% FROM THE NOAM CHOMSKY ARCHIVE
% http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu:/usr/tp0x/chomsky.html
% ftp://ftp.cs.cmu.edu/user/cap/chomsky/
% Filename:    articles/chomsky.z.victors-part2
% Title:       The Victors, Part II
% Author:      Noam Chomsky
% Appeared-in: Z Magazine, January 1991
% Source:      ACTIV-L listserver file CHOMSKY VICTORS2
% Keywords:    Latin America, Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Cold War, new world order
% Synopsis:    Consequences of the Cold War in US dependencies
% See-also:    

                      THE VICTORS, PART II
                          Noam Chomsky
                    Z Magazine, January 1991


The first part of this series (_Z_, November) opened with the
conventional interpretation of the past decade: the U.S. won the
Cold War, a victory for the forces of righteousness. We then
turned to the question that would at once come to the mind of
anyone apart from the most fanatic ideologue: How are the victors
faring at this historic moment, as they celebrate their triumph?
We looked first at those who should be the most overjoyed because
of their unusual good fortune: our ``little brown brothers'' in
Central America and Panama, who have long been under the
protective wing of the leader of the crusade, becoming a foreign
policy obsession in the past decade. The conditions of their
existence help us understand why the obvious questions about the
Grand Victory of democracy and free market capitalism are so
scrupulously avoided in polite and cultivated circles. Needless
to say, the beneficiaries of our solicitude have some thoughts of
their own about these matters. We will turn in the final section
to their interpretation of the triumph of capitalism and freedom,
and the nobility of their protector---thoughts that do not
penetrate the well-disciplined commissar culture at home.

Let us now extend the survey to other regions where the virtuous
leaders of the crusade for freedom and justice have long held
sway and have thus been able to realize their noble objectives
with no more than marginal interference from Communists and other
evil forces, beginning with the rest of Latin America.


The Fruits Of Victory: Latin America

A World Bank study in 1982 estimated that ``40 percent of
households in Latin America live in poverty, meaning that they
cannot purchase the minimum basket of goods required for the
satisfaction of their basic needs, and . . . 20 percent of all
households live in destitution, meaning that they lack the means
of buying even the food that would provide them with a minimally
adequate diet.'' The situation became far worse through the
victorious 1980s, largely because of the huge export of capital
to the West. From 1982 to 1987 this amounted to about $250
billion, 25 times the total value of the Alliance for Progress
and 15 times the Marshall Plan. The Bank for International
Settlements in Switzerland estimates that between 1978 and 1987,
some $170 billion in flight capital left Latin America, not
including money hidden by falsified trade transactions. The New
York Times cites another estimate that anonymous capital flows,
including drug money and flight capital, total $600 billion to
$800 billion.

This huge hemorrhage is part of a complicated system whereby
Western banks and Latin American elites enrich themselves at the
expense of the general population of Latin America, which is
saddled with the ``debt crisis'' that results from these
manipulations, and of taxpayers in the Western countries who are
ultimately called upon to foot part of the bill. These are among
the triumphs of free market capitalism that we now
celebrate---apart from a few perpetual complainers who are ``as
welcome as gnats at a nudist party,'' a New York Times reviewer
comments, referring to Murray Bookchin.

Speaking in Washington in preparation for the 1989 General
Assembly of the OAS, which he headed, Brazilian President Soares
described the 1980s as a ``lost decade'' for Latin America, with
falling personal income and general economic stagnation or
decline. In 1988 average income had fallen to the level of 1978.
There was a further decline in 1989, and the export of capital
continued in a flood, the UN Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean reported.

According to World Bank figures, average per capita income in
Argentina fell from $1,990 in 1980 to $1,630 in 1988. Mexico's
GNP declined for seven straight years. Real wages in Venezuela
has fallen by a third since 1981, to the 1964 level. Argentina
allotted 20 percent of its budget to education in 1972, 6 percent
in 1986. David Felix, a leading specialist on Latin American
economics, writes that per capita output and real investment per
worker declined sharply in the 1980s, the latter falling to below
1970 levels in most of the heavily indebted countries, where
urban real wages are in many cases 20 percent to 40 percent below
1980 levels, even below 1970 levels.  The brain drain quickened
and physical and human capital per head shrank because of the
decline of public and private investment and collapse of
infrastructure. Much of the sharp deterioration of the 1980s,
Felix and others conclude, can be traced to the free-market
restructuring imposed by the industrial powers.

Mexicans continue to flee to the United States for survival, and
macabre stories abound, some hard to believe but important for
what they indicate about the prevailing mood. Reporting the
annual meeting of the Border Commission on Human Rights in
Mexico, Mexico's leading daily (Excelsior) alleges that actions
of the U.S. Border Patrol cause the drowning of persons seeking
to cross the river to the United States. A representative of the
regional Human Rights Committee told the session that 1,000
people had disappeared without a trace after leaving their homes
to enter the U.S. illegally. She ``also added that the
disappearance or theft of women for the extraction of organs for
use in transplants in the U.S. is common.'' Others reported
torture, high rates of cancer from chemicals used in the
maquiladora industries (mainly subsidiaries of transnationals
supplying U.S. factories), secret prisons, kidnapping, and other
horror stories. The journal also reports a study by environmental
groups, presented to President Salinas, claiming that 100,000
children die every year as a result of pollution in the Mexico
City area, along with millions suffering from pollution-induced
disease, which has reduced life expectancy by an estimated 10
years. The ``main culprit'' is the emissions of lead and sulfur
from operations of the national petrochemical company Pemex,
which is free from the controls imposed elsewhere---one of the
advantages of Third World production that is not lost on
investors.

The Mexican Secretariat of Urban Development and the Environment
described the situation as ``truly catastrophic,'' Excelsior
reports further, estimating that less than 10 percent of Mexican
territory is able to support ``minimally productive agriculture''
because of environmental degradation, while water resources are
hazardously low.  Many areas are turning into ``a real museum of
horrors'' from pollution because of the blind pursuit of profits
on the part of national and international private capital. The
Secretariat estimates further that more than 90 percent of
industry in the Valley of Mexico, where there are more than
30,000 plants, violate global standards, and in the chemical
industry, more than half the labor force suffers irreversible
damage to the respiratory system.

Maude Barlow, chairperson of a Canadian study group, reports the
results of their inquiry into maquiladoras ``built by Fortune 500
to take advantage of a desperate people,'' for profits hard to
match elsewhere. They found factories full of teenage girls, some
14-years-old, ``working at eye-damaging, numbingly repetitive
work'' for wages ``well below what is required for even a minimum
standard of living.'' Corporations commonly send the most
dangerous jobs here because standards on chemicals are ``lax or
non-existent.'' ``In one plant,'' she writes, ``we all
experienced headaches and nausea from spending an hour on the
assembly line'' and ``we saw young girls working beside open vats
of toxic waste, with no protective face covering.''  Unions are
barred, and there is an ample reserve army of desperate people
ready to take the place of any who ``are not happy, or fall
behind in quotas, or become ill or pregnant.'' The delegation
``took pictures of a lagoon of black, bubbling toxic waste dumped
by plants in an industrial park,'' following it to ``where it met
untreated raw sewage and turned into a small river running past
squatters' camps (where children covered in sores drank Pepsi
Cola from baby bottles) to empty into the Tijuana River.''

It is more fashionable to bemoan the environmental and human
catastrophes of Eastern Europe, the results of an evil system now
happily overcome in a victory for our humane values.

Colombia is another success story of capitalist democracy, flawed
only by the drug cartels---and for some of those gnats who still
fail to appreciate the wonders of our system, by such marginal
problems as the murder of ``subversives''---such as 1,000 members
of the leading opposition party and 3 of its presidential
candidates---by death squads in league with the security forces.

There is also a background, though one would be hard put to find
a discussion of it in recent commentary on U.S. efforts to aid
the Colombian military in the ``war against drugs.'' The topic is
addressed in a discussion of human rights in Colombia by Alfredo
Vasquez Carrizosa, president of the Colombian Permanent Committee
for Human Rights. ``Behind the facade of a constitutional
regime,'' he observes, ``we have a militarized society under the
state of siege provided'' by the 1886 Constitution. The
Constitution grants a wide range of rights, but they have no
relation to reality. ``In this context poverty and insufficient
land reform have made Colombia one of the most tragic countries
of Latin America.'' Land reform, which ``has practically been a
myth,'' was legislated in 1961, but ``has yet to be implemented,
as it is opposed by landowners, who have had the power to stop
it''---again, no defect of `'democracy,'' by Western standards.
The result of the prevailing misery has been violence, including
_la Violencia_ of the 1940s and 1950s, which took hundreds of
thousands of lives. ``This violence has been caused not by any
mass indoctrination, but by the dual structure of a prosperous
minority and an impoverished, excluded majority, with great
differences in political participation,'' the familiar story.

The story has another familiar thread. ``But in addition to
internal factors,'' Vasquez Carrizosa continues, ``violence has
been exacerbated by external factors. In the 1960s the United
States, during the Kennedy administration, took great pains to
transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades,
accepting the new strategy of the death squads.'' These Kennedy
initiatives ``ushered in what is known in Latin America as the
National Security Doctrine, . . . not defense against an external
enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters
of the game . . . [with] the right to combat the internal enemy,
as set forth in the Brazilian doctrine, the Argentine doctrine,
the Uruguayan doctrine, and the Colombian doctrine: it is the
right to fight and to exterminate social workers, trade
unionists, men and women who are not supportive of the
establishment, and who are assumed to be communist extremists.
And this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such
as myself.''

A study by Evan Vallianatos of the U.S. government Office of
Technology Assessment amplifies the dimensions of the victory of
capitalist democracy here. ``Colombia's twentieth century history
is above all stained in the blood of the peasant poor,'' he
writes, reviewing the gruesome record of atrocities and massacre
to keep the mass of the population in its place. The U.S. Aid
program, the Ford Foundation, and others have sought to deal with
the plight of the rural population ``by refining the largely
discredited trickle-down technology and knowledge transfer
process,'' investing in the elite and trusting in ``competition,
private property, and the mechanism of the free market''---a
system in which ``the big fish eats the small one,'' as one poor
farmer observes. These policies have made the dreadful conditions
still worse, creating ``the most gross inequalities that the
beast in man has made possible.'' It is not only the rural poor
who have suffered beyond endurance. To illustrate the kind of
development fostered by the multinational corporations and the
technocrats, Vallianatos offers the example of the small
industrial city of Yumbo, ``rapidly becoming unfit for human
habitation'' because of uncontrolled pollution, decay, and
``corrosive slums'' in which ``the town's spent humanity has all
but given up.''

Another victory for our side.

Brazil is another country with rich resources and potential, long
subject to European influence, then U.S. intervention, primarily
since the Kennedy years. We cannot, however, simply speak of
``Brazil.''  There are two very different Brazils. In a major
scholarly study of the Brazilian economy, Peter Evans writes that
``the fundamental conflict in Brazil is between the 1, or perhaps
5, percent of the population that comprises the elite and the 80
percent that has been left out of the `Brazilian model' of
development.'' The Brazilian journal _Veja_ reports on these two
Brazils, the first modern and westernized, the second sunk in the
deepest misery. Seventy percent of the population consumes fewer
calories than Iranians, Mexicans, or Paraguayans. Over half the
population have family incomes below the minimum wage. For 40
percent of the population, the median annual salary is $287,
while inflation skyrockets and necessities are beyond reach. A
World Bank report on the Brazilian educational system compares it
unfavorably to Ethiopia and Pakistan, with a dropout rate of 80
percent in primary school, growing illiteracy, and falling
budgets. The Ministry of Education reports that the government
spends over a third of the education budget on school meals,
because most of the students will either eat at school or not at
all.

The journal South, which describes itself as ``The Business
Magazine of the Developing World,'' reports on Brazil under the
heading ``The Underside of Paradise.'' A country with enormous
wealth, no security concerns, a relatively homogeneous
population, and a favorable climate, Brazil nevertheless has
problems: ``The problem is that this cornucopia is inhabited by a
population enduring social conditions among the worst in the
world. Two-thirds do not get enough to eat.  Brazil has a higher
infant mortality rate than Sri Lanka, a higher illiteracy rate
than Paraguay, and worse social indicators than many far poorer
African countries. Fewer children finish first-grade school than
in Ethiopia, fewer are vaccinated than in Tanzania and Botswana.
Thirty-two percent of the population lives below the poverty
line. Seven million abandoned children beg, steal and sniff glue
on the streets. For scores of millions, home is a shack in a
slum, a room in the inner city, or increasingly, a patch of
ground under a bridge.''

The share of the poorer classes in the national income is
``steadily falling, giving Brazil probably the highest
concentration of income in the world.'' It has no progressive
income tax or capital gains tax, but it does have galloping
inflation and a huge foreign debt, while participating in a
``Marshall Plan in reverse,'' in the words of former President
Jose Samey, referring to debt payments.

For three-quarters of the population of this cornucopia, the
conditions of Eastern Europe are dreams beyond reach, another
triumph of the Free World.

A UN ``Report on Human Development'' ranks Brazil, with the
world's eighth-largest economy, in 80th place in general welfare
(as measured by education, health, and hygiene), near Albania,
Paraguay, and Thailand. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) announced on October 18 that more than 40 percent of the
population (almost 53 million people) are hungry. The Brazilian
Health Ministry estimates that 840,000 children aged 1--4 and
420,000 newborns will die of hunger this year.

Here too it is widely alleged that babies are sacrificed for
organ banks, a belief that can hardly be true but that reveals
much about the conditions under which it can take root. The
Honduran press reported that Brazilian babies had been rescued
from a gang that ``intended to sacrifice them to organ banks in
the United States, according to a charge in the courts.''
Brazil's Justice Ministry ordered federal police to investigate
allegations that adopted children are being used for organ
transplants in Europe, a practice ``known to exist in Mexico and
Thailand,'' the London Guardian reports, adding that
``handicapped children are said to be preferred for transplant
operations'' and reviewing the process by which children in
Brazil are kidnapped, ``disappeared,'' or given up by
impoverished mothers, then adopted or used for transplants.

It would only be fair to add that the authorities are concerned
with the mounting problem of homeless and starving children and
are trying to reduce their numbers. Amnesty International reports
that death squads, often run by the police, are killing street
children at a rate of about one a day, while ``many more
children, forced onto the streets to support their families, are
being beaten and tortured by the police'' (Reuters, citing AI).
``Poor children in Brazil are treated with contempt by the
authorities, risking their lives simply by being on the
streets,'' AI alleges. Most of the torture takes place under
police custody or in state institutions. There are few complaints
by victims or witnesses because of fear of the police, and the
few cases that are investigated judicially result in light
sentences.

Recall that these are the conditions that hold on the 25th
anniversary of ``the single most decisive victory of freedom in
the mid-twentieth century'' (Kennedy Ambassador Lincoln Gordon),
that is, the overthrow of parliamentary democracy by Brazilian
generals backed by the United States, which then praised the
``economic miracle'' produced by the neo-Nazi national security
state they established. In the months before the generals' coup,
Washington assured its traditional military allies of its support
and provided them with aid, because the military was essential to
``the strategy for restraining left-wing excesses'' of the
elected Goulart government, Gordon cabled the State Department.
The U.S. actively supported the coup, preparing to intervene
directly if its help was needed for what Gordon described as the
``democratic rebellion'' of the generals. This ``de facto
ouster'' of the elected president was ``a great victory for the
free world,'' Gordon reported with joy, adding that it should
``create a greatly improved climate for private investment.''
U.S. labor leaders also demanded their proper share of the credit
for the overthrow of the parliamentary regime, as the new
government placed in power by the generals proceeded to smash the
labor movement and subordinate poor and working people to the
overriding needs of business interests, primarily foreign.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk justified U.S. recognition for the
obviously illegal regime on the grounds that ``the succession
there occurred as foreseen by the [Brazilian] Constitution,''
which had just been blatantly violated. The U.S. proceeded to
provide ample aid as torture and repression mounted, the relics
of constitutional Government faded away, and the climate for
investors improved under the rule of what Washington hailed as
the ``democratic forces.''

These events in Latin America's most powerful state initiated a
domino effect throughout the continent, leading to an
unprecedented plague of repression under the National Security
doctrines crafted by the military and political leaders of the
hemisphere and their U.S.  advisers.

The circumstances of the poor in Brazil continue to regress as
austerity measures are imposed on the standard International
Monetary Fund formula in an effort to deal somehow with this
catastrophe of capitalism. The austerity measures initiated by
President Collor de Mello were initially described as
``populist,'' harmful mostly to the wealthy. Predictably, reality
took a different course. Ken Silverstein reports that half a year
after the measures were inaugurated, ``the rich are reassured.''
The IMF measures primarily harmed the poor, while wealthy
individuals and large companies were able to find ways to enrich
themselves by exploiting measures that in theory were devised to
impose the main burden on them. A study by the J. Walter Thompson
agency concluded that ``Collor's policies are not a threat to the
wealthy. . . . The rich are now leading absolutely normal lives''
(agency vice-president Celia Chiavolle). Businessmen, bankers,
and the U.S.  Chamber of Commerce express their pleasure in the
course of policy, while ``the working class has been pushed to
the wall,'' Silverstein adds, with hundreds of thousands fired
and purchasing power reduced to a historic low, well below
minimal needs for about half the population.

The situation is similar in Argentina, where the Christian
Democratic Party called on its members to resign from the cabinet
in March ``in order not to validate, by their presence in the
government, the anti-popular [economic] measures of the regime.''
In a further protest over these measures, the Party expelled the
current Minister of the Economy. Experts say that the
socioeconomic situation has become ``unbearable.''

The terrible fate of Argentina is addressed in a report in the
Washington Post by Eugene Robinson. One of the ten richest
countries in the world at the turn of the century, with rich
resources and great advantages, Argentina is becoming a Third
World country, Robinson observes. About one-third of its 31
million inhabitants live below the poverty line. Some 18,000
children die each year before their first birthday, most from
malnutrition and preventable disease The capital, once considered
``the most elegant and European city this side of the Atlantic,''
is ``ringed by a widening belt of shantytowns, called _villas
miserias_, or `miseryvilles,' where the homes are cobbled-
together huts and the sewers are open ditches.'' Here too the
IMF-style reforms ``have made life even more precarious for the
poor''

Robinson's article is paired with another entitled ``A Glimpse
Into the Lower Depths,'' devoted to a mining town in the Soviet
Union Subtitled ``A mining town on the steppes reveals `the whole
sick system','' the article stresses the comparison to capitalist
success. The article on Argentina, however, says nothing about
any ``sick system.'' The only hint of a reason for the
catastrophe in Argentina, or the general ``economic malaise'' in
Latin America, is in a statement by a planning minister that ``we
destroyed ourselves'' by ``economic mismanagement.''  Again the
usual pattern: their crimes reveal their evil nature, ours are
the result of personal failings and the poor human material with
which we are forced to work in the Third World.

David Felix concludes that Argentina's decline results from
``political factors such as prolonged class warfare and a lack of
national commitment on the part of Argentina's elite,'' which
took advantage of the free-market policies of the murderous
military dictatorship that were much admired here. These led to
massive redistribution of income towards the wealthy and a sharp
fall of per capita income, along with a huge increase in debt as
a result of capital flight, tax evasion, and consumption by the
rich beneficiaries of the ``sick system''--- Reaganomics, in
essence.

In oil-rich Venezuela, over 40 percent live in extreme poverty
according to official figures, and the food situation is
considered ``hyper-critical,'' the Chamber of Food Industries
reported in 1989.  Malnutrition is so common that it is often not
noted in medical histories, according to hospital officials, who
warn that ``the future is horrible.'' Prostitution has also
increased, reaching the level of about 170,000 women or more,
according to the Ministry of Health. The Ministry also reports an
innovation, beyond the classic prostitution of women of low
in-come. Many ``executive secretaries and housewives and college
students accompany tourists and executives during a weekend,
earning at times up to [about $150] per contact.''  Child
prostitution is also increasing and is now ``extremely
widespread,'' along with child abuse.

Brutal exploitation of women is a standard feature of the
``economic miracles'' in the realms of capitalist democracy. The
huge flow of women from impoverished rural areas in Thailand to
service the prostitution industry---one of the success stories of
the economic takeoff sparked by the Indochina wars---is one of
the many scandals that escape notice in the admiration for the
Free World triumph. The savage conditions of work for young women
largely from the rural areas are notorious; >young< women,
because few others are capable of enduring the conditions of
labor, or survive to continue with it.

Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship is another famous success
story.  Under the heading ``Tyrant's `Success' Leaves 7 of 12
Million Chileans Poor,'' Antonio Garza Morales reports in
Excelsior that ``the social cost which has been paid by the
Chilean people is the highest in Latin America,'' with the number
of poor rising from 1 million after Allende to 7 million today,
while the population remained stable at 12 million. Christian
Democratic Party leader Senator Anselmo Sule, returned from
exile, says that economic growth that benefits 10 percent of the
population has been achieved (Pinochet's official institutions
agree), but development has not. Unless the economic disaster for
the majority is remedied, ``we are finished,'' he adds.
According to David Felix, ``Chile, hit especially hard in the
1982--84 period, is now growing faster than during the preceding
decade of the Chicago Boys,'' enthralled by the free market
ideology that is, indeed, highly beneficial for some: the
wealthy, crucially including foreign investors. Chile's recovery,
Felix argues, can be traced to ``a combination of severe wage
repression by the Pinochet regime, an astutely managed bailout of
the bankrupt private sector by the economic team that replaced
the discredited Chicago Boys, and access to unusually generous
lending by the international financial institutions,'' much
impressed by the favorable climate for business operations.

Environmental degradation is also a severe problem in Chile. The
Chilean journal Apsi devoted a recent issue to the environmental
crisis accelerated by the ``radical neoliberalism'' of the period
following the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the parliamentary
democracy. Recent studies show that about half the country is
becoming a desert, a problem that ``seems much farther away than
the daily poisoning of those who live in Santiago,'' the capital
city, which competes with Sao Paolo (Brazil) and Mexico City for
the pollution prize for the hemisphere (for the world, the
journal alleges). ``The liquid that emerges from the millions of
faucets in the homes and alleys of Santiago have levels of
copper, iron, magnesium and lead which exceed by many times the
maximum tolerable norms.'' The land that ``supplies the fruits
and vegetables of the Metropolitan Region are irrigated with
waters that exceed by 1,000 times the maximum quantity of
coliforms acceptable,'' which is why Santiago ``has levels of
hepatitis, typhoid, and parasites which are not seen in any other
part of the continent'' (one of every three children has
parasites in the capital). Economists and environmentalists
attribute the problem to the ``development model,'' crucially,
its ``transnational style,'' ``in which the most important
decisions tend to be adopted outside the ambit of the countries
themselves,'' consistent with the assigned ``function'' of the
Third World: to serve the needs of the industrial West.

The fashion at home, as noted, is to attribute the problems of
Eastern Europe to the ``sick system'' (quite accurately), while
ignoring the catastrophes of capitalism or, on the rare occasions
when some problem is noticed, attributing it to any cause other
than the system that consistently brings it about. Latin American
economists who have attributed the problems of the region to the
``development model'' are generally ignored, but some of them
have been useful for ideological warfare and therefore have
attained respectability in the U.S.  political culture. One
example is Francisco Mayorga, a Yale Ph.D. in economics, who
became one of the most respected commentators on the economic
affairs of Nicaragua in the 1980s because he could be quoted on
the economic debacle caused by the Sandinistas. He remained a
U.S.  favorite as he became the economic Czar after the victory
for the U.S.  candidate in the February 1990 election, though he
disappeared from view when he was removed after the failure of
his highly-touted recovery policies (which failed, in large part,
because of U.S.  foot-dragging, the UNO government being nowhere
near harsh and brutal enough for Washington's tastes).

But Mayorga was never quoted on what he actually wrote about the
Nicaraguan economy, which is not without interest. His 1986 Yale
doctoral dissertation is a study of the consequences for
Nicaragua of the development model of the U.S.-backed Somoza
regime, and of the likely consequences of alternative policy
choices for the 1980s. He concludes that ``by 1978 the economy
was on the verge of collapse'' because of the ``exhaustion of the
agroindustrial model'' and the ``monetarist paradigm'' that the
U.S. favored. This model had led to huge debt and insolvency, and
``the drastic downturn of the terms of trade that was around the
corner was clearly going to deal a crucial blow to the
agroindustrial model developed in the previous three decades,''
leading ``inexorably'' to an ``economic slump in the 1980s.''
The immense costs of the U.S.-backed Somoza repression of 1978--9
and the contra war made the ``inexorable'' even more destructive.
Mayorga estimates capital flight from 1977 to 1979 at $500
million, and calculates the ``direct economic burden'' of war
from 1978 to 1984 at more than $3.3 billion. That figure, he
points out, is one and a half times the ``record GDP level of the
country in 1977,'' a year of ``exceptional affluence'' because of
the destruction of the Brazilian coffee crop, hence regularly
used by U.S. propagandists (including some who masquerade as
scholars) as a base line to prove Sandinista failures. The course
of the economy from 1980, Mayorga concludes, was the result of
the collapse of the agroindustrial export model, the severe
downturn in the terms of trade, and the unbearable burden of the
1978--9 war and then the contra war (his study ends before the
U.S.  embargo exacerbated the crisis further). Sandinista
policies, he concludes, were ineffective in dealing with the
``inexorable'' collapse: they ``had a favorable impact on output
and a negative effect on rural wages and farming profits,''
favoring industrial profits and redistributing income ``from the
rural to the urban sector.'' Had there been ``no war and no
change in economic regime,'' his studies show, ``the Nicaraguan
economy would have entered a sharp slump.''

These conclusions being useless or worse, Mayorga's actual work
on the Nicaraguan economy passes into the same oblivion as all
other inquiries into the catastrophes of capitalism. The example
is noteworthy because of Mayorga's prominence, at the very same
time, insofar as he could serve a propaganda function for the
media.


The Fruits Of Victory: The Caribbean

Brazil and Chile are not the only countries to have basked in
praise for their achievements after U.S. intervention set them on
the right course. Another is the Dominican Republic. After the
latest U.S.  invasion under Lyndon Johnson in 1965, and a dose of
death squads and torture, democratic forms were established, and
U.S. commentators have expressed much pride in the peaceful
transfer of power---or better, governmental authority, power
lying elsewhere. The economy is stagnant and near bankrupt,
public services function only intermittently, poverty is endemic,
malnutrition is increasing, and the standard of living of the
poor continues its downward slide. In the capital city,
electricity supply is down to four hours a day; water is
available for only an hour a day in many areas. Unemployment is
rising, the foreign debt has reached $4 billion, the 1989 trade
deficit was $1 billion, up from $700 million the year before.
Estimates of the number who have fled illegally to the U.S. range
up to a million. Without the remittances of Dominicans working in
Puerto Rico and on the U.S.  mainland---illegally for the most
part---``the country could not survive,'' the London Economics
reports.

U.S. investors, assisted by Woodrow Wilson's invasion and its
aftermath, later Johnson's, had long controlled most of the
economy.  Now foreign investment in 17 free trade zones is
attracted by 15-year tax holidays and average wages of 65 cents
an hour. Some ``remain upbeat about the Dominican Republic's
situation,'' the Business Magazine of the Developing World
(South) reports, citing U.S.  ambassador Paul Taylor, who
described the new free trade zones as an economic miracle in a
talk to the chamber of commerce. There are some objective grounds
for Taylor's cheerful view of the prospects, South observes:
``Optimists point to the political and labour harmony in the
Dominican Republic, the substantial pool of cheap workers and the
transport, banking and communications services as continuing
strong incentives to investors. Indeed, as a Dominican factory
manager notes: `Anyone who gets involved in unions here knows
that they'll lose their job and won't work in the free trade zone
any more.' ''

As in Brazil and elsewhere, the American Institute for Free Labor
Development (AIFLD), the AFL-CIO foreign affairs arm supported by
the government and major corporations, ``has been instrumental in
discouraging hostile [sic] union activity in order to help U.S.
companies maximise their profits,'' South reports. With friends
like these, Dominican workers have little to fear.

A more recent beneficiary of U.S. invasion, Panama, also has its
share of optimists, as discussed in the first part of this
series, notably the tiny white minority now restored to power and
the U.S.  businesspeople who have revived Panama City's
night-life. As elsewhere in Latin America, the plight of the
unimportant people is deplored by sections of the Church who
persist in their old-fashioned ``preferential option for the
poor,'' not understanding the merits of the promising new
``trickle down'' techniques of raising them from their misery.

Elsewhere in the Caribbean basin, we find much the same picture,
including Grenada, also liberated by U.S. benevolence, then
restored to its proper status (see my article in Z, March 1990).
The U.S.  pursued a different path to ensure virtuous behavior in
the case of Jamaica. Upstarts led by the social democrat Michael
Manley and his People's National Party (PNP) sought to explore
the forbidden path of independent development and social reform
in the 1970s, eliciting the usual hostility from the United
States and sufficient pressures to achieve an electoral victory
for U.S. favorite Edward Seaga, who pledged to put an end to such
nonsense. Seaga's pursuit of proper free market principles was
lauded by the Reagan administration, which announced grandly that
it would use this opportunity to create a showcase for democracy
and capitalism in the Caribbean. Massive aid flowed. USAID spent
more on Jamaica than on any other Caribbean program. The World
Bank also joined in to oversee and expedite this estimable
project. Seaga followed all the rules, introducing austerity
measures, establishing Free Trade Zones where non-union labor,
mostly women, work in sweatshops for miserable wages in
foreign-run plants subsidized by the Jamaican government, and
generally keeping to the IMF prescriptions.

There was some economic growth, ``mainly as a result of laundered
`ganja' dollars from the marijuana trade, increased tourism
earnings, lower fuel import costs, and higher prices for bauxite
and alumina,'' the North American Congress on Latin America
(NACLA) reports. The rest was the usual catastrophe of
capitalism, including one of the highest per capita foreign debts
in the world, collapse of infrastructure, and general
impoverishment. According to USAID, by March 1988, along with its
``crippling debt burden,'' Jamaica was a country where economic
output was ``far below the production level of 1972,''
``distribution of wealth and income is highly unequal,''
``shortages of key medical and technical personnel plague the
health system,'' ``physical decay and social violence deter
investment,'' and there are ``severe deficits in infrastructure
and housing.'' The assessment was made six months before
hurricane Gilbert dealt a further blow.

At this point, Michael Manley, now properly tamed, was granted
the right to return to power to administer the ruins, all hope
for constructive change having been lost. Manley ``is making all
the right noises'' to reassure the Bank and foreign investors,
Roger Robinson, World Bank senior economist for Jamaica, said in
a June 1988 pre-election interview. He explained further that
``Five years ago, people were still thinking about `meeting local
needs,' but not any more. Now the lawyers and others with access
to resources are interested in external export investment. Once
you have that ingrained in a population, you can't go back
easily, even if the PNP and Michael Manley come in again. Now
there's an understanding among individuals who save, invest, and
develop their careers that capital will start leaving again if
the PNP, or even [Seaga's] JLP, intervenes too much.''

Returned to office, Manley recognized the handwriting on the
wall, outdoing Seaga as an enthusiast for free market capitalism.
``The old gospel that government should be operated in the
interests of the poor is being modified, even if not expressly
rejected, by the dawning realization that the only way to help
the poor is to operate the government in the interest of the
productive!'' the journal of the Private Sector of Jamaica
exulted---here the term ``productive'' does not refer to the
people who produce, but to those who manage, control investment,
and reap profits. The public sector is ``on the verge of
collapse,'' the Private Sector report continues, with schools,
health care and other services rapidly declining. But with the
``nonsensical rhetoric of the recent past'' abandoned, and
privatization of everything in sight on the way, there is
hope---for ``the productive,'' in the special intended sense.

Manley has won new respect from the important people now that he
has learned to play the role of ``violin president,'' in Latin
American terminology: ``put up by the left but played by the
right.'' The conditions of capital flight and foreign
pressures---state, private, and international economic
institutions---have regularly sufficed to bar any other course.


The Fruits Of Victory: Asia

Turning to Asia, a serious inquiry into the victory of freedom,
capitalism, and democracy will naturally begin with the
Philippines, which has benefited from U.S. solicitude for close
to a century. The desperate state of Filipinos is reviewed in the
Far Eastern Economic Review, firmly dedicated to economic
liberalism and the priorities of the business community, under
the heading ``Power to the plutocrats.''  Its reports conclude
that ``Much of the country's problems now . . . seem to be rooted
in the fact that the country has had in its entire history no
form of social revolution.'' The consequences of this failure
include ``the jinxed land reform programme,'' a failure that
``profoundly affects the prognosis for the incidence of poverty''
among the 67 percent of poor Filipino families living in rural
areas, condemning them to permanent misery, huge foreign debt,
``massive capital flight,'' an increase in severe malnutrition
among pre-school children since the Aquino Government took power,
widespread underemployment, and survival for many on incomes far
below Government-defined poverty thresholds, ``the growth of a
virtual society of beggars and criminals,'' and the rest of the
familiar story.  Government and academic experts expect things to
get considerably worse. For the ``rapidly expanding
disadvantaged,'' the only way out is to seek work abroad: ``legal
and illegal workers from the Philippines now comprise the
greatest annual labour exodus in Asia.'' With social programs
abandoned, the only hope is if ``the big-business elite, in a
situation of little government interference, foregoes the
Philippine elite traditional proclivity towards conspicuous
consumption, and instead use profits both for their employees'
welfare and to accumulate capital for industrial development.''

Their failure to do so can perhaps be explained by the fact that
the United States has had so little time to exercise its
tutelage; only 90 years, after all. That its ministrations might
have something to do with what we find is a possibility not to be
addressed.  In the real world, these desperate conditions can be
traced in no small measure to the U.S. invasion at the turn of
the century with its vast slaughter and destruction, the long
colonial occupation, and the subsequent policies including the
postwar counterinsurgency campaign and support for the Marcos
dictatorship as long as it was viable. But the Philippines did
gain the (intermittent) gift of democracy. In the same business
journal, a columnist for the Manila Daily Globe, Conrado de
Quiros, reflects on this matter under the heading ``The wisdom of
democracy.'' He compares the disaster of the Philippines to the
economic success story of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, whose
harsh tyranny is another of those famous triumphs of democracy
and capitalism. De Quiros quotes the Singapore Minister of Trade
and Industry, Lee's son, who condemns the U.S. model imposed on
the Philippines for many flaws, the ``worst crime'' being that it
granted the Filipinos a free press; in his own words, ``An
American-style free-wheeling press purveyed junk in the
marketplace of ideas, which led to confusion and bewilderment,
not to enlightenment and truth.''  With a better appreciation of
the merits of fascism, his Singapore government is too wise to
fall into this error.

The Americans did introduce a form of democracy, de Quiros
continues.  However, it ``was not designed to make Filipinos free
but to make them comfortable with their new chains.'' It may have
given the Filipinos more newspapers, but ``it has given them less
money with which to buy them. It has made the rich richer,'' with
``one of the world's worst cases of inequity in the distribution
of wealth,'' according to the World Bank. Democracy ``was an
instrument of colonisation,'' and was not intended to have
substantive content: ``For most Filipinos, American-style
democracy meant little more than elections every few years.
Beyond this, the colonial authorities made sure that only the
candidates who represented colonial interests first and last won.
This practice did not die with colonialism. The ensuing political
order, which persisted long after independence, was one where a
handful of families effectively and ruthlessly ruled a society
riven by inequality. It was democratic in form, borrowing as many
American practices as it could, but autocratic in practice.

That these were indeed the policy goals is a rational conclusion
in the light of historical practice and the documentary record.
We may then describe the Philippines as another success story of
democracy and capitalism, and number its people too among the
victors in the Cold War.

Under Philippine democracy, most of the population is not
represented.  The politicians are lawyers or wealthy businessmen
or landowners. As the political structure bequeathed to the
Philippines by the American occupation was reconstituted after
the overthrow of the U.S.-backed dictator by ``people power,''
Gary Hawes writes in the scholarly journal Pacific Affairs, ``it
is only those with money and muscle who can be elected.''
Candidates are mainly ``former elected officials, relatives of
powerful political families and/or members of the economic
elite,'' unrepresentative of the rural majority or even ``the
citizens who had demonstrated to bring down Marcos and who had
risked their lives to protect their ballots for Corazon Aquino.''
There was a party (PnB) based on the popular organizations that
arose against the dictatorship, with broad support from the
peasantry, the labor force, and large reformist sections of the
middle class, but it was to have no political role. In the
elections, PnB was outspent by the traditional conservative
parties by a ratio of up to 20 to 1. Its supporters were
subjected to intimidation and threats of loss of jobs, housing,
and city licenses. The military presence also served to inhibit
PnB campaigning. Interviews with poor farmers and workers
revealed a preference for PnB candidates, but a recognition that
since the military and the rural elite opposed them, ``the next
best choice was to take the money or the rewards and vote for the
candidates endorsed by the Aquino government.

The playing field having been properly levelled, our celebrated
``yearning for democracy'' is satisfied.

Under the reconstituted elite democracy, Hawes continues, ``the
voices of the rural dwellers''---almost two-thirds of the
population---``have seldom been heard,'' and the same is true of
the urban poor. The cure for agitation in the countryside is
militarization and the rise of vigilantes, leading to a record of
human rights violations ``as bad as, if not worse than, during
the time of Marcos,'' a 1988 human rights mission reported, with
torture, summary executions, and forced evacuations. There is
economic growth, but its fruits ``have seldom trickled down to
the most needy.'' Peasants continue to starve while paying 70
percent of their crop to the landlord. Agrarian reform is barely
a joke. Support for the National Democratic Front (NDF) and its
guerrillas is mounting after years of rural organizing.

De Quiros suggests that there has been ``substantive democracy in
the Philippines---despite colonialism and elite politics.''
``This is so because democracy took a life of its own, expressing
itself in peasant revolts and popular demand for reforms.'' It is
just this substantive democracy that the United States and its
allies are dedicated to repress and contain. Hence the absence of
any social revolution of the kind that he and several other
commentators in this most respectable business journal see as
sorely lacking in the Philippines ---though if it can join the
club of ``capitalist democracies'' of the Singapore variety, the
tune will likely change.

Meanwhile, Survival International reports that tribal peoples are
being attacked by the private army of a logging company, which,
in a six month campaign of terror, has killed and tortured
villagers, burned down houses, destroyed rice stores, and driven
thousands from their homes. The same tribal people are among the
many victims of bombing of villages and other practices of the
government counterinsurgency campaigns. Appeals to the Aquino
government have been ignored. An appeal to the U.S. government,
or Western circles generally, cannot be seriously proposed. The
same is true in Thailand, where the government announced a plan
to expel six million people from forests where it wants to
establish softwood plantations.

Miracles of capitalism are also to be found elsewhere in Asia.
Charles Gray, responsible for Asian affairs in the pro-business
AFL-CIO foreign affairs branch (AIFLD), observes in the Far
Eastern Economic Review that transnational corporations
``generally insist the host government suppress the right of
workers to organise and join unions, even when that right is
guaranteed in the country's own constitution and laws.'' The
organization that coordinates trade in the Free World (GATT) does
not have a single rule that ``covers the subsidies that
transnational corporations get though pressures on Third World
governments to permit 19th century-type exploitation of labour.''
In Malaysia, ``U.S. and other foreign corporations forced the
Labour Ministry in 1988 to continue the government's
long-standing prohibition of unions in the electronics industry
by threatening to shift their jobs and investments to another
country.'' In Bangladesh, contractors for the transnationals
``discriminate against women and girls by paying them starvation
wages as low as 9 U.S. cents an hour.''  In China's Guangdong
province, when the government found that ``the factory of a
leading toy manufacturer was engaged in labour law
violations---such as 14-hour workdays and 7-day workweeks---it
approached the managers to ask them to respect the law. The
managers refused, and said that if they were unable to operate
the way they wanted they would close their Chinese factories and
move to Thailand,'' where there are no such unreasonable demands.

Low prices for imported toys have doubtless brought much
Christmas cheer in the industrial West.


The Fruits Of Victory: Africa

The scene in Africa is worse still. To mention only one small
element of a growing catastrophe, a study of the U.N. Economic
Commission for Africa estimates that ``South Africa's military
aggression and destabilization of its neighbors cost the region
$10 billion in 1988 and over $60 billion and _1.5 million lives
in the first nine years of this decade._" Such figures are
considered too insignificant to merit notice in the Newspaper of
Record, which avoided the matter. Congress imposed sanctions on
South Africa in 1986 over Reagan's veto, but their impact has
been limited. The American Committee on Africa reports that only
25 percent of U.S.-South African trade has been affected, and
that iron, steel, and (until late 1989) half-finished uranium
continued to be imported. After the sanctions were put in place,
U.S. exports to South Africa increased from $1.28 billion in 1987
to $1.71 billion in 1989, according to the U.S. Commerce
Department.

While the South African government and the minority White groups
it represents face mounting problems, they may see some rays of
hope as well. New diplomatic ties between South Africa and
Hungary, now that it has achieved independence, may prove to be
``the wedge that breaks trade sanctions and the international
isolation of the South African government,'' the Christian
Science Monitor reports in a lead story, citing an economist at
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences who foresees expanding trade
between South Africa and Eastern Europe.

The economic catastrophe of much of Africa is commonly attributed
to ``socialism,'' a term used freely to apply to anything we are
not supposed to like. But there is an exception, ``an island of
freewheeling capitalism in a sea of one-party socialist states,''
Africa correspondent Howard Witt of the conservative Chicago
Tribune writes. He is referring to Liberia, which, like the
Philippines, can attribute its happy state to the fact that it
was ``America's only toehold on the African continent''---for a
century and a half, in this case. Liberia took on special
significance during the Cold War years, Witt continues,
particularly after President Samuel Doe, a ``brutish, nearly
illiterate army sergeant . . . seized power in 1980 after
disemboweling the previous president in his bed'' (more recently
suffering a similar fate himself), and proceeded to elevate his
fellow tribesmen---4 percent of the population---into a new
ruling elite, and to persecute and savagely oppress the rest of
the population. The Reagan administration, much impressed,
determined to turn Liberia, like Jamaica, into a showcase of
capitalism and democracy. In the first six years of Doe's regime,
the U.S. poured military and economic aid into ``the backward
country,'' ``even as evidence mounted that Doe and his ministers
were stealing much of the money, and after he ``brazenly stole''
the 1985 election with Washington's approval, in a replay of the
Noriega story a year earlier. A ``respected expatriate Liberian
dissident and former government minister,'' Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf, says: ``At the time, an American official told
me bluntly, `Our strategic interests are more important than
democracy'.''

The results of the aid are evident, Witt writes: ``The soldiers
of President Samuel Doe's army wear the uniforms of American GIs
as they go about their business murdering Liberian civilians on
the streets of the capital, Monrovia,'' named after President
Monroe, and ``the bodies of many of the civilian victims are
dumped in the morgue at the American-built John F. Kennedy
Hospital,'' where ``combat-hardened doctors'' say ``they have
never witnessed such brutality.'' Monrovia is a death trap, Witt
writes. Those who are not struck down by starvation, cholera, or
typhoid try to escape the army or the rebel forces under Charles
Taylor, a former Doe aide---or later, those under the command of
a breakaway unit led by Prince Johnson.

The results of the U.S. aid became even clearer when reporters
entered Monrovia with the African peacekeeping force after Doe
was tortured and murdered by Johnson's guerrillas. They found ``a
bloody legacy'' of the ``10 years in power'' of the U.S.
favorite, UPI reporter Mark Huband writes: piles of bleached
bones and skulls, many smashed; ``half-clothed, decomposed heaps
of flesh . . . littered with millions of maggots''; ``contorted
bodies . . . huddled beneath church pews'' and ``piled up in a
dark corner beside the altar''; bodies ``rotting into their
mattresses''; ``a large meeting hall for women and children
[where] clothes clung to the skeletons of female and underaged
victims.''

Not everyone, of course, has suffered in this ``island of
freewheeling capitalism.'' For a century and a half, the
oligarchy of freed American slaves and their descendants
``oppressed and exploited the indigenous population,'' while
``the U.S. looked the other way.'' And lately, the Reagan
favorites did quite well for themselves until their turn came to
be dispatched. Others merely benefited, escaping any such
unpleasant fate: ``U.S. corporations like Firestone and B.F.
Goodrich made healthy profits from the expansive Liberian
operations,'' Witt observes, proving that freewheeling capitalism
has its virtues. The U.S. built a huge Voice of America
transmitter in Liberia, perhaps to broadcast the happy message of
what can be achieved under capitalist democracy. We can chalk up
another victory for the Free World.

Current U.S. policy, Johnson-Sirleaf says, is ``a lack of
policy.''  ``It's kind of, `Oh, those Africans are at it again.
Let them fight, and may the best man win'.'' To judge by the
commentary on all of this, there is nothing here to teach us
anything about ourselves, our legendary benevolence, or the
marvels of freewheeling capitalism.

Behind the ``lack of policy,'' there is, however, the usual
policy toward the Third World, which we can trace back as usual
to the early postwar period when the global order was being
shaped in the interests of the rich and powerful in the West.
Like other parts of the Third World, Africa had its ``function.''
It was to be ``exploited'' for the reconstruction of Europe,
George Kennan explained in a major State Department study on the
international order. He added that the opportunity to exploit
Africa should provide a psychological lift for the European
powers, affording them ``that tangible objective for which
everyone has been rather unsuccessfully groping. . . .'' History
might have suggested a different project: that Africa should
``exploit'' Europe to enable it to reconstruct from centuries of
devastation at the hands of European conquerors, perhaps also
improving its psychological state through this process. Needless
to say, nothing of the sort was remotely thinkable, and the
actual proposals have received little notice, apparently being
regarded as uncontroversial.

In discussion of African policy particularly, the element of
racism cannot be discounted. Dean Acheson warned the former Prime
Minister of the racist government of Rhodesia in 1971 to beware
of the ``American public,'' who ``decide that the only correct
decision of any issue must be one which favors the colored point
of view.'' He urged that Rhodesia not ``get led down the garden
path by any of our constitutional cliches ---equal protection of
the laws, etc.---which have caused us so much trouble. . . .''
This venerated figure of American liberalism was particularly
disturbed by the Supreme Court's use of ``vague constitutional
provisions'' which ``hastened racial equality and has invaded the
political field by the one-man-one-vote doctrine,'' which made
``Negroes . . . impatient for still more rapid progress and led
to the newly popular techniques of demonstration and violence''
(September 1968). The ``pall of racism . . . hovering over''
African affairs under the Nixon administration, ``and over the
most basic public issues foreign and domestic,'' has been
discussed by State Department official Roger Morris, including
Nixon's request to Kissinger to assure that his first
presidential message to Congress on foreign policy have
``something in it for the jigs'' (eliciting ``the usual
respectful `Yes' '' from this abject flunkey); Kissinger's
disbelief that the Ibos, ``more gifted and accomplished'' than
other Nigerians, could also be ``more Negroid''; and Alexander
Haig's ``quietly pretend[ing] to beat drums on the table as
African affairs were brought up at NSC staff meetings.


The ``Unrelenting Nightmare''

The World Health Organization estimates that 11 million children
die every year in the world of the Cold War victors (``the
developing world'') because of the unwillingness of the rich to
help them. The catastrophe could be brought to a quick end, the
WHO study concludes, because the diseases from which the children
suffer and die are easily treated. Four million die from
diarrhea; about two-thirds of them could be saved from the lethal
dehydration it causes by sugar and salt tablets that cost a few
pennies. Three million die each year from infectious diseases
that could be overcome by vaccination, at a cost of about $10 a
head. Reporting in the London Observer on this ``virtually
unnoticed'' study, Annabel Ferriman quotes WHO director-general
Hiroshi Nakajima, who observes that this ``silent genocide'' is
``a preventable tragedy because the developed world has the
resources and technology to end common diseases worldwide,'' but
lacks ``the will to help the developing countries.''

The basic story was summarized succinctly by President Yoweri
Museveni of Uganda, chairman of the Organization of African
Unity. Speaking at the UN conference of the world's 41
least-developed countries, he called the 1980s ``an unrelenting
nightmare'' for the poorest countries.  There was a plea to the
industrial powers to more than double their aid to a munificent
2/10 of 1 percent of their GNP, but no agreement was reached, the
New York Times reports ``principally because of opposition from
the United States.''

As capitalism and freedom won their Grand Victory, the World Bank
reported that the share of the world's wealth controlled by poor
and medium-income countries declined from 23 percent to 18
percent (1980 to 1988). The Bank's 1990 report adds that in 1989,
resources transferred from the ``developing countries'' to the
industrialized world reached a new record. Debt service payments
are estimated to have exceeded new flows of funds by $42.9
billion, an increase of $5 billion from 1988, and new funds from
the wealthy fell to the lowest level in the decade.

These are some of the joys of capitalism that are somehow missing
in the flood of self-praise and the encomia to the wonders of our
system ---of which all of this is a noteworthy component---as we
celebrate its triumph. The media and journals are inundated with
laments (with an admixture of barely concealed glee) over the sad
state of the Soviet Union and its domains, where even a salary of
$100 a month enjoyed by the luckier workers is ``scandalously
high by the niggardly standards of Communism.'' One will have to
search far, however, for a look at the scene nearer to home, or
for derisive commentary on ``the niggardly standards of
capitalism'' and the suffering endured by the huge mass of
humanity who have been cast aside by the dominant powers, long
the richest and most favored societies of the world, and not
without a share of responsibility for the circumstances of most
of the others, all too easy to ignore.

The missing view also unveils a possible future that may await
much of Eastern Europe, which has endured many horrors, but is
still regarded with envy in large parts of the Third World
domains of the West that had comparable levels of development in
the past, and are no less well endowed with resources and the
material conditions for satisfying human needs. ``Why have the
leaders, the media, the citizens of the Great Western Democracies
cared long and ardently for the people of Central Europe, but
cared nothing for the people of Central America?''  the
experienced correspondent Martha Gellhorn asks: ``Most of them
are bone poor, and most of them do not have white skin. Their
lives and their deaths have not touched the conscience of the
world. I can testify that it was far better and safer to be a
peasant in communist Poland than it is to be a peasant in
capitalist El Salvador.''

Her question is, unfortunately, all too easy to answer. It has
been demonstrated beyond any lingering doubt that what sears the
sensitive soul is the crimes of the enemy, not our own, for
reasons that are all too obvious and much too uncomfortable to
face. The comparison that Gellhorn draws is scarcely to be found
in Western commentary, let alone the reasons for it.

As in Latin America, some sectors of Eastern European society
should come to share the economic and cultural standards of
privileged classes in the rich industrial world that they see
across their borders, much of the former Communist Party
bureaucracy probably among them. Many others might look to the
second Brazil, and its counterparts elsewhere, for a glimpse of a
different future, which may come to pass if matters proceed on
their present course.