LES PAQUIN TROUBLED COMMUNITY STRUGGLES
By Rev. Les Paquin
Take action to protest injustices Marcelo de Barros Souza, a Brazilian Benedictine, has co-authored with the Jesuit, José Caravias, a book called Theology of Landholding. The problem of a few owning large tracts and the workers, the many, owning nothing is, of course, age-old. But the stranglehold that the giant agricultural corporations are obtaining in country after country on the planet is doubling and trebling the problem.
Citing Roy May's work The Poor of the Earth (1986) they write: "The growing number of landless workers provides a permanent pool of cheap labour, easily exploited, reduced to subsistence level. . . . It is truly slavery. "If they flee to the city, they find themselves heaped up in slums, their traditions and culture rapidly washing away, becoming in the end individualists competing with each other for the chance at a day's work for a mere pittance. Co-operation goes out the window immediately, and learning from the slums' 'survivors' they deliver themselves to the politicos for handouts at election time."
When the Romans lost their sense of citizenship the imperial masters knew what to do: buy them with bread and numb them with brutal fighting in the circuses. Carnival and futebol are the Brazilian circuses, but the handouts at election time can hardly serve as "bread." The children of the expelled, already a generation removed from life in the country, grow up totally bereft of culture, of moral values. "The peasant migration to city slums," assert Barros and Caravias, "is the rotten vomit of capitalism's 'beautiful' agrarian policies."
I will be visiting Alagoas again in January 2001 with eight companions, including George Bunz, president of the non-governmental organization, Rainbow of Hope for Children. We will be visiting our friends, of course, but we will also be visiting all current development projects with the rural landless, the urban homeless and their predictable offspring: street children. Readers of this column will remember my reporting the murder of Quirino, "the Coconut Thief," in October. Now, it will be all too easy to write him off for not having overcome his street vices, but before we do that let us consider: -- have we ever protested the peasants' lack of access to land? -- have we, Americans and Canadians, written to our governments asking for greater fairness in our trade and financial policies toward Latin America? -- to be more concrete, if you the reader are American, did you ever revolt against United Fruit's takeover of Guatemala? of Hershey Chocolate's hold on the cane plantations of Cuba? of Coca Cola's tentacles everywhere? -- if you are Canadian, have you written to Talisman, the Calgary petroleum power, about its fuelling of the genocide in Sudan (Talisman claims that such use of revenues it generates for the Sudanese government is none of Talisman's business)? I think we are all arraigned at Quirino's grave.
Our complacent consumerism, our active support of capitalism even now that it has revealed its brutal visage, must lead us all to say, "Mea culpa -- mea maxima culpa." (Ps 69).