The Daily Grasshopper

The "Daily Grasshopper" has been spending a lot of time in the Middle East lately, what with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and all. But there's a story in yesterday's New York Times about the miners of Potosi, in Bolivia, that is worthy of consideration.

The article, "As Bolivian Miners Die, Boys Are Left to Toil," ran on page A3 of the Times yesterday. The link is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/24/international/americas/24BOLI.html

The article tells the story of the men, young and old, who work the mines, and how miserable their working conditions are. Here's some of the description:

"Grover Orcko is only 16, but when he goes to work, he puts on a helmet and headlamp. Then he enters the mines, through a dank, dark tunnel, careful to avoid the unmarked shafts that fall to oblivion.

He crawls through narrow openings and lowers himself on rickety ladders through craggy holes, all the while breathing a deadly fine dust. He descends ever deeper into the stifling bowels of a mountain once so famed for its abundant silver that the Spanish named it Rich Mountain.

Today, those who mine its seams call it the "Mountain That Eats Men."

Here, 250 feet down in a warren of caverns and cavities, Grover and the other boys - some of whom start as young as 10, most hardly 15 or 16 - work in much the same way they would have 300 years ago. They clear rocks with picks and shovels and heave 100-pound loads on their bare backs, as dynamite blasts shake the ancient timbers around them that hold back countless tons of rock.

Older miners, wheezing and slowly dying of lung disease, have trouble keeping up. By their 40's most are finished. Few live past 50. So much of the labor falls to the young, their sons, until they, too, wither, generation by generation.

The mountain does not discriminate. It eats boys, too.

'At first when I came into the mine, I just cried,' said Grover, a mere 5 feet tall, his eyes like saucers. 'But I had to work, so I began to learn, little by little.'"

Although the article is unflinching in its depictions of the misery of these workers, there are nevertheless important details left out. Times reporter Juan Forero (you may remember him from his articles on Colombia and Venezuela, which I've commented on) seems to want to overlook a couple of important pieces of the story, not the least of which is the role of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, in this tragedy. He writes that the use of child labor, in the mines and elsewhere, is due the fact that Latin America is "languishing in its worst economic cycle in decades."

I agree with Forero there. The economies of Latin America are basket cases. But why?

The article doesn't really say. But Forero does write a lot about history in his article, laying the blame for centuries of atrocities at the feet of the Spanish conquistadors:

"They toil in a city of past glories, as evidenced by its colonial splendor. In its heyday, Potosí was as big and rich as London. Its silver helped build the Spanish Armada and bankrolled Spanish military expansion.

But it was also the scene of one of history's lesser known tragedies - the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Indians in the mines over 350 years under Spanish domination, falling to illness and starvation, or simply overwork."

The article assures us that "the young are not exploited by some faceless multinational company." Forero blames the collapse of the international tin market in 1985, and the aforementioned "economic cycle," for the plight of these young wage slaves. They now work for themselves, in cooperatives, Forero tells us.

The truth is that the same greed that forced the Quechua Indians into the mines during the Conquest is alive and well today, and forcing their ancestors into similar slavery. Only it's more subtle this time around. The Bolivian miners aren't being forced into the mines at gun or knifepoint - that's true. But the devastation of the Bolivian economy by its foreign-held debt, compounded by the World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs that most Latin American countries are laboring under (coincidentally, in the same period during which they've seen what Forero calls the "worst economic cycle in decades"), means that working in the mines is the only option for young Bolivians in Potosi.

Bolivia is what is known in IMF/World Bank parlance as an HIPC - Heavily Indebted Poor Country. David Malin Roodman, author of "Still Waiting for the Jubilee: Pragmatic Solutions for the Third World Debt Crisis," explains:

"In a sort of money merry-go-round, rich governments, the IMF, the World Bank, and other official lenders are granting poor countries new loans to repay old ones. For every dollar they lend to low-income nations they get 83 cents right back in principal and interest payments. This makes bad loans look good and hides the full extent of failure."

The result of such international loan-sharking is that the governments in countries like Bolivia wind up focusing all their economic energies on satisfying external debt, at the expense of services to their populations. According to the Worldwatch Institute:

"Today's unsustainable debt burdens are a formidable obstacle to poverty alleviation and environmental protection. Many of the 47 most indebted countries spend more on foreign debt service than on basic health, education, and social services for their own people. Thirty-seven of these countries rank in or just above the United Nations' lowest category of human development. In one extreme case, Zambia devoted 40 percent of its budget to foreign debt payments in 1997 and only 7 percent to basic social services. The death rate among Zambian children is rising, partly because a third of those under five have not received cheap, effective vaccines.

Additionally, the need to generate foreign exchange in many highly indebted countries is placing an extra burden on natural resources. Debt pressure has spurred increases in export-oriented mining and logging in developing countries."

http://www.worldwatch.org/press/news/2001/04/26/

The largest single holders of debt of the HIPCs are international commercial banks - people like Citigroup. Some people think Paul O'Neill lost his job as the Bush administration's Treasury Secretary because the stock market took a dive. What is more likely is that O'Neill got the axe because back in September he threw his support behind an IMF plan to offer a sort of bankruptcy filing process for countries like Bolivia. And corporations like Citi didn't like it a bit. O'Neill is now back in the private sector. The new IMF rules were released earlier this year without the O'Neill-backed proposal.

http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/worldnews/northamerica/imf090103.htm

I've reviewed the draconian measures that international lending agencies impose on poor countries before - forcing them to produce for export, slash health and education services, raise taxes and interest rates, etc. All these are done to encourage foreign investment. The results for the population, however, are easy to predict. Last month, Bolivians protested a new tax increase and the government responded with a ferocious crackdown. Almost 20 people were killed.

The great Uruguayan author and journalist Eduardo Galeano wrote at length about Potosi in his catalog of the exploitation of a continent: "The Open Veins of Latin America." He writes about the more than 500 years of capitalist underdevelopment of the countries of South America, keeping the populations poor while foreign companies make huge profits. Latin America is home to some of the most unequal distributions of land and wealth on earth. Here's Galeano on how it works (originally published in 1971):

"Latin America is the region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European - or later United States - capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources. Production methods and class structure have been successively determined from outside for each area by meshing it into the universal gearbox of capitalism. To each area has been assigned a function, always for the benefit of the foreign mteropolis of the moment, and the endless supply chain of dependency has been endlessly extended. The chain has many more than two links. In Latin America it also includes the oppression of small countries by their larger neighbors and, within each country's frontiers, the exploitation by big cities and ports of their internal sources of food and labor. (Four centuries ago sixteen of today's twenty biggest Latin American cities already existed.)

For those who see history as a competititon, Latin America's backwardness and poverty are merely the result of its failure. We lost; others won. But the winners happen to have won thanks to our losing: the history of Latin America's underdevelopment is, as someone has said, an integral part of the history of world capitalism's development. Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison. Potosi, Zacatecas, and Ouro Preto became desolate warrens of deep, empty tunnels from which the precious metals had been taken; ruin was the fate of Chile's nitrate pampas and of Amazonia's rubber forests. Northeast Brazil's sugar and Argentina's quebracho belts, and communities around the oil-rich Lake Maracaibo, have become painfully aware of the mortality of wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates. The rain that irrigates the centers of imperialist power drowns the vast suburbs of the system. In the same way, and symmetrically, the well-being of our dominating classes - dominating inwardly, dominated from outside - is the curse of our multitudes condemned to exist as beasts of burden."

They don't export anything from the mines in Potosi anymore. What money there is to be made in Bolivia today is in debt service, money that winds up in the hands of some of the wealthiest corporations on earth - the international banks. After centuries of bleeding the Bolivian peasants, they're almost dry.