Avaliação: CAPITALISMO Y POLÍTICAS DE PROTECCIÓN DE LA NATURALEZA EN AMERICA LATINA – Natural Resources: Blessing or Curse? An Insight into Contemporary Environmental History Through the Ecuadorian Case

The history of Latin America is the chronicle of natural resources extraction and commodification in the global market. Academic approaches to the region’s liaison with nature traditionally served to rationalize its underdevelopment with respect to the Global North as well as to underline transient development gains particularly during commodities boom periods. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, academic discussions on the region’s natural resources-based development model gained momentum thanks to the irruption of environmental thinking into Latin American social thought. Even before the emergence of COVID-19, the crisis triggered by the end of the last commodity price cycle (2003-2014) was an invitation to revisit a key question of the Global South: are natural resources a blessing or a curse?
This paper aims to converge upon such contemporary debates by exploring the paradigmatic case of the Ecuadorian oil era. The country study transparently mirrors Latin American sociopolitical processes since the end of the Second World War, in which the concepts of nature and development became inextricable. Thereby, nature assimilated to different meanings in line with the reconfigurations of capitalism. It is argued that emerging meanings of nature (sometimes even antagonistic) increasingly contributed to the semiotic construction of the concept of development in the twenty-first century.

• Latin America
• Nature
• Environmental Discourse
• Neo-extractivism
• Development Studies