Year 501 (34 page)

“Until recently,” Blixen writes, “the image of the abandoned Latin American child was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway. Today the image is of a body, lacerated and dumped in a city slum—those who survive that far.”
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A leading Mexican journal reports a study by Victor Carlos García Moreno of the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), presented at a conference on “International Traffic in Children” in Mexico City. He found that about 20,000 children are sent illegally to the United States each year “for supplying illegal traffic in vital organs, for sexual exploitation, or for experimental tests.” Mexico's leading daily,
Excelsior
, reports that “Another element of abuses against minors [in Guatemala] is the existence of various illegal ‘crib houses' responsible for the ‘fattening' of newborns who are sent out of the country for their organs to be sold in the United States and Europe.” A Professor of Theology at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Father Barruel, informed the UN that “75 percent of the corpses [of murdered children] reveal internal mutilation and the majority have their eyes removed.” The President of the Episcopal Council of Latin America, Archbishop Lopez Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, stated in July 1991 that the Church “is investigating all the charges concerning sale of children for illegal adoption or organ transplant.”

There have been numerous allegations about kidnapping of children for organ transplant in Latin America; whether true or not, the fact that they are taken seriously, from the press to academic researchers and government agencies, is indicative of the conditions of existence for children.
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And other superfluous creatures as well. The
British Medical Journal
reported an Argentine judicial investigation that led to arrest of the director of a state-run mental hospital, doctors, businessmen and others, after “evidence of the trafficking of human organs” was unearthed, among other crimes. AFP reported that “Argentines were aghast at the near-hallucinatory revelations of the horrors involving disappearances, trafficking in corneas, blood, babies, contraband and corruption” for more than a decade at the hospital, and the discovery in Uruguay of a “gang of organ smugglers headed by Argentinians.” “There is traffic in children and organs,” the Argentine Minister of Health reported.

A novel idea was implemented in Colombia, where security guards of a medical school murdered poor people and sold the bodies to the school for student research; reports indicate that before they were killed, organs that could be sold on the black market were removed. These practices, however, scarcely make a dent in one of the worst human rights records in the continent, compiled by security forces that have long benefited from US training and supply and have now become one of the hemisphere's top recipients of US military funding. As elsewhere, the main targets for mutilation, torture, and murder are priests, union activists, political leaders and others who try to defend the poor, form cooperatives, or otherwise qualify as “subversives” by interfering with the neoliberal economic model implemented under instructions from the US and the World Bank.
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These development programs have other features, among them, an epidemic of pesticide poisoning that has reached the few corners of our little region over here that, for a time, escaped the deadly impact of the neoliberal doctrines. In Costa Rica, “legal pesticides—many of them imported from the United States—are making people sick, injuring them, even killing them,” Christopher Scanlan reports in the
Miami Herald
from Pitahaya, where a 15-year old farm worker had just died of poisoning by a highly toxic American Cyanamid product. The village cemetery of Pitahaya, he continues, “is a stark symbol of a global death toll from pesticides estimated at 220,000 a year by the World Health Organization,” along with 25 million incidents a year of illness, including chronic neurological damage; the Guaymí Indians who die from pesticide poisoning cleaning drainage ditches at US-owned plantations in Costa Rica and Panama are unlikely to make it to a village cemetery. More than 99 percent of deaths from acute pesticide poisoning occur in Third World countries, which use 20 percent of agricultural chemicals.

With “markets closed at home” by regulations to protect the population and the environment, “chemical companies shifted sales of these banned chemicals to the Third World where government regulations are weak.” The corporations have also devised new “nonpersistent” pesticides that “are generally much more acutely toxic” to farm workers and their families, including some “first developed as nerve gas by the Germans before World War II.” Physicians in Costa Rica are calling for removal of killer chemicals from the Third World market, but “the Bush administration sides with the industry,” Scanlan reports. Its position is that the solution does not lie in interference with the market—to translate to English: profits for the rich. Rather, in “educating people about the risk,” William Jordan of the Environmental Protection Agency explains. Progress has its problems, he concedes, but “you cannot simply ignore progress.” An American Cyanamid executive says “I sleep at night very comfortably.” So do leaders and ideologists generally, except when their rest is disturbed by the faults of official enemies and their retrograde doctrines.
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The United States has never been very happy with Costa Rica, despite its almost total subordination to the wishes of US corporations and Washington. Costa Rican social democracy and successes in state-guided development, unique in Central America, were a constant irritant. Concerns were relieved in the 1980s, as the huge debt and other problems gave the US government leverage to move Costa Rica closer to the “Central American mode” lauded by the press, but the Ticos still don't know their place. One problem arose in November 1991, when Costa Rica renewed its request to the US to extradite US rancher John Hull, who was charged with murder in the La Penca bombing in which six people were killed, as well as drug running and other crimes. This renewed call for extradition was particularly irritating because of the timing—just as the US was orchestrating a vociferous PR campaign against Libya for its insistence on keeping to international law and arranging for trial of two Libyans accused of air terrorism either in its own courts or by a neutral country or agency, instead of handing them over to the US. The unfortunate coincidence did not disrupt the Washington-media campaign against Libya, thanks to the scrupulous suppression of the Costa Rican request.

Yet another Costa Rican crime was its expropriation of property of US citizens, for which it was duly punished by the freezing of promised economic assistance. The most serious case was the confiscation of the property of a US businessman by President Oscar Arias, who incorporated it into a national park. Costa Rica offered compensation; but not enough, Washington determined. The land was expropriated when it was found that it had been used by the CIA for an illegal air strip for resupplying US terrorist forces in Nicaragua. Arias's expropriation without adequate compensation is a crime that naturally calls for retribution by Washington—and silence by the media, particularly as they are railing against Libyan terrorism.
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The effrontery of the powerful often leaves one virtually speechless.

Another
Miami Herald
reporter surveys the “barren future” that “looms for Central America” as forests there and in Mexico vanish at a rate “faster than any other region on Earth except West Africa,” perhaps to “disappear within our lifetime.” The accelerating destruction is caused by poor farmers, lumbermen, and people seeking firewood, but “experts throughout the region blame rapid deforestation on unfair land distribution” throughout the region, including even Costa Rica, which “boasts one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world.” Another major factor is the US-initiated counterinsurgency doctrine, with its emphasis on blasting people out of their homes and lands with massive firepower if they cannot be controlled. The Central American Committee on Water Resources warned that the ecological disaster is also severely diminishing water supply. “The main lagoons and rivers which supply water to the people are about to be destroyed by continuous deforestation in the region,” one high official said after a July 1992 regional meeting, also “setting back the generation of electricity and possible economic growth in the region.”

“The concentration of the best land into vast coffee, cotton and sugar estates owned by a small elite meant hundreds of thousands of peasants were forced to eke a living off steep, marginal land,” Tom Gibb reports from El Salvador, where firewood may disappear in a decade and 90 percent of rivers are contaminated. The destruction might still be averted, but that would “require a change in the political atmosphere that has dominated El Salvador for decades: peasant farmers are afraid to organize and work in groups for fear of being labeled ‘subversive'.”
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To rephrase in more realistic terms, farmers are aware that efforts to organize will call forth another US-sponsored wave of torture and massacre to bar any interference with our high ideals of economic liberalism for the Third World.

A study of the Costa Rican economy by the Washington World Resources Institute and the Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica concludes that each year, 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product “has vanished without a trace” and that depredation of natural resources has robbed the country of almost 30 percent of its potential net growth over the past 20 years. A quarter of the estimated growth rate from 1970 through 1989 disappears when these factors are considered.
31

These effects will only increase as neoliberal models are more firmly implanted. In Costa Rica, they were firmly in place by 1985, earlier in much of the region—and in fact, they are only a variant of traditional US programs. After five years of IMF Fundamentalism in Costa Rica, the predicted growth had not occurred though the trade deficit grew substantially, fed primarily by imports from the US; the minimum wage had lost 25 percent of its buying power, with 37 percent of salaried workers paid below the legal minimum. Average family incomes declined by 10 percent through the 1980s, except for the top 5 percent, and buying power of workers continues its decline. The Ministry of Labor reported that under President Calderón's neoliberal rule, poverty had increased 18 percent in 1991 alone, leaving 35 percent of Costa Rican families unable to satisfy their most basic needs, a home census of the Ministry of Economy revealed. 1991 marks a sharp increase in the poverty rate, “a consequence of the kind of economic adjustment applied in recent years,” a researcher added. “Representatives of the World Bank and USAID have showered the Calderón administration with praise for its economic program,”
CAR
reports.
32

Costa Rica is the Central American exception, a special case. When we turn to the “Central American mode,” the situation is vastly worse. In Honduras, IMF measures “have provoked mass unemployment [to two-thirds of the population] and skyrocketing inflation,” with sharply rising prices for fuel, food, and medicine (
CAR
). President Callejas concedes that these policies have had “a negative effect on the vast majority of the population”; but,
CAR
observes, he “is willing to pay this price, however, to satisfy international lenders and continue promoting a free market economy.” Callejas and his associates, needless to add, are not those who “pay the price.” In El Salvador, 90 percent of the population live in poverty and only 40 percent have steady employment. The 1990 structural adjustment program put 25,000 more out of work and substantially reduced exports, and despite increase in minimum salaries, “the price of the basic family basket far outstrips workers' income.” Almost 80 percent of private bank loans go to large businesses; of agricultural loans, 60 percent went to coffee growers, 3 percent to small-scale basic grain producers. Reserves have risen, the Central Bank reports, but not because of the austerity measures; rather, as a result of the $700 million sent by Salvadorans abroad, many of them refugees fleeing the state terror of the past decade, which, in this way, did produce an “economic success story.” Mass terror has declined, but terror continues at a low level. On July 31, 1992, a top leftist union leader, Ivan Ramírez, was murdered by unidentified gunmen in the style of the death squads. We turn to Nicaragua directly.
33

The effects of IMF Fundamentalism, now administered with renewed fervor, “have been catastrophic” in Central America, the Jesuit journal
Envío
reports. Inflation has increased. Fiscal deficits have not declined as anticipated, but GOP growth has stagnated since 1985 and declined since 1988. Real wages have substantially fallen almost everywhere in Latin America, and the distribution of income is becoming even more skewed than before. “The word ‘development' has disappeared from Latin America's economic vocabulary”—though “profit” is on everyone's lips, for the foreigner and the domestic islands of privilege. The same can only be expected elsewhere. Discussing what lies ahead for India under IMF-designed restructuring, two economics professors at the Bombay Institute of Development Research review the consequences of such programs worldwide, drawing the “unambiguous” conclusion from “economic theory and the recent economic history of developing countries”: the effects are “tremendous hardship for the poor and working people” and “great hardship on the economies of developing nations”; no less unambiguous are the benefits for the privileged sectors and their foreign associates, who call the tune.
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