unscrupulous extraction.
Recounting the story commodity by commodity, Andy Robinson reveals what oxen have to do with the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, how quinoa explains the mob that descended on Evo Morales, and why oil is the culprit behind the protracted coup in Venezuela. In addition to the usual suspects like gold and bananas which underscored the original plunder of the Americas, Robinson also shows how a new generation of valuable resources—like coltan for smartphones, lithium for electric cars, and niobium for SpaceX rockets—have become important players in the fate of Latin America. And as the energy transition sets mineral prices soaring, Latin America remains at the mercy of the rollercoaster of commodity prices.
In Gold, Oil, and Avocados, Robinson takes readers from the salt plains of Chile to the depths of the Amazonian jungle to stitch together the story of Latin America's last decade, showing how the imperial plunder of the past carries on today under a new name.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
La Vanguardia reporter Robinson makes his English-language debut with an incisive look at how an overreliance on the extraction and export of raw materials has fueled Latin America's recent political, social, and economic turmoils. Drawing inspiration from Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, Robinson sketches the rise and fall of progressive governments across the region over the past two decades, as efforts to "accelerate growth in order to eliminate poverty and extreme inequality" were undermined by the 2008 financial crisis; tensions between extractivist industries and environmental activists; and U.S. meddling, among other factors. In Venezuela, the collapse of international oil prices, coupled with "erratic management" of the state-owned oil company and harsh U.S. sanctions, contributed to an economic crisis in 2019. In the Michoacán region of Mexico, Americans' growing taste for avocados has "annihilated" crop diversity and led to the takeover of local farms by criminal cartels. Other commodities that come under Robinson's microscope include lithium, soy, beef, diamonds, and peyote. It's a sobering and well-documented picture, shot through with Robinson's caustic wit (avocados, he writes, are a "tasteless alternative to butter spread on trillions of slices of students' toast"). This sweeping survey packs a punch.
