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Turmoil in Latin America
The decade of democracy in Latin America may be over. Corruption is rampant as the region seems headed for a repeat of the 1970s and 1980s, when authoritarian caudillos and military leaders ran many countries in Central and South America. An intelligence consulting firm spokesman says, “What we are seeing in Latin America is a crisis of unrealized expectations.” Ten years of reforms have not reduced poverty, but in many cases, it-and crime-has gotten worse, the spokesman says. People are tired of democracy’s unfulfilled promises and again are starting to support populists such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, a leftist paratrooper whose early 1990s coup attempt failed, who promised to end corruption. He has praised China’s communist government and maintains an admiring friendship with Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Observers say that rising malaise and no faith in political parties have prompted Latinos to turn to these caudillos, such as Chavez and Peru’s former strongman Alberto Fujimori, to solve their woes.

Rich getting richer
The World Bank study “Attacking Poverty” finds that Latin America suffers from the world’s greatest income inequalities-even worse than sub-Saharan Africa. In Latin America, over half the population lives on less than a third of the average national income. The report says that some 35 percent of its people live on less than $2 a day.

New Zealand Christians against legal same-sex unions
New Zealand’s government is moving to grant homosexual couples the same rights as married male-female couples-including divorce and adoption rights. But Christians there say they’ll fight any proposal to change marriage laws. Christian Heritage Party leader Graham Capill says, “Children have the right to be parented by a mother and a father. If the government tries to bring in legislation for homosexual marriage or the adoption of children, we will create quite a campaign.” Should the government plan go through, New Zealand would be the world’s third country to approve gay marriage, after Denmark in 1989 and Holland in September.

Smugglers ferry illegal immigrants in Europe
Smugglers are earning $20 billion annually by trafficking political and economic refugees from Eastern Europe to more prosperous Western Europe. With little hope of legally leaving their own countries, these refugees pay mafiosos $500 to $10,000 apiece to help them escape. Experts say that human trafficking is almost as profitable as narcotrafficking, but the risks are relatively low and penalties are less severe, reports ABC News. Governments are using extra means to keep asylum-seekers away. “The real crux of the problem is that it is virtually impossible for people fleeing persecution to enter (Europe) legally, and they are therefore forced to resort to such desperate measures in their search for sanctuary,” says a British Refugee Council official. While 16,000 refugees were caught last year trying to illegally migrate west, some 700,000 succeeded.

Torture, ill treatment abound
Of 195 countries and territories, state officials use torture or ill treatment in 150 of them, Amnesty International reports: “In more than 80 countries, people reportedly died as a result.” Usually, the torturers are police officers. Typically, the victims are convicts and suspects; thus, the practice has not evoked public outcry. Since 1997, the methods include electric shock and the suspension of the body in more than 40 countries; rape and sexual abuse in custody; mock execution or threat of death or prolonged solitary confinement in more than 50 countries; and suffocation and beating on the soles of the feet in more than 30 countries. AI describes judicial corporal punishment as “lawful torture,” legal in at least 31 countries. Since 1997 this human rights organization has documented cases of judicial floggings in 14 countries and amputations in seven: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Sudan.

Health care disparities
Basic health care, such as vaccinations and prenatal care, remains out of reach for the poor in Two-Thirds World countries, the World Bank reports. Among poor Bolivian and Turkish children under 5, death rates may be four times higher than for children from wealthier families. In sub-Saharan Africa, less than 40 percent of the poorest receive full immunizations; in contrast, almost 70 percent of the richest children receive their shots. In Nicaragua, a typical poor woman will have more than six children, while an average wealthy woman has two. These reports show that basic health programs aren’t serving the poor well enough to close the gap with the rich, a World Bank specialist says.

Lifting up the poor
Latin America’s main asset-a cheap, unskilled labor pool-is becoming a liability in the face of globalization. An Inter-American Development Bank official told Business Week, “We’re seeing a skill-biased technology change worldwide, which may conspire against our hopes of achieving a rapid reduction in poverty.” The average Latino has only a seventh-grade education. If policymakers fail to find a way to educate and train the poor for a more competitive workplace, the region risks falling further behind. So governments are leaving traditional “welfare handouts” of food and housing to fight poverty in favor of trying new ways, such as partnering with businesses and getting input from the poor themselves in projects aimed at helping them.

Facing promiscuity
Sexually transmitted disease is rampant in Brazil because many men frequent prostitutes. Evangelicals may be the least affected because of abstinence, report LAM missionaries there. In Ecuador, LAMer Carlos Pinto says that modern teaching about sexuality contradicts biblical precepts, thus adding to confusion among youth.

Wife-beating sometimes OK, Indian women say
At times, men are right to beat their wives, say more than half of the 90,000 Indian women surveyed for a health ministry study there. About 56 percent said domestic violence was justified on at least one of six grounds. A survey report noted that because the topic is sensitive and wives may be reluctant to report abuse, the findings likely underestimate the violence. Grounds the women gave for abuse included neglecting the house or children, going out without telling their husbands, disrespecting inlaws, suspicion of infidelity, too-small dowry, or bad cooking. The survey found that one-fifth of the women had been physically mistreated since age 15, most commonly by the husband.

Arab women and rights
The plight of Arab women has improved in the past year, Agence France-Presse reports. While Egypt maintains travel restrictions on married women, laws now grant them the right to file for divorce and to get passports without their husbands’ approval. In Oman five women serve on the 48-member state council, which advises on the nation’s economic, social, and political policies. Jordan gave women the vote in 1989, Oman in 1994, and Qatar in 1999. Setbacks for women include Kuwait’s high court rejecting women’s suffrage, and Saudi Arabia’s requirement that women cover their faces outdoors. Saudi Arabia also bans women from driving and from professions such as teaching and medicine. In Jordan, “honor” killings, in which relatives kill female kin whom they believed committed sexual improprieties, remain legal.

Turkish women suicides up
Turkey’s women are twice as likely to commit suicide as its men. The rate among women in Turkey’s southeastern region is opposite that of other parts of the world, reports the New York Times. Just 20 years ago, Turkey was a rural nation, but Turks by the millions have migrated to the cities of Istanbul, Ankara, and others in pursuit of a better life. Turkey’s government launched a program aimed at getting peasants to go back home, but the program has met little success. In the cities, jobs are scarce, good housing unavailable, and their traditional social rules don’t apply.

In one migrant family, a 22-year-old woman lived with parents who refused to allow her to get a job or go to school. After they beat her for wearing a too-tight skirt, she jumped off a seven-story building. These women are torn between village tradition, which holds that a woman’s place is home tending to children rather than at school or the workforce, and the urban society into which they have been transplanted. A psychologist who works with these women stated that “there is a huge gap between their lives and those dreams.” To help women, the government has created a crisis-intervention hotline and reading and writing classes in shanty neighborhoods.

Cambodian children at risk
The Khmer Rouge destroyed families in the 1970s. Now Cambodia has a high rate of child abandonment-and pedophilia. Orphanages are overcrowded. Many babies are abandoned by poor rural mothers who themselves suffer abuse at home. Glue-sniffing and begging street children roam Phnom Penh. Sexual tourists prey on them. A school principal was charged with filming pornography of children as young as 8. The government, however, has increased efforts to help, including not granting visas to suspected sex tourists. It is also reforming adoption laws that let officials demand bribes from those wanting to adopt and has issued a moratorium on adoption. The Economist reports that an orphanage has been accused of paying poor villagers $100 per baby to put them up for foreign adoption.

Child abuse, sex slavery in South Africa
Children as young as 4 are being traded as sex slaves or prostitutes, activists at the 13th International Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect in Johannesburg told 1,000 delegates from more than 60 countries. Inadequate laws, collapsing families, and AIDS have set the stage for de facto slave markets where children are smuggled in from other African countries, Eastern Europe, and Thailand. Other victims are South African AIDS orphans or those who have been sold into slavery by family members. Sexual tourism in South Africa is a growing business. Politicians, police, and professionals are involved in the trade as customers and suppliers. Inadequate laws and law enforcement, and the great supply of vulnerable children, feed the industry. The United Nations estimates that most of the 4 million slaves traded each year are children.

Morocco’s child labor force
In Fez, parents are paid $10 per month for their 5-year-old daughters’ labors at carpet looms, reports The Economist. Although school attendance became compulsory almost 40 years ago, some 2.5 million children don’t attend, as the country’s economy depends on their labor. Half of all Moroccans are illiterate. A fourth of the workforce is unemployed. Many defend employing children on the grounds that it keeps them off the streets and provides them with skills. Employers are laying off adults and hiring children, whose labor costs about a third of adult labor. Poor parents often send their children to work in the cities, where many become addicts, thieves, and prostitutes.

January 5, 2001