1973-04-26

Welcome to Latin American Press Review, a weekly selection and analysis of important events and issues in Latin America as seen by leading world newspapers, with special emphasis on the Latin American press. This program is produced by the Latin American Policy Alternatives Group.

Two comments in the Latin America press seemed to sum up the general feeling on the continent in the wake of the recent organization of American States meeting in Washington DC. Mexico's President Echeverría, when asked by Rio de Janeiro's Opinião about his opinion of the organization was replied, "The OAS? Does it still exist? It is necessary to reconstruct it on different bases. It is necessary to establish a new regional organization which does not exclude anybody, including Canada and Cuba."

In Lima, a newspaper favoring the government, El Expreso, said that the Latin Americans now need a Declaration of independence equal to the one the North Americans gave to England in 1776, and concluded that the organization of American states will not survive if the United States continues to dominate it.

A more detailed view of the OAS (Organization of American States) meeting was given by the British Weekly, Latin America, which said that the general assembly of the OAS ended its meeting in Washington two weeks ago without voting on the question of Cuba's readmission, or the lifting of diplomatic and economic sanctions against the island. Although there was undoubtedly a majority in favor of ending Cuba's isolation, most delegates withdrew from the brink of an outright confrontation with the US, which continued to object to Havana's military links with Moscow, and maintained that despite certain changes, Cuba was still interfering in other countries' internal affairs. A working group was set up to find a compromised solution with both Chile and Brazil among its members representing the most extreme viewpoints on Cuba.

It was also agreed unanimously to form a commission to study the complete restructuring of the OAS, and there was a unanimous vote for ideological plurality in the hemisphere. A resolution approved by 21 votes to none, with only the United States and Honduras abstaining, called on Washington not to sell its strategic mineral reserves in a way that would harm Latin American economies.

Another resolution approved unanimously, except for the abstention of the US, called on Washington to prevent transnational companies from intervening in other countries internal affairs. This report from the weekly Latin America.

There's increasing concern in Latin America with what is considered distorted press coverage of the area by United States Media. Chile Hoy reports with obvious interest on the work of a Rutgers University sociologist analyzing US press coverage of Salvador Allende. Dr. John Pollock, whose work has also been cited by Mexico City's Excélsior, did a detailed analysis of US press reportage of the Chilean president's visit to the United States last December. In an article published in The Nation, he claimed that a mission of important information is systematic, and includes even the most basic data. For instance, the New York Times, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, Miami Herald, and Los Angeles Times all failed to mention the fact that Allende had been received triumph fully and enthusiastically in Peru and Mexico on his way to the US. In addition, Pollak singled out phrases such as, "Acrobat," "Wiley fox," and, "Skillful juggler," as prejudicing news reports. This from Chile Hoy in Santiago.

La Nación from Buenos Aires reports on the current US-Chile negotiations. If the United States insists on compensation for certain North American properties that have been nationalized, Chile will invoke a 1914 treaty, which calls for an international commission of five members to arbitrate discussion in case of stalemate. Because of disagreements as to the extent of compensation, Chile has been unable to refinance its external debt with the United States, which consists of $1,200,000,000. Vital lines of public and private credit have been cut, and Chile faces difficulties in obtaining goods from North American suppliers. This report from La Nación in Buenos Aires.

La Prensa of Lima comments about internal political struggles in Chile. The revolutionary leftist movement in Chile directed strong criticisms against the reformists, intensifying the struggle between the radical left and the government of President Allende. In a public declaration, the organization denounced a reprimand, which the president had addressed to some radical groups who were involved in the attempted takeover of some businesses. The radicals termed Allende's speech alarmist and accused him of threatening the workers. Later on radio and TV, Allende said he would go to any lengths necessary to prevent illegal action. "The rights of workers are one thing," he said, "But hasty, demagogic and spontaneous acts are another." The radicals replied that it was an objective fact that workers and peasants throughout the country had been mobilized by inflation and lack of supplies and not by extremists. This from La Prensa, the Peruvian Daily.

The pro-government press in Chile has accused the opposition of launching a campaign to discredit the armed forces, and in particular, the commander in chief and former interior minister, General Carlos Pratts. The opposition evening paper, La Segunda, alleged that Pratts had told a meeting of 800 officers that he supported the process of change being carried out by President Allende. Other opposition papers have alleged that several senior officers have been prematurely retired because of their opposition to the government's education reform bill.

Peru's La Prensa says that the Argentine guerrillas, who apparently have the technique down pat, successfully engineered another kidnapping this last week. The production manager of Kodak Argentina was released by his kidnappers after a ransom of a million and a half dollars was paid. This is the highest price yet exacted from an Argentine subsidiary for the return of one of its executives. In a press release which they agreed to make, Kodak announced that the man was unharmed. Although the recent kidnappings are aimed at raising money through ransoms, an additional reason this time seems to be to ensure that political prisoners held by the military junta will not be harmed. On May 25th, President-elect Héctor Cámpora, a peronist, is scheduled to be inaugurated. Cámpora has promised to free all political prisoners. This from La Prensa in Lima, Peru.

Opinião of São Paulo comments on the fact that prominent members of the Brazilian Congress have recently demanded more democratization of the nation's political institutions before this election of a new president, which will occur later this year. The president of the House of Deputies recently expressed these goals in an interview with Rio's Jornal de Brazil. He defended the need for greater participation on the part of the Congress on the grounds that Brazil has the necessity of presenting itself in foreign lands as a democratized nation. Other members of the Congress, even within the government's party, have echoed these sentiments. Opinião however thinks this will all come to nothing, and the congress will have the opportunity to discuss the choice of the next president only after the army has effectively made that choice.

An open declaration of war by the Brazilian church against the government seems to have been the effect of the memorial service for geology student Alexandre Lemi who was killed while in the custody of São Paulo security services. Latin America News Weekly reports that Alexandre Lemi, 22, was one of the brightest students in the geological faculty of Sao Paulo University, and came from a traditionally Catholic family. He was arrested on March 16th for being a member of the National Liberation Force. On March 17th, he was killed while in police custody, ostensibly by passing motor vehicle. The official police report issued by the security secretary of São Paulo said he was taken to a street crossing where he had a meeting with a friend at a bar, and while the security agents remained at a distance, he ran away across the road where he could not be followed because of the amount of traffic, but was run over by a truck.

Police refusal of an appeal from the boy's parents for their son's body, and of a call by the Council of the University's teaching staff for an exhumation and postmortem, is being seen in some quarters as proof that this was an official murder. But Alexandra's death, in a manner all too common in present day Brazil, would've passed without notice had it not been for the shattering effect of the memorial mass held for him and the Cathedral da Sé, presided over by the Archbishop and Bishop of Sorocaba, assisted by 24 priests. The mass was fixed for 6:30, but by four o'clock the center of São Paulo was occupied by armed police and shock troops, while the university was surrounded by military police.

Nevertheless, 3000 students managed to enter the cathedral. No doubt to their surprise, the first song in the service sheet, which had been prepared by a special commission was no hymn, but a song prohibited by the Brazilian censorship, and who's author, Geraldo Vandré, lives in exile. The liturgy of the mass included the words, "We are imprisoned in our egotism instead of catering for the great causes of our society," and one of the songs proclaimed, "We offer the end in the asking, the hard struggle between the old and the new, the dark night of the people and the dawn of the resurrection."

"If the liturgy was subversive," says Latin America, "The sermons were almost revolutionary". The Bishop of Sorocaba accused the government openly. "We are unable to give the lie to the police accusations against this young student. God knows and He will be the judge, but I find that he was barbarically liquidated." The cardinal, in the first words of his sermon, noted that even Christ after his death was returned to his family and friends. The representative of Roman power was able to do that much justice. The repercussions were immediate. A complete censorship was imposed on any reference to the mass in press, radio, and television. The government was further embarrassed by the fact that the mass was on March 30th, the day before the anniversary celebration of the revolution of 1964.

But the censorship was broken. São Paulo's channel five television station broadcast a news flash for which it has been punished under the national security law. More daring was the weekly Opinião, which has recently been increasing sales in leaps and bounds as the only publication that dares to criticize the government. Not only did it publish a brief report on the mass, as well as the security secretary's statement, but it also gave an interview with the cardinal in which he described the people of São Paulo as living in a situation of emergency in relation to wages, health, and public security.

Nemesis for Opinião was not slow in coming. The censorship has demanded that all its material must be submitted to the sensors 48 hours before going to press, effectively making publication impossible. This week's proposed edition, which it is understood, will not be appearing, had 8 of 24 pages completely censored. The censored pages contained material on wage problems, the political situation, and Brazilian investments in Bolivia. A protest has already been made by the Inter American Press Society to the Brazilian government while the Estela de São Paulo and Jornal da Tarde, two other newspapers, have announced that they will accept no government advertising nor government announcements for publication, as a protest against censorship. The government has banned live television reporting as dangerous, and all programs must in the future be prerecorded.

"But whatever happens to the press," concludes Latin America newsletter, "The real importance of the death of Alexandre Lemi is that the church has revealed a newfound and aggressive militancy. If, as it appears, the church is now on a collision course with the government, there is little doubt who will win in the end. The government may be able to suppress a handful of left-wing terrorists, but the Christian Church has for nearly 2000 years, thrived on persecution and martyrdom and always come out on top. All the signs are that Alexandre Lemi is to be presented as a martyr of the regime." This from Latin America.

Religious militancy is also appearing in the Dominican Republic. The Miami Herald reports that the country's Roman Catholic Church has denounced that there is no respect for human life in the Dominican Republic. In an Easter message before numerous government officials at Santo Domingo's Cathedral, a bishop said, "There is no respect for human life here. Human life is worth less than a cigarette in our country." The priest charged that inhumane punishments are being inflicted on inmates in Dominican jails, and that brutal assassinations occur frequently. He added that, "Hunger and misery affect most of the people in the country."

Opinião of Rio de Janeiro reports that Pablo Picasso's death received wide coverage in the Latin press. Picasso was admired in the hemisphere not only for his painting, but for his political stance against the Franco regime in Spain. A member of the French Communist Party since 1944, Picasso once summed up his views on the relationship between art and politics while answering critics of his leftist stance.

"What do they think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes if he's a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a layer in each chamber of his heart if he's a poet, or that he's simply a boxer, only muscles. On the contrary, an artist is at the same time a political being, always aware of the pains, conflagrations, or happy incidents of the world, shaping himself in their image. How could it be possible not to feel interest in other people, and because of an ivory tower of indifference, disconnect oneself from the life which they bring with such open hands? No, painting was not created to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war with which to attack the enemy and defend ourselves from him." This from Opinião.

You're listening to Latin American Press Review, a weekly selection and analysis of important events and issues in Latin America. This program is produced by the Latin American Policy Alternatives Group. Comments and suggestions about the program are welcome and may be sent to us at 2205 San Antonio Street, Austin, Texas. This program is distributed by Communications Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

For today's feature, we've invited economist David Barkin to discuss the problem of unemployment in Latin America. David's a participant in the conference on US/Mexico Economic Relations this week on the University of Texas campus, is currently teaching economics at the City University of New York, and has traveled widely in Latin America. He visited Cuba for two months in 1969 at the invitation of the Cuban government, has worked with Chilean economists off and on for the past four years, and has done extensive research and has taught economics in Mexico for about five years.

David, someone at the conference the other day stated that unemployment rate in Mexican agriculture is 46%. Could you comment on this figure, and include what efforts are being made by the Mexican government to correct this problem?

The problem of unemployment in Mexico is very serious because of the nature of development, which is leading to the development of commercial agriculture in selected parts of the country. In a few selected parts of the country. And the rest of the agricultural sector is stagnating. People are being forced out of the agricultural sector, but those who remain are finding themselves without the resources and without the government assistance which is necessary for them to become productive members of the society.

The 46% unemployment figure in Mexico is a reflection of the fact that although a lot of people remain in the agricultural economy, many of them are not producing nearly as much as they might produce were resources available for the production of goods which could satisfy the needs of the mass of the people in the population. In the urban sector, the problem is not quite as serious in absolute magnitude, but perhaps in human terms even more serious. The misery associated with urban unemployment is greater than that with rural unemployment. And the slums in the large Mexican cities are growing year after year. The unemployment rate in Mexico City and in other urban areas in the country may be as high as 30 or 40 percent, if you consider what these people could produce if they were working fully in productive occupations, satisfying the basic needs of people, which at the present time aren't being satisfied.

Now, in terms of what the Mexican government is trying to do to solve the problem, they have undertaken a large program of public works projects, and are trying to encourage additional investment both by Mexicans and foreigners. The problem with this program is that it is designed to satisfy the needs of only a small proportion of the Mexican population, perhaps only 30% of the population. 30% of the population with income levels far above those of the other 70% of the population who live at bare levels of subsistence, and many of them living at below the level of what we would consider dignified living levels. It does not seem to me, nor to many of the representatives at the conference that the present development programs of the Mexican government are going to be able to seriously attack and make inroads into the problem of unemployment in Mexico. This is further compounded of course by the high rate of population growth in Mexico, but even if population growth rates were to decline in Mexico, it's not clear that they would be able to solve the unemployment problem with their present approach.

What about the effect of US investments in Mexico on the employment problem?

US investments are particularly injurious to the Mexican people because they're creating a type of industry which is displacing people in favor of machines, for the production of whatever goods are being produced in Mexico. US investments are generally what we would call capital intensive. That is using machinery to replace people in the production of goods. The goods which are produced are the kinds of goods which we, Americans, consume, but which because we are so rich, the middle level American standard of living is so high compared to that in Mexico, the kinds of goods which are produced are only able to be bought by those people in the 30% that I cited, who have sufficient income to buy those kinds of goods. That is they have income like a middle income level person in this country might have. An average person.

As a result, American investment is only heightening the problem in Mexico, creating additional difficulties because they are creating the appearance of modernity and creating a whole gamut of goods which the whole population can see but does not have access to.

What about the Mexicanization regulations that are being discussed now in Mexico in terms of affecting foreign investment? Is that going to solve any of the problem?

The Mexicanization legislation, which is designed to put some curbs on foreign investment is designed to attack a different problem. A problem that American foreign investment is making inroads into the capital equipment, the machinery and the factories which is owned by Mexican entrepreneurs. Until recently, Americans have been going into Mexico and purchasing outright large factories in large parts of the economy owned by Mexicans, and what the new legislation is designed to do is to try to stem this tide. It is not designed to prevent foreign investment, and it is not designed to prevent the sorts of effects which I just talked about, but rather to try to give the Mexican some protection in the face of the large transnational corporations who are trying to get greater control over the Mexican economy.

David, what about unemployment in Chile under the popular Unity government? What is Salvador Allende doing to correct this problem?

Well, unemployment in Chile was a growing problem during the last part of the 1960s. The economy was stagnating and unemployment rates in the city of Santiago, which is the most highly developed part of the country, reached as high as 10 and 12%. Now, that's very serious in an industrial labor force, which was as fully integrated into the modern sector of the economy, as is the case in many of our own North American cities.

10% and 12% unemployment for the group as a whole is very serious, and the Allende government's first problem, first priority when taking over was to do something about this problem. What they did was to redistribute income in a very simple, straightforward way by directing that wages be increased while profits be frozen. This sort of measure led to an immediate reactivation of the economy and an increase in demand by workers and the lower socioeconomic groups in the population, which made it possible for the government to increase employment in firms which it was taking over because private entrepreneurs were not responding to the increase in demand by the lower classes, and in instead trying to shift their resources to production of goods for the upper classes. As a result, in 1972, employment rates had gone down to below 4%. Quite an achievement in a very short period of time.

The Cuban government claims to have created a full employment economy. David, you've visited Cuba and you've written a book about Cuba. From your experience, how has this been accomplished?

Basically, the reason—the way in which unemployment has been eliminated, in fact the employment problem has been changed from one of unemployment to one of over full employment and a shortage of labor, is by a change in the basic assumptions on by which people are asked to participate in the economy.

In an economy based on a market system, people must work, produce sufficient income for an employer in order to provide that employer with a profit. If the person could produce something for the benefit of society, but that production is not profitable for some private entrepreneur, that person is not going to be employed. In Cuba, a person who could produce for the benefit of society, even if it doesn't go to the benefit of one individual in the society, can and must be employed.

In fact, during the first years of economic reorganization in Cuba, people were absorbed into the economy through a vast educational effort in 1961, a vast medical effort, and the expansion of production in every sector of the economy. Social services and productive services were expanded so that by the late 1960s the problem in Cuba was not how to find work for people, but rather how to encourage people who previously did not consider themselves part of the workforce to join the workforce, and now old people who were previously retired are performing useful social tasks for the society, people who are in schools, children and young people are being asked to join as part of their regular school program in productive tasks, and women and disabled people are also being fully incorporated into the economy.

I'd like to go on though and explain the nature of the unemployment problem and the way in which the Cubans solve it differently than say the Mexicans. Sugar cane cutting is a very difficult task and it requires in the pre-revolutionary era, about 300 to 400,000 people during four months a year, working 12 hours a day and sometimes as much as seven days a week during four months a year to cut the sugar cane. During that period they were paid sufficient income to live on for 12 months, but only at the very, very miserable levels of subsistence, which prevailed in Cuba at that time. Most of them didn't have access to meat and milk, for example. But they were unemployed for eight months of the year.

In the post-revolutionary government era, it's impossible to conceive of people being idle for eight months a year because of the very, very serious needs of people throughout the whole economy to solve productive problems, and to increase production in agriculture and industry and in services. As a result, most of these people who were working in sugar were incorporated into other activities. Reorganization of agriculture, livestock industry, and things like that. As a result, they were not available full-time during the sugar harvest for cane cutting.

When cane cutting needs were great, the entire population was recruited for sugar cane cutting on a voluntary basis. And people worked in brigades based on workplaces, and went into voluntary areas, and people at the factories remaining at the productive jobs and in the bureaucracy were expected to do the work of other people, to cover their jobs while they were absent. As a result, a technical problem, the cutting of sugarcane is solved in present day Cuba not by allowing people to be unemployed, which is the case of our migrant farm workers and of migrant farm workers all over the hemisphere, but rather by getting brigades of voluntary workers to achieve this task in a collective way.

This I think has great lesson for us in America, because we assume that people must be employed only at a specific task, and if that task is not available, then they're going to remain unemployed, as is the case of migrant farm workers. When we cannot create sufficient jobs because of specific political policies, policies of the government, we are in a quandary. We don't know how to provide these people with sufficient income and still remain with the incentive system to encourage them to work when we need them to work at low wages. As a result, we have a technical problem which translates itself into a social problem. The social problem of poverty, and widespread un- and underemployment, with the impossibility of many groups in our population finding work at all. Especially women and some third world groups.

The technical problem could be solved in our country, but not under the assumption that people must work to provide a profit for a small group of employers. It's only if they could work by satisfying social needs that we're going to be able to attack the basic underlying problem of poverty.

We've been talking today with David Barkin, economist and teacher at City University of New York, who is a participant in the current conference on US/Mexico Economic Relations at the University of Texas campus. You have been listening to Latin American Press Review, a weekly selection and analysis of important events and issues in Latin America, as seen by leading world newspapers with special emphasis on the Latin American press. This program is produced by the Latin American Policy Alternatives Group. Comments and suggestions about the program are welcome, and may be sent to us at 2205 San Antonio Street, Austin, Texas. This program is distributed by Communication Center, University of Texas at Austin.