It could've been set just about anywhere...
Especially somewhere where limited resources are contested by an impoverished population and ruled by a corrupt, yet precarious, government. Which, again, could be any one of the thousand such regions of the globe....
For a quick, well-known example of foreign corporate/governmental interference in an entire continent's affairs, one need only look back at the American United Fruit Company. Ya know, the one who created "Banana Republics" (no, not the tacky** clothing store) across South America.
The United Fruit Company used slave labour, massacred striking workers in 1926, clear cut rainforests, polluted the soil and water, controlled the infrastructure of a half dozen countries, and prevented projects and legislation that would adversely affect and interfere with their business operations.
They (with CIA backing) installed military dictator Carlos Castillo Armas in Guatemala in a coup d'état against a democratically elected president.
In 2007 (as the renamed, re-branded Chiquita Brands International), they were forced to pay (a paltry) $25 million in restitution to the families of innocent victims of the Colombian paramilitary group Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, known as the AUC (labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. Department of State). Chiquita had been paying the AUC, a drug trafficking group, for "protection" from other gangs and rebel groups (some you may recognise, like FARC and the ELN); they also worked as union busters and intimidated (or outright murdered) independent farmers, journalists, and anyone who attempted to stand up to an imperialistic monopoly that had a world superpower backing it.
There's a long and storied tradition of this kind of behaviour, governments acting on behalf of corporations and vice versa; going back to well before Britain's Opium Wars and the Dutch East India Trading Company. For a good example, read King Leopold's Ghost. It's about the Belgian exploitation and decimation of the Congo for natural rubber, and the atrocities and abjectly horrific conditions these people lived and toiled under... women, children, all.
And I'm not a "liberal" (in either the colloquial sense or as a geopolitical worldview), but I recognise how the world works, and it's very often to the detriment and debasement of the weakest and most vulnerable.
**This is the only non-factual statement, a statement of opinion, in my comment.
something terribly clever.
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majoorellana21
9 years ago
You make a good point. It could happen anywhere in the world where the local people feel like they are being robbed of their resources. Yet I feel that the main reason people complain of the plot is because it feels lazy. We are not giving any further information about what ignited the movement, instead we are just fed images of a violent uprising that kinda feels like it came out of nowhere. Yes, we are told that there is a coup d'êtat by a nationalist movement that is reacting to this company that came to work with the water (? I don't remember the plot really well). But nothing else, we only see the American family suffering, everyone else is just a background.
It somehow feels like the plot didn't go further because we have to believe that because it's a "Third World Country" (or a "Fourth World Country" as the mom calls it at some point, which is a really degrading term, I feel) the people are MEANT to be inherently violent. I guess that is what makes people so mad, but that is just my opinion.
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savcam500
9 years ago
You make some quite good points as well.
As for the mother calling it a "Fourth World" country, that's just hyperbole on her part, I think she is suffering a bit from both culture shock and the suddenness of the move. There's some bit of dialogue between them (that I'm not too sure about) where she seems to say he didn't tell her the full truth. Besides her being hyperbolic, there is no such thing as a "Fourth World" country. The terms come from the Cold War and did not originally have anything to do with a nations socio-economic standing. First World nations were essentially the West (US, UK, France, et alia) and the nations and satellite states within its sphere of influence; the Second World were the Soviet Union and its allies; the Third World were unaligned states, the "battleground" states where both sides fought for control and influence via proxy wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Algeria). The term Fourth World is (at least in my experience) used to refer to stateless ethnic groups.
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