Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 60
that roosted on its Pacific littoral shores. Chilean, English and Spanish companies
interested only in the fertilizing power of the guano deposits controlled the business.
Before the advent of carbohydrate derived fertilizers, European farmers found guano of
critical importance to their industry. The European powers of the time used the military
might of their armed forces to open and maintain commodity sources for the benefit of
privately chartered companies. This arrangement was known as an expression of
mercantilist economic policy. These companies employed the native population under
very harsh conditions and did not bring permanent new residents to the country. Bolivia
was disconnected, isolated, mismanaged and impoverished. Its riches were an easy
temptation to mercantilist exploiters who found no advantage in working with its
authorities.
Significant numbers of new people did not come to the hinterland until the end of the
19 th century and beginning of the 20 th when tin mining became important in the Andes
Mountains and rubber harvesting boomed on the plains of the Amazon headwaters.
Both were strategic raw materials for mechanized manufacturing but were more prized
for war making purposes. The industrial nations needed them. The financial stakes
exacerbated the weakness of a country wrought by the isolationism that had prevailed
for more than one hundred years. An enfeebled Bolivia, in the last quarter of the 19 th
century, suffered two devastating territorial dismemberments, one to its neighbor to the
southwest, Chile, losing its seacoast, guano deposits, and rich mining districts. The
other loss was to its neighbor to the north, Brazil, losing the fertile grounds where
rubber, cinchona and other bountiful plants from the rainforest grew.
The discovery of quinine in the second quarter of the 19 th Century, a medicine extracted
from the cinchona tree, also produced some immigration and economic activity. This
tree, native to the Bolivian eastern plains of the Amazon River headwaters, was the only
effective medicine against malaria. However, in a relative short time, first quinine and
then rubber lost their importance in Bolivia and all South America. Reaching the
naturally existing trees that supplied quinine and rubber through impenetrable and
infested swampy jungles, and then retrieving the harvest, was difficult, dangerous and
expensive. It caused extreme human suffering among the dispossessed native
populations enlisted for this work.
No Bolivian, or for that fact, no South American person or institution either sponsored by
government or as a private entrepreneur, sought a solution that could solve these
problems. In time they lost the initiative, lost the monopoly, and lost what I think could
have been a valid opportunity to establish another large corporation such as Mr. Simon
I. Patino did with tin. One remarkable Bolivian tycoon, Nicolas Suarez, in the early 20 th
century organized a successful trading company but was not able to permanently
resolve the difficult logistics of rubber exploitation and the vagrancies of the
commodities market.
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