GULF WAR / AROUND THE WORLD
International Viewpoint #200 • February 18, 1991
### PRELUDE via, and also perhaps in Italy and France. A deeper analysis is needed to grasp the significance of this recession, its duration and at what point it may be turned around by opposing tendencies.
Among the factors to take into account in such an analysis are the duration of the war, long-term variations in energy prices (and not only the oil price), the extent of the destruction in the Middle East, the ecological consequences, political reactions in the Third World and so on.
GEOGRAPHICALLY and social differentiated consequences: Hardest hit by the war will be the poorer countries and countries with few natural resources. Differences in living standards will increase, on a world scale, within each region of the world, and within each country.
The "economically weak" will be suffer more than the "economically strong" Non-oil producing Third World countries will be worst affected. The absolute impoverishment of these countries will grow. The war will also hit the Eastern European countries hard. Their energy bills will rise, and thus their production costs, making it harder for them to export.
In the semi-industrialized countries of East Asia, the war will entail a sharp reduction in exports to the USA, higher production costs, thus a decline in competitiveness, a slowdown in economic growth and even a recession.
The oil-producing countries outside the Middle East (for example, Venezuela, Mexico, Indonesia and Nigeria) will profit from the rise in the oil price and step up production. At the same time, they will lose out through declining exports of other products to the imperialist countries and the increase in the price of their imports from these countries.
The Western countries and Japan will feel a deterioration in the economic climate, although the precise dimensions of the problem cannot be given.
Only the Soviet Union is in a position to derive all-round economic benefits from the war — provided that it is able to 10 my maintain and increase oil output, which is no means guaranteed. *
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PANAMA Fruits of liberation THIRTEEN months after the military invasion of Panama by the United States, carried out under the pretext of capturing General Noriega, accused of involvement in drugs trafficking (see /V 177), popular disaffection in the face of economic deterioration is growing. Barricades reap peared in the capital during the strike of December 5, 1990, despite ferocious police repression.
Unemployment has reached 25% of the population (and the puppet government of Roberto Endara has announced a new wave of dismissals in the administration affecting 500 people, accused of having participated in stoppages); 40% of Panamanians are living below the poverty line. The United States embassy, which determines the law, has declared that the counhas been no more than 6%, according to official sources, whereas bank deposits
Social discontent crystallized during the partial legislative elections of January 27, 1991. The coalition supporting President Endara fell apart. The Nationalist Republican Liberal Movement (MOLINERA), the Authentic Liberal Party (PLA) and the Arnulfista Party (PA), which accused the president of being no more than a puppet of the United States, allied themselves with Noriega's old formation, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (the PRD, founded by General Omar Torrijos), and won 40% of the votes, pushing the ruling coalition, the Christian Democrat Alliance (ADOC), into second place in six of the country's nine provinces. * SOVIET UNION A Trotskyist in Moscow ERNEST MANDEL, a leader of the Fourth International, was a guest at a press conference held in Moscow on January 18, 1991, by the review The Socialism of the Future, which he contributes. Speaking as an activist in the wartime antifascist resistance and a former inmate of a Nazi prison camp, Mandel paid tribute to the heroic resistance of the Soviet workers which had defeated the barbarous project of Nazism, whilst pointing out that the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy had done much to discredit both that achievement and the October Revolution. Addressing himself to the Soviet Union's current problems, Mandel said that the consequences of the despotism of capital in much of the world were no less grave than those of the despotism of the state in Eastern Europe.
He condemned both imperialism's war against Iraq and the Soviet bureaucracy's military intervention in Lithuania, and pointed to the cynical collusion of the US and Soviet governments in both aggressions.
During his stay in Moscow, Mandel gave a long interview on Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Fourth International to the weekly Argumenti i Fakti. The theoretical review Dialog published one of his articles on the democratic self-managed economy. * LATIN AMERICA "500 Years of resistance" TO celebrate the 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of America, the Spanish govtogether with several Latin American countries, is scale festivities for 1992. But the peoples of Latin America, and above all the indigenous communities, are aware that in reality this discovery amounted to conquest, the pillage of raw materials, the genocide of entire peoples, and forced evangelization and cultural assimilation.
In October 1989, at a meeting of Latin American indigenous organizations in Bogota, Colombia, delegates from 21 countries founded the "Continental Campaign: 500 Years of Indigenous and Popular Resistance". Then, in July 1990, at Quito (Ecuador) the first continental meeting of indigenous peoples took place, with delegates attending from the United States and Canada. The campaign is supported by popular and indigenous organizations, human rights groups, womens' organizations and students, as well as by the Catholic base communities.
In the Spanish state, Commissions against the 500th anniversary celebrations have been created in the principal towns As well as publicizing the reality of the conquest, they plan a counter summit when the heads of Latin American states meet in Madrid during the week of October 12, 1992. *