Extractivism and Democracy. A scene of incestuous relationships

Abstract

Those peripheral-dependent countries, specialized in exporting primary goods and heavily financing their economies with exports, seem to be condemned to poverty precisely because they are ‘rich’ in natural resources. This interaction between periphery, dependency, and extractivism seems to trap societies in a perverse logic that consolidates states and economies that live off the rent of Nature. These extractivist regimes, of an exacerbated presidentialism, with a clientelistic approach to attending to social demands, do not structurally address the causes of poverty and marginality. While the environmental and social impacts, typical of these large-scale extractive activities, used ungovernability, which in turn requires new repressive responses. In this context, the exercise of democracy - and even freedoms - is subject to the cycles of commodity prices. The balance is evident, more extractivism, less democracy.