The IMF's domino effect
Latin America, where almost all governments follow the International Monetary Fund's economic philosophy without question, is in the throes of an unprecedented structural crisis. Argentina, once a model of IMF policies - the country even adopted the US dollar as a second currency - has been going through a critical economic crisis since December 2001. The crisis was the consequence of decades of internationally "suggested" privatisation of public services, which meant the increase of foreign multinationals' control of the economy, depriving successive Argentinean governments of a large amount of tax revenue.
Watching the bankruptcy of this once rich nation, Peruvians and Paraguayans are objecting to the privatisation of state companies, with popular uprisings repressed by their respective governments.
In the South of Peru, around the city of Arequipa, the protest centred on the privatisation of the state owned electricity company. President Alejandro Toledo - who used to work for the World Bank - approved the sale of the company even though his presidential campaign was based on the maintenance of public services.
There have been major protests in Paraguay since the beginning of June following the planned privatisation of the telecom company Copaco. Demonstrations in Paraguay began to grow after thousands of farmers threatened to mobilise in Asuncion, against privatisations and other measures imposed by IMF demands. Police repression left two killed and dozens wounded in Ciudad del Este, near the Brazilian border. Rubber bullets and tear gas were used in the capital, Asunción, against protestors blocking roads.
Then it happened in Uruguay. Uruguay has been called the Switzerland of Latin America. The warm waters of Uruguay's beaches and its generous tax and banking secrecy laws have long been a magnet for rich Argentines in times of crisis. Foreign investors were attracted to the country's investment-grade status - the only Latin American country besides Mexico to enjoy that rank. So, Uruguayan assets became an anchor for many Latin-American portfolios.
But this impressive track record came to an end in January, when Argentina devalued and defaulted. That country's strict capital controls forced Argentines to dip into their Uruguayan savings, reducing those deposits by 80% since then. In June, Uruguay floated its peso, which promptly fell by 45%. After the bank run, the central bank on 29 June ordered a four-day bank holiday, its first in 70 years. Congress swiftly passed legislation exchanging $2.2 billion in fixed-term dollar deposits for government bonds.
Following this, 13 supermarkets were looted amid growing protests against structural adjustment and hundreds of people were arrested. The rate of unemployment in Uruguay is close to 18%, and President Batlle asked for US$1.5 billion in loans from the IMF.
After much pleading and begging, the Uruguayan President managed to get a US$1.5 billion loan from the IMF and reopened the banks. Protests against neoliberal policies continue, however. Students have started a strike and occupied a university building, while the Pit-CNT trade union began a general strike and took to the streets protesting against the loan and its conditions.
US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who arrived on Sunday 11 August in Brazil for a regional tour, said the $1.5 billion temporary loan was in recognition of "the strong economic programme" Uruguay was putting in place.
In Brazil, observers have watched in horror as the value of its currency - the real - has dropped 50% to the US dollar in the last six months. The government has agreed an imposed two-year economic plan with the IMF - on Wednesday 7 August, the IMF staff agreed on a new 15-month $30 billion standby loan facility for Brazil - even though presidential candidates in the upcoming October elections have spoken out against it.
Meanwhile, foreign investors and the US government are threatening to exacerbate economic instability, as Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Workers' Party leads the race.
As the threat to local economies in Latin America comes from international financial organisations and corporations, the people's response has also become transnational. On 3 August, a workers' march was held in the state of Rio Grande do Sul of Brazil to an international bridge in the city of Uruguayana, which separates Brazil from Argentina. About eight thousand people participated in the event. Participating unions included the CUT, the PIT-CNT (Uruguayan) and CTA (Argentinean), the MTD (Movement of Dismissed Workers), and others. The marchers were barred by the Argentine Army and Brazilian Federal Police from crossing the Amizade (Friendship) Bridge when arriving in Uruguayana.
The central demand of the march was the rejection of the ALCA (FTAA - Free Trade Area of the Americas). It also protested unemployment rates in the region, the curtailing of civil liberties, and the concession to the US of the Alcantara aerospace centre, located in the state of Maranhao near the Amazon rainforest.
The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is the formal name given to an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to every country in Central America, South America and the Caribbean, except Cuba. Negotiations began right after the completion of NAFTA in 1994 and are to be completed by 2005. The US is pushing for an earlier completion deadline of 2003.
For more information: www.indymedia.org and Centre for Economic and Political Research at www.cepr.net
About FTAA, check www.globalexchange.org
Semra Basyigit dies on hunger strike
Semra Basyigit has become the 92nd martyr of the prison protests in Turkey and the 52nd person to die on hunger strike in the campaign against the F-type isolation prisons. Despite all the recent media publicity about 'reforms' and the abolition of the death penalty in Turkey, the hunger strikes continue, ignored by the outside world.
When the resistance started, she was not in prison, but she saw that the F-Types were not just destined for those who were in jail. Outside prison, she had taken part in some solidarity actions and when in Bursa she went on hunger strike with a number of relatives and friends of prisoners. Among them was Hulya Simsek, who was to die in the Death Fast.
On 6 January 2001, ten people were imprisoned, among them Semra Basyigit. From then on, Semra continued her struggle inside prison. She joined the sixth Death Fast team in Kartal Special Prison. She began her hunger strike on 28 July 2001. She died on 30 July after 367 days fasting.
Around the World
BY MICHAEL PIERSE
Toxic cloud threatens Asia's, Earth's future
SOUTH ASIA - If anyone ever doubted that the human race's overuse of fossil fuels and rapidly increasing emissions of industrial wastes were threatening the global climate, indeed, the very existence of the human race, conclusive evidence came this week from South Asia.
A three-kilometre deep blanket of toxic cloud, stretching acrosss the entirety of Southern Asia, threatens to inflict as yet untold economic damage on the region and put millions of people at risk, scientists said on Monday.
Dubbed the "Asian Brown Haze", a mass of ash, acids, chemical droplets and other particles is already wreaking havoc on weather systems in the region, triggering droughts in some areas and floods in others, the UN-commissioned scientists' preliminary findings suggest. The pollution blanket is also reducing the amount of sunlight or solar energy hitting the Earth's surface by an estimated 10 to 15 percent. Its impact is expected to intensify over the next 30 years, with the South Asian population set to balloon to five billion.
Klaus Toepfer, the United Nations Environment Programme's executive director, said more research is needed before the full implications of the cloud can be calculated.
"The haze is the result of forest fires, the burning of agricultural wastes, dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations, and emissions from millions of inefficient cookers burning wood, cow dung, and other bio-fuels," he said. "There are also global implications, not least because a pollution parcel like this, which stretches three kilometres high, can travel half-way round the globe in a week."
Zimbabwe's landed aristocracy may get concession
ZIMBABWE - Robert Mugabe, sarcastically dubbed this week by Guardian Columnist George Monbiot as the "World's Third Most Evil Man", (the cherished first and second places ceded to Osama and Saddam, of course) extended a somewhat withered olive branch to Zimbabwe's white farmers this week.
Following days of intense media reporting of the evictions of some 3,000 white farmers, who control over two-thirds of the country's farming land, Mugabe said that all "genuine and well meaning" white farmers, who wished to remain in their occupations would not be left landless. Mugabe also, however, inferred a subtle threat to the hundreds of farmers who have defied his eviction orders, warning that those who "want another war should think again when they still have time to do so".
Zimbabwe succeeded in liberating itself from British rule over 20 years ago, following a bloody guerilla war, but the white farmers, who own huge estates, containing some of the country's most arable land, have been a source of conflict since. Half of Zimbabwe's twelve-and-a-half million population currently faces starvation.
Those who remain tied to Britain, Mugabe said, have no place in Zimbabwe: "To those who want to own this country for Britain, the game is up, and it is time for them to go where they belong. There is no room for rapacious supremacists."
Pressure from abroad, he said, would not affect the Zimbabwean government's stance: "No enemy is too big or too powerful to be fought and vanquished for this land. Our people are the principle owners of this land. We will not budge."
War on Iraq has already begun
IRAQ - The US war on Iraq has already begun, despite soundings from Washington to the contrary, a pro-Israeli, anti-Palestinian organisation operating from Jerusalem reports.
According to Debka (www.debka.com), an internet-based weekly covering political, military and intelligence issues (and containing liberal use of the word 'terrorism'), US and Turkish forces have already annexed an air-base in Northern Iraq and are amassing troops around and in the country. The US offensive will be waged by stealth - an exercise in "gradualism", rather than a D-Day type drama, it says.
Debka's military sources say the war will be waged by tens of thousands of US, British, French, Dutch and Australian troops, openly or covertly. Disinformation and diversionary ruses - like the latest statements from George Bush, claiming no date has been set for an attack, or Tony Blair, claiming that the war is a long way off - have combined with grave reservations from Russian, French and German leaders to leave most of us thinking that a rapproachment may be on the cards. Far from it, says Debka.
Special US forces entered Kurdish regions of north Iraq towards the end of march - nearly four months ago - to set up local Kurdish militias and train them for battle, Debka reports.
At around the same time, Turkish special forces went into northern Iraq in waves that continued through April, camping down in Turkmen regions around the big oil towns of Mosul and Kirkuk.
Meanwhile, the US built a ring of bases around Iraq, using existing facilities and adding new ones. Armoured ground units, tanks, air, navy and missile forces, as well as combat medical units and special contingents for anti-nuclear, biological and chemical warfare have been pouring in since. Debka's sources claim that the noose around Iraq extends from Georgia and Turkey in the north, Israel, Egypt and Jordan in the west, Eritrea and Kenya in the southwest, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Bahrain to the south.
A large US armada, including aircraft carriers, has assembled in the Meditteranean, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, and since June American and Turkish construction engineers have been building and expanding air fields and air strips to make them fit for military use.
Since last week, the action has been stepped up. On Monday 6 August, US and British air bombers destroyed the Iraqi air command and control centre at al-Nukhaib with previously unherd of precision-guided bombs capable of locating and destroying fibre-optic networks.
About 260 miles south of Baghdad, US warplanes followed up by entering Iraqi airspace and flying over Baghdad - confirming that the Iraqi early-warning radar system was now inopertive.
Two days later, Turkish warplanes entered Iraqi territory and seized Bamerni airport in northern Iraq, allowing for the movement of further heavy military machinery and electronic equipment into the region via the airport.
Turkish soldiers in the region now number 5,000 and, as the gradual invasion escalates, there are fears that Iraq's passivity thus far is being stretched to its limit.
Cheating the Revenue for Iraqi children
ENGLAND - A doctor from Oxford has begun withholding 7 per cent of her tax bill in protest against sanctions on Iraq, and instead is donating the amount, which would usually go to the military, to the British charity, Medical Aid for Iraqi Children.
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