Ibero-American News Digest
Haiti: A Free-Trade Tragedy
The tragic plight of Haiti became international news last week, after mass flooding, triggered by Hurricane Jeanne, wiped out the country's third-largest city, Gonaives, killing an estimated 2,000 people, injuring countless more, and leaving some 300,000 homelessand, in many cases, without any shelter. Crops and livestock have been destroyed; roads washed out; electricity, potable water, sewage systems, and hospitals knocked out of commission. As things now stand, despite some international efforts to provide emergency assistance, this island nation of 8 million is facing extinction from starvation and disease.
Hurricane Jeanne notwithstanding, there is nothing "natural" about this disaster. The world's financial elites have used Haiti as a laboratory for "free-trade" policies and IMF-induced genocide for decades, and today's tragedy is the direct consequence.
Repeatedly denied the right to develop itself, to grow its own food, to build modern infrastructure, to industrialize, Haiti has instead been kept as a virtual concentration camp of cheap labor, a brutal example of British colonial free-trade policy in a "post-colonial" world. Left with no margin of survival, Haiti's million people80% of whom lived below the poverty line before this latest crisislive forever on the brink of disaster.
In 1941, Haiti was nearly self-sufficient in food. Its land was largely owned by small farmers who produced food for national consumption, not cash crops for export. That same year, under the aegis of the Good Neighbor Policy, the Franklin Roosevelt Administration in the U.S. set up SHADA (Société Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole), a development corporation to serve as a model for similar entities established in other Ibero-American countries. With a $5-million credit line from the U.S. government, and active involvement by the U.S. Export-Import Bank, SHADA pursued "the development and exploitation of all agricultural and other resources of, and within, the Republic of Haiti.... Experimentation is to be undertaken to improve existing crops and to cultivate new ones."
Then, it was determined that while the industrialization of Haiti might not be on the immediate agenda, its ability to meet its food needs must be guaranteed. But over the past decade, due to the imposition of free-trade policies which demanded that Haiti open itself up to cheap food imports, thereby destroying its own agriculture, Haiti has gone from what was nearly food self-sufficiency in the 1940s, to producing less than 45% of its food needs today. And with the havoc wrought by Jeanne, which destroyed harvests of sweet potatoes, rice, banana, and other food crops in the "breadbasket" region of Haiti known as the Artibonite, the level of food self-sufficiency has plummeted further.
In colonial times, it is estimated that three-quarters of Haiti was forested. Today, less than 1% of Haitian territory still has trees that have not yet been burned for fuel by a population which relies on charcoal for fuel, because it cannot afford even kerosene. The flooding that proved so devastating to Gonaives and other Haitian towns was the consequence of the land having been so denuded that it could neither absorb nor hold back the floodwaters.
In Gonaives, corpses are still trapped in the mud that has replaced city streets and homes. Hundreds of decayed bodies are being hurriedly buried in mass graves, some much too close to the surface. Many people have gone for a week without food, and are drinking muddy water contaminated by broken sewage lines and rotting corpses, both human and animal. There are no hospitals, only some open-air tents where volunteer doctors are giving babies intravenous feeds, only to send them back on the street to starve. Often without benefit of anesthesia and antibiotics, and with no ability to keep the wounds clean, doctors are amputating limbs that have gone gangrenous from untreated wounds.
UNICEF officials toured 14 shelters holding 8,800 homeless people afflicted with rampant illness, with no sanitation and no food. Tens of thousands are still living out in the open. The government has announced plans to evacuate some of the homeless to a tent camp, but conditions are not likely to be any better. Various United Nations aid organizations are calling the situation "critical," as armed bands desperate for food and water have attacked relief trucks and food distribution centers, and 3,000 international peacekeepers are mobilized to protect what emergency supplies are making their way into the worst areas.
An international mobilization to pour food, medicine, clothing, and shelter into Haiti should be at the top of every nation's agenda. But, as important, the vicious free-trade policies that have destroyed Haiti and are ravaging nations around the world, must be overturned. It's high time for a new Good Neighbor Policy.
Brazil Fin Min To Increase Primary Budget Surplus
On Sept. 22, Brazil's Finance Minister Antonio Palocci announced an increase in the primary budget surplus, from 4.25% of GDP to 4.50% of GDP. The justification for this, is that Brazil is doing "so well," that it has generated a larger surplus than the 4.25% agreed on with the IMF, and is therefore in a position to pay more debt. From Brasilia, President Lula da Silva praised the "persistence of the economics team," whose budget-cutting "has produced results far beyond our expectations." With extra revenue, "We will assume our responsibility. We owe, so we are going to pay a larger part of what we owe." The IMF and various Wall Street predators were thrilled.
The increase in the primary budget surplus supposedly means that the Central Bank won't raise interest rates again, but no one believes that. When the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee (Copom) raised the benchmark Selic rate last week to 16.25% from 16%, it indicated that this was the beginning of a period of "adjustment" in the rate. The Bank is already pointing out that inflation for 2005 will probably exceed its 4.5% target, which will undoubtedly be used to justify raising rates again.
The increase in Brazil's primary budget surplus means that fewer funds will be available for productive investments. Last February, for example, as part of the government's budget-cutting policy, President Lula froze R$3 billion already authorized in the 2004 budget for investment in roads, water, and sanitation infrastructure. It was hoped that these funds, which represent 25% of the total public investment budget, would be released soon. But, as part of this latest austerity measure, the Executive has indicated that these funds will remain frozen. Funding for the Ministries of Transportation, National Integration and Cities will be most seriously affected by this measure.
It is estimated that the new primary budget surplus of 4.5% of GDP will yield an additional R$4.2 billion, an amount that could finance the entirety of the project to divert the Sao Francisco River. Lula recently said he wanted that project to be like the Tennessee Valley Authority that Franklin Delano Roosevelt built, but he appears to have decided that paying the debt is more important. As of now, almost all infrastructure projects being built in Brazil, such as expanding and improving the country's ports, are for the purpose of facilitating export activity.
Mexican Jobless Rate Highest in Seven Years
Mexico's official statistical agency Inegi reported a jobless rate of 4.35% at the end of August, the highest in seven years, El Universal reported Sept. 23. Even more revealing of the state of the economy, is the fact that unemployment for ages 12-19 is 10.8%, and 8.6% for youth aged 20-24. In addition, 7.4% of the labor force earns less than the minimum wage, and 51.3% receive no benefits whatsoever.
Against this backdrop, President Vicente Fox has determined that the country's top priority is to ram through "structural reform" which will allegedly create jobs and promote economic growth.
Andean Coca Growers Defy Eradication Efforts
In both Bolivia and Peru, the coca-growing peasantsboth the victims and cheap fodder for the campaigns of the narco-terrorists and legalization lobbyistsare once again being mobilized into action against ongoing government drug-eradication programs.
In Peru, where more than 50 cocalero leaders have been conducting a hunger strike to protest coca eradication, the cocalero ranks have begun to "radicalize" their protests by blockading highways and threatening to take over public buildings, including schools and hospitals, as a means of drawing attention to their cause. The first such event occurred the last week in September, when a group of some 300 unarmed coca farmers, accompanied by a bunch of university students, occupied an Inca temple in the city of Cuzco, and held nearly a score of foreign tourists hostage, the majority of them French, to demand government attention to the indefinite strike of coca-farmers in the area. The tourists were freed an hour into the occupation, by troops using tear-gas to clear the place. Seven "militants" were arrested, and nobody was seriously hurt. The cocaleros are insisting the government has broken promises to buy a portion of the coca crop for legitimate use, and to move ahead with alternative crop assistance, something the Toledo government denies.
In the coca-producing region of Bolivia known as the Chapare, the coca-producers' federations are threatening to expel all government and foreign personnel if coca eradication isn't "immediately" suspended and police withdrawn. The threat was issued at a gathering of six cocalero federations, following a series of bloody confrontations in recent days between the growers and police and military troops sent to accelerate eradication efforts in the area. At least one farmer was killed, and a number injured in those confrontations.
Peru Court May Release Narco-Terrorist Leader Guzman
A Peruvian judge in Lima has accepted a habeas corpus petition on the part of imprisoned Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman and eight other terrorists, who are claiming that their constitutional rights were violated at the time of their arrest, conviction, and imprisonment under President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). The outcome of the petition could well hang on a pending decision of the Inter-American Court regarding the Lori Berenson case, which could set a precedent for the Guzman and other terrorist cases. Berenson is the American who was arrested several years ago in a conspiracy by the narco-terrorist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in Peru, and is now demanding release from prison alleging that she was denied due process at the time of her trial.
Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) is reportedly becoming increasingly active again in Peru, with a special focus on recruiting at universities. According to known pro-terrorist Carlos Tapia, a former member of the George Soros-created "Truth Commission," their plan is to recruit intellectuals to their cause. Shining Path is said to be active at San Marcos University in Lima and at a half-dozen other universities, and is reactivating "study circles" at the Universidad Nacional del Centro in Huancayo, just as it did in the 1980s. According to Tapia, Shining Path is in its "fourth phase" of the people's war, which is to strengthen its ideological base, and then "organize the masses."
That not just students, but also teachers, are the focus of this recruitment drive was suggested by raids carried out in five cities by the Interior Ministry, in which 17 presumed members of Shining Path were arrested, eight of them teachers and deans of state colleges.
|