HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- http://www.colombiareport.org/globalization_colombia.htm#one A Report by the
Information Network of the Americas (INOTA)
Colombia: Demanding Wealth, Supplying Death The Channels of Exploitation Remain Open The Effects of Centuries of Austerity Plan Colombia: Ensuring Access to Resources Plan Colombia: A Convergence of Corporate Interests ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…We should cease to talk about vague and - for the far east - unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization." George Kennan, U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study, 1949 It has been said that colonization was one of the first steps in the globalization process. For the Europeans, colonization fueled industrial growth by utilizing cheap labor to extract raw materials. This new division of labor, where one actor took everything and gave nothing, was only sustainable through the use of force. In areas where anger and resistance were fierce and the contested resources were desired more than labor, massacres aimed at extermination were most useful. Globalization began, not because international actors came together to conduct a voluntary and mutually beneficial exchange, but because colonizers had the firepower to coerce the colonized into a completely asymmetrical relationship. The first global connections established a system where resources and capital flowed from the colonized to the industrializing colonizers. While the era of colonization has passed, certain fundamental patterns remain. The colonizers, today's "developed" nations, still seek to control access to inexpensive resources. Profit maximization is the name of the game, therefore, unequal relations of exchange are desirable. Because the more unequal the exchange the greater the profit, the most successful players on the global stage are those who are most willing and able to impose these asymmetrical relationships on developing nations. Hence, although globalization has made international exchanges more numerous than ever before, resources and capital increasingly flow in one direction. This is illustrated by the fact that the gap between rich and poor countries continues to widen. Currently the net worth of the three richest families in the world is greater than the combined gross domestic product of the 43 poorest nations on earth.1 One person's right is another person's duty, and the freedom to take indefinitely is accompanied by the duty to give indefinitely. Powerful economic actors possess many rights and freedoms but are allotted few responsibilities and perform few duties, while less powerful beings have fewer rights, little freedom, and many duties. This distribution of freedom and obligation is so skewed that while some live gluttonously, others die of hunger or are killed for challenging the superfluous resource ownership of the powerful. The celebration of the liberty and prosperity that many living in developed nations enjoy is largely divorced from an understanding of the price that others have paid and continue to pay to make these privileges possible. The dominant voices are those coming from corporate America. For them, neoliberal policies and a decrease in the political regulation of their activities increase their freedom and prosperity, but the converse is the imposition of duty on others: namely the citizens of countries where profit maximization is carried out without restrictions. Environmental degradation, human rights abuses, harassment and even murder of union leaders, activists, and representatives of non-governmental organizations are all by-products of unregulated corporate freedom. The unrestrained drive for profit demands death of those who get in the way. In some places, the right to maximize profit is, in fact, accompanied by the duty to die. Colombia: Demanding Wealth, Supplying Death "We live in a world that treats the dead better than the living. We the living are the askers of questions and givers of answers, and we have other grave defects unpardonable by a system that believes death, like money, improves people." Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America In Colombia, homicide is the leading cause of death. Each year, over 300,000 people are murdered. It is no accident that the largest percentage of these deaths are found in the economic poles of the country: the emerald zone of Boyaca; the gold mines in Antioquia; the coal mines of Cesar and La Guajira; the petroleum zones in Santander, Arauca and Casanare; the regions of commercial agriculture; and during the period known as La Violencia (1946-1965), in the coffee zones. It is in these regions that the contradictions of globalization and neoliberalism are exposed. Great wealth and great poverty sit side by side, both sprung from the same seed. Those who have been impoverished battle to regain what they have lost, and those who have been enriched hire private armies to defend what they have gained. In this battle for resources, competition is as fierce, or dare I say it, as healthy as it can get. There are no rules and the ends justify the means: On both sides, the demand is for death. And, as always, it is the poor peasants who are doing most of the dying. In Colombia, the demand for resources and profit is greater than the demand for human life. Hundreds of years have not changed that pattern. From colonization to globalization, the few have enforced asymmetrical relations of exchange on the many. Today, international financial institutions maintain these patterns by enforcing "freedom" and increasing liberalization of the channels of extraction. For some, both the elites in Colombia, and foreign corporations profiting from operations, such as Occidental Petroleum, BP-Amoco and others, this allows the accumulation of great wealth. For others, especially poor rural Colombians and those dwelling in the urban shantytowns, the result is either a slow death from denial of basic necessities, or a quick death by private killers hired to clear resistant peasants out of the way of economic progress. Whatever the pretext for Plan Colombia, in actuality, it is securing corporate access to inexpensive resources. In recent years, emiseration of the average Colombian has resulted in an increased popular resistance to the implementation of neoliberal economic policies. Consequently, there has been a corresponding increase in the levels of violence used against such elements as guerrillas, peasants, union leaders, and human rights activists who challenge a system of economic relations that ships resources needed for survival off to foreign lands under the label of "free trade". But "free trade" refers, as it always has, to the freedom of large financial players to engage in the maximization of profit without concerning themselves with the annoyances of environmental, labor, or human rights regulations. Environmental concerns aside, history proves that such an increase in exploitative potential will provoke anger and resistance, violent repression, and an intensifying cycle where the resultant demand is death, and there is already enough of that. The Channels of Exploitation Remain Open "Latin America is a region of open veins. Everything, from the discovery until our time, has always been transmuted into European- or later United States-capital, and as such has accumulated in distant centers of power. " Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America Colombia, like the rest of Latin America, was violently colonized by the Spanish. The indigenous groups were subdued and forced into labor in the mines. The land and the people were raped and the valuable stones and minerals were shipped back to the coffers of the Spanish crown. Independence brought little change for most of the population. Land, resources and wealth remained concentrated in the hands of the American-born Spaniards who inherited power. Even the long and bloody La Violencia affected little change. The peasants took up arms and shed their blood, but when all was said and done, it seemed that their lives had been tossed away for little more than political posturing. The elites of the Liberal and Conservative parties made their peace and maintained their connections to foreign interests. The peasants still were given nothing (see, Fifty Years of Violence). But resistance had been mobilizing and violence intensified against the exploitative relations of "exchange". Humiliation, misery and a desire for revenge birthed guerrillas from the ravaged peasant masses. They rallied behind a platform of social justice and violently demanded wealth redistribution and land reform. Although the government conceded to peace negotiations with some groups, there was no significant redistribution of land or resources. New official economic positions merely affected superficial changes, and, even while the Colombian economy grew consistently under the Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) regimes, wealth continued to accumulate in the hands of the elites at the expense of the poor. In the 1980s, for the first time, there was a significant challenge to the balance of power in Colombia and the established oligarchy's hegemony over economic life. The cocaine industry inundated entrepreneurial drug barons and cartels with U.S. dollars. The new lords of the drug trade expanded their might by funding private armies, a practice that originated when large landholders and cattle ranchers took advantage of the lack of government presence in the countryside to create death squads to combat the guerillas and clear peasants off desirable lands. Like the private militias of the past, the new paramilitaries secured access to resources through force. In Colombia, money can buy anything, even life can be bought for a price: If the price of your life is lower than the profit to be made from the resource you refuse to relinquish, you die. These are market forces working more freely than people in the United States, with the exception of the North American Indians, have ever experienced. The Colombian government derives most of its revenue by taxing licit export production that is largely regulated through regional and bilateral trade agreements and taxed upon entry into the U.S. market. On the other hand, the drug baron's export profits are illicit and therefore evade taxation and price caps meant to keep capital in the United States. The drug trade, unencumbered by state regulation, is actually free to distribute profits back to the producers in developing nations. The drug trade initiated a convergence of interest between the United States and the Colombian government against the power of this "free" drug trade. Colombia's elites needed help defending themselves against the encroaching economic power of the drug lords. Washington needed to reverse the flow of capital back into the United States. In 1989, President Virgilio Barco placed a quarter of a million dollar bounty on the heads of cartel leaders and called for U.S. help to fight the drug cartels. Not coincidentally, in this same year he folded to International Monetary Fund (IMF) pressure to initiate a strategy for opening up the Colombian economy. In 1990, Barco's successor, President Cesar Augusto Gaviria, undertook massive reforms, including the apertura, or "economic opening," that paved new avenues for wealth extraction. The administration dismantled a protectionist system that, under ISI, had been used to promote the development of domestic industries. Tariffs, trade barriers and subsidies were reduced or eliminated and public enterprises were privatized. Customs procedures were simplified (which further facilitated the drug trade), restrictions on foreign ownership of local banks were done away with, the need for authorization on foreign investment was eliminated, foreign interests were given free reign to repatriate profits, and portfolio (often short term speculative capital) investment was given unconditional tax exemption. In the middle of 1991, the financial market was also opened, which meant that monetary and exchange rate policies could no longer be determined by the state and were, instead, subject to the forces of international financial movements. True to form, the liberalization of markets let loose massive swells of capital and deregulated their movement. They were now free to be sucked right out of Colombia…and they were. Falling tariffs and the elimination of domestic subsidies decreased the relative price of imports. Rich Colombians took advantage of the lower prices of imported luxury goods; private consumption skyrocketed while private savings dropped to its lowest levels ever. From 1992-1994, private international debt went from $3.5 to $8.5 billion.2 Meanwhile, a large influx of foreign capital (not to worry: one hundred percent can be repatriated) was spurred by the expectation of a Colombian oil bonanza. This generated an appreciation of the domestic currency that threatened exports by decreasing their competitiveness. Because of the liberalization of financial and capital markets, the only policy lever available to the government was the use of fiscal policy to control inflation. However, as the government's budget was dwarfed by the huge sums of money sloshing through the hands of drug traffickers and private corporations, fiscal expenditures were ineffective. The balance of trade deteriorated from a $2.3 billion surplus in 1991 to a $2.4 billion deficit in 1994.3 Furthermore, while the economy was opened to foreign producers, it quickly closed for many domestic manufacturers, especially those who could only afford small or mid-scale production. The technological efficiency of industries in developed nations made foreign imports more competitive. Besides the inherent advantages of large-scale production in driving down prices, foreign corporations were also the recipients of subsidies from their own governments and generous tax exemptions from Colombia, benefits most small and medium-sized Colombian producers were denied. While in theory liberalization was supposed to spur industrial development, in actuality, it did just the opposite: it resulted in de-industrialization. In 1997 and 1998, massive imports of manufactured goods led to the closing of 5,000 small factories. According to Patricia Burtica, a representative of Colombia's largest union, Unified Workers Central (CUT), "The opening market economy has provoked the closing of 20,000 commercial enterprises in our country."4 In sum, the liberalization of the Colombian economy placed more and more power in the hands of foreign corporations and, as intended, resulted in a transfer of resources from lower class Colombians to the elites and multinational corporations. In the labor market, the Gaviria Administration paved the way for increased unemployment that benefited the Colombian economic elites and foreign investors. By rewriting labor legislation in the 1991 Constitution, it became easier for employers to lay off workers. Previously, companies had to pay a severance to workers laid off before their contract had expired. In order to eliminate the burden of "redundant labor", the severance requirement was dropped and work contracts that began after 1980 could be terminated without any economic inconvenience to the employer. As a result, even conservative government figures (which take the informal sector into account) concede that a fifth of the population is now unemployed. When the informal sector is not taken into account, some estimate unemployment to be as high as 60 percent. In terms of land tenure, the Sustainable Development Department of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations found that forced "liberalization" of the land market, despite subsidies provided for rural peasants, only resulted in a greater concentration of land ownership. In 1994, in an effort to make land use more efficient and productive, the Colombian government encouraged large landholders to sell parts of their land to investors. Responding to the demands of demobilized guerrillas with whom the government had recently signed a peace accord, the law included a subsidy scheme to help the rural poor purchase land. However, most landowners were still unwilling to sell to rural peasants because they could not obtain a sufficient profit margin. Although subsidies initially enabled some of the rural poor to purchase land, they were unable to hold onto their newly gained properties. Violence, intimidation, and the corruption of local officials left them unable to defend their resources and they were either violently displaced or forced to sell. Consequently, the top three percent of the landed elite now own over 70 percent of the arable land, while 57 percent of the poorest farmers subsist on less than three percent. Once again, the deregulation of the market only provided freedom to some, namely, to those with the power and the capital to hold on to violently contested resources. The powerless Colombian peasant lost yet again. (cond.) --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^==^============================================================= This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.bacIlu Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^==^============================================================= |
