Recap of the coming industrialization of South America

[auroraglacialis]

Perhaps the tip-off to this lunge toward technological expansion arose when billboards leading into the tiny agricultural town of Tiquipaya were abruptly changed from “EL CAPITÁL DE FLORES” to “EL CAPITÁL DEL PROGRESO” – and high-rise apartments and office buildings, suddenly and without local input, began to tower over tin-roofed shanties and women hawking papayas on the Reducto.
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The discovery of lithium was the biggest boon to Morales’ urge to emulate Brazil’s rise to economic potency. The rarity of the “gold of the 21st chellis mapcentury”-- with its importance to the up-and-coming electric-car battery industry, as well as to nuclear weaponry -- has put Bolivia in the running to build a Saudi-Arabia-size bank account, with battery sales between 2011 and 2014 slated to top $902 million and total sales possibly reaching $515 billion. At the same time, partnerships with the likes of Mitsubishi and South Korea have traditional communities nervous about any possibility of local input – as does the inevitable contamination of air, water, and soil via leeching, leaks, spills, and emissions.
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The Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America aims to construct mega-high-tech-industrial-highway-telecommunications-corridor networks throughout the continent, and Bolivia’s part has already been started: a 300-kilometer highway that will bust through a national eco-reserve, slashing the forestlands of at least 11 endangered animals and 60 indigenous communities, some of whom are the last to live according to their traditional hunter-gatherer ways.

Chellis Glendinning: The Techno-Fantasies of Evo Morales