By then, another “economic miracle” was in place: “a treasury brimming with foreign reserves, inflation at its lowest rate in five years, and an economy growing at the fastest rate in the Americas, 9.2 percent in 1991,”
Times
correspondent James Brooke reported, noting also some familiar flaws, among them a fall in the real minimum wage in Caracas to 44 percent of the 1987 level, a decline in nutritional levels, and a “scandalous concentration of wealth,” according to a right-wing Congressman he quotes. Other flaws were to come to light (in the US) a few weeks later after a coup attempt, among them, the government's admission that only 57 percent of Venezuelans could afford more than one meal a day in this country of enormous wealth. Other flaws in the miracle had been revealed in the report of an August 1991 Presidential Commission for the Rights of Children, not previously noticed, which found that “critical poverty, defined as the inability to meet at least one half of basic nutritional requirements,” had tripled from 11 percent of the population in 1984 to 33 percent in 1991; and that real per capita income fell 55 percent from 1988 to 1991, falling at double the rate of 1980-1988.
17
On February 4,1992, an attempted military coup was crushed. “There was little jubilation,” AP reported. “The coup attempt caps a crescendo of anger and frustration over the economic reforms that have written such a macroeconomic success story but have failed to benefit the lives of most Venezuelans and have embittered many”(
Financial Times
). It “was met by silent cheers from a large part of the population,” Brooke reported, particularly in poor and working-class areas. Like the Brazilian technocrats, Pérez had done everything right, “cutting subsidies, privatizing state companies and opening a closed economy to competition.” But something had unaccountably gone wrong. True, the growth rate was impressive, but “most economic analysts agree that the high price of oil in 1991 fueled Venezuela's growth more than Pérez's austerity moves,” Stan Yarbro reported, and none can fail to see that “the new wealth has failed to trickle down to Venezuela's middle and lower classes, whose standard of living has fallen dramatically.” Infant deaths “have soared in the past two years as a result of worsening malnutrition and other health problems in the shantytowns,” a priest who had worked in poor neighborhoods for 16 years said. There is ample “new wealth,” much of it “poured into financial speculation schemes rather than new investments in industry. In 1991 money made in real estate and financial services almost equaled the profits from manufactures.”
18
In short, a typical economic miracle, achieved under unusually favorable conditions for the evaluation of the neoliberal doctrines preached with such fervor by the priesthood of what Jeremy Seabrook calls the new “International Monetary Fundamentalism.”
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7. Some Competitors for the Prize
It is a bit unfair to award Brazil the prize for enslavement, murder, and abuse of children; after all, it is the “colossus of the South,” so opportunities abound and numbers are larger. In fact, the story is much the same throughout the continent. Take Guatemala, another country richly endowed with resources that offered fine prospects for a success story for capitalism after the US regained control in 1954âand another case that should inspire us with pride in our accomplishments, so impressive in comparison with the wreckage left by the despicable enemy.
Guatemala now boasts a higher level of child malnutrition than Haiti, according to UNICEF. The Health Ministry reports that 40 percent of students suffer from chronic malnutrition, while 2.5 million children in this country of 9 million suffer abuse that leads them to abandon school and become involved in crime. A quarter of a million have been orphaned by political violence. The condition of children is not very surprising when 87 percent of the population live below the poverty line (up from 79 percent in 1980), 72 percent cannot afford a minimum diet (52 percent in 1980), 6 million have no access to health service, 3.6 million lack drinking water, and concentration of land ownership continues to rise (2 percent now control 70 percent of the land). Purchasing power in 1989 was 22 percent of its 1972 level, dropping still further as the neoliberal measures of the 1980s were intensified.
We need not linger on the record of mass slaughter, genocide in the highlands, disappearance, torture, mutilation, and other standard accompaniments of Free World victories; admittedly, a display of imperial benevolence that has been somewhat excessive in the case of Guatemala. The contours, at least, should be recalled. The terror began as soon as the US-run military coup succeeded in overthrowing the reformist capitalist democracy. Some 8000 peasants were murdered in two months in a terror campaign that targeted particularly United Fruit Company union organizers and Indian village leaders. The US Embassy participated with considerable fervor, providing lists of “Communists” to be eliminated or imprisoned and tortured while Washington dedicated itself to making Guatemala “a showcase for democracy.” At a comparable stage, the Khmer Rouge were condemned for genocide. Terror mounted again in the 1960s, with active US participation. The process resumed in the late 1970s, soon reaching new levels of barbarism. Over 440 villages were totally destroyed and well over 100,000 civilians were killed or “disappeared,” up to 150,000 according to the Church and others, all with the enthusiastic support of the Reagan Administration. Huge areas of the highlands were destroyed in a frenzy of irreversible environmental devastation. The goal was to prevent a recurrence of popular organization or any further thought of freedom or social reform. The toll since the US regained control is estimated at about 200,000 unarmed civilians killed or “disappeared,” and in the highlands, episodes that qualify as genocide, if the word has meaning. In an amazing triumph of the human spirit, popular forces and leaders continue their struggle against US-inspired neo-Nazism.
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The terror continues, still arousing little notice in the US or the West generally. The report of the Archbishop's Office of Human Rights for the first half of 1992 reported at least 399 assassinations, many of them “extrajudicial actions” of the state security forces and their allies. “Every day dozens of attacks upon constitutional rights are reported.” The terror has its place in the neoliberal economic program. “Twenty union leaders fled into exile in 1991 because of death threats against themselves and their families,” according to the State Department's annual human rights review. When workers began to form a legally recognized union in the US-owned Phillips-Van Heusen company in 1991, the result was death threats, raised production quotas and the shooting of an organizer to deter any threat to the working conditions that enable foreign-owned clothing assembly plants to make their contribution to the “economic miracle”: under $2 wages for 16 hours of work, stifling warehouses with few fans and locked exits, and physical and sexual abuse, according to a complaint by US unions to the US Trade Representative Office.
21
As for the “showcase of democracy,” an election was scheduled for 1963, but it was prevented by a military coup backed by the Kennedy Administration to block the participation of Juan José Arévalo, the founder of Guatemalan democracy, who had been elected in 1945 after the overthrow of the US-backed Ubico dictatorship. A 1966 election extended military control over the country, setting off another wave of terror. The 1985 election was proclaimed by the US Embassy to be the “final step in the reestablishment of democracy in Guatemala.” The November 1990 elections ended in a draw between two right-wing neoliberal candidates, who managed to stir up 30 percent of the electorate (counting valid votes). In the runoff election won by Jorge Serrano, abstention was even higher.
These achievements aside, the prevailing social conditions are the result of another successful experiment: the development model introduced by US advisers after the 1954 coup terminated the ten-year episode of capitalist democracy. As terror improved the investment climate, export-oriented economic programs led to rapid growth in production of agricultural commodities and beef for export, destruction of forests and traditional agriculture, sharp increase in hunger and general misery, the world championship for DDT in mothers' milk (185 times World Health Organization limits), and gratifying balance sheets for US agribusiness and local affiliates. The new maquiladoras are having a similar impact. Current economic plans, under the guidance of US advisers, are intensifying this range of effects.
No less predictably, in his January 1992 report to Congress, President Serrano declared the results of the properly neoliberal economic program (including the 100 percent increase for the military in the 1992 budget) to be an “economic miracle,” while Western commentators applauded and looked forward to still further triumphs of capitalist democracy.
We may recall, in passing, that the main victims are indigenous people, who constitute over half the population. Their travail began long ago. “At no time before the [Spanish] conquest,” Susanne Jonas writes, “did the Indians suffer the systematic material deprivation that has characterized Guatemala since 1524,” and “although Bartolomé de Las Casas's figure of 4-5 million Indian deaths in Guatemala between 1524 and 1540 may be exaggerated, its thrust is accurate. An estimated two-thirds to six-sevenths of the Indian population in Central America and Mexico died between 1519 and 1650.”
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Child slavery has long been documented in the traditional service areas. India alone is reported to have some 14 million child laborers, aged six and up, many working under conditions of virtual slavery for up to 16 hours a day. As always, this is a reflection of general social conditions. A detailed study in a leading Indian journal of “one of South India's most fertile and productive regions” found “a story of narrowing options, desolation and despairâand, increasingly, of death” from starvation and suicide, with at least 73 starvation deaths among weavers in two months of 1991. The deteriorating conditions result from the “frenzied export drive” and accompanying “strategy of taxing the poor and pampering the rich,” policies to be accelerated under the IMF-designed policies for which India is now widely praised.
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The situation in Thailand has long been notorious, condemned by international and Thai human rights groups while Thailand is hailed in the West as another “success story for capitalism.” The Bangkok press alone offers harrowing testimony. Cambodia specialist Michael Vickery provides a recent sample, including the case of teenagers “freed...from a factory where they were allegedly detained for slave labour and tortured,” tied up and beaten when they became too tired to work after 18-hour shifts; eighteen girls aged 12-14 rescued from a textile mill where they worked over 15 hours a day “for almost no pay”; teenagers fleeing from poverty in the Northeast dragooned into factories or forced into brothels for European and Japanese tourists. A leading Thai political scientist comments:
In Thailand, we occasionally hear stories about young children sold into bondage by their parents. These young indentured servants work under harsh conditions...and for many, the bondage will be renewed when the parents make out another loan from the employer. [Young girls] would be forced to work in a factory normally not registered with the Minister of Industry... as young as nineâwould be literally imprisoned by the boss for up to 12 hours a day...those who complained or attempted to escape would be harshly punished.
This is apart from the normal misery and brutal exploitation of the millions of poor.
“Year after year, such incidents are revealed in the Thai press,” Vickery observes, “and although the authorities express shock each time, no substantial reform ever results. This is because such atrocities, and we must call them by their true name, are systemic in the Thai type of capitalism”âmore generally, in the “economic miracles” that are the “success stories of capitalism.” It is all more “irony,” given the locus of the plague. Another “irony” is illustrated by Vickery's acid comment on the treatment of Cambodia and Vietnam, tortured and strangled by US-run economic warfare, in comparison to Thailand, a major aid recipient: “While Vietnamese farmers are getting greater control over land and its produce, Thai farmers are losing theirs and their children are forced into types of exploitation which have not been discovered in Vietnam since 1975, even by the most hostile observers.”
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Surveying the Latin American region in a Peruvian Church journal, Uruguayan journalist Samuel Blixen reports that in Guatemala City, the majority of the 5000 street children work as prostitutes. In September 1990, three bodies of children were found with their ears cut off and eyes gouged out, a warning about what would happen to witnesses of abuse of children by the security forces, formal or informal. In Peru, children are sold to the highest bidder to pan for gold; according to a young campesina who escaped, they work 18 hours a day in water up to their knees and are paid with a daily ration sufficient to keep them alive. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, some 100,000 children from 4 to 14 work 10-to 12-hour shifts for low wages, many of them victims of sexual abuse. “In Panama the Minors Protective Tribunal buildings were bombed during the 1989 US invasion, rendering work nearly impossible. Following the invasion the number of criminal gangs robbing stores in search of food increased,” with about 45 percent of robberies attributed to children using stolen military weapons. UNICEF reports that 69 million children in Latin America survive by menial labor, robbing, running drugs, and prostitution. A study released by the health ministers of the Central American countries in November 1991 estimated that 120,000 children under five die annually in Central America from malnutrition (one million are born annually), and that two-thirds of the survivors suffer from malnutrition.