Colin Wishneski curated this story by Catherine House, which The Appalachian published October 14, 1993.
In celebration of Columbus Day, former president of Ecuador Rodrigo Borja spoke on U.S. and Latin relations at 8 p.m. on Monday in Rosen concert hall. He was introduced by chancellor Francis Borkowski, who gave a brief history of his political background.
During his presidency, Borja made many changes which acted as an important shift towards democratization. He made progress on lowering inflation and unemployment rates, and also made reforms on trade and tariffs.
Borja began his lecture by talking about the last 44 years, specifically the Cold War when, “at any moment by someone’s mistake or simply because someone became nervous, it could have begun the third world war with catastrophic results.” He referred to this period as a “Geopolitical game of chess.”
He described the economic worlds that existed before the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, he said the second world has sunk and other political organizations will either assert themselves with the first world or fall into the third world. He believes that Latin America belongs to the third world because of its principal economic characteristics.
Borja compared the agriculture of the United States and Latin America. Latin America dedicates 40 percent of its industry to the cultivation of land; the United States only dedicates 4 to 5 percent.
This means that Latin America employs 40 people to feed 100 people while the United States employs 4 to 5 people to feed 100 people. This disparity, Borja said, is due to the lack of advanced technology in Latin America.
Borja said that Latin America has a high level of dependency of foreign countries, and that “technology is the primary cause of all dependencies.” He said that everything depends on technology whether it is technology dealing with the economy, the military, or culture in general.
Borja said he is very concerned with relations between the north and the south, more specifically between the developed world and underdeveloped countries. He believes it is important to understand one another and that it is possible for relations to be good between the two with some pre-requisites.
These two prerequisites are to end protectionist policies of industrialized nations and political organization intervention in the political affairs of another state.
