Potosi

"Andre Gunder Frank, in analyzing “metropolis-satellite” relations through Latin American history as a chain of successive subjections, has highlighted
the fact that the regions now most underdeveloped and poverty-stricken are those which in the past had had the closest links with the metropolis and had enjoyed periods of boom. Having once been the biggest producers of goods exported to Europe, or later to the United States, and the richest sources of capital, they were abandoned by the metropolis when for this or that reason business sagged. Potosi is the outstanding example of this descent into the vacuum."

"Potosian society, sick with ostentation and extravagance, left Bolivia with
only a vague memory of its splendors, of the ruins of its churches and palaces,
and of 8 million Indian corpses. Any one of the diamonds encrusted in a rich
caballero’s shield was worth more than what an Indian could earn in his whole
life under the mitayo,( A mitayo is an Indian who pays a mita. or tribute,
usually in the form of forced labor in public works, especially the mines,
(Trans.)) but the caballero took off with the diamonds. If it were not a futile
exercise, Bolivia— now one of the world’s most poverty-stricken countries—
could boast of having nourished the wealth of the wealthiest. In our time Potosi
is a poor city in a poor Bolivia: “The city which has given most to the world
and has the least,” as an old Potosian lady, enveloped in a mile of alpaca shawl,
told me when we talked on the Andalusian patio of her two-century-old house.
Condemned to nostalgia, tortured by poverty and cold, Potosi remains an open
wound of the colonial system in America: a still audible “J’accuse.”"

"The price of the tide of avarice, terror, and ferocity bearing down on these
regions was Indian genocide: the best recent investigations credit pre-
Columbian Mexico with a population between 30 and 37.5 million, and the
Andean region is estimated to have possessed a similar number; Central
America had between 10 and 13 million. The Indians of the Americas totaled
no less than 70 million when the foreign conquerors appeared on the horizon; a
century and a half later they had been reduced to 3.5 million. In 1685 only
4,000 Indian families remained of the more than 2 million that had once lived
between Lima and Paita, according to the Marquis of Barinas."
- Galeano