From Christopher Columbus to Claudia Sheinbaum

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 15/10/2024

Every year, on the occasion of the anniversary of Christopher Columbus's landing on American soil, a media uproar is created between those who consider the date to be one of disgrace and those who, on the contrary, see it as the celebration of the beginning of the civilization of the land mass that would bear the name of the explorer and navigator Amerigo Vespucci.

The truth is that both sides are lost in the historical details of the process of America's insertion into the world economy, which is the fundamental aspect for the progress or lack thereof in any nation. And this is the creation of wealth. And the creation of wealth flows when individuals who occupy a territory are free to own property and that property ownership is respected.

In both Spain and Portugal, at the beginning of the Age of Geographical Discovery, land ownership was held by the respective crowns. And it was the crowns that allowed or prevented the inhabitants from owning real estate. From the point of view of the American communities, the issue of property was not far removed from the situation prevailing in Spain and Portugal. The Incas and the Aztecs were not great fans of private property either. They preferred community systems of ownership of real estate and maintained absolute monopolies on the possession of means of payment. Therefore, none of the cultures active in America could be considered as pioneers of civilization. Especially if one considers that by the time of Columbus' landing in Mainz, Mr. Gutenberg had already begun to flood the neighboring principalities where enlightenment was emerging with books that until then had been a monopoly of the Catholic Church.

Let us add to this account the expropriation of the American lands from their original inhabitants by Pope Alexander VI via the bull Inter Caeteris and the creation of the Holy Office to realize that the process that followed Columbus' feat had nothing to do with a civilizing task.

But as history is made by accidents - let us remember what it cost Adam to sleep under the apple tree - Columbus' landing opened the bottle of the most transformative genius ever known in the history of humanity. We are referring to trade, whose capacity for innovation is such that it made Samarkand an emporium of civilization and wealth creation. It also did the same with the Italian republics, particularly Venice and Genoa and to a lesser extent Florence and Milan. And although Spain and Portugal made the most absurd efforts to possess the commercial flows, competition from the Netherlands, England and France prevented the commercial monopoly from being achieved. Of course, the pirates of the Caribbean had something to do with this story. But from the point of view strictly of development, it was trade that was the civilizing force of America.

This, of course, should not surprise us since Christopher Columbus undertook the feat of discovering America because he was looking for a trade route to Asia that would allow Europe to continue the wave of development initiated by the Italian republics.

Today Latin America is what it is thanks to trade and perhaps it would be even more than it is if it had been able to establish a continental free trade zone. If it had done so in the 1990s, the regional product would be US$20 trillion today instead of the current figure of barely US$4.5 trillion.

This should be the lesson to be learned by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. Her country has been able to lift millions of families out of poverty and thus increase the proportion of its middle classes thanks to trade and in particular free trade with the United States and Canada. The moment that vein is extinguished, Mexico will return to the state of development it had until the 1990s when it was one of the countries with the lowest proportion of middle classes in the region. And I do not believe that the Mexican public will be very enthusiastic about this painful path. And although her predecessor created a political map similar to the one that prevailed for 70 years, in this 21st century these maps tend to fragment. Because the single party in which she sits carries within itself two different visions of the development process of Mexico. One of them prefers that there be free trade and that the middle classes grow, of which many of the political leaders are part.

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