World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [33]
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Slim’s focus these days is on the Internet and global markets. To attract Spanish-speaking web surfers, Slim began offering bilingual service through Prodigy, the U.S.’s third-largest Internet service provider, which Slim bought outright in 1997 for $100 million in cash and $150 million in debt assumption. After Slim took over, Prodigy’s subscriber base in the United States increased by 1,000 percent. Meanwhile, a month after acquiring CompUSA, Slim launched what he predicts will be the largest Spanish-language portal in all of North and South America, a joint venture between Telmex and Microsoft called Tlmsn. Most recently, Telmex spun off its fast-growing cellular phone and international division in a $15 billion listing of America Movil SA on the New York Stock Exchange; the Slim family still indirectly controls both companies. In addition to its U.S. holdings, America Movil has telecom, wireless, and broadband interests in nine Latin American countries. Slim’s goal is reportedly for America Movil to dominate both the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American cellular and Internet markets.
Needless to say, Slim has no Amerindian ancestors. As elsewhere in the world, the Lebanese community in Mexico is very tight: Slim’s late wife was also Christian Lebanese, and, reportedly, most members of Slim’s extended family have married other Christian Lebanese; virtually all are extremely wealthy.
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As Carlos Slim illustrates, the line separating rich and poor in Latin America is not as simple as “old Spanish” landowning families on the one hand and Amerindian and mestizo masses on the other. Instead, white wealth takes two very different forms: old Spanish (or in Brazil’s case, Portuguese) wealth, typically rooted in the plantation, or latifundia, system; and more recent immigrant wealth, often reflecting enormous entrepreneurialism. Although both result in white market dominance, the history and economics behind them are totally different.
Latifundia and Global Markets:
Nonentrepreneurial White Dominance
The market dominance of Latin America’s European-descended landowners owes as much to colonial oppression as to commercial dynamism. By all accounts the Spaniards easily conquered the vastly more numerous Amerindians they encountered in the New World. They managed this through a combination of superior technology, European germs that decimated an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian indigenous population—and sheer trickery. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond describes, in the words of a contemporary observer, the trap set by conquistador Francisco Pizarro for the Incan emperor Atahuallpa:
On the next morning a messenger from Atahuallpa arrived, and [Governor Pizarro] said to him, “Tell your lord to come when and how he pleases, and that, in what way soever he may come I will receive him as a friend and brother. I pray that he may come quickly, for I desire to see him. No harm or insult will befall him.”
Later that day, when Atahuallpa arrived with his squadrons of “Indians dressed in clothes of different colors, like a chessboard,” some dancing and singing, others bearing great quantities of gold and silver furniture—Pizarro’s troops ambushed them. “Cavalry and infantry, sallied forth out of their hiding places straight into the mass of unarmed Indians crowding the square, giving the Spanish battle cry, ‘Santiago!’” Once Atahuallpa was captured,
Pizarro proceeded to hold his prisoner for eight months, while extracting history’s largest ransom in return for a promise to free him. After the ransom—enough gold to fill a room 22 feet long by 17 feet wide to a height of over 8 feet—was delivered, Pizarro reneged on his promise and executed Atahuallpa.
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Similarly, in 1572, another Inca ruler, Tupac Amaru, a nephew of Atahuallpa,