Politics of foreign tragedies

Looking back on the news of 1998, and excluding the impeachment farce, two stories stand out: Hurricane Mitch and the continuing AIDS crisis. Both events were treated as “acts of God,” — tragic yet inescapable. But the casualties from these disasters cannot be laid at God’s door.

Take Hurricane Mitch. Officials from the United States government, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) met recently to discuss debt relief for the nations pummeled by Mitch. But these officials should consider their own role in this disaster.

In 1954, the United States government, at the behest of United Fruit, engineered the overthrow of the moderately leftist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz. Arbenz was no Communist, but he did believe in buying unused lands for peasants in order to redress the vast colonial-era inequalities in land distribution.

That coup served its purposes well. Throughout Latin America, land reform efforts were stalled. Alexander Cockburn, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times recently highlighted some of the effects: “The peasants had no option but to migrate to forested hillsides too steep to be of interest to … foreign companies. Year after year, the peasants tried to ward off starvation, raising subsistence crops on slopes so extreme that sometimes … one comes across a peasant working his land while tied to a stake, so he won’t slip. In such manner the trees got cut down and the land worked and overworked, until a tropical storm would send the bare hillsides careening down in deadly mud slides.”

The Caribbean will always be a site of deadly storms, but economic inequalities compound their effects. A peasantry deprived of land has been a catastrophe waiting to happen. Enter Mitch.

AIDS in Africa is another tale of political malfeasance. Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zambia have adult infection rates at or above 20 percent. South Africa is starting to see huge spikes in its infection rate. Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute reports that: “Barring a medical miracle, these countries will lose one-fifth or more of their adult population to AIDS within the next decade. To find a precedent for such a potentially devastating loss of life from an infectious disease, we have to go back … to the bubonic plague.”

But, once again, public policy compounds the tragedy. Here in the United States, the disease has been caught up in an ugly cultural politics. Efforts to portray the disease as a “plague on gays” and wars over abortion politics have slowed international efforts against the disease. The new Federal budget cuts off all assistance to international family-planning agencies, the principal source of many foreign AIDS prevention initiatives.

Economic development policy plays an equally destructive role. In South Africa, IMF and World Bank austerity plans have driven working people’s wages dramatically lower and increased desperation. In such a context, even the most well-crafted prevention strategies are likely to fail. It’s hard to convince many people to worry about any long-term health issue in a climate where lives are often burdened by desperate poverty.

And in a final affront, corporations are refusing even a life raft for the poorer nations. In ongoing international trade negotiations, drug manufacturers have resisted efforts by African nations to exempt a few lifesaving drugs from stringent patent protections. Granting international exemptions to monopoly power in such exceptional cases would hardly dent drug company profits. But it would make medical progress against AIDS available to poorer nations.

We need to stop viewing calamities such as AIDS and Mitch as the playthings of an angry God. Instead, we should look at the policies of U.S. corporations and the U.S. government. We can’t prevent hurricanes or epidemics, but we can prevent them from reaching such catastrophic proportions.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail comments to jbuell@acadia.net.