We trekked through the Amazon Rainforest, kicking up the mud with our boots, wielding our machetes, and avoiding the danger in our path. Don Gregario, an Ecuadorean farmer and my service group’s host for the week, led us on the journey into the forest where he tended a small cocoa farm. Sweating from the terrible heat, we helped Don Gregario with his work: clearing waist-high weeds, collecting cocoa plants, and carrying seed-filled buckets on our backs. While I was exhausted at the end of the day from both the heat and the strenuous labor, I appreciated seeing the reality of working at the other end of a neocolonial system.
Despite his arduous labor, Don Gregario, like thousands of other farmers in developing countries, cannot send his children to school, take a small vacation, or afford anything other than basic necessities. He is a victim of an unfair system enforced by industrial nations like the United States. After only experiencing his life for a week, I realized how much of a global issue the lack of freedom in a free market is as the rich get richer and the poor only get poorer.
While our collective notion of colonialism may evoke images of bygone days, neocolonialism, a capitalistic form of imperialism, still pervades the global market. Our failure to recognize the negative consequences of this system has allowed several industrialized nations to maintain their economic dominance over developing societies, whose resources and populations are being unfairly exploited despite advances in technology, a greater range of diversity in economic practices, and an overflow of resources. Although many conservatives refuse to recognize these facts, self-determination can actually come at a very high price.
Since the 1960’s, foreign companies have invested in Ecuador’s large oil deposits. Instead of helping the middle and lower classes, these corporations have stripped Ecuador of its resources, destroyed the Amazon rainforest, and taken away homes from some of the most hard-working people I have ever met.
The struggle persists, and the rights of populations in developing nations continue to take a backseat to capitalistic concerns. In September, the United States denied visas to five Ecuadorian nationals who needed them in order to travel to the UN General Assembly, where they would have presented a case against Chevron-Texaco, one of the largest oil companies in the world. As a result of this multi-billion dollar company’s actions in Ecuador, 16 to 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater have been dumped into the rainforest.
Thanks to companies like Chevron-Texaco, the local population has been exposed to a wave of cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects over the past three decades. Although we have the technology to drill oil ethically, we still allow mammoth companies to bully and exploit developing nations.
Because their land has been destroyed, many citizens become dependent upon industrialized nations for their livelihood, and they have no other option but to work for the very companies that infringed upon their rights. The nation’s water supplies are polluted, farmers like Don Gregario are scrambling to find new land, and young Ecuadorians are denied a future as they are cast into a never-ending cycle of poverty.
The effects of neocolonialist practices extend across the globe. All along the ivory coast of Africa, cocoa farmers often resort to child labor because they have no other way to compete against companies like Nestlé, which has had a history of human rights violations in this area.
Failing to address this issue allows for both environmental destruction and human rights violations throughout the world. Before my trip to Ecuador, where I talked to families that had lost loved ones to the environmental destruction caused by companies like Chevron-Texaco, I did not realize neocolonialism was still alive. Despite conservative efforts to draw attention away from the issue, the consequences of neocolonialism—poverty, unfair labor, and discrimination—are still problems that they have to face everyday.
I hope that one day I can visit Don Gregario again. I hope he’s living the life he deserves. Until we collectively address the issue, developing nations will inevitably become victims of this harmful system.
