Tough Times

These are not good times for working people. As real incomes decline throughout the Americas and decent jobs become harder to find—even during the region's much-heralded periods of prosperity—a demoralization has set in. There has been a palpable diminution of working-class solidarity, and a breakdown of belief in the efficacy of any sort of collective struggle. The scarcity of adequate employment has produced what Carlos Vilas, in this NACLA Report on labor, calls "a war of all against all for a job." The region's once-proud labor movements have fallen on hard times. Nonetheless, there is a new attitude and understanding within the region's labor movements that a global system of production requires the global defense of labor.

January/February
1999
Volume: 
32
Number: 
4

Taking Note

Jo-Marie Burt
Angel Páez, this year’s winner of the Samuel Chavkin Prize for Integrity in Latin American Journalism, is no stranger to threats. Over the past year and a half he has been the victim of a systematic government campaign to intimidate him, and in the process, to silence Peru’s independent press.

Intro

NACLA
These are not good times for working people. As real incomes decline throughout the Americas and decent jobs become harder to find—even through the region’s much-heralded periods of prosperity—a demoralization has set in. There has been a palpable diminution of working-class solidarity, and a breakdown of belief in the efficacy of any sort of collective struggle.

Open Forum

Cathy Schneider
On November 25, the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights, the British Law Lords gave human rights activists around the world a reason to celebrate. By a margin of three to two, the Lords overturned a lower court ruling giving the Chilean Senator-for-Life Augusto Pinochet immunity from prosecution under the argument that he was head of state at the time his crimes were committed.

Updates

Kathleen Bond
The last drop of rain fell on the rural community of Juarzerinho, in Brazil’s Northeast state of Paraíba on November 16, 1997. A trip to Juarzerinho eight months later found signs of the drought everywhere.

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.
Duncan Green
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.
Fred Rosen
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.
Steve Ellner
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.
Carlos Vilas
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.
Mary Garcia Castro
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.

Reviews

NACLA
This exhaustive account of the last major U.S. Cold War adventure is destined to become a definitive source on the subject.

In Brief

InterPress Service/Weekly News Update
Guatemala City—Since his brutal murder in April 1998, Guatemalan authorities have insisted that Bishop Juan José Gerardi had been the victim of a common crime or a crime of passion. But in a report made known last week, Acisclo Valladares, a former attorney general of Guatemala who was commissioned by the Guatemalan Catholic Church to examine the government inquiry into the Bishop’s murder, concluded that he was most probably murdered by persons linked to the military and that the priest arrested for his murder has been wrongly accused.

Article

Nelson Manrique
The treaty ending the border conflict divided public opinion in both Peru and Ecuador, fanning the virulent flames of nationalism in both countries. Latin America's nation-states were born of the wars of independence against the Spanish Empire, and the borders adopted were based on the admin- istrative divisions established by the colonial regime.