2,000 Greater & Lesser Mysteries/2,000 Greater and Lesser Mysteries.iso/politics/mys01615.txt

Text File | 1994-06-10 | 67.1 KB | 1,185 lines

Article 1164 of misc.activism.progressive:
Path: bilver!tarpit!fang!att!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!mont!rich
From: [e-mail] (Harel Barzilai)
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Subject: Z: The Victors II (1/91)
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Date: 21 Oct 91 22:23:12 GMT
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[From: Z Magazine, January, 1991... about Z Magazine:

Z is an independent, progressive monthly magazine of critical
thinking on political, cultural, social, and economic life in the
United States.  It sees the racial, sexual, class, and political
dimensions of personal life as fundamental to understanding and
improving contemporary circumstances; and it aims to assist
activist efforts to attain a better future.
 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Subscriptions: One Year $25; Two Years $40; Three Years $55
Z Magazine, 150 W Canton St., Boston MA 02118, [phone]
[Each issue of the magazine is about 100 pages -- no advertisements]

##################################################################


THE FIRST PART of this series (Z, November) opened with the
conventional interpretation of the past decade: the U.S. won the Cold
War, a victory for the forces of righteousness. We then turned to the
question that would at once come to the mind of anyone apart from the
most fanatic ideologue: How are the victors faring at this historic
moment, as they celebrate their triumph? We looked first at those who
should be the most overjoyed because of their unusual good fortune:
our "little brown brothers" in Central America and Panama, who have
long been under the protective wing of the leader of the crusade,
becoming a foreign policy obsession in the past decade. The conditions
of their existence help us understand why the obvious questions about
the Grand Victory of democracy and free market capitalism are so
scrupulously avoided in polite and cultivated circles. Needless to
say, the beneficiaries of our solicitude have some thoughts of their
own about these matters. We will turn in the final section to their
interpretation of the triumph of capitalism and freedom, and the
nobility of their protector -- thoughts that do not penetrate the
well-disciplined commissar culture at home.

Let us now extend the survey to other regions where the virtuous
leaders of the crusade for freedom and justice have long held sway and
have thus been able to realize their noble objectives with no more
than marginal interference from Communists and other evil forces,
beginning with the rest of Latin America.

====================================
The Fruits Of Victory: Latin America
====================================

A WORLD BANK study in 1982 estimated that "40 percent of households in
Latin America live in poverty, meaning that they cannot purchase the
minimum basket of goods required for the satisfaction of their basic
needs, and... 20 percent of all households live in destitution,
meaning that they lack the means of buying even the food that would
provide them with a minimally adequate diet." The situation became far
worse through the victorious 1980s, largely because of the huge export
of capital to the West. From 1982 to 1987 this amounted to about $250
billion, 25 times the total value of the Alliance for Progress and 15
times the Marshall Plan. The Bank for International Settlements in
Switzerland estimates that between 1978 and 1987, some $170 billion in
flight capital left Latin America, not including money hidden by
falsified trade transactions. The New York Times cites another
estimate that anonymous capital flows, including drug money and flight
capital, total $600 billion to $800 billion.

This huge hemorrhage is part of a complicated system whereby Western
banks and Latin American elites enrich themselves at the expense of
the general population of Latin America, which is saddled with the
"debt crisis" that results from these manipulations, and of taxpayers
in the Western countries who are ultimately called upon to foot part
of the bill. These are among the triumphs of free market capitalism
that we now celebrate -- apart from a few perpetual complainers who
are "as welcome as gnats at a nudist party," a New York Times reviewer
comments, referring to Murray Bookchin.

Speaking in Washington in preparation for the 1989 General Assembly of
the OAS, which he headed, Brazilian President Soares described the
1980s as a "lost decade" for Latin America, with falling personal
income and general economic stagnation or decline. In 1988 average
income had fallen to the level of 1978. There was a further decline in
1989, and the export of capital continued in a flood, the UN Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean reported.

According to World Bank figures, average per capita income in
Argentina fell from $1,990 in 1980 to $1,630 in 1988. Mexico's GNP
declined for seven straight years. Real wages in Venezuela has fallen
by a third since 1981, to the 1964 level. Argentina allotted 20
percent of its budget to education in 1972, 6 percent in 1986. David
Felix, a leading specialist on Latin American economics, writes that
per capita output and real investment per worker declined sharply in
the 1980s, the latter falling to below 1970 levels in most of the
heavily indebted countries, where urban real wages are in many cases
20 percent to 40 percent below 1980 levels, even below 1970 levels.
The brain drain quickened and physical and human capital per head
shrank because of the decline of public and private investment and
collapse of infrastructure. Much of the sharp deterioration of the
1980s, Felix and others conclude, can be traced to the free-market
restructuring imposed by the industrial powers.

Mexicans continue to flee to the United States for survival, and
macabre stories abound, some hard to believe but important for what
they indicate about the prevailing mood.  Reporting the annual meeting
of the Border Commission on Human Rights in Mexico, Mexico's leading
daily (Excelsior) alleges that actions of the U.S. Border Patrol cause
the drowning of persons seeking to cross the river to the United
States. A representative of the regional Human Rights Committee told
the session that 1,000 people had disappeared without a trace after
leaving their homes to enter the U.S. illegally. She "also added that
the disappearance or theft of women for the extraction of organs for
use in transplants in the U.S. is common."  Others reported torture,
high rates of cancer from chemicals used in the maquiladora industries
(mainly subsidiaries of transnationals supplying U.S. factories),
secret prisons, kidnapping, and other horror stories. The journal also
reports a study by environmental groups, presented to President
Salinas, claiming that 100,000 children die every year as a result of
pollution in the Mexico City area, along with millions suffering from
pollution-induced disease, which has reduced life expectancy by an
estimated 10 years. The "main culprit" is the emissions of lead and
sulfur from operations of the national petrochemical company Pemex,
which is free from the controls imposed elsewhere -- one of the
advantages of Third World production that is not lost on investors.

        [Send the 1-line message GET MEX-CITY AIRKILLS ACTIV-L to
        [e-mail] for more on the "100,000 children"]

The Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and the Environment
described the situation as "truly catastrophic," Excelsior reports
further, estimating that less than 10 percent of Mexican territory is
able to support "minimally productive agriculture" because of
environmental degradation, while water resources are hazardously low.
Many areas are turning into "a real museum of horrors" from pollution
because of the blind pursuit of profits on the part of national and
international private capital. The Secretariat estimates further that
more than 90 percent of industry in the Valley of Mexico, where there
are more than 30,000 plants, violate global standards, and in the
chemical industry, more than half the labor force suffers irreversible
damage to the respiratory system.

Maude Barlow, chairperson of a Canadian study group, reports the
results of their inquiry into maquiladoras "built by Fortune 500 to
take advantage of a desperate people," for profits hard to match
elsewhere. They found factories full of teenage girls, some
14-years-old, "working at eye-damaging, numbingly repetitive work" for
wages "well below what is required for even a minimum standard of
living." Corporations commonly send the most dangerous jobs here
because standards on chemicals are "lax or non-existent." "In one
plant," she writes, "we all experienced headaches and nausea from
spending an hour on the assembly line" and "we saw young girls working
beside open vats of toxic waste, with no protective face covering."
Unions are barred, and there is an ample reserve army of desperate
people ready to take the place of any who "are not happy, or fall
behind in quotas, or become ill or pregnant." The delegation "took
pictures of a lagoon of black, bubbling toxic waste dumped by plants
in an industrial park," following it to "where it met untreated raw
sewage and turned into a small river running past squatters' camps
(where children covered in sores drank Pepsi Cola from baby bottles)
to empty into the Tijuana River."

It is more fashionable to bemoan the environmental and human
catastrophes of Eastern Europe, the results of an evil system now
happily overcome in a victory for our humane values.

Colombia is another success story of capitalist democracy, flawed only
by the drug cartels -- and for some of those gnats who still fail to
appreciate the wonders of our system, by such marginal problems as the
murder of "subversives" -- such as 1,000 members of the leading
opposition party and 3 of its presidential candidates -- by death
squads in league with the security forces.

        [Use GET with HRWATCH COLOMBIA for a report by Human Rights ]
        [Watch, re: "drug war" = repression in Colombia             ]

There is also a background, though one would be hard put to find a
discussion of it in recent commentary on U.S.  efforts to aid the
Colombian military in the "war against drugs." The topic is addressed
in a discussion of human rights in Colombia by Alfredo Vasquez
Carrizosa, president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human
Rights.  "Behind the facade of a constitutional regime," he observes,
"we have a militarized society under the state of siege provided" by
the 1886 Constitution. The Constitution grants a wide range of rights,
but they have no relation to reality.  "In this context poverty and
insufficient land reform have made Colombia one of the most tragic
countries of Latin America." Land reform, which "has practically been
a myth," was legislated in 1961, but "has yet to be implemented, as it
is opposed by landowners, who have had the power to stop it" -- again,
no defect of ''democracy,'' by Western standards.  The result of the
prevailing misery has been violence, including _la Violencia_ of the
1940s and 1950s, which took hundreds of thousands of lives. "This
violence has been caused not by any mass indoctrination, but by the
dual structure of a prosperous minority and an impoverished, excluded
majority, with great differences in political participation," the
familiar story.

The story has another familiar thread. "But in addition to internal
factors," Vasquez Carrizosa continues, "violence has been exacerbated
by external factors. In the 1960s the United States, during the
Kennedy administration, took great pains to transform our regular
armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of
the death squads."  These Kennedy initiatives "ushered in what is
known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine,... not
defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military
establishment the masters of the game ... [with] the right to combat
the internal enemy, as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the
Argentine doctrine, the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian
doctrine: it is the right to fight and to exterminate social workers,
trade unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the
establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists. And
this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as
myself."

        [Use the GET command (see top) with LAT-AMER HMNRTS90    ]
        [regarding extrajudicial executions in Columbia; send for]
        [AI_REPT ELSALV regarding the so-called "death squads" in]
        [El Salvador; for other files, send for ACTIV-L ARCHIVE  ]

A study by Evan Vallianatos of the U.S. government Office of
Technology Assessment amplifies the dimensions of the victory of
capitalist democracy here. "Colombia's twentieth century history is
above all stained in the blood of the peasant poor," he writes,
reviewing the gruesome record of atrocities and massacre to keep the
mass of the population in its place. The U.S. Aid program, the Ford
Foundation, and others have sought to deal with the plight of the
rural population "by refining the largely discredited trickle-down
technology and knowledge transfer process," investing in the elite and
trusting in "competition, private property, and the mechanism of the
free market" -- a system in which "the big fish eats the small one,"
as one poor farmer observes.  These policies have made the dreadful
conditions still worse, creating "the most gross inequalities that the
beast in man has made possible." It is not only the rural poor who
have suffered beyond endurance. To illustrate the kind of development
fostered by the multinational corporations and the technocrats,
Vallianatos offers the example of the small industrial city of Yumbo,
"rapidly becoming unfit for human habitation" because of uncontrolled
pollution, decay, and "corrosive slums" in which "the town's spent
humanity has all but given up."

Another victory for our side.

Brazil is another country with rich resources and potential, long
subject to European influence, then U.S. intervention, primarily since
the Kennedy years.  We cannot, however, simply speak of "Brazil."
There are two very different Brazils. In a major scholarly study of
the Brazilian economy, Peter Evans writes that "the fundamental
conflict in Brazil is between the 1, or perhaps 5, percent of the
population that comprises the elite and the 80 percent that has been
left out of the 'Brazilian model' of development." The Brazilian
journal _Veja_ reports on these two Brazils, the first modern and
westernized, the second sunk in the deepest misery. Seventy percent of
the population consumes fewer calories than Iranians, Mexicans, or
Paraguayans. Over half the population have family incomes below the
minimum wage. For 40 percent of the population, the median annual
salary is $287, while inflation skyrockets and necessities are beyond
reach. A World Bank report on the Brazilian educational system
compares it unfavorably to Ethiopia and Pakistan, with a dropout rate
of 80 percent in primary school, growing illiteracy, and falling
budgets. The Ministry of Education reports that the government spends
over a third of the education budget on school meals, because most of
the students will either eat at school or not at all.

The journal South, which describes itself as "The Business Magazine of
the Developing World," reports on Brazil under the heading "The
Underside of Paradise." A country with enormous wealth, no security
concerns, a relatively homogeneous population, and a favorable
climate, Brazil nevertheless has problems: "The problem is that this
cornucopia is inhabited by a population enduring social conditions
among the worst in the world. Two-thirds do not get enough to eat.
Brazil has a higher infant mortality rate than Sri Lanka, a higher
illiteracy rate than Paraguay, and worse social indicators than many
far poorer African countries.  Fewer children finish first-grade
school than in Ethiopia, fewer are vaccinated than in Tanzania and
Botswana.  Thirty-two percent of the population lives below the
poverty line.  Seven million abandoned children beg, steal and sniff
glue on the streets. For scores of millions, home is a shack in a
slum, a room in the inner city, or increasingly, a patch of ground
under a bridge."

The share of the poorer classes in the national income is "steadily
falling, giving Brazil probably the highest concentration of income in
the world." It has no progressive income tax or capital gains tax, but
it does have galloping inflation and a huge foreign debt, while
participating in a "Marshall Plan in reverse," in the words of former
President Jose Samey, referring to debt payments.

For three-quarters of the population of this cornucopia, the
conditions of Eastern Europe are dreams beyond reach, another triumph
of the Free World.

A UN "Report on Human Development" ranks Brazil, with the world's
eighth-largest economy, in 80th place in general welfare (as measured
by education, health, and hygiene), near Albania, Paraguay, and
Thailand. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced on
October 18 that more than 40 percent of the population (almost 53
million people) are hungry. The Brazilian Health Ministry estimates
that 840,000 children aged 1-4 and 420,000 newborns will die of hunger
this year.

Here too it is widely alleged that babies are sacrificed for organ
banks, a belief that can hardly be true but that reveals much about
the conditions under which it can take root.  The Honduran press
reported that Brazilian babies had been rescued from a gang that
"intended to sacrifice them to organ banks in the United States,
according to a charge in the courts." Brazil's Justice Ministry
ordered federal police to investigate allegations that adopted
children are being used for organ transplants in Europe, a practice
"known to exist in Mexico and Thailand," the London Guardian reports,
adding that "handicapped children are said to be preferred for
transplant operations" and reviewing the process by which children in
Brazil are kidnapped, "disappeared," or given up by impoverished
mothers, then adopted or used for transplants.

It would only be fair to add that the authorities are concerned with
the mounting problem of homeless and starving children and are trying
to reduce their numbers. Amnesty International reports that death
squads, often run by the police, are killing street children at a rate
of about one a day, while "many more children, forced onto the streets
to support their families, are being beaten and tortured by the
police" (Reuters, citing AI). "Poor children in Brazil are treated
with contempt by the authorities, risking their lives simply by being
on the streets," AI alleges. Most of the torture takes place under
police custody or in state institutions. There are few complaints by
victims or witnesses because of fear of the police, and the few cases
that are investigated judicially result in light sentences.

        [Use the GET command as above with LAT-AMER HMNRTS90 ]
        [for fully details of these Amnesty reports          ]

        [Use Get with AMNESTY CATALG90 for a copy of this]

Recall that these are the conditions that hold on the 25th anniversary
of "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth
century" (Kennedy Ambassador Lincoln Gordon), that is, the overthrow
of parliamentary democracy by Brazilian generals backed by the United
States, which then praised the "economic miracle" produced by the
neo-Nazi national security state they established. In the months
before the generals' coup, Washington assured its traditional military
allies of its support and provided them with aid, because the military
was essential to "the strategy for restraining left-wing excesses" of
the elected Goulart government, Gordon cabled the State Department.
The U.S. actively supported the coup, preparing to intervene directly
if its help was needed for what Gordon described as the "democratic
rebellion" of the generals. This "de facto ouster" of the elected
president was "a great victory for the free world," Gordon reported
with joy, adding that it should "create a greatly improved climate for
private investment."  U.S. labor leaders also demanded their proper
share of the credit for the overthrow of the parliamentary regime, as
the new government placed in power by the generals proceeded to smash
the labor movement and subordinate poor and working people to the
overriding needs of business interests, primarily foreign. Secretary
of State Dean Rusk justified U.S. recognition for the obviously
illegal regime on the grounds that "the succession there occurred as
foreseen by the [Brazilian] Constitution," which had just been
blatantly violated. The U.S. proceeded to provide ample aid as torture
and repression mounted, the relics of constitutional Government faded
away, and the climate for investors improved under the rule of what
Washington hailed as the "democratic forces."

These events in Latin America's most powerful state initiated a domino
effect throughout the continent, leading to an unprecedented plague of
repression under the National Security doctrines crafted by the
military and political leaders of the hemisphere and their U.S.
advisers.

The circumstances of the poor in Brazil continue to regress as
austerity measures are imposed on the standard International Monetary
Fund formula in an effort to deal somehow with this catastrophe of
capitalism. The austerity measures initiated by President Collor de
Mello were initially described as "populist," harmful mostly to the
wealthy. Predictably, reality took a different course. Ken Silverstein
reports that half a year after the measures were inaugurated, "the
rich are reassured." The IMF measures primarily harmed the poor, while
wealthy individuals and large companies were able to find ways to
enrich themselves by exploiting measures that in theory were devised
to impose the main burden on them. A study by the J. Walter Thompson
agency concluded that "Collor's policies are not a threat to the
wealthy... The rich are now leading absolutely normal lives" (agency
vice-president Celia Chiavolle). Businessmen, bankers, and the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce express their pleasure in the course of policy,
while "the working class has been pushed to the wall," Silverstein
adds, with hundreds of thousands fired and purchasing power reduced to
a historic low, well below minimal needs for about half the
population.

The situation is similar in Argentina, where the Christian Democratic
Party called on its members to resign from the cabinet in March "in
order not to validate, by their presence in the government, the
anti-popular [economic] measures of the regime." In a further protest
over these measures, the Party expelled the current Minister of the
Economy. Experts say that the socioeconomic situation has become
"unbearable."

The terrible fate of Argentina is addressed in a report in the
Washington Post by Eugene Robinson. One of the ten richest countries
in the world at the turn of the century, with rich resources and great
advantages, Argentina is becoming a Third World country, Robinson
observes. About one-third of its 31 million inhabitants live below the
poverty line.  Some 18,000 children die each year before their first
birthday, most from malnutrition and preventable disease The capital,
once considered "the most elegant and European city this side of the
Atlantic," is "ringed by a widening belt of shantytowns, called
_villas miserias_, or 'miseryvilles,' where the homes are cobbled-
together huts and the sewers are open ditches." Here too the IMF-style
reforms "have made life even more precarious for the poor"

Robinson's article is paired with another entitled "A Glimpse Into the
Lower Depths," devoted to a mining town in the Soviet Union Subtitled
"A mining town on the steppes reveals 'the whole sick system'," the
article stresses the comparison to capitalist success.  The article on
Argentina, however, says nothing about any "sick system."  The only
hint of a reason for the catastrophe in Argentina, or the general
"economic malaise" in Latin America, is in a statement by a planning
minister that "we destroyed ourselves" by "economic mismanagement."
Again the usual pattern: their crimes reveal their evil nature, ours
are the result of personal failings and the poor human material with
which we are forced to work in the Third World.

David Felix concludes that Argentina's decline results from "political
factors such as prolonged class warfare and a lack of national
commitment on the part of Argentina's elite," which took advantage of
the free-market policies of the murderous military dictatorship that
were much admired here. These led to massive redistribution of income
towards the wealthy and a sharp fall of per capita income, along with
a huge increase in debt as a result of capital flight, tax evasion,
and consumption by the rich beneficiaries of the "sick system" --
Reaganomics, in essence.

        [Use GET with ECONOMIC STATS for a look at the Reagan/ ]
        [Bush years redistribution of income in this country   ]

In oil-rich Venezuela, over 40 percent live in extreme poverty
according to official figures, and the food situation is considered
"hyper-critical," the Chamber of Food Industries reported in 1989.
Malnutrition is so common that it is often not noted in medical
histories, according to hospital officials, who warn that "the
future is horrible." Prostitution has also increased, reaching the
level of about 170,000 women or more, according to the Ministry of
Health. The Ministry also reports an innovation, beyond the classic
prostitution of women of low in-come. Many "executive secretaries and
housewives and college students accompany tourists and executives
during a weekend, earning at times up to [about $150] per contact."
Child prostitution is also increasing and is now "extremely
widespread," along with child abuse.

Brutal exploitation of women is a standard feature of the "economic
miracles" in the realms of capitalist democracy.  The huge flow of
women from impoverished rural areas in Thailand to service the
prostitution industry -- one of the success stories of the economic
takeoff sparked by the Indochina wars -- is one of the many scandals
that escape notice in the admiration for the Free World triumph. The
savage conditions of work for young women largely from the rural areas
are notorious; >young< women, because few others are capable of
enduring the conditions of labor, or survive to continue with it.

Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship is another famous success story.
Under the heading "Tyrant's 'Success' Leaves 7 of 12 Million Chileans
Poor," Antonio Garza Morales reports in Excelsior that "the social
cost which has been paid by the Chilean people is the highest in Latin
America," with the number of poor rising from 1 million after Allende
to 7 million today, while the population remained stable at 12
million. Christian Democratic Party leader Senator Anselmo Sule,
returned from exile, says that economic growth that benefits 10
percent of the population has been achieved (Pinochet's official
institutions agree), but development has not.  Unless the economic
disaster for the majority is remedied, "we are finished," he adds.
According to David Felix, "Chile, hit especially hard in the 1982-84
period, is now growing faster than during the preceding decade of the
Chicago Boys," enthralled by the free market ideology that is, indeed,
highly beneficial for some: the wealthy, crucially including foreign
investors. Chile's recovery, Felix argues, can be traced to "a
combination of severe wage repression by the Pinochet regime, an
astutely managed bailout of the bankrupt private sector by the
economic team that replaced the discredited Chicago Boys, and access
to unusually generous lending by the international financial
institutions," much impressed by the favorable climate for business
operations.

Environmental degradation is also a severe problem in Chile. The
Chilean journal Apsi devoted a recent issue to the environmental
crisis accelerated by the "radical neoliberalism" of the period
following the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the parliamentary
democracy. Recent studies show that about half the country is becoming
a desert, a problem that "seems much farther away than the daily
poisoning of those who live in Santiago," the capital city, which
competes with Sao Paolo (Brazil) and Mexico City for the pollution
prize for the hemisphere (for the world, the journal alleges). "The
liquid that emerges from the millions of faucets in the homes and
alleys of Santiago have levels of copper, iron, magnesium and lead
which exceed by many times the maximum tolerable norms." The land that
"supplies the fruits and vegetables of the Metropolitan Region are
irrigated with waters that exceed by 1,000 times the maximum quantity
of coliforms acceptable," which is why Santiago "has levels of
hepatitis, typhoid, and parasites which are not seen in any other part
of the continent" (one of every three children has parasites in the
capital). Economists and environmentalists attribute the problem to
the "development model," crucially, its "transnational style," "in
which the most important decisions tend to be adopted outside the
ambit of the countries themselves," consistent with the assigned
"function" of the Third World: to serve the needs of the industrial
West.

        [For a comparison of Eastern Europe and Latin America (by a ]
        [Guatemalan Journalist) as regions in the shadows of        ]
        [superpowers, use GET on E-EUROPE C-AMERIC (i.e. send 1-line]
        [GET E-EUROPE C-AMERIC ACTIV-L  to: [e-mail] )]

The fashion at home, as noted, is to attribute the problems of Eastern
Europe to the "sick system" (quite accurately), while ignoring the
catastrophes of capitalism or, on the rare occasions when some problem
is noticed, attributing it to any cause other than the system that
consistently brings it about. Latin American economists who have
attributed the problems of the region to the "development model" are
generally ignored, but some of them have been useful for ideological
warfare and therefore have attained respectability in the U.S.
political culture. One example is Francisco Mayorga, a Yale Ph.D. in
economics, who became one of the most respected commentators on the
economic affairs of Nicaragua in the 1980s because he could be quoted
on the economic debacle caused by the Sandinistas. He remained a U.S.
favorite as he became the economic Czar after the victory for the U.S.
candidate in the February 1990 election, though he disappeared from
view when he was removed after the failure of his highly-touted
recovery policies (which failed, in large part, because of U.S.
foot-dragging, the UNO government being nowhere near harsh and brutal
enough for Washington's tastes).

But Mayorga was never quoted on what he actually wrote about the
Nicaraguan economy, which is not without interest. His 1986 Yale
doctoral dissertation is a study of the consequences for Nicaragua of
the development model of the U.S.-backed Somoza regime, and of the
likely consequences of alternative policy choices for the 1980s. He
concludes that "by 1978 the economy was on the verge of collapse"
because of the "exhaustion of the agroindustrial model" and the
"monetarist paradigm" that the U.S. favored. This model had led to
huge debt and insolvency, and "the drastic downturn of the terms of
trade that was around the corner was clearly going to deal a crucial
blow to the agroindustrial model developed in the previous three
decades," leading "inexorably" to an "economic slump in the 1980s."
The immense costs of the U.S.-backed Somoza repression of 1978-9 and
the contra war made the "inexorable" even more destructive. Mayorga
estimates capital flight from 1977 to 1979 at $500 million, and
calculates the "direct economic burden" of war from 1978 to 1984 at
more than $3.3 billion. That figure, he points out, is one and a half
times the "record GDP level of the country in 1977," a year of
"exceptional affluence" because of the destruction of the Brazilian
coffee crop, hence regularly used by U.S. propagandists (including
some who masquerade as scholars) as a base line to prove Sandinista
failures. The course of the economy from 1980, Mayorga concludes, was
the result of the collapse of the agroindustrial export model, the
severe downturn in the terms of trade, and the unbearable burden of
the 1978-9 war and then the contra war (his study ends before the U.S.
embargo exacerbated the crisis further). Sandinista policies, he
concludes, were ineffective in dealing with the "inexorable" collapse:
they "had a favorable impact on output and a negative effect on rural
wages and farming profits," favoring industrial profits and
redistributing income "from the rural to the urban sector." Had there
been "no war and no change in economic regime," his studies show, "the
Nicaraguan economy would have entered a sharp slump."

        [The following archived files are relevant:

  FSLN    ACHIEVE   Achievements of the revolution in Nicaragua
  OXFAM84 NICARAG   1984 Oxfam bulletin on Nicaragua
  CONTRA  TERROR    Origins, composition and practices of the "contras"
  FSLN    MISKITOS  Sandinista treatment of Miskitos;Charges & Realit
  FSLN    NICAJEWS  Debunks charges of Sandinista 'Anti-Semitism'

        [see FSLN H-RIGHTS as well as LAT-AMER HMNRTS90 regarding  ]
        [human rights; consult ACTIV-L ARCHIVE for up to date      ]
        [listings; files on fairness of the '84 Nicaraguan election]
        [are in preparation]

    =================================
    To get a file named ABC XYZ from the archiver (all file names are
    two words separated by a space), one sends the 1-line message

    GET ABC XYZ ACTIV-L

    to: [e-mail]
    =================================

These conclusions being useless or worse, Mayorga's actual work on the
Nicaraguan economy passes into the same oblivion as all other
inquiries into the catastrophes of capitalism. The example is
noteworthy because of Mayorga's prominence, at the very same time,
insofar as he could serve a propaganda function for the media.

====================================
The Fruits Of Victory: The Caribbean
====================================

BRAZIL AND CHILE are not the only countries to have basked in praise
for their achievements after U.S. intervention set them on the right
course. Another is the Dominican Republic. After the latest U.S.
invasion under Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and a dose of death squads and
torture, democratic forms were established, and U.S. commentators have
expressed much pride in the peaceful transfer of power -- or better,
governmental authority, power lying elsewhere. The economy is stagnant
and near bankrupt, public services function only intermittently,
poverty is endemic, malnutrition is increasing, and the standard of
living of the poor continues its downward slide. In the capital city,
electricity supply is down to four hours a day; water is available for
only an hour a day in many areas. Unemployment is rising, the foreign
debt has reached $4 billion, the 1989 trade deficit was $1 billion, up
from $700 million the year before. Estimates of the number who have
fled illegally to the U.S. range up to a million. Without the
remittances of Dominicans working in Puerto Rico and on the U.S.
mainland -- illegally for the most part -- "the country could not
survive," the London Economics reports.

U.S. investors, assisted by Woodrow Wilson's invasion and its
aftermath, later Johnson's, had long controlled most of the economy.
Now foreign investment in 17 free trade zones is attracted by 15-year
tax holidays and average wages of 65 cents an hour. Some "remain
upbeat about the Dominican Republic's situation," the Business
Magazine of the Developing World (South) reports, citing U.S.
ambassador Paul Taylor, who described the new free trade zones as an
economic miracle in a talk to the chamber of commerce. There are some
objective grounds for Taylor's cheerful view of the prospects, South
observes: "Optimists point to the political and labour harmony in the
Dominican Republic, the substantial pool of cheap workers and the
transport, banking and communications services as continuing strong
incentives to investors.  Indeed, as a Dominican factory manager
notes: 'Anyone who gets involved in unions here knows that they'll
lose their job and won't work in the free trade zone any more.'"

As in Brazil and elsewhere, the American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO foreign affairs arm supported by the
government and major corporations, "has been instrumental in
discouraging hostile [sic] union activity in order to help U.S.
companies maximise their profits," South reports. With friends like
these, Dominican workers have little to fear.

A more recent beneficiary of U.S. invasion, Panama, also has its share
of optimists, as discussed in the first part of this series, notably
the tiny white minority now restored to power and the U.S.
businesspeople who have revived Panama City's night-life. As elsewhere
in Latin America, the plight of the unimportant people is deplored by
sections of the Church who persist in their old-fashioned
"preferential option for the poor," not understanding the merits of
the promising new "trickle down" techniques of raising them from their
misery.

        [Use GET with PANAMA INVASION for a copy of FAIR's report "The
        [Media Goes to War: How Television Sold the Panama Invasion"]

Elsewhere in the Caribbean basin, we find much the same picture,
including Grenada, also liberated by U.S. benevolence, then restored
to its proper status (see my article in Z, March 1990). The U.S.
pursued a different path to ensure virtuous behavior in the case of
Jamaica. Upstarts led by the social democrat Michael Manley and his
People's National Party (PNP) sought to explore the forbidden path of
independent development and social reform in the 1970s, eliciting the
usual hostility from the United States and sufficient pressures to
achieve an electoral victory for U.S. favorite Edward Seaga, who
pledged to put an end to such nonsense. Seaga's pursuit of proper free
market principles was lauded by the Reagan administration, which
announced grandly that it would use this opportunity to create a
showcase for democracy and capitalism in the Caribbean. Massive aid
flowed. USAID spent more on Jamaica than on any other Caribbean
program. The World Bank also joined in to oversee and expedite this
estimable project.  Seaga followed all the rules, introducing
austerity measures, establishing Free Trade Zones where non-union
labor, mostly women, work in sweatshops for miserable wages in
foreign-run plants subsidized by the Jamaican government, and
generally keeping to the IMF prescriptions.

There was some economic growth, "mainly as a result of laundered
'ganja' dollars from the marijuana trade, increased tourism earnings,
lower fuel import costs, and higher prices for bauxite and alumina,"
the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) reports. The rest
was the usual catastrophe of capitalism, including one of the highest
per capita foreign debts in the world, collapse of infrastructure, and
general impoverishment. According to USAID, by March 1988, along with
its "crippling debt burden," Jamaica was a country where economic
output was "far below the production level of 1972,""distribution of
wealth and income is highly unequal,""shortages of key medical and
technical personnel plague the health system," "physical decay and
social violence deter investment," and there are "severe deficits in
infrastructure and housing." The assessment was made six months before
hurricane Gilbert dealt a further blow.

At this point, Michael Manley, now properly tamed, was granted the
right to return to power to administer the ruins, all hope for
constructive change having been lost. Manley "is making all the right
noises" to reassure the Bank and foreign investors, Roger Robinson,
World Bank senior economist for Jamaica, said in a June 1988
pre-election interview. He explained further that "Five years ago,
people were still thinking about 'meeting local needs,' but not any
more.  Now the lawyers and others with access to resources are
interested in external export investment. Once you have that ingrained
in a population, you can't go back easily, even if the PNP and Michael
Manley come in again. Now there's an understanding among individuals
who save, invest, and develop their careers that capital will start
leaving again if the PNP, or even [Seaga's] JLP, intervenes too much."

Returned to office, Manley recognized the handwriting on the wall,
outdoing Seaga as an enthusiast for free market capitalism. "The old
gospel that government should be operated in the interests of the poor
is being modified, even if not expressly rejected, by the dawning
realization that the only way to help the poor is to operate the
government in the interest of the productive!" the journal of the
Private Sector of Jamaica exulted -- here the term "productive" does
not refer to the people who produce, but to those who manage, control
investment, and reap profits. The public sector is "on the verge of
collapse," the Private Sector report continues, with schools, health
care and other services rapidly declining. But with the "nonsensical
rhetoric of the recent past" abandoned, and privatization of
everything in sight on the way, there is hope -- for "the productive,"
in the special intended sense.

Manley has won new respect from the important people now that he has
learned to play the role of "violin president," in Latin American
terminology: "put up by the left but played by the right." The
conditions of capital flight and foreign pressures -- state, private,
and international economic institutions -- have regularly sufficed to
bar any other course.

===========================
The Fruits Of Victory: Asia
===========================

TURNING TO ASIA, a serious inquiry into the victory of freedom,
capitalism, and democracy will naturally begin with the Philippines,
which has benefited from U.S. solicitude for close to a century. The
desperate state of Filipinos is reviewed in the Far Eastern Economic
Review, firmly dedicated to economic liberalism and the priorities of
the business community, under the heading "Power to the plutocrats."
Its reports conclude that "Much of the country's problems now...seem
to be rooted in the fact that the country has had in its entire
history no form of social revolution." The consequences of this
failure include "the jinxed land reform programme," a failure that
"profoundly affects the prognosis for the incidence of poverty" among
the 67 percent of poor Filipino families living in rural areas,
condemning them to permanent misery, huge foreign debt, "massive
capital flight," an increase in severe malnutrition among pre-school
children since the Aquino Government took power, widespread
underemployment, and survival for many on incomes far below
Government-defined poverty thresholds, "the growth of a virtual
society of beggars and criminals," and the rest of the familiar story.
Government and academic experts expect things to get considerably
worse. For the "rapidly expanding disadvantaged," the only way out is
to seek work abroad: "legal and illegal workers from the Philippines
now comprise the greatest annual labour exodus in Asia." With social
programs abandoned, the only hope is if "the big-business elite, in a
situation of little government interference, foregoes the Philippine
elite traditional proclivity towards conspicuous consumption, and
instead use profits both for their employees' welfare and to
accumulate capital for industrial development."

Their failure to do so can perhaps be explained by the fact that the
United States has had so little time to exercise its tutelage; only 90
years, after all. That its ministrations might have something to do
with what we find is a possibility not to be addressed.
In the real world, these desperate conditions can be traced in no
small measure to the U.S. invasion at the turn of the century with its
vast slaughter and destruction, the long colonial occupation, and the
subsequent policies including the postwar counterinsurgency campaign
and support for the Marcos dictatorship as long as it was viable. But
the Philippines did gain the (intermittent) gift of democracy. In the
same business journal, a columnist for the Manila Daily Globe, Conrado
de Quiros, reflects on this matter under the heading "The wisdom of
democracy." He compares the disaster of the Philippines to the
economic success story of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, whose harsh
tyranny is another of those famous triumphs of democracy and
capitalism. De Quiros quotes the Singapore Minister of Trade and
Industry, Lee's son, who condemns the U.S. model imposed on the
Philippines for many flaws, the "worst crime" being that it granted
the Filipinos a free press; in his own words, "An American-style
free-wheeling press purveyed junk in the marketplace of ideas, which
led to confusion and bewilderment, not to enlightenment and truth."
With a better appreciation of the merits of fascism, his Singapore
government is too wise to fall into this error.

The Americans did introduce a form of democracy, de Quiros continues.
However, it "was not designed to make Filipinos free but to make them
comfortable with their new chains." It may have given the Filipinos
more newspapers, but "it has given them less money with which to buy
them.  It has made the rich richer," with "one of the world's worst
cases of inequity in the distribution of wealth," according to the
World Bank.  Democracy "was an instrument of colonisation," and was
not intended to have substantive content: "For most Filipinos,
American-style democracy meant little more than elections every few
years. Beyond this, the colonial authorities made sure that only the
candidates who represented colonial interests first and last won. This
practice did not die with colonialism. The ensuing political order,
which persisted long after independence, was one where a handful of
families effectively and ruthlessly ruled a society riven by
inequality. It was democratic in form, borrowing as many American
practices as it could, but autocratic in practice.

That these were indeed the policy goals is a rational conclusion in
the light of historical practice and the documentary record. We may
then describe the Philippines as another success story of democracy
and capitalism, and number its people too among the victors in the
Cold War.

Under Philippine democracy, most of the population is not represented.
The politicians are lawyers or wealthy businessmen or landowners. As
the political structure bequeathed to the Philippines by the American
occupation was reconstituted after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed
dictator by "people power," Gary Hawes writes in the scholarly journal
Pacific Affairs, "it is only those with money and muscle who can be
elected."  Candidates are mainly "former elected officials, relatives
of powerful political families and/or members of the economic elite,"
unrepresentative of the rural majority or even "the citizens who had
demonstrated to bring down Marcos and who had risked their lives to
protect their ballots for Corazon Aquino." There was a party (PnB)
based on the popular organizations that arose against the
dictatorship, with broad support from the peasantry, the labor force,
and large reformist sections of the middle class, but it was to have
no political role. In the elections, PnB was outspent by the
traditional conservative parties by a ratio of up to 20 to 1.  Its
supporters were subjected to intimidation and threats of loss of jobs,
housing, and city licenses. The military presence also served to
inhibit PnB campaigning. Interviews with poor farmers and workers
revealed a preference for PnB candidates, but a recognition that since
the military and the rural elite opposed them, "the next best choice
was to take the money or the rewards and vote for the candidates
endorsed by the Aquino government.

The playing field having been properly levelled, our celebrated
"yearning for democracy" is satisfied.

Under the reconstituted elite democracy, Hawes continues, "the voices
of the rural dwellers" -- almost two-thirds of the population -- "have
seldom been heard," and the same is true of the urban poor. The cure
for agitation in the countryside is militarization and the rise of
vigilantes, leading to a record of human rights violations "as bad as,
if not worse than, during the time of Marcos," a 1988 human rights
mission reported, with torture, summary executions, and forced
evacuations.  There is economic growth, but its fruits "have seldom
trickled down to the most needy." Peasants continue to starve while
paying 70 percent of their crop to the landlord. Agrarian reform is
barely a joke.  Support for the National Democratic Front (NDF) and
its guerrillas is mounting after years of rural organizing.

De Quiros suggests that there has been "substantive democracy in the
Philippines -- despite colonialism and elite politics." "This is so
because democracy took a life of its own, expressing itself in peasant
revolts and popular demand for reforms."  It is just this substantive
democracy that the United States and its allies are dedicated to
repress and contain.  Hence the absence of any social revolution of
the kind that he and several other commentators in this most
respectable business journal see as sorely lacking in the Philippines
-- though if it can join the club of "capitalist democracies" of the
Singapore variety, the tune will likely change.

Meanwhile, Survival International reports that tribal peoples are
being attacked by the private army of a logging company, which, in a
six month campaign of terror, has killed and tortured villagers,
burned down houses, destroyed rice stores, and driven thousands from
their homes. The same tribal people are among the many victims of
bombing of villages and other practices of the government
counterinsurgency campaigns. Appeals to the Aquino government have
been ignored. An appeal to the U.S. government, or Western circles
generally, cannot be seriously proposed. The same is true in Thailand,
where the government announced a plan to expel six million people from
forests where it wants to establish softwood plantations.

Miracles of capitalism are also to be found elsewhere in Asia. Charles
Gray, responsible for Asian affairs in the pro-business AFL-CIO
foreign affairs branch (AIFLD), observes in the Far Eastern Economic
Review that transnational corporations "generally insist the host
government suppress the right of workers to organise and join unions,
even when that right is guaranteed in the country's own constitution
and laws."  The organization that coordinates trade in the Free World
(GATT) does not have a single rule that "covers the subsidies that
transnational corporations get though pressures on Third World
governments to permit 19th century-type exploitation of labour." In
Malaysia, "U.S. and other foreign corporations forced the Labour
Ministry in 1988 to continue the government's long-standing
prohibition of unions in the electronics industry by threatening to
shift their jobs and investments to another country." In Bangladesh,
contractors for the transnationals "discriminate against women and
girls by paying them starvation wages as low as 9 U.S. cents an hour."
In China's Guangdong province, when the government found that "the
factory of a leading toy manufacturer was engaged in labour law
violations -- such as 14-hour workdays and 7-day workweeks -- it
approached the managers to ask them to respect the law. The managers
refused, and said that if they were unable to operate the way they
wanted they would close their Chinese factories and move to Thailand,"
where there are no such unreasonable demands.

Low prices for imported toys have doubtless brought much Christmas
cheer in the industrial West.

=============================
The Fruits Of Victory: Africa
=============================

THE SCENE IN Africa is worse still.  To mention only one small element
of a growing catastrophe, a study of the U.N. Economic Commission for
Africa estimates that "South Africa's military aggression and
destabilization of its neighbors cost the region $10 billion in 1988
and over $60 billion and *1.5 million lives in the first nine years of
this decade."*  Such figures are considered too insignificant to merit
notice in the Newspaper of Record, which avoided the matter. Congress
imposed sanctions on South Africa in 1986 over Reagan's veto, but
their impact has been limited. The American Committee on Africa
reports that only 25 percent of U.S.-South African trade has been
affected, and that iron, steel, and (until late 1989) half-finished
uranium continued to be imported. After the sanctions were put in
place, U.S. exports to South Africa increased from $1.28 billion in
1987 to $1.71 billion in 1989, according to the U.S. Commerce
Department.

While the South African government and the minority White groups it
represents face mounting problems, they may see some rays of hope as
well. New diplomatic ties between South Africa and Hungary, now that
it has achieved independence, may prove to be "the wedge that breaks
trade sanctions and the international isolation of the South African
government," the Christian Science Monitor reports in a lead story,
citing an economist at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who foresees
expanding trade between South Africa and Eastern Europe.

The economic catastrophe of much of Africa is commonly attributed to
"socialism," a term used freely to apply to anything we are not
supposed to like. But there is an exception, "an island of
freewheeling capitalism in a sea of one-party socialist states,"
Africa correspondent Howard Witt of the conservative Chicago Tribune
writes. He is referring to Liberia, which, like the Philippines, can
attribute its happy state to the fact that it was "America's only
toehold on the African continent" -- for a century and a half, in this
case. Liberia took on special significance during the Cold War years,
Witt continues, particularly after President Samuel Doe, a "brutish,
nearly illiterate army sergeant...seized power in 1980 after
disemboweling the previous president in his bed" (more recently
suffering a similar fate himself), and proceeded to elevate his fellow
tribesmen -- 4 percent of the population -- into a new ruling elite,
and to persecute and savagely oppress the rest of the population. The
Reagan administration, much impressed, determined to turn Liberia,
like Jamaica, into a showcase of capitalism and democracy. In the
first six years of Doe's regime, the U.S. poured military and economic
aid into "the backward country," "even as evidence mounted that Doe
and his ministers were stealing much of the money, and after he
"brazenly stole" the 1985 election with Washington's approval, in a
replay of the Noriega story a year earlier. A "respected expatriate
Liberian dissident and former government minister," Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf, says: "At the time, an American official told me
bluntly, 'Our strategic interests are more important than democracy'."

The results of the aid are evident, Witt writes: "The soldiers of
President Samuel Doe's army wear the uniforms of American GIs as they
go about their business murdering Liberian civilians on the streets of
the capital, Monrovia," named after President Monroe, and "the bodies
of many of the civilian victims are dumped in the morgue at the
American-built John F. Kennedy Hospital," where "combat-hardened
doctors" say "they have never witnessed such brutality."  Monrovia is
a death trap, Witt writes. Those who are not struck down by
starvation, cholera, or typhoid try to escape the army or the rebel
forces under Charles Taylor, a former Doe aide -- or later, those
under the command of a breakaway unit led by Prince Johnson.

The results of the U.S. aid became even clearer when reporters entered
Monrovia with the African peacekeeping force after Doe was tortured
and murdered by Johnson's guerrillas. They found "a bloody legacy" of
the "10 years in power" of the U.S. favorite, UPI reporter Mark Huband
writes: piles of bleached bones and skulls, many smashed;
"half-clothed, decomposed heaps of flesh...littered with millions of
maggots"; "contorted bodies...huddled beneath church pews" and "piled
up in a dark corner beside the altar"; bodies "rotting into their
mattresses"; "a large meeting hall for women and children [where]
clothes clung to the skeletons of female and underaged victims."

Not everyone, of course, has suffered in this "island of freewheeling
capitalism." For a century and a half, the oligarchy of freed American
slaves and their descendants "oppressed and exploited the indigenous
population," while "the U.S. looked the other way." And lately, the
Reagan favorites did quite well for themselves until their turn came
to be dispatched. Others merely benefited, escaping any such
unpleasant fate: "U.S. corporations like Firestone and B.F. Goodrich
made healthy profits from the expansive Liberian operations," Witt
observes, proving that freewheeling capitalism has its virtues. The
U.S. built a huge Voice of America transmitter in Liberia, perhaps to
broadcast the happy message of what can be achieved under capitalist
democracy. We can chalk up another victory for the Free World.

Current U.S. policy, Johnson-Sirleaf says, is "a lack of policy."
"It's kind of, 'Oh, those Africans are at it again. Let them fight,
and may the best man win'." To judge by the commentary on all of this,
there is nothing here to teach us anything about ourselves, our
legendary benevolence, or the marvels of freewheeling capitalism.

Behind the "lack of policy," there is, however, the usual policy
toward the Third World, which we can trace back as usual to the early
postwar period when the global order was being shaped in the interests
of the rich and powerful in the West. Like other parts of the Third
World, Africa had its "function." It was to be "exploited" for the
reconstruction of Europe, George Kennan explained in a major State
Department study on the international order. He added that the
opportunity to exploit Africa should provide a psychological lift for
the European powers, affording them "that tangible objective for which
everyone has been rather unsuccessfully groping...." History might
have suggested a different project: that Africa should "exploit"
Europe to enable it to reconstruct from centuries of devastation at
the hands of European conquerors, perhaps also improving its
psychological state through this process. Needless to say, nothing of
the sort was remotely thinkable, and the actual proposals have
received little notice, apparently being regarded as uncontroversial.

In discussion of African policy particularly, the element of racism
cannot be discounted. Dean Acheson warned the former Prime Minister of
the racist government of Rhodesia in 1971 to beware of the "American
public," who "decide that the only correct decision of any issue must
be one which favors the colored point of view." He urged that Rhodesia
not "get led down the garden path by any of our constitutional cliches
-- equal protection of the laws, etc. -- which have caused us so much
trouble..." This venerated figure of American liberalism was
particularly disturbed by the Supreme Court's use of "vague
constitutional provisions" which "hastened racial equality and has
invaded the political field by the one-man-one-vote doctrine," which
made "Negroes... impatient for still more rapid progress and led to
the newly popular techniques of demonstration and violence" (September
1968). The "pall of racism...hovering over" African affairs under the
Nixon administration, "and over the most basic public issues foreign
and domestic," has been discussed by State Department official Roger
Morris, including Nixon's request to Kissinger to assure that his
first presidential message to Congress on foreign policy have
"something in it for the jigs" (eliciting "the usual respectful 'Yes'"
from this abject flunkey); Kissinger's disbelief that the Ibos, "more
gifted and accomplished" than other Nigerians, could also be "more
Negroid"; and Alexander Haig's "quietly pretend[ing] to beat drums on
the table as African affairs were brought up at NSC staff meetings.

===========================
The "Unrelenting Nightmare"
===========================

THE WORLD HEALTH Organization estimates that 11 million children die
every year in the world of the Cold War victors ("the developing
world") because of the unwillingness of the rich to help them. The
catastrophe could be brought to a quick end, the WHO study concludes,
because the diseases from which the children suffer and die are easily
treated. Four million die from diarrhea; about two-thirds of them
could be saved from the lethal dehydration it causes by sugar and salt
tablets that cost a few pennies. Three million die each year from
infectious diseases that could be overcome by vaccination, at a cost
of about $10 a head. Reporting in the London Observer on this
"virtually unnoticed" study, Annabel Ferriman quotes WHO
director-general Hiroshi Nakajima, who observes that this "silent
genocide" is "a preventable tragedy because the developed world has
the resources and technology to end common diseases worldwide," but
lacks "the will to help the developing countries."

The basic story was summarized succinctly by President Yoweri Museveni
of Uganda, chairman of the Organization of African Unity. Speaking at
the UN conference of the world's 41 least-developed countries, he
called the 1980s "an unrelenting nightmare" for the poorest countries.
There was a plea to the industrial powers to more than double their
aid to a munificent 2/10 of 1 percent of their GNP, but no agreement
was reached, the New York Times reports "principally because of
opposition from the United States."

As capitalism and freedom won their Grand Victory, the World Bank
reported that the share of the world's wealth controlled by poor and
medium-income countries declined from 23 percent to 18 percent (1980
to 1988). The Bank's 1990 report adds that in 1989, resources
transferred from the "developing countries" to the industrialized
world reached a new record. Debt service payments are estimated to
have exceeded new flows of funds by $42.9 billion, an increase of $5
billion from 1988, and new funds from the wealthy fell to the lowest
level in the decade.

These are some of the joys of capitalism that are somehow missing in
the flood of self-praise and the encomia to the wonders of our system
-- of which all of this is a noteworthy component -- as we celebrate
its triumph.  The media and journals are inundated with laments (with
an admixture of barely concealed glee) over the sad state of the
Soviet Union and its domains, where even a salary of $100 a month
enjoyed by the luckier workers is "scandalously high by the niggardly
standards of Communism." One will have to search far, however, for a
look at the scene nearer to home, or for derisive commentary on "the
niggardly standards of capitalism" and the suffering endured by the
huge mass of humanity who have been cast aside by the dominant powers,
long the richest and most favored societies of the world, and not
without a share of responsibility for the circumstances of most of the
others, all too easy to ignore.

The missing view also unveils a possible future that may await much of
Eastern Europe, which has endured many horrors, but is still regarded
with envy in large parts of the Third World domains of the West that
had comparable levels of development in the past, and are no less well
endowed with resources and the material conditions for satisfying
human needs. "Why have the leaders, the media, the citizens of the
Great Western Democracies cared long and ardently for the people of
Central Europe, but cared nothing for the people of Central America?"
the experienced correspondent Martha Gellhorn asks: "Most of them are
bone poor, and most of them do not have white skin. Their lives and
their deaths have not touched the conscience of the world. I can
testify that it was far better and safer to be a peasant in communist
Poland than it is to be a peasant in capitalist El Salvador."

        [Again, for an essay by Guatemalan journalist Julio Godoy,   ]
        [former Nieman fellow at Harvard, "Return to Guatemala:Unlike]
        [East Europe, Fear Without Hope," send the 1-line message    ]
        [GET E-EUROPE C-AMERIC ACTIV-L  to: [e-mail]   ]

Her question is, unfortunately, all too easy to answer. It has been
demonstrated beyond any lingering doubt that what sears the sensitive
soul is the crimes of the enemy, not our own, for reasons that are all
too obvious and much too uncomfortable to face. The comparison that
Gellhorn draws is scarcely to be found in Western commentary, let
alone the reasons for it.

As in Latin America, some sectors of Eastern European society should
come to share the economic and cultural standards of privileged
classes in the rich industrial world that they see across their
borders, much of the former Communist Party bureaucracy probably among
them. Many others might look to the second Brazil, and its
counterparts elsewhere, for a glimpse of a different future, which may
come to pass if matters proceed on their present course.

       __________________________________________________
      | Footnotes to this article are available from    |
      | Noam Chomsky, MIT Linguistics Dept.,            |
      | Cambridge, MA 02139. Please include $2 to       |
      | cover reproduction and postal costs.            |
       --------------------------------------------------

##################################################################
We hope to have Oxfam America's 1984 report

                  _Honduras: Why Farmer's Go Hungry_

(_Nicaragua: Development Under Fire_ in its entirety is already
on-line; use GET as above on the file OXFAM84 NICARAG)

See Oxfam America's addresses in the archived PUBLCATN RESOURCE ;
of email Oxfam at one of their PeaceNet addresses below

    --------------------------------------------
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    substitute "XYZ" for "peacenet" in the following:

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        For general questions/help, substitute "support" for
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Oxfam accounts on PeaceNet:

oxfama (Oxfam America)
oxfamcom (Oxfam Communications) [Boston, MA]
oxperu (Oxfam Andean Region Office)
oxsd (Oxfam Caribbean Office)