Year 501 Read Online Free PDF Page B

“massive impoverishment” including a 60 percent drop in workers’ buying power in 3 years, while enriching financial groups and transnational corporations. 16
    By then, another “economic miracle” was in place: “a treasury brimming with foreign reserves, inflation at its lowest rate in five years, and an economy growing at the fastest rate in the Americas, 9.2 percent in 1991,” Times correspondent James Brooke reported, noting also some familiar flaws, among them a fall in the real minimum wage in Caracas to 44 percent of the 1987 level, a decline in nutritional levels, and a “scandalous concentration of wealth,” according to a right-wing Congressman he quotes. Other flaws were to come to light (in the US) a few weeks later after a coup attempt, among them, the government’s admission that only 57 percent of Venezuelans could afford more than one meal a day in this country of enormous wealth. Other flaws in the miracle had been revealed in the report of an August 1991 Presidential Commission for the Rights of Children, not previously noticed, which found that “critical poverty, defined as the inability to meet at least one half of basic nutritional requirements,” had tripled from 11 percent of the population in 1984 to 33 percent in 1991; and that real per capita income fell 55 percent from 1988 to 1991, falling at double the rate of 1980-1988. 17
    On February 4,1992, an attempted military coup was crushed. “There was little jubilation,” AP reported. “The coup attempt caps a crescendo of anger and frustration over the economic reforms that have written such a macroeconomic success story but have failed to benefit the lives of most Venezuelans and have embittered many”( Financial Times ). It “was met by silent cheers from a large part of the population,” Brooke reported, particularly in poor and working-class areas. Like the Brazilian technocrats, Pérez had done everything right, “cutting subsidies, privatizing state companies and opening a closed economy to competition.” But something had unaccountably gone wrong. True, the growth rate was impressive, but “most economic analysts agree that the high price of oil in 1991 fueled Venezuela’s growth more than Pérez’s austerity moves,” Stan Yarbro reported, and none can fail to see that “the new wealth has failed to trickle down to Venezuela’s middle and lower classes, whose standard of living has fallen dramatically.” Infant deaths “have soared in the past two years as a result of worsening malnutrition and other health problems in the shantytowns,” a priest who had worked in poor neighborhoods for 16 years said. There is ample “new wealth,” much of it “poured into financial speculation schemes rather than new investments in industry. In 1991 money made in real estate and financial services almost equaled the profits from manufactures.” 18
    In short, a typical economic miracle, achieved under unusually favorable conditions for the evaluation of the neoliberal doctrines preached with such fervor by the priesthood of what Jeremy Seabrook calls the new “International Monetary Fundamentalism.” 19

    7. Some Competitors for the Prize
    It is a bit unfair to award Brazil the prize for enslavement, murder, and abuse of children; after all, it is the “colossus of the South,” so opportunities abound and numbers are larger. In fact, the story is much the same throughout the continent. Take Guatemala, another country richly endowed with resources that offered fine prospects for a success story for capitalism after the US regained control in 1954—and another case that should inspire us with pride in our accomplishments, so impressive in comparison with the wreckage left by the despicable enemy.
    Guatemala now boasts a higher level of child malnutrition than Haiti, according to UNICEF. The Health Ministry