Colonial Mining & Contemporary Trust in Latin America

The hypothesis of this research project is that colonial forced labor and slavery affected trust in Latin America that persists today. In order to test this hypothesis, trust is compared in mining and non-mining subnational regions in Mexico, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. The 2011 paper by Nunn and Wantchekon, "The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa" is an important source for this research paper. Nunn and Wantchekon researched the negative effect of slavery on long-term economic development in Africa and found that individuals whose ancestors were slaves are less trusting today. In my study, trust is the dependent variable. The Latinobarómetro survey question on trust in others is used as the measure of trust by individuals living in these areas today. Mining intensity, a proxy for forced labor, is the primary explanatory variable. Mining data are obtained from HGIS de las Indias. In estimating the relationship between trust and mining, the following control variables are included: country fixed effects, latitude, elevation, population density, GDP per capita, ethnicity, language, religion and gender. In the subnational regions where there was forced labor and slavery, my results show that there is less contemporary trust. This relationship is robust to the inclusion of control variables. This finding is important because others have shown that there is a causal link between mistrust and long-run economic development.