It has been well documented, and confirmed by the experiences of many of us, that in Latin America, people in power seize and hold local resources using a variety of schemes. What is common to most of these situations is that local resources – whether cash crops for exports, local tourist sites, or other resources – do not contribute to the local economic vitality unless they are controlled and operated by local folks.
In Latin America, local resources are often developed in such as way as to make services and products unaffordable to local folks, and sometimes in direct violation of national constitutions and laws. The target market is people who live far away, in much better economic conditions than the local population. The local population is considered valuable only as labor and local governments useful only as instruments to avoid environmental, labor and other important laws that may exist and originally enacted for the local community’s health.
As much as some would like to point out that resource development by non-local power structures brings job opportunities, what it does, in fact, is render local initiatives and resources to the service of outside interests, creating cycles of poverty that have only exacerbated the migration of people across the continent. As many immigrants find that they are not welcome elsewhere, they return to their original home communities with limited or nonexistent economic opportunities or power.
Economic development in rural Latin America is one of the best strategies for fighting undocumented immigration into the U.S. People across the continent have shown that they have the know-how to developing local opportunities, but the problem is that those opportunities are too often drained by those in power, by people who control the structures that control the local resources, by people who maintain power through political maneuverings and corrupt administrations.