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