Being in Latin America there are basically two options as a foreigner. You can be blind to everything, visit the tourist sites and take cheap drugs or you can talk to people and become enraged by the injustice of the world. I was coming to Latin America on the back of 2 years of reading about political history from people like Howard Zinn, Bill Blum and Noam Chomsky. I also read motorcycle diaries and a biography of Che Guevara which gave me insights into Latin American history.
When you talk to someone here they will tell you .. I'm earning less than minimum wage but there are so few jobs that there is no better option. Unions have been paralysed, foreign companies are buying up everything. Most people don't have health or life insurance nor will they ever retire. These things have all come about in the recent past. There are some people that are extremely rich while minimum wage would be around $1.20 an hour if they weren't forced to work 80 hour weeks. My girlfriend just got a job for minimum wage 70 hours per week for $55, she starts at 8 and finishes between 8-10pm. she's not allowed to leave for lunch an gets 2 Sundays off a month if she works well. The shop has massively over staffed because labour is so cheap.
I just walked around the block in the town centre. I saw an indigenous woman with her kid getting ready to sleep in the street after a day of begging. 10 prostitutes. A midget playing a banjo for cash. I smelt the rock that many of the people who live in the street smoke. I saw about 5 guys carrying sacks with their only possessions. 2 police men (police and military forces are massive) they get pensions and opportunities for education. Uni's are being privatised and education is each year more for the rich. You have to pay $50 a year to go to school which for many families with many children means they don't send their kids to school.
There are posters for 5 people who have disappeared in the train station. They change every couple of weeks. If you want to be a union leader or ask a multinational company to pay it's taxes or its workers here you have to be ready to seek asylum and hide your family. Companies have all the power. Even professionals get 2 weeks a year holidays and people are scared to take more because there is so much unemployment. Only 8 million of a 22 million person workforce have real jobs. Lots of the others are "occupied" selling mobile phone minutes, fruits, newspapers, cleaning windscreens or one of hundreds of other ways to keep a roof over their heads and full stomachs.
Each reform is making the situation worse. They are looking to get a free trade agreement with the US which in other countries has lead to a spike in poverty.
There are 4 million displaced people in the country because of the paramilitaries (private armies of rich land owners) and army who have killed and forced poor people off their land so that it can be used for mass industry. That is part of why they have had 40 years of civil war here. The people in power at the moment by 60% majority are all linked with these movements and are major land holders. People hate the guerrilla army who fight for the land to be returned. Recently one paramilitary admitted to knowing of 5000 holes where poor land holders and guerrillas (the same thing really) have been buried. He is getting 4 years in jail for being honest about his genocide.
I wanted to just give you a taste of what it's like to be here but I guess a bit more came out.. I have learnt more about other countries. I am interested in politics but I'm increasingly cynical about the world. We are doing everything wrong. I still have faith in the human race but the forces that hold it in it's misery and injustice will go to any extreme to maintain it. When you are here you can see the multinationals like Coke or fruit companies will pay to kill union leaders to keep profits up and kill indigenous to rape their land.. ..they are the same companies that operate in the rich world they just can't get away with the same shit. The US has planned, authorised and payed for genocides and massacres in almost every country in Latin America.
To answer the question. Reading the paper and books here as well as talking to people have been the most valuable things.. some Internet articles. Mostly its being close to the lives that are being ruined by this system and knowing that something different is easily possible if the propaganda was different. The lies of mass media and our education are the most important reasons for the injustice that we live.
My role ?
Keegan
http://www.soberania.org/Images/hambre_1802.jpg
http://www.soberania.org/Images/hambre_1802.jpg
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