Report
Ethel Brooks & Winifred Tate
The wars are over in Central America, but peace in the region has not brought economic prosperity. Real wages have declined and unemployment has skyrocketed since the early 1990s.
By 6:00 a.m. in the market of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, horses are hauling carts loaded with pineapples, bananas and vegetables to the market stalls, sending up sweet smells of pineapple, coriander and rain from last night’s thunderstorm. As the traffic builds up, smog starts to clog the dawn sky. The first school uniforms appear.
This past May, two independent Mexican labor federations, the National Workers Union (UNT) and the Authentic Labor Front (FAT) jointly brought a complaint against the U.S. government under the terms of the labor side agreements to NAFTA. The complaint alleged that the federal government was not enforcing minimally required levels of health care and wages among Mexican and Mexican-American apple-industry workers in the state of Washington.
Latin America continues to lead the way in the free-market overhaul of social benefits. This lead was just widened when outgoing Vene-zuelan President Rafael Caldera gained Congressional approval for the privatization of the five main components of the country’s social-security system: health, retirement, unemployment compensation, housing and recreation.
Growth and price stability have returned to Latin America, but at a staggering social cost. Through the first half of the 1990s the combined Latin American economies grew by about 15% with decreasing inflation.
In recent years a political practice that is embedded firmly in both class politics and the feminist movement has emerged in Brazil. It has links to some feminist organizations, labor unions and parties on the left, and insists on the importance of the feminist transformation of leftist political parties and labor unions from the inside.