Distant Voices (27 page)

There is no running water. Water is paid for and carried in. There is no sewer, of course; they wrap their waste in plastic and take it up to Smoky Mountain. Almost every child is sickening; a strain of dengue fever is the latest. Yet the children stepping over stagnant pools on their way to school wear clothes that are neat and scrubbed, white collars for the boys and big bows in the girls' hair, exercise books under their arms, encased in plastic wallets. If the treatment of and affection for children indicates the degree of civilisation, this is a profoundly civilised place. Not once did they or their parents ask me for anything. That people here are frustrated in their attempts to extend survival to the pursuit of a decent life says much about the nature of the forces ranged against them.

The people of Smoky Mountain are the face workers of modern poverty. Their lives are a metaphor for the condition of most of humanity, whose accelerating impoverishment in the 1990s is allowed only fleeting intrusion upon Western consciousness. Seventy per cent of the population of the Philippines, or about forty-five million people, live in a poverty that has been defined here as ‘that income level below
which people cannot buy for their families recommended nutrient requirements, cannot provide two changes of garments, cannot permit grade-six schooling for their children, cannot cover minimal costs of medical care and cannot pay for fuel and rent'.
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There are numerous, complex factors causing this, all of them overshadowed and compounded by debt and its silent war. It is a war whose jargon speaks of ‘low level violence': that is, of children dying often unseen and slowly.
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According to UNICEF, it causes the deaths of 650,000 children every year.
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‘In the Philippines', says John Cavanagh, of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, ‘we have calculated that one child dies every hour because debt repayments consume vital services like health care.'
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It is, however, a cost-effective war: indeed the profits to date have surpassed all expectations. In the period 1983–90, the poor countries paid £98,000 million to the rich countries. That's a net figure, after taking into account new loans and all aid. It works out at about £1.4 million per hour. Put another way: by the end of Red Nose Day this year the equivalent of all the money that Comic Relief raised in Britain – about £12 million – had come back to the rich countries in interest payments on loans that most people in poor countries never knew existed.
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British high-street banks have done nicely, having collected more than £1 billion in tax relief on loans that are still current.
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Perhaps this will surprise those who have been long persuaded that we ‘haves' have given limitless ‘aid' to the ‘have-nots'. Capitalism is even said to be suffering from ‘compassion fatigue'! Such a perspective may now be changing as well-informed dissident groups, notably the World Development Movement and Christian Aid, force a public debate. The oldest human rights organisation in the world, the Anti-Slavery Society, is in no doubt: debt is ‘contemporary slavery' and interest payments a form of ‘national bondage'.
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In the twenty-first century, debt and so-called ‘free trade' will discipline the ‘new world order'. Britain, says Douglas Hurd,
will not give ‘aid' to any country unless ‘the market' dominates its economy.
¹⁸
Recolonisation has begun: official.

Since 1972, the Philippines' national debt has risen from $2.7 billion to $29 billion. Much of this is the result of secret and often fraudulent deals by the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund quietly approved of Marcos and worked to keep him in power. According to internal World Bank documents, the martial law imposed by Marcos in 1972 made possible the ‘economic reforms' that ‘opened up the economy to the inflow of foreign capital'.
¹⁹
Within two years, during which the country's democratic institutions were muzzled, World Bank loans to the Philippines had increased fivefold. After more than a century of debilitating struggle for their independence, Filipinos were watching their sovereignty again slip away.

The centrepiece of World Bank strategy – formulated within an institution based in Washington, headed by an American and funded principally by the United States and its allies – was Rural Development, known as ‘RD'. ‘Rural Development', wrote the Filipino economist Walden Bello and his colleagues in their exposé of the World Bank, ‘was counter-insurgency. And its targets were obvious: the independent peasant movements and armed rural-based revolutionary forces like the New People's Army.' As in its other client states, the World Bank set out to undermine an economy that had the capacity to feed the population. The instrument was a strategy called ‘export-led industrialisation', which was ideologically based and of minimal economic worth. This, wrote Bello, ‘virtually abandoned the domestic market as the basis for industrial advance and tied the fate of economic growth almost completely to favourable external factors . . .'
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Since 1972, the World Bank has poured more than $7.5 billion into the Philippines.
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During that time the growth rate has fallen and poverty has risen by a third; and rural people – like Eddie – have been dispossessed by an economy
addicted to earning more and more foreign exchange to pay off the interest on foreign loans.
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The feudal oligarchies – from which Cory Aquino comes – have done well; and those who played golf with Ferdinand Marcos at Manila's Wack Wack Country Club have done wonderfully. Marcos is now believed to have looted some $15 billion. In 1981, Vice-president George Bush raised his glass to Marcos and said, ‘We love you, sir . . . we love your adherence to democratic principles and democratic processes.'
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Filipinos threw out Marcos in 1986. The heroine of the moment, Cory Aquino, was handed an opportunity unparalleled in recent colonial history. She could have demanded that the debts incurred by Marcos be wiped out so as to allow her people to benefit from the deeds of their civilised uprising. Instead, she pledged to ‘vigorously seek to renegotiate the terms of our foreign debt'.
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She did nothing of the kind and is now often reminded of her earlier description of the Philippines as ‘a land of broken promises'.
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‘People power,' as Manila's lively columnists write, was really ‘some people power'. Aquino has given priority to paying back every dollar and cent. She has held on to several of Marcos's decrees, including the notorious Presidential Decree 1177, which appropriates whatever funds are necessary from the budget to meet debt repayments. This violates the post-Marcos constitution guaranteeing that education must command the highest proportion of the national budget.
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Education is currently 15 per cent of the budget; ‘debt service' accounts for 44 per cent.
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None of this will be on the agenda of the annual binge of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Bangkok. To the IMF, the Philippines has been ‘structurally adjusted'. This has meant the establishment of ‘Export Processing Zones' in areas where food was once grown in abundance. It has meant that almost all the forests will be lost by the end of the century. It has meant that those Filipino workers who go abroad to work, and who provide the main source of foreign exchange, must compete for fewer low-paid
jobs in the recession-hit developed world. I once interviewed a married couple in London, he a hospital porter and she a child-minder. They had not seen their own children for four years and worked solely to keep them going. They tried to put aside enough for a phone call home every month.

The current demands of the IMF are for further reductions in public spending, a freeze on wages and new taxes. The Philippines' National Economic Development Authority estimates that, as a result of IMF policies, 500,000 workers will lose their jobs this year.
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According to an internal voluntary agency memorandum, ‘an increase in child labour is anticipated as opportunities for adult labour contract and children are forced to contribute to the family income'. In 1989, the Department of Health said that IMF demands would mean that 399,000 children would be denied milk and vitamins, and 103,000 tuberculosis sufferers medical treatment.
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The implication is clear: tens of thousands of children will die ‘silently' and unnecessarily.
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Elizabeth, aged three, and Lito, aged two, were two of these children. Eddie took Elizabeth to the local hospital when her diarrhoea ‘would not stop'. The hospital said they would take the child, but Eddie would have to buy the medicines in the market. Health care accounts for 3 per cent of the national budget.

The cheapest he could find cost forty pesos. So he scavenged for a day and got it. But Elizabeth was now seriously ill; and so, too, was Lito whose stomach had distended in a matter of days. Teresita told me how she watched horrified as worms emerged from the mouth of her skeletal child. On the day they buried Elizabeth, in a cemetery occupied mostly by the unmarked graves of children, Lito died too.

October 18, 1991

Bangkok

ON ARRIVAL IN
Bangkok, we were tagged and assigned seats in a fleet of new Volvos driven by men in white ice-cream suits, white shoes and white peak caps. In the back of my Volvo were two men in pinstripes; one of them arranged debt equity swaps, the other owned a third of a bank in Ecuador. With lights flashing and police outriders going ahead – and looking terrific in their ice-cream suits, reflecting sunglasses, parachutist's wings and decorative holsters – we headed into Bangkok's famous traffic, which had vanished, past Bangkok's famous street vendors, most of whom had vanished, through an underpass where people have scratched for a living since I have been coming here; and they, too, had gone. In their place were teams of women in blue smocks waiting to catch anything, a leaf, before it sullied the ground.

Along the way Coke, Pepsi, IBM, Nissan and a large massage parlour welcomed us to the World Bank/International Monetary Fund conference ‘ . . . everything 50 per cent off for you delegates and participants'. On arrival at the Holiday Inn, people in white coats and tails ran at us, bowing low. We were thanked for everything; one of them got into the lift and thanked us for going up and down. Thais are polite and gracious people but do not normally engage in the sort of spectacular deference for which the door-openers of Tokyo department stores are famous.

Once in room 2436, things were becoming clearer. There was much to look at, including a picture of Margaret Thatcher and the words: ‘You don't have to be rich and
powerful . . . When the daughter of a humble grocery shop owner went on to become prime minister of Britain, she proved it! Now we are proving it
again
!' The ‘we' is a computer firm.
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Next to this was a profile of World Bank President Lewis T. Preston. ‘He is, first of all, a Marine,' it said. ‘However, an intimate family friend swore that he and his wife are warm and hospitable . . .
but
no one fails to mention that Lew Preston is one tough
hombre
!'
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Next to Lewis T. Preston was a form for me to fill in my blood group. A Thailand health guide advised against sharing a toothbrush, due to the prevalence of Aids. Under ‘Emotional Health' it warned that some of us World Bankers might have difficulty adapting to our new environment and find ourselves feeling depressed. ‘This stage is not unusual,' it reassured us, ‘nor is it a sign of failure.'

Do tough
hombres
like Lewis T. Preston get these depressions too? Surely not. The World Bank seldom has a surplus of less than a billion dollars and everyone wants to borrow from it – everyone being those very poor countries whose economies have been ‘structurally adjusted' by the World Bank and the IMF so that they can compete with other very poor countries for ever-diminishing export markets in order to acquire hard currency, in order to pay back the World Bank and the IMF the interest charges on loans they have repaid several times over.

The consequences of this system bring to mind Tolstoy: ‘I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back.'

In Senegal, 40 per cent of the fertile land is given over to growing peanuts for Western margarine; in Ghana half the arable land is devoted to cocoa for Western chocolate bars; and in Colombia cut flowers are grown on farmland for export to the American rich. In these countries, the corollary is widespread, increasing malnutrition.

Remember Live Aid? In 1985, the twenty-nine poorest
countries of sub-Saharan Africa paid back to the World Bank, the IMF and Western commercial banks a total of $6.7 billion – more than twice as much as they received in emergency aid from governments and the good-hearted.
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These facts are known here as ‘unmentionables'. The original aim of the World Bank, says Lewis T. Preston, ‘was and remains the reduction of poverty'. The original aim as enshrined in the 1947 Bretton Woods charter was, in so many words, to provide markets for the rich world and to control the resources of the poor. Understandably, in these triumphant days, it is difficult for the corporate do-gooders to restrain themselves. ‘We should not be afraid', Norman Lamont told the conference, ‘to say that what we are extolling here are the virtues of
capitalism
! And the driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of
profit
!' There, he said it: no blah about eradicating poverty from Norman, whom a Bangkok radio station persists in calling ‘Chancellor of the Excesser, Norm Lament'.
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