Comment by linuxkerneldev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linuxkerneldev | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> South America has a long tradition of interchangeable strongman governments, none of whom had any real interest in advancing the needs of citizens.

This statement is generally true. Areas that were setup as encomiendas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda ) right from the period of Pizzaro and Cortez have retained that exact flavour. Individual strong men rule because that's exactly what was setup. Any "citizen" (ie: indigenous person, slave, or otherwise disenfranchised individual) who tried to go against this system or even escape its clutches was punished severely. It is extremely hard to break that structure. If you wonder why that did not happen in North America, it was because the North was much more sparsely populated and so the colonizers had to setup systems that gave rights to everyone (except of course the sparse indigenous population that needed to be exterminated since it could not be "encomienda"-ed), just so that the companies that sponsored the colonization in North America (like the Virginia company) could turn a profit. It is noteworthy that the Virginia company for example, did actually plan to use the same encomienda approach but was startled to find that there weren't enough compliant indigenous people to enslave. They then switched to trying to strongarm the colonialist/settlers but this had disastrous results. It was only thereafter they gave rights, and privileges to "citizens". This all happened when they became desperate to get a return on their investment.

So yes, your statement is absolutely true. Long tradition indeed. Since 1492 in fact.

To lay the blame Latin America's political failures wholesale on the West is to greatly overestimate the West and underestimate Latinos, not to mention to completely misunderstand geopolitics. One of the first things that gets forgotten about colonialism is how utterly tiny the European population was in comparison to the natives. Without the cooperation of the natives, Europeans could get nowhere.

Natives were not the pathetic, stupid rubes that people often seem to think they were. They had their own political systems, agricultural systems, militaries. Sure, the locals were shocked when the white men with the powerful guns landed, but you can bet that every single one of their leaders had contingency plans in place for just how to deal with Cortes and his contemporaries once their political usefulness ended. Europe simply didn't have the manpower to field large enough armies in the New World to get what they wanted by force.

South America has always been geographically stunted compared to North America. It cost too much to get there, what they had wasn't of interest to Europe, the terrain inhospitable. I think we vastly overrate how much damage Europeans did directly.

> South America has always been geographically stunted compared to North America.

I believe you are very much mistaken unless your definition of "geographically stunted" and "has always" is different than what is generally accepted.

The facts show clearly that prior to 1492, Central and South America were where the larger, more organized, more sedentary, more productive civilizations were. That's why the Incas, Mayas, Olmecs, Aztecs, were all NOT in North America. So any theory of "geographical stunting" would need to explain what changed in the geography after 1492.

> Without the cooperation of the natives, Europeans could get nowhere.

I'm surprised that anyone would believe this "cooperation" of the natives. I have a simpler explanation. "Natives" did not cooperate willingly. Instead, through our vastly superior military technology, we imposed "cooperation" on the natives in Central and South America, while in the North, we imposed something completely different as already explained above. In the Central and South American region, we setup political and military structures to preserve ourselves at the top and keep the entirety of the other population at the bottom and also to prevent their escape. That was the defined purpose of the encomiendas. We wanted to do the same in the North but could not. North America escaped this fate precisely because the native population was far too sparse to enable viable encomiendas. So our corporations had to find alternate ways to gain profit, and that turned out to be, by enabling and giving rights to the settlers/colonialists. That difference is effectively the primary cause of what has given rise to the vastly different fates between the 2 regions.

> So any theory of "geographical stunting" would need to explain what changed in the geography after 1492.

What changed was technology. Once you have ships going back and forth across the Atlantic, everything changes. Europeans introduced cows, sheep, pigs, chickens. The New World's only domesticable native animal is the llama, which is the main reason why civilizations sprung up in Central and the northern parts of South America, that's where llamas were.

Now, to the Europeans, with vastly superior farming technology, the Caribbean and North America were veritable cornucopias of geopolitical possibility. Islands sheltered plantations. Europe could project real power only very closely to the shore, where the big naval guns could reach. The reason was supply. To maintain a group of soldiers requires not just food but adequate clothing, weapons, ammunition, and horses to carry all of that.

It took over a century of growth for a colony to get to the point to where it could maintain and supply an army for deeper treks inland. By that time the colonies would have been deeply entrenched in native political systems. Because the warships protecting your colony could only hang around for so long, colonies were quite vulnerable to native military action, or even just having them hang around outside the settlement and killing whoever goes outside, say, to chop wood. It made sense for settlers to be nice to the locals, at least at first.

CGPGrey just put out a fantastic video comparing the Old and New Worlds that neatly explains why Europe won and the Western Hemisphere lost. The actual mechanism was disease, which does not require a supply train, but there's a lot more to the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com