Regarding the stuff on Sachs in Bolivia, the piece plays so fast and loose with the details as to -- unfortunatley -- bring into question the rest of the article. > The thousands of tin miners who lost their jobs were > forced into an economy with few alternatives. Of the > ways to survive, only one held any realistic > possibilities-coca farming. In 1984, the C.I.A. > engineered a coup d'�tat to ensure that there would > be a government that would agree to professor Sachs' > austerity recommendations. In fact, that government came into power in 1980 (the Garcia Meza regime), and quickly turned out to be so corrupt that even the Reagan administration him unpalatable, and fianllly cut of funding. Sachs wasn't anywhere to be seen yet, arrving 4.5 years later. > But such were the sordid details. Sachs was a hero > who had protected the income stream of the banks by > demonstrating that the calls for economic structural > adjustments could be flexibly applied in even the > worst-case scenario. The fact that he an author of > an agreement that would help swamp American cities > with cheap crack probably never even entered his > head. No economic model demonstrates a link between > tin mining and drug addiction so for Sachs, it > didn't exist as a possibility. Golly, such simplifications DO obscure more than they reveal. Nope, my favorite Sachs-bashing quote is the one I posted some time ago here. He is reported to have said "I told the Bolivians, from the very beginning, that what you have here is a miserable, poor economy with hyperinfaltion; if you are brave, if you are gutsy, if you do everything right, you will end up with a miserable, poor economy with stable prices." (See Duncan Green's _Silent Revolution_, London: Latin American Bureau, 1995). And you know what? He was right. The degree to which this stability (social/political, not prices) was dependent upon repatriation of capital no-questions-asked (cocaine $ laundering through the central bank) remains unknown, though widely specualted over. To find political ill deeds one needn't resort to conspiracies, cocaine, and what-not (though, of course, all that might be true too). Former president Sanchez de Lozada, Sach's local counterpart during the period of savage adjustment, is proud to point out that such adjustmet was first and foremost POLITICAL, a necessary adjustment to the balance of social power (breaking the militant miners unions) essential for realizing his vision of capitalist development. Heck, that's conspiracy enough for me. Tom Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
