LATIN AMERICA AND THE KNOWLEDGE EMPIRES

Since the end of the last century, the so-called first world countries, which, in addition to having financially robust economies and a booming industrial infrastructure, understood that in the coming years their main export product and generator of welfare was knowledge, fostered by a series of discoveries and technological advances that, together with a gradual and increasingly significant insertion of the population into these advances, gave rise to these new changes of world order, which was called globalization.

IT advances and the development of new technologies in electronics, telecommunications and consumer products changed the economic, political and social scenario. Thus, the creation of a versatile and very useful computer program generates more economic benefits than the production of another item not considered within the technological field.

It is clear that in our region the exploitation of raw materials is and will be for many years the main export product, and this because the only thing that it costs us is to extract it and until a few years ago foreign companies did it for us, we are a reliable source of resources for the great powers and in most cases we do not have the technology or the industrial infrastructure to process it, becoming dependent consumers, generating a strong foreign influence that in many cases openly interferes in the internal affairs of our countries.

Hence, it would be a bit delusional to pretend not to know that almost everything that mobilizes the region's economy is not produced or generated in it. To give an example, the computers that are used in almost all daily activities, the software, the internal and external electronic elements, in themselves, are all foreign technology and production.

So if we know that in order to compete in international markets and diversify the existing economy in our countries we must develop and generate our own technology, why is it not done? This question brings us to a number of reasons and it is not precisely because of the lack of ingenuity of the inhabitants of our region, but because we are immersed in such a third world diatribe that our energies and resources are used in issues that do not generate us but rather subtract resources that we could use in the development of new generations of young people immersed in the new scheme of knowledge production. Latin America has produced great minds, but through a natural process, they have had to go to other nations where their knowledge is harnessed and rewarded at its fair value. Many of these distinguished citizens have been educated in other countries with the intention of bringing back and contributing new knowledge, but in many cases the process of return becomes traumatic when they find themselves in an environment that is unsuitable for product development (Knowledge).

That is why, if it is oriented towards investing in quality education, in the development and creation of new technologies, in modernizing the agro-industrial, petrochemical and metallurgical park and taking advantage of the immense amount of economic and natural resources and human talent that we have, we are destined to be one of the regions with the best and greatest possibilities of progress in the coming years.