Industrialization helped many Latin American countries evolve rapidly benefitting the world in many aspects. Latin America was changed forever once the Spanish conquistadores colonized and introduced key technologies into the new world. After splitting up the land in the America’s dividing it up between Spanish and Portuguese territories, the process of industrialization started. Specifically, in Brazil, it started in the mid 1500’s with the Portuguese using sugar plantations along the coast for exportation. Industrialization rate increased rapidly with new industries, exports and trades. One of the largest sources for export was silver mining in Bolivia. This powered the economy in Latin America and eventually became significant part of the global industrialization process. As Brazil moves forward with industrialization, urbanization soon followed. People started migrating from the countryside and farmlands, to cities in search of new jobs as new factories and industries were created. This caused a sharp increase in urban population. Industrialization positively affected Brazil because it became one of the largest economies in the world by creating new industries, exporting goods, and developing modern technology. It also became one of the largest Latin American societies as it increased in population and became more urbanized.
The Spanish and Portuguese started colonizing South America in the 16th century. In 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, a treaty which divided the world into 2 different sides, each group claiming their land. After the treaty, Portugal received territory in the northeastern part of South America, mainly Brazil. “Portuguese interest in Brazil rose dramatically after mid-century when entrepreneurs established profitable sugar plantations on the coast. The Portuguese used slaves imported from Africa as a source of labor and eventually took most of Brazil’s population.” Silver production was one of their major focuses and the two biggest silver mining areas were northern Mexico and modern day Bolivia. While most of the Spanish Americas concentrated on the extraction of silver, the Portuguese empire in Brazil depended on the production and exportation of sugar.
In the long run, industrialization helped benefit Brazil and its’ economy because it brought in more people to cities and more people worked in the new industries. The industrial structure that was created during this early period of growth was made up of light industries such as clothing, textiles, shoes, and the food industries. The general power behind the pre-industrial growth was the coffee boom. A considerable amount of infrastructural investment was used to help railroads and power stations for the coffee sector, which was financed by planters and foreign capital. The vast immigrant population employed in the coffee and coffee related sectors provide a large market for cheap consumer goods. Industrialization in the main Latin America economies were prominent between 1870 and 1913. “The start of industrialization was impressive before 1890; Mexico was labeled with the fastest industrialization and after 1920, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil all had rapid industrial growth, as Mexico’s growth rate started to decline”. As industrialization took over Latin America, it significantly affected Brazil in positive ways such as increasing the population, work force, urbanizing cities and improving their economic viability.
Present day Brazil is very different than what it was in the 1900’s and has made a lot of positive changes that accelerated the industrialization process. Throughout the course Brazil’s history, there have been major changes that occurred. Brazil experienced modernization such as changes in habits and customs, and most of all, a large growth in population but mainly in the cities because new jobs were created for people to come from the countryside and work for them. “What was once an agrarian nation that was sparsely populated, technologically backward, and economically and politically dependent now has a large, diversified economy, an integrated industrial complex, a considerable network of world-class cities, and artistic and intellectual production of high quality”. Before industrialization and before the Spanish conquistadors arrived, Brazil was a very rural country and it was never modernized until they came. “Industrial growth in Greater São Paulo was based on a large workforce pool, drawn from the countryside, from other states and even from other nations, concentrated in the urban centers seeking jobs and alternative means of subsistence in factories”. At the start of the twentieth century, less than one in five lived in the cities. Which meant that majority of the population lived in the countryside where they would work on farms and mills. São Paulo had only a little more than 30,000 inhabitants. Today, industrialization increased it to nearly four out of five Brazilians that live in urban areas. Industrialization caused a deep movement that has touched every region of the country so that people from all across were migrating to cities. The immense transfer of people to the cities was an important contribution in the improvement in social indicators that Brazil had been successful in since 1940. In 1996, the average life expectancy was 56 percent higher, illiteracy was 70 percent lower, and mortality rate for infants was 74 percent lower than fifty-six years ago. Overall, many positive changes have occurred in the past century since industrialization initiated and some of those changes positively affected the people of Brazil and other Latin American countries. Industrialization created new jobs that came with the new technologies.
Although industrialization may have benefitted Brazil’s economy and it’s people, there were critical negative effects that occurred in the process of industrialization. One of these things was deforestation in the Amazon. The forest has never disappeared so rapidly in any other country as in the Brazilian Amazon. According to FAO’s statistics, Brazil deforested 25,540 km2 between 1990 and 1995, most of which occurred in the Amazon. This is double or possibly triple the amount of forest lost by any other country. “Deforestation in the Amazon is defined as complete destruction of the forest for the purpose of allowing alternative land uses (agriculture, pasture, infrastructure, etc.). This reflects a choice by many observers to focus on land-use change, recognizing the tendency of deforestation in the Amazon to be driven by demand for new crop land and pastures rather than predominantly by demand for timber, as in much of Asia, or firewood, as in parts of Africa”. “Cattle ranching became a main source of deforestation. Other activities – like timber extraction, charcoal production, mining, and hydroelectric dams – had minor and indirect roles through their stimuli to agricultural settlements inside the region”. Altogether, deforestation of the Amazon for additional land for labor and agricultural resources that are not critical for human survival in Brazil is unnecessary. Clearing out forests in the Amazon also creates a mass carbon release in the air which goes up and clutters our atmosphere which increases the problem of global warming. We depend on the ocean and forests to survive and for us to eliminate the amount of forest land we have is critical. Although we are not in a critical state of human survival, at this rate, we will have very few forests, not just in the Amazon, but in other places around the world. There are many other problems that are occurring in the world such as pollution, waste, and deforestation only adds to the list of problems we have to deal with.
Brazil’s society is still growing and its economy is the eighth largest economy in the world. Brazil has exports of $180 billion dollars and imports $143 billion dollars. Their main exports currently are coffee, automobiles, transport equipment, iron, footwear, and crude oil. Brazil was positively affected by industrialization because of its high economic status, continually improvement their society, and creating even more viable industries that increase exportation of goods. To sum it all up, Brazil would have never been the same as it today if industrialization did spread throughout Latin America.