Do you have an idea about of your own as to why there's such a difference yeah i can point to a couple of historical factors that make them different one is that um going all the way back to the colonial period costa rica lacked the two things that brought a lot of um spanish exploitation to other parts of latin america um it lacked exploitable resources and it lacked a large indigenous population that meant that it's a little like new england in that way with um with little in the term in uh easily exploitable resources for export um and no large imperial indigenous polities to take over,
And exploit for labor so that means that costa rica remained much more lightly populated and that the spaniards who went there kind of had to farm for themselves because there wasn't much else they could do as opposed to places where they were able to develop these extremely hierarchical violent and exploitative export economies and you even see that difference if you look at the north versus the south of the united states where there was an exploitable resource for export is where the um extreme inequalities and exploitation and forced labor systems are implemented and where there's nothing to exploit there's you can't really make a lot of money,
Bring in a lot of forced workers and exploit them so you know that's kind of a long-term difference in costa rica um and then in the 1950s costa rica abolished its military so and one of the reasons it was able to do that was because the levels of inequality and exploitation were lower so it didn't need the large military to to continually be attacking its own population because that's what latin america's militaries have basically served for has been to to oppress and exploit their own populations but where there's less inequality less concentration of land less forced labor system you don't need a stronger military so but by abolishing its military that allowed costa rica to devote its state resources towards building a social welfare state instead of just towards increasing its military,
You know we see this conflict going on in the united states right now um can we have guns and butter and if we can only have one we know which one it's going to be it's going to be guns because they pass the military budget without a question but when it comes to social welfare aspects of the budget oh no we can't afford that um in fact congress just passed more than biden even asked for in next year's military budget so um you know maintaining a a huge military um is a huge expense and it drains state resources and it entrenches the need for that military because by taking resources away from the poor it makes the poor more unhappy,
And then you need more of the military to keep them down and again you can kind of see echoes of this happening in the united states too so i would say that those those are two sort of historical factors and moments that led costa rica on a different path on the other hand since the 1990s costa rica has been just as costa rica's economy has been just as undermined by neoliberal reforms and the social welfare state has really been put into a certain degree of of tatters so um you know of course as a historian i hate to try to predict the future but in some ways costa rica has become more central americanized in the last couple of decades i see yeah last time i was there as in maybe 2003 but it is quite a distinct country and the fact that you brought up spanish colonialism is so important,
We bring up jamestown and plymouth rock here we want to understand our own history but the the foundations the economic and social foundations that followed spanish colonialism did have an impact and continue to five centuries later um so and i really love charles bergquist's book labor in the course of american democracy um where he kind of compares the united states north and south to different parts of latin america and this is where he makes the the argument that i was kind of summarizing about how um where you have a lot of resources and you develop really exploitative labor systems those anti-democratic structures are really durable and where there's no resources and nobody to exploit that's where democracy can flourish yeah interesting,
Also has a lot of work on colombia right oh yeah yeah right on the well and so this these economic foundations are really important for listeners to understand too because they don't just go away and a lot of the uh reforms that the sandinistas were i'm just generally referring to san denises of course there were a lot of different groups there but uh what they're trying to undo is something what the fmln was trying to do as well which is uh kind of change the uh the power structure the economic structure because from there you can have these social reforms but if there are if there's military uh actions that are being used against economic reforms over the course of centuries really then you kind of learn the lesson you have that you have to take up arms too it's like that old saying inevitable revolutions the revolutions become inevitable,
Can you talk about uh kind of going back maybe to the late 1800s in places like guatemala and el salvador how some of those changes economic concentration changes might have affected what was going on during the cold war so the late 1800s is the period that some um historians refer to as the second conquest of latin america the first conquest was the conquest by the spanish and portuguese and the second conquest comes after independence and it is the it's also known as the liberal era um the consolidation of the nation states after independence but consolidation of dependent nation states so they're politically independent but economically dependent especially on northern european countries england germany,
Increasingly on the united states and it's called the second conquest because there's a huge assault on indigenous lands in in establishing these new dependencies and the development of new export economies so if the colonial export economy was based on precious metals and sugar primarily um depending on what part of of latin america we're talking about um the the second conquest is based on new export crops like coffee especially in central america it's coffee in other parts of latin america there are other metals that become important like copper fertilizers like nitrites um guano uh basically feeding the industrial revolution that's going on in germany united kingdom united states um and feeding the industrial revolution in two ways oh the other central american product is bananas,
So feeding the industrial revolution with raw materials that the factories need um and this is also the period if you remember when the scramble for africa is going on and the industrializing european countries are taking over the entire continent of africa again in the search of raw materials for their industry and food products to feed their own populations who are no longer working on their farms because they are moving to the cities and starting to work in industry so that there's a big transformation that's going on in europe in the united states from rural to urban and from independent artisan production to industrial production so what are people eating when they stop working on the farms,
And the farms are also mechanizing and industrializing of course what are people eating tropical stimulants coffee tea sugar colonial products from the tropics from these new colonies and neo colonies so this second conquest um takes over huge amounts of native american indigenous land um and of course the united states is taking over indigenous land in the late 1800s as well if you you know compare to what's going on in u.s history,
Feeding its own industrial expansion domestically as well as globally looking for outlets for capital looking looking for investments and looking for raw materials for industry so africa and latin america and southeast asia and south asia uh form part of this new second conquest uh but in latin america i think only in latin america is that terminology used because latin america was already colonized by europeans in the 1500s and now it's being recolonized in the 1800s so the central american economies are through foreign investment.
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