"Latin America has enjoyed a long period of buoyant optimism based on the policy of industrial development through import substitution. In other words, the installation of factories for local production of what had formerly been imported, an operation which was subsidized with costly benefits: exchange facilities, customs protection, loans in local currency and government guarantees for financing from abroad. Experience has shown that tills type of industrialization—promoted mainly by international corporations—has proved to be a new instrument of recolonization. Its harmful effects include the creation of a technician-manager stratum which has grown increasingly influential, and has become a defender of the foreign interest which it has identified with its own. Still more serious have been the social effects. The big industrial plants, which use sophisticated techniques, absorb little manpower, give rise to serious unemployment and underemployment problems, and result in the bankruptcy of small- and medium-scale domestic industries. We should also mention the tendency to concentrate on industries producing consumer goods which are of use to only a thin stratum of privileged persons, and indirectly create conspicuous consumption patterns and values, to the detriment of the values characteristic of our culture."