The hidden face of Latin America
The struggle for the right to exist, in a system that doesn't care
WORLD BANK
The international division of labour is easy to understand, the writer Eduardo Galeano' once said. Some countries specialisation is to win, others is to lose.
Unfortunately, Latin America is in the second group. The continent now only produces 4.5% of global trade.
Over the last few decades, we have gone from being an exp loited region, to an excluded one. Nowadays, who cares about our 200 million poor, miserable and excluded citizens? By Ernesto Herrera* AT THE EVE OF THE 21ST CENTURY, ALMOST half (46%) of the Latin-American population lives "from hand to mouth". Modernisation has obviously modified our behaviour. We no Longer work the land (because we don't own any). And if we try to hunt, or cut firewood, here in the sprawling cities of the south, we end up ill, or arrested, or dead.
Until a few years ago, poverty and misery were widely recognised as being the result of social injustice. Even the most archaic right-wingers didn't deny it. Today, with the tepid blanket of neo-liberalism covering all public discourse, poverty is "reinvented" as the just punishment for inefficiency and under-development. This isn't just the message from the international financial institutions and their local agents (our governments). Since the Berlin wall fell, plenty of Latin America's left wing intellectuals have also started bowing down to those on high. Few have much, many have little
Every year, Latin American states spend $17,300,000,000 on weapons. About the same amount as the cumulative foreign debt of Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay and Uruguay' Total debt in Latin America is about $533 billion, even though most of our governments have meekly and diligently made interest payments for years and years now. The Brady plan now enables this debt to be transformed into shares in newlyprivatised companies. This incredible plan didn't stop debt from rising 7.5% in 1995 alone. In this bog of fraud and waste, one in three Latin Americans survives (or not) on an daily income lower than one US dollar.
The impunity of the money-lords and their servants is limitless. Carlos Hernandez,
Latin America chief at J.P. Morgan [investment bankers] recently enthused that "Latin
America is one of the regions of the future, and we have to be present (The Wall Street Journal Americas, ist July 1996). The allure of the region, for people like him, is the low price of bonds giving title to our foreign debt. and cheap shares in our public sector enterprises. Plus, of course, the new opportunities to invest and make money in our social security and health care systems, currently being privatised.
A few months ago, the governors of the Inter-American Investment Bank met in Buenos Aires to praise themselves on their contribution to structural reform (i.e. the denationalisation of our economies), the reduction in budget deficits (cuts in services) and taming of inflation (wage stagnation or decline). Even the "Tequila effect"* is no longer a threat to growth in most of the coun tries of the continent. Everyone can look forward, then, to a new influx of foreign capital, which will lift us from underdevelopment, and bury us up to our necks in
The governors did spare time before the desert for a crocodile tear about the inevitable increase in unemployment and poverty. The Inter-American Corruption Bank, as it is more popularly know down here, did, however, reassure itself (and us) that "with an extra effort" in the application of government economic policies, "it is easy to imagine a more diversified economy, with solid fiscal, financial and monetary institutions. To use the words of Paul Samuelson, our wise and
Latin America * lead to total eradication. powerful leaders will "soon transform the dinosaur of instability [that's Latin Americal of before the reforms, into a lizard, after the reforms." (Semanario Posdata, Montevideo, 20 March 1996),
The technocrats' tools for the economic invigoration of Latin America are the same measures which have already been applied, with the disastrous consequences we have already felt: trade liberalisation, creation of new enterprises, price stability, and clarification of property rights. The imagination of these masters of deception is limitless. Out here in the real economy, the marketplace that millions of Latin Americans suffer from, things are developing rather differently than in the business studies text books.
Obscene inequality
Proportion of revenue held by
Country richest 10% poorest 20%
Brazil 2.1
Chile 46 3.3
Colombia 40 3.6
Costa Rica 35 4.0
Mexico 40 4.1
Panama 42 2.0
Source: Compiled by the author
According to the World Bank's own figures, social inequality in Latin America has reached scandalous proportions, as the * Uruguayan trade union leader, editor of Mas Alla magazine
December 1996 #283 9
* Latin America table on the previous table illustrates.
According to the World Bank figures, the rhythm of growth expected by the financial elite over the next ten years will not be sufficient to guarantee a higher general standard of living. In fact, there are two new poor people (those with a daily income lower than two US dollars) every 60 seconds. Over 86 million Latin Americans exist on less than one dollar a day. In the middle of the 1990s, 46% of the population were unable to meet their basic needs, while 22% (94 m. people) lived extreme poverty. Some 196 m. people live on $60/month.® 60 m. Latin Americans live in what the UN "chronic hunger".
By the year 2000, Latin America will be the most urban region of the world. Seventy percent of the workforce live in the towns. But over half of them work in the informal sector of the economy. Of every 100 new jobs created in Latin America and the Caribbean, 83 jobs are in the informal sector'
The hardest hit is the indigenous ("Indian") population, which makes up 8% of the total population. These 34 million native Americans are the most vulnerable sector of the population. They are sicker and more malnourished than the rest of us. They have very little access to education. They are the poor among the poor. Almost none of them have a daily revenue higher than about
In the towns, those under 25 years old are the hardest hit by unemployment and marginalisation. Murder is the second highest cause of death for the young today. The yearly murder rate in Latin America is 20 per 100,000 people, the highest rate of any
Poverty is also female. One in three households is headed by an unmarried. separated, divorced or widowed woman. These are often the poorest families.
In other words, that great "transformation" of the economy which, the prophets said, would lead us to "modernisation" only deepened social injustice to what were once unimaginable depths. Social genocide
"Every year we loose about one million children aged under five. This is Latin America's gravest catastrophe. The main causes of death are lack of under-nutrition and infections. We have 30 million children who work for a living, half of them on the streets." These aren't the rantings of an old leftist, this is the Deputy Director of UNICEF, the UN agency for children.
Infant mortality is a clear indicator of poverty. In Latin America, 52%c of our children (641,000) die within 12 months of birth. And 69%o die before the age of five. The worst rates of mortality are in Haiti, followed by Bolivia, Guatemala and Brazil. 10 International Viewpoint
Life expectancy has risen in recent decades, but is still only 55 in some rural zones of Haiti, Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru and Ecuador. Illiteracy is higher than 30% in the rural and semi-urban parts of Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, Salvador, Ecuador and Paraguay.
In the last four years, Latin American doctors have registered 1,061,188 cases of cholera, a classic poverty-related disease. More than 10,000 people died. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that in Peru, under President Fujimori, where real wages have fallen 11% in the last three years, about 7,000 teachers infected with tuberculosis have continued working, rather than face a cut in their monthly salary of 150
Cuts in social security and health care have plunged the public services into a calamitous situation. Take Chile, the country presented as the neo-liberal success story of the continent. In the early 1970s, Chile allocated 3.5% of its state budget to health
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Y065 care. The 1996 figure is 0.8%. This residual budget provides minimal care for the poorest 28% of the population, those who earn less than $150/month. The rest of Chile's population is at the mercy of private medicine. Dependency, or invisibility?
A few decades ago, dependency theory was very popular in Latin American writings? The theory stressed the difference between hegemonic countries, and the dependent, or dominated ones. Yes, we were exploited, but this did enable us to be integrated into the capitalist system. Dependency as a concept began to be replaced by "third world", but many Latin Americans kept their attachment to some concept of national liberation, inspired by dependency theory.
Now we face capitalist globalisation. The categories and meanings are changing again. Some talk of the Forth World, others of the "B World" others just of "The South".
Whatever words we use, we are talking about hundreds of millions of human beings which the system has designated "unadapted," of regions of Latin America designated "unsuitable for integration". These are people who will never share in the booty, because they are part of it.
"What is left of dependency theory now that Latin America is more a continent excluded than a continent exploited?" the Argentinean Jose P. Flienmann recently asked, "Now that media globalisation is squashing national identities? After Henry Kissinger could smile and comment, after a good meal, that Latin America could sink into the Pacific, without disrupting the normal workings of the market economy."
Never mind dependency theory. In the face of this economic and social fiasco, we need to develop our own "right to existence" theory. Because, for the masters of this world, we simply don't exist any more. * 1. (1940- ), Uruguayan writer. 2. FLASCO: Latin American Social Science 3. Presented on 10 March 1989, the Brady plan (named after a US Treasury Secretary) concerns, most of all, the medium and heavily indebted countries of the Ill world. 4. Expression created during the crisis of the Mexican peso at the end of 1994, to describe the repercussions of Mexico's crisis on the other countries of Latin America. 5. Report published in the March 1996 issue of America Economia magazine. 6. CEPAL 7. SELA 8. Alberto Fujimori (1938- ): President of Peru since 1990, he has brutally applied structural adjustment plans designed by the International Monetary Fund. The world media praised this brutal "Fujishock", even after its true consequences were exposed by the massive cholera epidemic which broke out in early 1991. 9. Theory popularised, among others, by Andre Gunder Frank. 10. Pagina 12, Buenos Aires Labor in Unison Labor unions in MERCOSUR propose action against neoliberalism The major labor unions of MERCOSUR, the Common Market of the South made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay have put forward a program to fight unemployment, low wages in their region resulting from their regional free trade agreement, neoliberal economic policies and globalization. The Coordinating Committee of Union Federations of the Southern Cone (Coordinadora de Centrales Sindicales del Cono Sur — CCSCS), headed by Vicente Paulo Da Silva, known as "Vicentinho," has called for a genera strike next year in all of the MERCOSUR countries. The COSCS will also bring together representatives of workers from all four countries, perhaps in Foz de Iguazu. Among the groups participating in the CCSCS meeting were the CUT and Fuerza Sindical of Brazil, the CT of Argentina, the PITy CNT of Uruguay, the ORIT and the CIOL Source: Mexican Labor News and Analysis Oct.16, 1996