New financializations, old displacements: neo-extractivism, ‘whitening’, and consumption in Latin America

Abstract

ABSTRACT The wave of Latin American left-wing governments of the 2000s claimed to have redistributed the national wealth originating from the extraction of natural resources. Termed ‘neo-extractivism’, this strategy expanded the extractive frontier and relied on the intensive exploitation of natural resources to reinvigorate welfare programs. During this period, we contend, financialization took new shapes, both in how raw materials were commercialized and in the new forms of credit and consumption enabled by the social programs institutionalized by the progressive Latin American governments during the 2000s. Indigenous, mestizo, and afro-descendant populations were the ones that confronted the expulsion produced by this economic model, displaced by the repurposing of land to expand extractive projects. We frame the ghost of empire as an instrumental metaphor to understand the concrete impacts of extractive policies, the financial relations they produced, and the racial forced displacements they generate. The ghost of empire metaphor articulates the interrelation between culture and economy, with an economic realm focused on growing state revenues via the intensive extraction of natural resources, and a cultural imagination that legitimizes the displacement and dispossession of those affected by the model in a way that inevitably reconjures the spectral forces of the colonial past.