Milena Velba Smartphone

The city \u200b\u200bgas chamber: Eduardo Galeano

"A peasant is worth less than a cow and a chicken than I reported in Caaguazú in Paraguay. And in Brazil nordesde: who have no land plant , who has plant earth.

Our fields are empty, Latin American cities are hell big as countries. Mexico City is growing at a rate of half a million people and thirty miles per year : is five times more people than all of Norway. In a little while, at the end of the century, the capital of Mexico and the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo will be the world's largest cities.

Southern cities on the planet are as large northern cities, but seen in a distorting mirror. Copycat modernization multiplied the model's shortcomings. Latin American capitals, noisy, smoky, no bicycle lanes or toxic gas filters.

clean air and silence are items as rare and so expensive that only the wealthiest people can afford.

In Brazil, Volkswagen and Ford make cars without filters to sell in Brazil and other Third World countries.

However, the same Brazilian subsidiaries of Volkswagen and Ford to produce cars filters (catalytic converters) to sell in the First World. Argentina produces unleaded gasoline for export. For the domestic market, however, produces poisonous gas. Throughout Latin America, cars are free to throw lead by the exhaust pipes. From the point of view of the cars, the lead increases the octane and increase the rate of profit. From the point of view of people, lead damages the brain and nervous system. Automobiles, owners of the cities, do not listen to outsiders.

Year 2000, memories of the future: people with oxygen masks, birds coughing instead of singing, trees that refuse to grow.

Currently in Mexico City, are signs that say: Please do not bother walls and Please do not hit the door . There is still no sign: is recommended not to breathe, but something similar is suggesting now, official warnings to the public health. The give away cars and factories into the atmosphere every day, eleven thousand tons of gas and smoke enemies. There is a mist of dirt in the air, children are born with blood lead and more than one occasion been raining dead birds on the city that was, at times, not so long ago, the most transparent region air. Now the cocktail of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide becomes three times higher than the maximum tolerable to humans. What is the maximum tolerable for urban beings?

Five million cars: the city of San Pablo has been defined as a patient on the eve of the attack. A cloud of gas masks. Only on Sundays you can see from the outside, the most developed city in Brazil. In the streets of the center, lighted signs warn people every day:

AIR QUALITY: RUIN

According to the measuring stations, the air was dirty or very dirty during 323 days of 1986.

In June 1989, Santiago de Chile disutó with Mexico City and Sao Paulo in a few days without rain or wind, the world championship of contamination. Cerro San Cristobal, in the heart of Santiago, not seen, hidden behind a mask of smog. The nascent democratic government of Chile imposed some minimal action against eight hundred tons of gas each day are incorporated into the city air. Then the cars and factories screamed to the sky: those limitations violated the freedom of business and hurt property rights. The freedom of money, that despises freedom of others, had been unlimited under the dictatorship of General Pinochet, and had made a valuable contribution to general poisoning. The right to pollute is a major incentive for foreign investment, almost as important as the right to pay wages dwarfs. And after all, General Pinochet had never denied the Chilean the right to breathe shit. "

Of Use and throw The world seen from a Latin American by Eduardo Galeano ecology

How Many Calories In A Barbecue Sandwich

The social cost of Progress: Eduardo Galeano

February 1989, Caracas. Climb to the clouds, suddenly The ticket price is multiplied by three the price of bread and popular anger erupts: the streets are lying dead three hundred or five hundred, or who knows.

Fwebrero 1991, Lima. The cholera plague strikes the coast of Peru, it strikes on the port of Chimbote and the urban slums of Lima, killing a hundred just a few days. In hospitals there is no serum or salt. The economic adjustment the government has dismantled what remained of public health and has doubled in a heartbeat, the number of Peruvians in a state of extreme poverty, earning below minimum wage. The minimum wage is $ 45 per month .

wars now, electronic warfare, occur in videogames screens. The victims were not heard or seen. Laboratory economics do not hear or see the hungry, or scorched earth. Remote Weapons kill without remorse. International technocracy, which requires the Third World development programs and adjustment plans, also kills from outside and from afar.

ago more than a quarter century Latin America has been dismantling the débilesdiques opposed to the arrogance of the money.

Bankers creditors have bombed those defenses, with accurate weapons of extortion, political and military leaders have helped to collapse, blowing inside. So they fall, one after another, the protective barriers raised in the past, from the State. And now the state is selling the national public companies for nothing, or worse than nothing because the seller pays. Our countries get the keys and everything else to the international monopolies, now called factors price formation, and become free markets. International technocracy, which teaches us to give injections wooden legs, said that the free market is the talisman of wealth. Why is it that the rich countries who preach it, do not practice? The free market, shrine of the weak, is the most successful export product of the strong. Manufactured for use in poor countries. No rich country has ever used.

Talisman of wealth, for how many? Official data from Uruguay and Costa Rica, countries with less burning, before the social contradictions: now one in six Uruguayans living in extreme poverty, with two in five poor Costa Rican families.

The dubious marriage of supply and demand in a free market that served the despotism of the powerful, punishes the poor and creates an economy of speculation. Production is discouraged, it discredits the work, divinizes consumption. Slates are contemplated exchange houses like movie screens, there is talk of the dollar as if it were person:

_ And how is the dollar?

The tragedy repeats itself as farce. From the time of Christopher Columbus, Latin America has suffered its own tragedy foreign capitalist development. Now I repeated as farce. Is the caricature of development: a dwarf that simulates be a child.

Technocracy see is numbers and not people, but only see the numbers that you should look. After this long quarter-century, are celebrated some successes modernization.

The miracle Bolivia, for instance, accomplished by the grace of the capital of drug trafficking: the cycle of tin is over, and with the collapse of tin collapsed mining centers and labor unions more bullies in Bolivia : now the people of Llallagua, which has no drinking water, has a TV satellite dish on top of the hill of Calvary. Or Chilean miracle, because the magic wand General Pinochet, successful product being sold in potions, in the East. But what is the price of the Chilean miracle? Who are the Chileans who have paid and paid?

Who will be the Poles and Czechs and Hungarians who will pay? In Chile, official statistics claim the multiplication of the loaves and yet admit the multiplication of the hungry. Sings the rooster victory. This crow is suspect. Would not it be uploaded to the head failure? In 1970, there were about 20 percent of poor Chileans. Twenty years later, there is 45 percent.

confess figures, but do not repent. At last, after all, human dignity depends on the calculation of costs and benefits, and the sacrifice of the poor multitude is not only the social costs Progress.

What is the value of that social cost, if it could be measured? In late 1990, the magazine Stern made a careful estimate of the damage caused by the development in Germany today. The magazine evaluated in economic, human and material damage resulting from car accidents, traffic congestion, air pollution, water and food, the decline of green spaces and other factors, and reached the conclusion that the value of damages is equal to a quarter of the entire national product of the German economy. The multiplication of misery was not, obviously, between the damage, because a few centuries ago that Europe is feeding their wealth with the poverty of others, but it would be interesting to know how far I could get such an assessment, if applied to the catastrophes of modernization in Latin America. And we must bear in mind that in Germany the state controls and limits to some extent, harmful effects on prsonas system and the environment. What would be the assessment of damages in countries like ours, who have believed the story free market and let the money to move like a tiger loose? "The damage we do, and make us a system of artificial needs stuns us to forget our real needs? How far could it be measured? Can you measure the mutilations of the human soul? Does the proliferation of violence, the debasement of everyday life?

The West lives the euphoria of victory. Following the collapse of the East, the alibi is served: in the East, was worse. Was it worse? Rather, I think, we should ask whether it was essentially different . West: the sacrifice of justice in the name of freedom, on the altars of the goddess Productivity. To the east: the sacrifice of liberty in the name of justice, on the altars of the goddess Productivity.

the South, we still have time to wonder if that God deserves our lives.

to be like them and other items by Eduardo Galeano

fragment published in Use and throw The world seen from a Latin American ecology