Global Finance in the Americas: Wealth and Hunger Revisited

A coalition of groups has now arisen to do battle with the underdeveloped world's huge, unpayable foreign debt. Because of the key role of the debt in the process which defines both the nature and the limits of contemporary economic development, this coalition, called Jubilee 2000, has set in motion a process which calls into question the entire set of financial relationships that now define North and South, and the relations between the wealthy and the impoverished. This NACLA Report examines those relations, some of their consequences, and some of the opposition they have engendered.

July/August
1999
Volume: 
33
Number: 
1

Taking Note

Jo-Marie Burt
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a bunch of pro-terrorists? That is what President Alberto Fujimori would have his fellow Peruvians believe now that the Court has announced its unanimous decision to declare null and void a summary trial by a "faceless" military court of four Chileans accused of belonging to the rebel Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).

Intro

NACLA
Over the course of the 1980s, following Mexico's 1982 debt moratorium and the subsequent inability of many other Southern nations to service their foreign debts, U.S. policy makers and multilateral lenders—mostly based in Washington—imposed a series of market-oriented reforms and "adjustments" upon the debtor countries in the interest of making them once again "creditworthy."

Open Forum

Raul Molina Mejia
On December 29, 1996, the "Firm and Lasting Peace" Agreement was signed between the Government of Guatemala and the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). A period of four years was established for the implementation of the agreement, and the international community, which played a key role in the peace process, committed itself to fully supporting implementation.

Updates

Liisa North
The elites' first reaction to the social disorder induced by their own policies has been to spend scarce public resources beefing up police and military forces. Now," says Carmen Delgado, "there's nothing left.
Mario Murillo
This past March, three U.S. indigenous rights activists, Ingrid Washinawatok, Lahe'ena'e Gay and Terence Freitas, were kidnapped and later killed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). For Colombia's 84 Indian tribes—who have been victims of intimidation tactics and outright killings by guerrillas, state security agents and right-wing paramilitaries for the past several decades—the execution-style murders were seen as a direct attack on their communities and their centuries-long struggle for political, economic and cultural rights.

Report

Eric Fichtl
In July 1944, as the war in Europe drew to a close, delegates from 44 nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire to develop the framework for a postwar global financial order, presumably to avoid future financial crises like the Great Depression, seen by many as the cause of World War II.
Fred Rosen
Jubilee 2000, a well-funded coalition of religious and civic groups, is spearheading a world-wide campaign for the cancellation of Third World debt. "The Biblical tradition calls for a Jubilee year," the group proclaims, "when slaves are set free and debts are cancelled.
Doug Henwood
The last 20 years have been kind to the United States. It defeated its rival of 70 years and restructured a good bit of the economic and ideological world in its own image. Along with the obvious weapons of Hollywood and the Pentagon, no small part of this reassertion of power has been what has been called “the Americanization of global finance.”[1]
Duncan Green
The extraordinary rise of global finance has been the single most outstanding economic development in the last quarter of this century. The breakdown in the early 1970s of the global system of fixed exchange rates established at the Bretton Woods conference has unleashed a series of booms—foreign exchange markets in the 1970s, bond markets in the 1980s, and global equity markets in the 1990s.[1]
John D. Abell
It had been a productive morning so far. The family I was helping had picked close to 200 pounds of red, ripe coffee beans and we were relaxing around a cooking fire where the women had prepared a feast of beans, tortillas and avocado. Life seemed peaceful for the moment.
Oscar Ugarteche
In the early 1970s, following Richard Nixon's removal of the U.S. dollar from its gold and silver backing and the "shock" caused by the steep rise in oil prices, the international economic order which had been in place since the end of World War II came to an exhausted end.

Interview

Maria Luisa Mendonça
Noam Chomsky was interviewed in his office by María Luisa Mendonça on March 12, 1999.

In Brief

Patricia Verdugo
SANTIAGO—Many years ago, in the early 1980s, Lucía Pinochet telephoned me to invite me to her office for coffee. I understood that she wanted to converse in private with the political editor of Chile's principal opposition weekly, Hoy. To reject her invitation would have been imprudent: She was the daughter of the dictator.