harelb@cabot.dartmouth.edu (Harel Barzilai) (06/19/91)
"Maude Barlow, chairperson of a Canadian study group, reports the
results of their inquiry into maquiladoras 'built by Fortune 500 to
take advantage of a desperate people,' for profits hard to match
elsewhere. They found factories full of teenage girls, some
14-years-old, 'working at eye-damaging, numbingly repetitive work'
for wages 'well below what is required for even a minimum standard
of living.' Corporations commonly send the most dangerous jobs here
because standards on chemicals are 'lax or non-existent.'
'In one plant,' she writes, 'we all experienced headaches and
nausea from spending an hour on the assembly line' and 'we saw
young girls working beside open vats of toxic waste, with no
protective face covering.'"
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T H E V I C T O R S : I I
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B Y N O A M C H O M S K Y
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Z is an independent, progressive monthly magazine of critical thinking
on political, cultural, social, and economic life in the United
States. It sees the racial, sexual, class, and political dimensions
of personal life as fundamental to understanding and improving
contemporary circumstances; and it aims to assist activist efforts to
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Z Magazine, 150 W Canton St., Boston MA 02118, (617)236-5878
[Each issue of the magazine is about 110 pages -- no advertisements]
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THE FIRST PART of this series (Z, November) opened with the
conventional interpretation of the past decade: the U.S. won the Cold
War, a victory for the forces of righteousness. We then turned to the
question that would at once come to the mind of anyone apart from the
most fanatic ideologue: How are the victors faring at this historic
moment, as they celebrate their triumph? We looked first at those who
should be the most overjoyed because of their unusual good fortune:
our "little brown brothers" in Central America and Panama, who have
long been under the protective wing of the leader of the crusade,
becoming a foreign policy obsession in the past decade. The conditions
of their existence help us understand why the obvious questions about
the Grand Victory of democracy and free market capitalism are so
scrupulously avoided in polite and cultivated circles. Needless to
say, the beneficiaries of our solicitude have some thoughts of their
own about these matters. We will turn in the final section to their
interpretation of the triumph of capitalism and freedom, and the
nobility of their protector -- thoughts that do not penetrate the
well-disciplined commissar culture at home.
Let us now extend the survey to other regions where the virtuous
leaders of the crusade for freedom and justice have long held sway and
have thus been able to realize their noble objectives with no more
than marginal interference from Communists and other evil forces,
beginning with the rest of Latin America.
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The Fruits Of Victory: Latin America
====================================
A WORLD BANK study in 1982 estimated that "40 percent of households in
Latin America live in poverty, meaning that they cannot purchase the
minimum basket of goods required for the satisfaction of their basic
needs, and... 20 percent of all households live in destitution,
meaning that they lack the means of buying even the food that would
provide them with a minimally adequate diet." The situation became far
worse through the victorious 1980s, largely because of the huge export
[much deleted]
Mexicans continue to flee to the United States for survival, and
macabre stories abound, some hard to believe but important for what
they indicate about the prevailing mood. Reporting the annual meeting
of the Border Commission on Human Rights in Mexico, Mexico's leading
daily (Excelsior) alleges that actions of the U.S. Border Patrol cause
the drowning of persons seeking to cross the river to the United
States. A representative of the regional Human Rights Committee told
the session that 1,000 people had disappeared without a trace after
leaving their homes to enter the U.S. illegally. She "also added that
the disappearance or theft of women for the extraction of organs for
use in transplants in the U.S. is common." Others reported torture,
high rates of cancer from chemicals used in the maquiladora industries
(mainly subsidiaries of transnationals supplying U.S. factories),
secret prisons, kidnapping, and other horror stories. The journal also
reports a study by environmental groups, presented to President
Salinas, claiming that 100,000 children die every year as a result of
pollution in the Mexico City area, along with millions suffering from
pollution-induced disease, which has reduced life expectancy by an
estimated 10 years. The "main culprit" is the emissions of lead and
sulfur from operations of the national petrochemical company Pemex,
which is free from the controls imposed elsewhere -- one of the
advantages of Third World production that is not lost on investors.
[Send the 1-line message GET MEX-CITY AIRKILLS ACTIV-L to
LISTSERV@UMCVMB.BITNET for more on the "100,000 children"]
The Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and the Environment
described the situation as "truly catastrophic," Excelsior reports
further, estimating that less than 10 percent of Mexican territory is
able to support "minimally productive agriculture" because of
environmental degradation, while water resources are hazardously low.
Many areas are turning into "a real museum of horrors" from pollution
because of the blind pursuit of profits on the part of national and
international private capital. The Secretariat estimates further that
more than 90 percent of industry in the Valley of Mexico, where there
are more than 30,000 plants, violate global standards, and in the
chemical industry, more than half the labor force suffers irreversible
damage to the respiratory system.
Maude Barlow, chairperson of a Canadian study group, reports the
results of their inquiry into maquiladoras "built by Fortune 500 to
take advantage of a desperate people," for profits hard to match
elsewhere. They found factories full of teenage girls, some
14-years-old, "working at eye-damaging, numbingly repetitive work" for
wages "well below what is required for even a minimum standard of
living." Corporations commonly send the most dangerous jobs here
because standards on chemicals are "lax or non-existent." "In one
plant," she writes, "we all experienced headaches and nausea from
spending an hour on the assembly line" and "we saw young girls working
beside open vats of toxic waste, with no protective face covering."
Unions are barred, and there is an ample reserve army of desperate
people ready to take the place of any who "are not happy, or fall
behind in quotas, or become ill or pregnant." The delegation "took
pictures of a lagoon of black, bubbling toxic waste dumped by plants
in an industrial park," following it to "where it met untreated raw
sewage and turned into a small river running past squatters' camps
(where children covered in sores drank Pepsi Cola from baby bottles)
to empty into the Tijuana River."
It is more fashionable to bemoan the environmental and human
catastrophes of Eastern Europe, the results of an evil system now
happily overcome in a victory for our humane values.
[.....]