At about that time a man approached me; he had a small, portable TV camera and a mike and he asked me a simple question: What are the issues?
He said that he is a free-lance TV producer and a reporter for a public radio station. He explained that he had been searching the newspapers and carefully following TV and radio reports of the demonstrations and had been unable to determine what the fuss is about.
So I told him.
I looked into the eye of the camera and explained about the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that they were products of the Bretton Woods agreement of half a century ago, which purported to stabilize the monetary systems and the economies of all the countries of the world. The WB's task was to provide loans of development capital for countries looking to modernize their social and economic infrastructures. A nation that needed a safe water supply, for instance, could apply to the bank for a loan of the necessary funds and the WB, after carefully checking out the need and the plans, could advance the money and would oversee construction of the project. Or, if a nation wanted to pursue a particular path of economic development, the WB could help establish the necessary infrastructure: railroad beds, for example, or a dam.
The agreement established the IMF as sort of a "lender of last resort" for countries whose economies might be faltering. If, because of negative balance of payments or severe inflationary trends, a nation was on the verge of economic collapse, the IMF could shore up that economy with loans to tide the situation over until things could stabilize.
But of course, those loans would have to be repaid. And that's where much of the problem lies. The interest rates and conditions connected to those loans have often been such as to impoverish the borrowers. The two institutions don't just say "Here's the money, now pay it back." They attach conditions which, in the gimlet-eyed view of the bankers involved, should ensure that money would be forthcoming. They required social and institutional changes designed to refocus economic efforts toward production for export - at the expense of the country's internal economy. They open up land to foreign exploitation; they demand drastic cuts in government spending for such things as health care, education, social security, all of what we think of as the "safety net; they insist on privatization of government services and enterprises.
Here's how that worked in Mexico: former Mexican president Carlos Salinas pushed a law through the Mexican Congress which wiped out the ejidos, the communally-owned farmlands which the Constitution had previously protected from outside encroachment. That cleared the way for multi-national agricultural combines to buy up the land and start mass-producing crops for the export market. What happened to the campesinos? In a Grapes of Wrath scenario, they headed for the cities, or wherever they could make some kind of living without their now-lost land base.
Poverty rates, never very low, increased drastically. Hunger became endemic. Infant mortality rates and disease incidence started an upswing. Might all that have had something to do with the rush of undocumented immigrants over our southern borders?
We have just witnessed major upheavals in Bolivia in response to the privatization of the water supply in that country, a move which resulted in twenty to thirty percent increases in the cost of water to the people. That's water, a life necessity! A move to privatize the telephone system in Puerto Rico resulted in a general strike. Mexico is still struggling to privatize Pemex, the government-owned petroleum industry, against heavy popular opposition.
(Note: when privatization takes place, it generally involves sale of government-owned institutions to multi-national corporations at giveaway prices.)
There's more: the WB only recently decided to back off on a plan to construct massive dams in India, projects which would have displaced over a million people from land they have lived on for generations. Where would they have gone. Fortunately, the resistance there was strong enough to turn the project around. But the Three Gorges dam in China is still on the books. It's a massive undertaking which would wreak environmental havoc on the Shanghai River watershed and displace some Three million people. (I recently saw a figure of twelve million as the number of people moved off of their ancestral land by various WB projects.)
The WB doesn't seem to have learned the lesson of Egypt's Aswan dam, construction of which has led to increased diseases in the northern Nile valley and to drastic decreases in the fish populations that depended for sustenance on the materials brought to the Mediterranean by the waters of the Nile.
When I finished my account, the reporter thanked me profusely for information he had been unable to turn up in the mainstream media. And that brings up an associated problem. There is no doubt in my mind that if more people knew some of the details of what these institutions are up to, there would be even more protest. But our mainstream media, major corporations in their own right, do their best to trivialize, marginalize and even bury the kind of information that would clue people in to what's happening.
As for the demonstrations, the scene was a bit different from that in Seattle. In the places I was, the cops maintained their cool; there were only a couple of people maced when they pushed too hard against the police line.
There was almost a total dearth of tear gas and I heard of no rubber bullets at all. However, I know of one person who was, locked arm in arm with others, who got an arm broken and lost some front teeth to a police baton. And the arrest procedures were dismal.
Apparently the cops counted on arresting small numbers of people at a time, so when faced with a 600-person arrest, they couldn't handle it. People remained on school buses for up to six hours at a time with no food or water and no bathroom facilities, waiting to be booked.
The police hadn't counted on prisoner solidarity either. Refusal to give names, constant agitation to see lawyers, insistence on identical charges and equal treatment for all pushed police tempers to the edge. One group, refusing to be cited out, took off their clothes and said they wouldn't go to court. Police had to forcibly dress them and the court had to forcibly cite them out.
The media called it a wash, emphasizing the one point that the WB-IMF meetings went on as scheduled in spite of all the protest. But aside from the fact that the entire city was closed down for a day, that spin overlooks the fact that opposition to the financial institutions which work solely for the benefit of the financiers and the multi-nationals is a process, not a one-time shot. The demonstrations once again raised the issues to the level of public consciousness. People know that there is something to oppose, even if they're not out in the streets themselves. And the final chapters of this story are yet down the line. The WB the IMF and the entire global elitism which they support will either change their ways or disappear. We, the people, will see to it.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2000
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited