Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

Toure related this to the fact that the average per
capita income in the U.S., which in 1945 was ten times
greater than the average income in Asia, Afrika and Latin
Amerika, had by 1960 become even more extreme - no
less than seventeen times as much as the average Third
World income! (3)
This extractive process has since 1960 only stepped
up its tempo, driven to new levels by imperialism's crisis of
profitability. The New York Times recently said: "Commodity
prices have in fact reached their lowest levels in 30
years.. .For Central America's agricultural economies, the
terms of trade - the relative prices of exports and imports
- have deteriorated 40 per cent since 1977.. .the gap between
the richest and poorest nations has
widened.. .Moreover, many ruial societies are no longer
able to feed themselves. In Africa, for example, there is
In his 1982 Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm, Colombian
novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminded the
world how in the previous eleven years Latin America has
1 suffered from imperialist violence.
"There have been 5 wars and 17 military coups;
there emerged a diabolial dictator who is carrying out, in
God's name, the first Latin American ethnocide of our
time. In the meantime, 20 million Latin American children
died before the age of one - more than have been born in
Europe since 1970.
"Those missing because of repression number
nearly 120,000, which is as if no one would account for all
the inhabitants of Upsala. Numerous women arrested
while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet
nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their
children ... Because they tried to change this state of things,
nearly 200,000 men and women have died throughout the
continent, and over 100,000 have lost their lives in three
small and ill-fated countries of Central America:
Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatamala. If this had happened
in the United States, the corresponding figure would
be that of 1,600,000 violent deaths in four years.
"One million people have fled Chile, a country
with a tradition of hospitality - that is, I0 percent of its
population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two and a half
million inhcbitants, which considered itself the continent's
most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every
five citizens ... The country that could be formed of all the
exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a
population larger than that of Norway. "
less food per capita today than there was 20 years ago,
with sub-Saharan Africa frequently ravaged by
starvation. "(4)
Behind the neo-colonial facade of international
airports, of tourist hotels, of Mercedes-Benz society in the
capital cities, is a world of oppressed nations increasingly
war-torn, looted and socially disorganized. No less than
the Wall Street Journal clinically described this in the example
of the Dominican Republic:
"Sugar had been like oil to the Dominican
Republic, allowing the country to import its needs without
learning to develop them locally. 'Over the past few years
we've been able to create the illusion of being a developed
country - we have the latest computers, automobiles and
appliances,' says Felipe Vicini. 'But we aren't developed at
all. '
"Stripped of its imported goods, the Dominican
Republic is essentially what it was 100 years ago - a plantation
society with thousands of acres of sugar cane, some
bananas and cocoa, and several gold and silver mines. Today,
in this plantation society, about 6% of the population
owns 40% of the wealth. Most of the people are peasants,
living in areas where unemployment is 50%, illiteracy is
80% and many of the adults and children are malnourished.
The impoverished population spills over into urban
barrios and in the city streets children beg.. .
"In the sugar fields, wages average $3.50 a day, at
least during the six-month cutting season when work is
available. Much of the cutting is done by Haitians...some
half million of them roam the Dominican countryside
often working in conditions approaching slavery." (5)
In 1965, when a reform government was attempted
by a faction of the Dominican military, the U.S. promptly
invaded with 23,000 troops to restore the old order. The
neo-colonial societies are not, of themselves, stable or
viable. To maintain them imperialism subjects the world to
a never-ending series of search-and-destroy missions.
There is both the "white death" by starvation and disease
and the literally millions of Third World casualties from
endless war. Jon Stewart of the Pacific News Service has
written:
"According to War In Peace, a new book published
in London, about 35 million people have died in 130
military conflicts in more than 100 countries (all but a
handful in the Third World) since the end of World War
11. In the vast majority of these conflicts, the four original
powers of the UN Security Council - Britain, France, the
United States and the Soviet Union - have played prominent
direct or indirect roles.
"One thinks especially of Korea, which claimed
2% million lives and involved all the great powers; of Indochina,
which involved all the great powers but Britain;
of France's bloody colonial wars in Africa, which claimed
several million.. .
"The argument that these Third World wars -
which, taken together, really represent a third World War
- are mostly the products of nation-building among
backward and bloodthirsty societies simply doesn't wash.
At least it doesn't explain why the four great powers ... have
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