"In Latin America children and adolescents make up nearly half the population. Half of that half lives in misery. Survivors: in Latin 5 America a hundred children die of hunger or curable disease every hour, but that doesn't stem their numbers in the streets and fields of a region that manufactures poor people and outlaws poverty. The poor are mostly children and children are mostly poor. Among the system's hostages, they have it the worst. Society squeezes them dry,watches them constantly, punishes them, sometimes kills them; almost never are they listened to, never are they understood.
Everywhere on earth, these kids, the children of people who work hard or who have neither work nor home, must from an early age spend their waking hours at whatever breadwinning activity they can find, breaking their backs in return for food and little else. Once they can walk, they learn the rewards of behaving themselves-boys and girls who are free labor in workshops, stores, and makeshift bars or cheap labor in export industries, stitching sports clothes for multinational corporations. They are manual labor on farms and in cities or domestic labor at home, serving whoever gives the orders.
They are little slaves in the family economy or in the informal sector of the global economy, where they occupy the lowest rung of the world labor market:
* in the garbage dumps of Mexico City, Manila, or Lagos they hunt glass, cans, and paper and fight the vultures for scraps
* in the Java Sea they dive for pearls
* they hunt diamonds in the mines of Congo
* they work as moles in the mine shafts of Peru, where their size makes them indispensable, and when their lungs give out they end up in unmarked graves
* in Colombia and Tanzania they harvest coffee and get poisoned by pesticides
* in Guatemala they harvest cotton and get poisoned by pesticides
* in Honduras they harvest bananas and get poisoned by pesticides
* they collect sap from rubber trees in Malaysia, working days that last from dark to dark * they work the railroads in Burma
* in India they melt in glass ovens in the north and brick ovens in the south
* in Bangladesh they work at over three hundred occupations, earning salaries that range from nothing to nearly nothing for each endless day
* they ride in camel races for Arab sheiks and round up sheep and cattle on the ranches of the Rio de la Plata
* they serve the master's table in Port-au-Prince, Colombo, Jakarta, or Recife in return for the right to eat whatever falls from it
* they sell fruit in the markets of Bogota and gum on the buses of Sao Paulo
* they wash windshields on corners in Lima, Quito, or San Salvador
* they shine shoes on the streets of Caracas or Guanajuato
* they stitch clothes in Thailand and soccer shoes in Vietnam
* they stitch soccer balls in Pakistan and baseballs in Honduras and Haiti to pay their parents' debts
* they pick tea or tobacco on the plantations of Sri Lanka and harvest jasmine in Egypt for French perfume
* rented out by their parents in Iran, Nepal, and India they weave rugs from before dawn until past midnight, and when someone tries to rescue them they ask, "Are you my new master? "
* sold by their parents for a hundred dollars in Sudan, they are put to work in the sex trade or at any other labor.
Armies in certain places in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America recruit children by force. In war, these little soldiers work by killing and above all by dying. They make up half the victims of recent African wars.
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.
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 Nino, 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."
excerpts from the book
Upside Down
a primer for the looking glass world
by Eduardo Galeano
Picador USA / Henry Holt, 2000, paper
Everywhere on earth, these kids, the children of people who work hard or who have neither work nor home, must from an early age spend their waking hours at whatever breadwinning activity they can find, breaking their backs in return for food and little else. Once they can walk, they learn the rewards of behaving themselves-boys and girls who are free labor in workshops, stores, and makeshift bars or cheap labor in export industries, stitching sports clothes for multinational corporations. They are manual labor on farms and in cities or domestic labor at home, serving whoever gives the orders.
They are little slaves in the family economy or in the informal sector of the global economy, where they occupy the lowest rung of the world labor market:
* in the garbage dumps of Mexico City, Manila, or Lagos they hunt glass, cans, and paper and fight the vultures for scraps
* in the Java Sea they dive for pearls
* they hunt diamonds in the mines of Congo
* they work as moles in the mine shafts of Peru, where their size makes them indispensable, and when their lungs give out they end up in unmarked graves
* in Colombia and Tanzania they harvest coffee and get poisoned by pesticides
* in Guatemala they harvest cotton and get poisoned by pesticides
* in Honduras they harvest bananas and get poisoned by pesticides
* they collect sap from rubber trees in Malaysia, working days that last from dark to dark * they work the railroads in Burma
* in India they melt in glass ovens in the north and brick ovens in the south
* in Bangladesh they work at over three hundred occupations, earning salaries that range from nothing to nearly nothing for each endless day
* they ride in camel races for Arab sheiks and round up sheep and cattle on the ranches of the Rio de la Plata
* they serve the master's table in Port-au-Prince, Colombo, Jakarta, or Recife in return for the right to eat whatever falls from it
* they sell fruit in the markets of Bogota and gum on the buses of Sao Paulo
* they wash windshields on corners in Lima, Quito, or San Salvador
* they shine shoes on the streets of Caracas or Guanajuato
* they stitch clothes in Thailand and soccer shoes in Vietnam
* they stitch soccer balls in Pakistan and baseballs in Honduras and Haiti to pay their parents' debts
* they pick tea or tobacco on the plantations of Sri Lanka and harvest jasmine in Egypt for French perfume
* rented out by their parents in Iran, Nepal, and India they weave rugs from before dawn until past midnight, and when someone tries to rescue them they ask, "Are you my new master? "
* sold by their parents for a hundred dollars in Sudan, they are put to work in the sex trade or at any other labor.
Armies in certain places in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America recruit children by force. In war, these little soldiers work by killing and above all by dying. They make up half the victims of recent African wars.
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.
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 Nino, 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."
excerpts from the book
Upside Down
a primer for the looking glass world
by Eduardo Galeano
Picador USA / Henry Holt, 2000, paper
