LATIN AMERICA AND CARIBBEAN

As it has already been pointed out, a very outstanding characteristic of the world industry of the cigarette during the last decades has been the displacement of the companies of national property for branches of the transnational corporations in many countries. This phenomenon is maybe more evident in Latin America and the Caribbean, where it exercises a decisive influence in the future consequences of the tabaquismo about the society and the health. Next, it is made a revision of the history and the current characteristics of the industry of the cigarette in the region. 

The tobacco was often part of the economic and political fights of the colonial era in Latin America and the Caribbean. This way, the rebellion of the comuneros in Socorro, Colombia, in 1781, began as tub protests against the cultivation politicians and commercialization of the tobacco during the monopoly of the crown of Thorn. With the time, the deep hate generated by the colonial monopoly took to the breakup of almost all the monopolies of the tobacco. By the middle of the XIX century, almost all the tobacco industries of the region were, at least officially, private. 

The progressive linking of the Latin American and Caribbean countries with the international commercial system took them to experience with different types of goods that allowed them to negotiate with advantage one of these goods it was the leaf of tobacco, and several countries had sporadic ascents of the import of this product. The tobacco was indispensable part of the budget of the governments in almost all these nations before and after its independence. 

The industry of the tobacco in the region was based on the dark tobacco of local production that was used to manufacture cigarettes, snuff and tobacco of chewing in the era previous to the cigarette. These brown tobaccos, cured to the air, they were the most popular in the areas with Latin cultural inheritance. At the end of the XIX century, when the factory of cigarettes, the obtaining of dark leaves for cigarettes began it was already well laid the foundation. With the result that the makers of cigarettes of Latin America and the Caribbean used this type of black tobacco for their production.