MAKE ARGUMENTS (FACTS) OF THE FOLLOWING TEXT Nation projects: The fact that the countries of Latin America were confined to the production of a single product, that is, to monoculture, established a relationship of profound inequality between Latin America and the metropolitan centers of the economy. So, in Latin America, there was a lack of a national project that would integrate the countries through regional, autonomous economies that authentically produced different products that were not imported, but rather served for the internal development of each country. There was no internal market. And the internal market has another name, it has the name of a nation. Where there is an internal market there is a nation. Where there is a nation there is a country. Where there is a homeland, a state is necessary. So, in all of Latin America what there were were oligarchies that lived enjoying the easy abundance of primary products, but they did not build a country. They built urban centers for the enjoyment of these oligarchies. A country could have been built with the comprehensive development of the country. In other words, not submitting to a single product but developing all those that the country could develop with which the internal market could have been created, jobs could have been provided, it would not have been "necessary" to kill so many people but rather they would have been integrated into an economy that we could call integration. But to economically integrate a country, an internal market and production for that internal market are necessary.
There were those who were always opposed to this easy economy of sending the first thing we have to Europe. Let's see, what grows here? Corn grows here, we send corn. There is sugar, we send sugar. No no no. There were thinkers, there were politicians who proposed something else. Because how dare you nationalize copper. The copper is not from Chile, the copper is to be delivered to the countries that dominate the world market.
We see that this has happened in all ages. From the beginning the fall of the Allende government is planned by this type of protectionist measures. Protectionism and free trade have always been at odds. What is protectionism? Protectionism is to say: look gentlemen, don't send us sewing machines because we are going to manufacture them ourselves. That is economic protectionism, and we make our sewing machines instead of having them sent to us by the English. But liberalism was chosen, and what is liberalism: look, send us your sewing machines, we are open to anything you want to send us and we send you whatever you want. Do you want us to be monocultures? Well, for that we are free, we freely choose to be monocultures and you freely send us all the manufactured products that we could make if we were protectionists, but how can we be protectionists? Paraguay was, but because it had a dictator, Francisco Solano López, and he closed Paraguay. Sure, it's true, in Paraguay there were shipyards, there was a profound, independent, autonomous capitalist development, that's why we had to devastate Paraguay with 600,000 Paraguayan dead (in the War of the Triple Alliance). And these things must be done in the name of the "progress of history." Even Marx himself will say: “what do horrors matter, if the fruits are pleasures? He did not kill thousands of beings of beings, Tamerlane in his reign." With which he is saying, the human costs implied by the imperialist penetration in the colonial countries do not matter. Because Marx himself supports bourgeois development because dialectically, Hegelian, he believes that from this bourgeois development the industrial proletariat will emerge that will lead these countries to liberation. But here he was seriously mistaken. On the other hand, the Creole oligarchies did not need that dialectic. The Creole oligarchies of all the countries of Latin America said “free trade”. Free trade because with free trade we send the raw materials and England sends us the manufactured products. On the other hand, a protectionist State would have defended the national economy and would have led the national economy to manufacture autonomously, internally, those products that an internal market would have claimed. This was not done and the countries of Latin America were constituted in exteriority, that is, giving the central handle to the empire and submitting to the only product that each one of them managed to produce. Thus, Latin America was condemned to industrial backwardness and that has been its dark destiny in the economic aspect. Therefore, it was a subaltern continent before the great powers.