Title:  "From El Dorado to the End of the Earth: Latin America Past and Present"

Time: April 29 (Wed), 12:00-13:00

Venue: TSE  

Speaker: Louis Goodman (Emeritus Dean and Professor of International Relations at American University’s School of International Service)

Lecture Abstract: This lecture will discuss key elements of the history of Latin America and how they impact the region’s current economic, political and social reality.

Speaker Bio:

Louis Goodman is Emeritus Dean and Professor of International Relations at American University’s School of International Service. He carries out research on social change and politics in Latin America and in Asia. His current research focuses on public goods, regional cooperation and the Global South. He has published widely on civil-military relations in Latin America, on foreign investment in developing countries and on determinants of career success for blue-collar workers. He has researched and lived abroad in Chile, Ecuador, Mexico,Peru , Azerbaijan, Nigeria, and Singapore. Dr. Goodman served on the faculty of Yale University’s Department of Sociology and as Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Programs of the Social Science Research Council and The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He has held visiting appointments at The Latin American Faculty of the Social Sciences (Santiago), Tsinghua University (Beijing), the National University of Singapore, and Manipal University (India). He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from San Martin de Porres University (Lima), the United Nations University for Peace (San Jose), and Ritsumeikan University (Kyoto). In 1992, Dr. Goodman served as the President of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs. He is currently teaching the course "Social Political Economy in Latin America and Asia" in TSE.

Lecture Summary (by Lorraine, 1st year PhD):

In the lecture of Professor Louis Goodman, “From El Dorado to the End of the Earth: Latin America Past and Present”, he gave us a look into the tragic shift of Latin America from being one of the world’s most progressive and well-off domains prior to the European rout (specifically in regions of Mesoamerica and the Andes) to a geographic area today that is scorned with deeply rooted politico-economic pressures. He utilizes the figurative language ‘the edge of the Earth’ to talk about the situation of Latin America at present, and explains how they are suffering from various unstable thresholds in spite of their valuable cultural heritage.

Further, he utilizes the proven evidence on plate tectonics as a symbol of the threatening social trends occurring in South America. He justifies such scientific analogy by describing how Latin America is at risk of a probable “Second Lost Decade” as a consequence of its unsteady economic growth and ineffective politics – while it has 8% of the world’s population, the area only adds to a modest fraction of economic development. He also emphasizes its administrative losses by mentioning that Latin America underwent an unreasonably large ratio of COVID-19 deaths, as compared to other countries in the world. Compounding the issue, some specialists have also been signalling to the world that the Amazon rainforest, which is a major part of Latin America, may shortly hit a turning point where it will cease to nurse its own weather system and may probably make it denature into a torrid savanna.

Professor Goodman weighs these contemporary difficulties against welfare in the time of pre-Columbian America, which is usually linked to the tale of El Dorado. Although Europeans visualized a legendary city of gold, he explains that the true El Dorado was already present ahead of the occupation. In 1492, roughly 50 million inhabitants resided in the Western Hemisphere, and they were subsidized with the help of leading farming structures and greatly formed nations at the time. Administrative centers like Tenochtitlan and Cuzco resembled, and even topped the larger European cities in that period in terms of scope. Indigenous peoples also established well-made civic rules made up of the Inca Empire and the Iroquois Confederation, whose Great Law of Peace subsequently shaped egalitarian views in the United States. However, this remains debated.

Nonetheless, European colonization wrecked these populations. Plagues like smallpox, measles, and influenza removed most of the indigenous communities, scaling down millions of people to only some hundred thousand surviving individuals throughout the mid-1500s. Those who withstood this debacle were usually required to work against their will. Meanwhile, imperial influence revolutionized the general production techniques of indigenous groups into resource-based restraints directed at mineral exploitation. Tremendous volumes of gold and silver were transferred to Europe, and they supplemented the lives of these oppressive aristocrats in the time they left Latin America financially vulnerable. He wraps up the lecture with his argument that clientelism and hundreds of years of resource extraction started the serious problem of injustice that still represents a large part of Latin America at present.