Message-ID: <19960419141944882.AAA76@tamanini> Date: Fri, 19 Apr 1996 14:19:46 +0000 From: Joaquim Moura <mailto:joaquim.moura@PERSOCOM.COM.BR> Subject: Massacre and development To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Dear FriendsI know, yesterday we had a massacre in Egipt and another in Lebanon... Of course all those deaths of innocent people are absurd evidences of cruelty and lack of love, of empathy, of wisdom, of generosity, of grandeur, coming from supposed to be leaders of religious groups.
But what happened yesterday in Brazil has some peculiarities that make the massacre of at least 25 landless workers by the Military Police of the Brazilian state of Para' another example of cruelty, injustice and cowardice very typical of "our" culture. In Egipt and in Lebanon, the killers were not from the same country as the victims. And the killers were not from the Police, paid and armed by the population. And the victims were not so poor, so poor, so isolated from all support, lost in the middle of the Amazon region, living in canvas and plastic film tents, no electric light, just difficulties as we can hardly imagine. I saw the photographies: all those thin, old and miserable bodies, shot in their heads and breasts by heavy weapons even after being surrended and arrested.
The Agrarian Reform is the only possibility to change the social and environmental future of Brazil. But the government of our sociologist PhD President is concerned just with the neoliberalist reforms of the state (to make it smaller and weaker), of the welfare system (to make it more distant of the population) and of the financial system (to make it more affluent). But all these reforms are just palliative, and not able to promote changing at the population livehood level. Meanwhile, the income and wealthy concentration in Brazil, already the worst in the world, is becoming even more accute...
Two other incredible facts: 1. More two deaths of kidney ill people, hemodialisis patients at the same Institute of Kidney Health - the deaths sums now 42 (almost every day, one or two more people die). This is another consequence of the neoliberalist deregulation of the health system... The health system that the population can reach has being depleted since the last decade, when the neoliberalism started to raise in Brazil. Now just the rich have access to regular (or high) quality medical (paid) care in Brazil. Most people just must die in the miserable public hospitals, assisted by doctors who earn wages increasingly worse. 2. During the Seminar on Child and Adolescent Prostitution in the Americas, which is happening this week in Brasilia, we learned from the UN researches, that there are 2 million infant prostitutes in the world, and that 500 thousands are Brazilian children...
I am telling these facts not to blame this huge country, or beg your pardon, pity or money, but just to inform you about our present situation that menaces to become a worldwide situation, as the neoliberalism grows everywhere, and money for development projects becomes more and more scarce (where has all the money gone?). And let me tell you again: if you don't help us to change Brazil, soon you will be changed by the same forces that are active here through the last five centuries but that, now, we can see them spreading all around the world...
Take a good look at a world map and you will perceive that if we want be strategical, we must gather forces to change the biggest and unfairest poor country of this planet. And Brazil has some cultural elements which could be a gift for the humankind, but they are vanishing by the commercial culture (which comes from the USA) and being substituted by the imbecilization of the youth and of the population. Does this look familiar also to you? Please, tell us what you could do to revert this globalized trend.