Ibero-American News Digest
Argentina: How the IMF Killed a Nation
It used to be the case that mention of the South American nation of Argentina would evoke images of abundant food, a place where cattle and wheat covered the vast pampas (plains) as far as the eye could see, and where no onenot even the poorwent hungry. This was the "breadbasket" of South America, which by the early 1960s had attained levels of development comparable to those of Japan. With impressive scientific and technological achievements, a skilled and educated workforce, and adequate basic infrastructure, Argentines looked to the future with optimism.
No moreunless 2004 Democratic Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche's proposals for a New Bretton Woods system are implemented very quickly. Today, with 53% of its 36 million people officially categorized as "poor," scenes of starving children fainting at school are now commonplace, as are stories of mobs of poor stealing and slaughtering cows, even sick cows unsuitable for human consumption. Rates of malnutrition among infants and children are soaring, as are cases of low birthweights among newborns, on a scale seen only in very poor countries.
Typifying the horror in Argentina today, is the painful report given by retired Army Major Adrian Romero Mundani, during the Aug. 22-23 "Mexico-Brazil-Argentina: Hour of Integration" conference held in Guadalajara, Mexico. "Mama, will there be food in heaven?" were the words of a child to her mother, as she lay dying of starvation. This crisis "cries out to heaven," the Argentine patriot said. "People may starve when there is no food, but it is inadmissible that children starve when there is a surplus of food, because my country ... can feed the hungry world."
Nothing about this devastation is accidental, despite the Wall Street Journal and IMF line that "it's their own fault." During the 1990s, Argentina was the international poster-boy for the IMF's free-market "adjustment" model, and imposed every single austerity dictate demanded of it, with the promise that this would bring the country into "the First World." Instead, parts of Argentina today resemble Africa.
The IMF's insistence that the government impose murderous austerity to service an unpayable $220 billion in foreign debt literally killed Argentina, just as Lyndon LaRouche warned it would, in several public statements earlier this year. The IMF's "fiscal responsibility" policies have ripped the physical economy to shreds, producing an official unemployment rate of 21.5%, the highest in Argentina's history, but also greatly understated.
Driven into homelessness or the slums by job loss, former members of the middle class, including teachers and state-sector workers, now pick through the garbage each night in cities, looking for food, or items they can sell.
Some desperate older and retired women have become prostitutes, because, as film maker Rolando Grana told BBC news service, "They are women who have lost everything, who have no pension, and the only thing they can think of doing is overcoming embarrassment and prostituting themselves." According to Bloomberg news agency, other Argentine families sell their hair to wig factories to earn $25.
A 33% inflation rateinflation has soared since the January devaluation of the pesoplaces food and medicine out of the reach of the poor and unemployed. In the first quarter of this year, the price of the monthly market basket of essential food items increased by 42.4%, while real wages declined by 25.5% between January and May.
- Children Hit the Hardest -
The government statistical agency, INDEC, calculates that 16,856 people per day enter the ranks of the poor, which over the past year, translates into 6.2 million more poor people. Of these, the majority are "indigent"the poorest of the poor.
"Poor" means that people lack the income to purchase a basic market basket of goods and services. The 9 million indigent among this group cannot even purchase enough food to satisfy minimum caloric requirements. In the past 12 months, the indigence rate has doubledadding 4.5 million people, at the rate of 12,300 per day.
Children are especially vulnerable. Seven of every 10 children under the age of 14 are classified as poor, which means that 4 million out of 5.7 million children have absolutely no access to the minimum market basket of goods and services. Undernourished and indigent children now number 2.1 million.
Impoverished children depend on subsidized food programs in the public schools, where at least one meal is guaranteed, sometimes two. Some of the highest levels of malnutrition are therefore now seen among preschool children, who don't get enough foodif anyat home. Malnutrition is increasingly seen among newborns, because their mothers don't eat. In one working-class Buenos Aires neighborhood, 26.6% of newborns were malnourished.
What was once Ibero-America's premier health-care system, to which students from around the hemisphere flocked to study medicine, is in shambles. Where health insurance used to be almost universal through trade-union-run programs, today 18 million people are without health insurance, and depend on public hospitals which are collapsing due to budget cuts.
Since last January's peso devaluation, the cost of medicine, components of which are imported, has increased almost 200%. Official government expenditures on the health sector will drop by 15% this year. Also since January, per-capita health expenditures have dropped from $650 to $184, plunging the country that once had Ibero-America's highest per-capita investment in medical care, into last place on the continent.
According to former Health Minister Aldo Neri, "increasingly efficient medical tools are meaningless in the face of ever-increasing poverty and misery." A study done by the government of Buenos Aires province for the year 2000, the last year for which statistics are available, showed a "notable increase" in tuberculosis among youth and people 65 or older, particularly in the middle of the 1990s, the heyday of free-market lunacy.
Colombia's FARC Threatens U.S. Citizens
[The following short appeared in the New Federalist of Sept. 2, 2002]
The Colombian police recently intercepted a phone call between the military commander of the FARC, Jorge Briceno, and other terrorists, declaring that U.S. citizens in Colombia are to be considered military targets by the FARC. According to the transcript, which has yet to be verified, but which is being taken seriously by U.S. authorities, Briceno declared, "We must find where the 'gringos' are, because they have all declared war on us. You are obligated to fight them as well."
Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady posed the right question when she asked, in light of this new revelation of the FARC's bloody intent against American citizens, why did 45 U.S. Congressmen send a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell in July, protesting use of U.S. aid to boost the Colombian military?
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