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
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