Latin America: trade and culture at a crossroads

ABSTRACT

Trade liberalization took the cultural community in Latin America by surprise, forcing a defensive reaction that took years to generate adequate public policy responses. However, cultural policy has changed unevenly in the region. Two issues became the center of culture and trade debates after the 1990s: cultural industry production and traditional indigenous knowledge. Mexico, by far the largest producer of audiovisual content on the continent, has been reluctant to adopt defensive approaches or red lines during trade negotiations. In fact, Chile is the only country that negotiated a ‘cultural reserve’ in its FTA with the United States. Regarding traditional knowledge, only states with large indigenous populations like Guatemala, Panama but especially Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador in the Andean Region dedicated significant efforts to fight for intellectual property protection for traditional knowledge, including benefit-sharing for the commercial use of genetic resources, derived through indigenous collective knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade
• cultural industries
• FTAs
• indigenous peoples
• cultural policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The list includes heritage and patrimonial goods, including collectors pieces and pieces over a 100 years old in addition to books, newspapers and periodicals and other printed material; recorded and audiovisual material as well as products out of the visual arts like paintings, sculpture and lithography. The measure includes audiovisual and related services and copyright royalties and fees (UNESCO 2004, 15).

2. Sangre de drago is a natural extract coming from the tree called Drago that is a natural healer of scars and minor cuts. In addition, it is an effective cure for gastritis and hemorrhoids.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [756-2015-0717];

Notes on contributors

Grace Jaramillo

Grace Jaramillo earned her Ph.D. in Political Studies from Queen’s University in 2016. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of British Columbia, Department of Political Science. She won a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship to study institutional change after free trade agreements in Latin America. She has extensive experience in Latin America, after one decade of teaching and researching at the Latin American Faculty for Social Sciences –FLACSO- where she was chair of the Department of International Relations from 2007 to 2010. As a former member of the Ecuadorian Council of Foreign Relations, she was a member of the Carter Center’s initiative ‘The Bi-National Group for Dialogue’ to promote peace and mutual understanding between Ecuador and Colombia. She was nominated twice (2010, 2013) to the annual 20 ‘CAF Most prominent young thinkers in Latin America.’ She is currently working on updating her dissertation, The Political Economy of Industrial Policy in Ecuador and Peru 1970-2010. Some of its methodological contributions will appear in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Politics in 2019. Among her publications in Spanish are: ‘Ecuador vs. the World’: Ten years of Foreign Policy Analysis”; ‘Building Bridges between Ecuador and Colombia’ (2009) –published under the auspices of the OAS and the UNDP- and ‘New Approaches to Regional Integration: New Regionalism and Beyond’ (2008).