Why Is Latin America still Poor

Why Is Latin America still Poor
Casual Scholar

Everybody, including me, complains about Maduro, the President of Venezuela, but I can kind of understand him now. Latin America has been ruled by a tiny minority who own all the land AND who see no reason to change the way their countries are run. It's not enough to just become president, you need to ruin everyone of those mother-fookers. If any on them manage to hang onto their lands, the whole elitist oligarchy will return and things will go back to the way they were. That is fine for the 'nobility' but wretched for everyone else.

You might think that he could at least manage the country's oil business a little better, but I suspect anyone who could compently run the oil business is a member of the 'ruling elite' and so, like in China's cultural revolution, they can't be trusted. But the people who can be trusted, people who are part of the revolution, don't know anything about the oil business because they never got a decent education. You'd think they would put a priority on sorting that out, but I suspect that there is a whole lot of in-fighting going on behind, beside and all around Maduro. Everybody is trying to get their piece of the pie. If the whole pie gets destroyed that's too bad. At least none of those other mother-fookers got any of it. And if you wonder why they are like that, it's because they learned it from the best, the people who were running the country before Maduro came to power.

All this assumes Maduro has good intentions and is sufficiently paranoid. It could be that he is an idiot, but somehow I doubt it. So we have two questions: can he destroy the oiligarchy? and two, will he be able to restart the economy from ground zero once they are well and truly obliterated? Castro pretty much destroyed the local oligarchy in Cuba, but once he had done that, he didn't build anything new.

Part of the problem is that most of Latin America is very Catholic, and the Catholic church has been very complicit helping the oligarchy maintain their position. They were in the past anyway, I don't know how much support they give them now.