Upside Down, Page 2

  “I feel great, I get rid of all my problems,” said one. “When I come down and I’m just me,” he added, “I feel trapped like a bird in a cage.”

  These children are regularly harassed by the police and their dogs in the Northern Bus Terminal. The company manager assured the reporter, “We don’t let these children die, because in some way they are human.”

  * * *

  In nearly all these tasks, except war, which tradition decrees and reality teaches is a male affair, girls’ hands are just as useful as boys’. But the labor market treats girls the same way it treats women. They always earn less than the meager bit paid to boys, when they earn anything at all.

  Prostitution is the fate of many girls and fewer boys around the world. Astonishing as it seems, there are at least a hundred thousand child prostitutes in the United States, according to a 1997 UNICEF report. But the vast majority of child victims of the sex trade work in the brothels and on the streets of the southern part of the globe. This multimillion-dollar industry, with its networks of traffickers, intermediaries, travel agents, and procurers, operates with scandalous ease. In Latin America, it is nothing new: child prostitution began in 1536, when the first “tolerance home” opened in Puerto Rico. Today half a million Brazilian girls sell their bodies for the benefit of adults—as many as in Thailand, but not as many as in India. On some Caribbean beaches, the prosperous sex tourism industry offers virgins to whoever can pay the price. The number of girls placed on the market is rising steadily: according to estimates by international organizations, at least a million girls swell the ranks of the global supply of bodies every year.

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  Flight/2

  In the streets of Mexico City, a girl inhales toluene, solvents, glue, you name it. When she stops trembling, she says: “I hallucinated the Devil, I mean I went into the Devil and right then, whoa! I was at the edge, I was about to jump, the building was eight stories high, and I was about to jump, but just then my hallucination stopped, the Devil left me. The hallucination I liked best was when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared before me. I saw her twice.”

  * * *

  The number of poor children who work, in their homes or out, for their families or for whomever, is uncountable. They work outside the law and outside statistics. And the rest? Many are superfluous. The market doesn’t need them, nor will it ever. They aren’t profitable; they never will be. From the point of view of the established order, they begin by stealing the air they breathe and soon steal anything they can lay their hands on. Hunger or bullets tend to shorten their voyage from crib to grave. The system that scorns the old also fears the young. Old age is a failure, childhood a threat. Ever more poor children are “born with a tendency toward crime,” according to specialists. They are the most dangerous category of the “surplus population.” The child as public threat: “the antisocial conduct of youth in Latin America” has been a recurring theme at the Pan-American Children’s Congress for years. Governments and some experts on the subject share this obsession with violence, vice, and perdition. Each child is a potential El Niño, and the disasters he or she may cause must be prevented. At the first South American Police Congress, held in Montevideo in 1979, the Colombian delegate explained that “the rising daily increase in the population under eighteen leads us to expect a higher POTENTIALLY DELINQUENT population” (uppercase in original).

  In Latin American countries, the hegemony of the market severs ties of solidarity and tears the social fabric to shreds. What fate awaits the nobodies, the owners of nothing, in countries where the right to own property is becoming the only right? And the children of the nobodies? Hunger drives many, who are always becoming many more, to thievery, begging, and prostitution. Consumer society insults them by offering what it denies. And then they take vengeance, united by the certainty of the death that awaits them. According to UNICEF, in 1995 there were eight million abandoned children on the streets of Latin America. According to Human Rights Watch, in 1993 death squads linked to the police murdered six children a day in Colombia, four a day in Brazil.

  Between the extremes lies the middle. Between the prisoners of opulence and the prisoners of destitution are the children who have quite a bit more than nothing but much less than everything. They, too, are less and less free. “To be allowed to be or not to be allowed to be, that is the question,” Spanish comic Chumy Chúmez liked to say. The freedom of these children is confiscated by societies that venerate order as they generate disorder. Fear of fear: the floor creaks under their feet and there are no guarantees. Stability is unstable, jobs evaporate, money vanishes. Just to make it to the end of the month is a feat. “Welcome, middle class,” is the greeting on a billboard at the entrance to one of the worst barrios of Buenos Aires. Middle-class people still live as impostors, pretending to obey the law and believe in it, pretending to have more than they have. But never before has it been so difficult for them to keep up this exhausting charade. Suffocated by debts and paralyzed by fear, the middle class raises its children in a state of panic. Fear of living, fear of falling, fear of losing your job, your car, your home, your possessions, fear of never having what you ought to have in order to be. In the widespread clamor for public security, imperiled by lurking criminal monsters, the members of the middle class shout loudest. They defend order as if they owned it, even though they’re only tenants overwhelmed by high rents and the threat of eviction.

  * * *

  So the Deaf Will Hear

  The number of malnourished children in the world is growing. Twelve million children under the age of five die every year from diarrhea, anemia, and other illnesses caused by hunger. A 1998 UNICEF report, full of such statistics, suggests that the struggle against child hunger and death “become the world’s highest priority.” To make it that, the report turns to the only argument that seems to work today: “The lack of vitamins and minerals in the diet costs some countries the equivalent of more than 5% of their gross national product in lives lost, disability, and lower productivity.”

  * * *

  Caught in the trap of terror, more and more of their children are condemned to suffer the humiliation of perpetual imprisonment. In the city of the future, which is becoming the city of the present, telechildren watched by electronic nannies will contemplate the street from a window of their telehomes: the street, off-limits thanks to violence or fear of it, the street where the dangerous and sometimes prodigious spectacle of life takes place.

  INJUSTICE 101

  Advertising enjoins everyone to consume, while the economy prohibits the vast majority of humanity from doing so. The command that everybody do what so many cannot becomes an invitation to crime. In the papers, crime stories have more to say about the contradictions of our times than all the articles about politics and economics.

  This world, which puts on a banquet for all, then slams the door in the noses of so many, is simultaneously equalizing and unequal: equalizing in the ideas and habits it imposes and unequal in the opportunities it offers.

  EQUALIZATION AND INEQUALITY

  Twin totalitarianisms plague the world: the dictatorships of consumer society and obligatory injustice.

  The machinery of compulsory equalization works against the finest trait of the human species, the fact that we recognize ourselves in our differences and build links based on them. The best of the world lies in the many worlds the world contains, the different melodies of life, their pains and strains: the thousand and one ways of living and speaking, thinking and creating, eating, working, dancing, playing, loving, suffering, and celebrating that we have discovered over so many thousands of years.

  Equalization, which makes us all goofy and all the same, can’t be measured. No computer could count the crimes that the pop culture business commits each day against the human rainbow and the human right to identity. But its devastating progress is mind-boggling. Time is emptied of history, and space no longer acknowledges the astonishing diversity of its parts. Through the mass media
the owners of the world inform us all of our obligation to look at ourselves in a single mirror.

  Whoever doesn’t have, isn’t. He who has no car or doesn’t wear designer shoes or imported perfume is only pretending to exist. Importer economy, impostor culture: we are all obliged to take the consumer’s cruise across the swirling waters of the market. Most of the passengers are swept overboard, but thanks to foreign debt the fares of those who make it are billed to us all. Loans allow the consuming minority to load themselves up with useless new things, and before everyone’s eyes the media transform into genuine needs the artificial demands the North of the world ceaselessly invents and successfully projects onto the South. (“North” and “South,” by the way, are terms used in this book to designate the carving up of the global pie and do not always coincide with geography.)

  What about the millions upon millions of Latin American children who will soon be condemned to unemployment or hunger wages? Does advertising stimulate demand or, as seems more likely, incite violence? Television gives us the full treatment: it teaches us to confuse the quality of life with the quantity of things and offers daily audiovisual courses on violence with video games for extra credit. Crime is the biggest hit on the small screen. “Strike first before they strike you,” caution the video game professors. “You’re all alone. Don’t count on anyone else.” Cars fly, people explode: “You, too, can kill.” Meanwhile, in Latin America’s cities, among the largest in the world, crime grows at an alarming rate.

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  The Exception

  There is only one place in the world where North and South meet on an equal footing: a soccer field at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. The equator cuts right through the middle of Zerão stadium in Amapá, so each team plays one half in the South and the other half in the North.

  * * *

  The world economy requires consumer markets in perpetual expansion to absorb rising production and keep profit rates from falling. It also requires ridiculously cheap labor and raw materials to keep production costs down. The same system that needs to sell more and more needs to pay less and less. This paradox gives birth to another: to increase the number of consumers, the North issues ever more imperious orders to consume to the South and the East, but the number of criminals multiplies even faster. Muggers seize the fetishes that make people real, in order to become what their victims are. Glove thy neighbor: in the madhouse of the streets, anyone can be dealt a punch or a bullet, those born to die of indigestion as well as those born to die of hunger.

  Cultural equalization, the process of casting all in the single mold of consumer society, can’t be reduced to statistics, but inequality can. The World Bank, which does so much to encourage inequality, freely admits—and several agencies of the United Nations confirm—that never has the world economy been less democratic, never has the world been so scandalously unjust. In 1960, the richest 20 percent of humanity had thirty times as much as the poorest 20 percent. By 1990, that figure had increased to seventy times. And the scissors continue to open: in the year 2000 the gap will be ninety times.

  Between the richest of the rich, who appear on the pornofinancial pages of Forbes and Fortune, and the poorest of the poor, who appear on the streets and in the fields, the chasm is even greater. A pregnant woman in Africa is a hundred times more likely to die than a pregnant woman in Europe. The value of pet products sold annually in the United States is four times the GNP of Ethiopia. The sales of just the two giants General Motors and Ford easily surpass the value of all black Africa’s economies. According to the United Nations Development Program, “Ten people, the ten richest men on the planet, own wealth equivalent to the value of the total production of fifty countries, and 447 multimillionaires own a greater fortune than the annual income of half of humanity.” The head of this UN agency, James Gustave Speth, declared in 1997 that over the past half century the number of rich people doubled while the number of poor tripled and that 1.6 billion people were worse off than they had been only fifteen years earlier.

  Not long before that, the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, threw cold water on the annual meeting of the bank and the International Monetary Fund. He warned those celebrating the achievements of the world government run by those two bodies that if things continue as they are, in thirty years there will be five billion poor people in the world, and inequality will explode in the face of future generations. Meanwhile, an anonymous hand wrote on a Buenos Aires wall, “Fight hunger and poverty! Eat poor people!”

  As if to confirm our optimism, as Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis suggests, the world carries on: the injustice that rules between countries is reproduced within each country, and year after year the gap between those who have everything and those who have nothing widens. We know it well in the Americas. In the United States half a century ago, the rich earned 20 percent of national income; now they get 40 percent. And in the South? Latin America is the most unjust region in the world. Nowhere else are bread and fish distributed as unfairly; nowhere else does such an immense distance separate the few who have the right to rule from the many who have the duty to obey.

  Latin America is a slave economy masquerading as postmodern: it pays African wages, it charges European prices, and the merchandise it produces most efficiently is injustice and violence. Official statistics for Mexico City from 1997: 80 percent poor, 3 percent rich, the rest in the middle. The same Mexico City is the capital of the country that in the 1990s spawned more instant multimillionaires than anywhere else on earth: according to UN figures, one Mexican has as much wealth as seventeen million of his poor countrymen.

  There is no country in the world as unequal as Brazil. Some analysts even speak of the “Brazilianization” of the planet in sketching a portrait of the world to come. By “Brazilianization” they certainly don’t mean the spread of irrepressible soccer, spectacular carnivals, or music that awakens the dead, marvels that make Brazil shine brightest; rather they’re describing the imposition of a model of progress based on social injustice and racial discrimination, where economic growth only increases poverty and exclusion. “Belindia” is another name for Brazil, coined by economist Edmar Bacha: a country where a minority lives like the rich in Belgium while the majority lives like the poor of India.

  In this era of privatization and free markets, money governs without intermediaries. A state that is judge and police and not much else keeps cheap labor in line and represses the dangerous legions of those without work. In many countries, social justice has been reduced to criminal justice. The state takes charge of public security; everything else is left to the market. And where the police can’t handle it, poverty—poor people, poor regions—is left to God. Even when government tries to dress up like some kindly mother, it has only the strength to exercise vigilance and mete out punishment. In these neoliberal times, public rights are reduced to public charity and handed out only on the eve of elections.

  Every year poverty kills more people than the entire Second World War, which killed quite a few. But from the vantage point of the powerful, extermination is not a bad idea if it helps regulate a population that is growing too fast. Experts decry “surplus population” in the South, where ignorant masses violate the Sixth Commandment day and night: “surplus population” in Brazil, where there are seventeen inhabitants per square kilometer, or in Colombia, where there are twenty-nine. Holland has four hundred inhabitants per square kilometer and no Dutchman dies of hunger, but Brazil and Colombia belong to a handful of gluttons. Haiti and El Salvador are the most overpopulated countries in the Americas—just as overpopulated as Germany.

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  Points of View/1

  From the point of view of the owl, the bat, the bohemian, and the thief, sunset is time for breakfast.

  Rain is bad news for tourists and good news for farmers.

  From the point of view of the natives, it’s the tourists who are picturesque.

  From the point of view of the Indians of the Car
ibbean islands, Christopher Columbus, with his plumed cap and red velvet cape, was the biggest parrot they had ever seen.

  * * *

  Power, which practices and lives by injustice, sweats violence through every pore. The damned of dark skin, guilty of their poverty and their hereditary criminal traits, exist in shantytown hells. Advertising makes their mouths water and the police chase them from the table. The system denies what it offers: magic lamps that make dreams come true, neon lights announcing paradise in the city night, the splendors of virtual wealth. As the owners of real wealth know, there is no Valium to calm so much anxiety, no Prozac to snuff out so much torment. Jails and bullets are the proper therapy for the poor.

  Twenty or thirty years ago, poverty was the fruit of injustice. The left decried it, the center admitted it, the right rarely denied it. How quickly times have changed: now poverty is fair reward for inefficiency. Poverty may arouse pity, but it no longer causes indignation. People are poor by the law of chance or the hand of fate. The dominant language—mass-produced images and words—nearly always serves a carrot-and-stick system that conceives of life as a pitiless race between a few winners and many losers, who were born to lose anyway. Violence is generally portrayed not as the child of injustice but as the fruit of bad behavior by poor sports, the numerous socially inept who fill poor neighborhoods and poor countries. Violence is their nature. It corresponds, like poverty, to the natural order of things, to the biological or perhaps zoological order. That’s how things are, that’s how they’ve been, and that’s how they will be.