Another Miami Herald reporter surveys the "barren future" that "looms for Central America" as forests there and in Mexico vanish at a rate "faster than any other region on Earth except West Africa," perhaps to "disappear within our lifetime." The accelerating destruction is caused by poor farmers, lumbermen, and people seeking firewood, but "experts throughout the region blame rapid deforestation on unfair land distribution" throughout the region, including even Costa Rica, which "boasts one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world." Another major factor is the US-initiated counterinsurgency doctrine, with its emphasis on blasting people out of their homes and lands with massive firepower if they cannot be controlled. The Central American Committee on Water Resources warned that the ecological disaster is also severely diminishing water supply. "The main lagoons and rivers which supply water to the people are about to be destroyed by continuous deforestation in the region," one high official said after a July 1992 regional meeting, also "setting back the generation of electricity and possible economic growth in the region."

"The concentration of the best land into vast coffee, cotton and sugar estates owned by a small elite meant hundreds of thousands of peasants were forced to eke a living off steep, marginal land," Tom Gibb reports from El Salvador, where firewood may disappear in a decade and 90 percent of rivers are contaminated. The destruction might still be averted, but that would "require a change in the political atmosphere that has dominated El Salvador for decades: peasant farmers are afraid to organize and work in groups for fear of being labeled `subversive'."³⁰

To rephrase in more realistic terms, farmers are aware that efforts to organize will call forth another US-sponsored wave of torture and massacre to bar any interference with our high ideals of economic liberalism for the Third World.

A study of the Costa Rican economy by the Washington World Resources Institute and the Tropical Science Center in Costa Rica concludes that each year, 5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product "has vanished without a trace" and that depreciation of natural resources has robbed the country of almost 30 percent of its potential net growth over the past 20 years. A quarter of the estimated growth rate from 1970 through 1989 disappears when these factors are considered.³¹

These effects will only increase as neoliberal models are more firmly implanted. In Costa Rica, they were firmly in place by 1985, earlier in much of the region -- and in fact, they are only a variant of traditional US programs. After five years of IMF Fundamentalism in Costa Rica, the predicted growth had not occurred though the trade deficit grew substantially, fed primarily by imports from the US; the minimum wage had lost 25 percent of its buying power, with 37 percent of salaried workers paid below the legal minimum. Average family incomes declined by 10 percent through the 1980s, except for the top 5 percent, and buying power of workers continues its decline. The Ministry of Labor reported that under President Calderón's neoliberal rule, poverty had increased 18 percent in 1991 alone, leaving 35 percent of Costa Rican families unable to satisfy their most basic needs, a home census of the Ministry of Economy revealed. 1991 marks a sharp increase in the poverty rate, "a consequence of the kind of economic adjustment applied in recent years," a researcher added. "Representatives of the World Bank and USAID have showered the Calderón administration with praise for its economic program," CAR reports.³²

Costa Rica is the Central American exception, a special case. When we turn to the "Central American mode," the situation is vastly worse. In Honduras, IMF measures "have provoked mass unemployment [to two-thirds of the population] and skyrocketing inflation," with sharply rising prices for fuel, food, and medicine (CAR ). President Callejas concedes that these policies have had "a negative effect on the vast majority of the population"; but, CAR observes, he "is willing to pay this price, however, to satisfy international lenders and continue promoting a free market economy." Callejas and his associates, needless to add, are not those who "pay the price." In El Salvador, 90 percent of the population live in poverty and only 40 percent have steady employment. The 1990 structural adjustment program put 25,000 more out of work and substantially reduced exports, and despite increase in minimum salaries, "the price of the basic family basket far outstrips workers' income." Almost 80 percent of private bank loans go to large businesses; of agricultural loans, 60 percent went to coffee growers, 3 percent to small-scale basic grain producers. Reserves have risen, the Central Bank reports, but not because of the austerity measures; rather, as a result of the $700 million sent by Salvadorans abroad, many of them refugees fleeing the state terror of the past decade, which, in this way, did produce an "economic success story." Mass terror has declined, but terror continues at a low level. On July 31, 1992, a top leftist union leader, Ivan Ramírez, was murdered by unidentified gunmen in the style of the death squads. We turn to Nicaragua directly.³³

The effects of IMF Fundamentalism, now administered with renewed fervor, "have been catastrophic" in Central America, the Jesuit journal Envío reports. Inflation has increased. Fiscal deficits have not declined as anticipated, but GDP growth has stagnated since 1985 and declined since 1988. Real wages have substantially fallen almost everywhere in Latin America, and the distribution of income is becoming even more skewed than before. "The word `development' has disappeared from Latin America's economic vocabulary" -- though "profit" is on everyone's lips, for the foreigner and the domestic islands of privilege. The same can only be expected elsewhere. Discussing what lies ahead for India under IMF-designed restructuring, two economics professors at the Bombay Institute of Development Research review the consequences of such programs worldwide, drawing the "unambiguous" conclusion from "economic theory and the recent economic history of developing countries": the effects are "tremendous hardship for the poor and working people" and "great hardship on the economies of developing nations"; no less unambiguous are the benefits for the privileged sectors and their foreign associates, who call the tune.³⁴

³⁰ Tim Johnson, MH, June 14, 1992; Inter Press Service (IPS), July 31, 1992; Gibb, SFC, June 17, 1992 (CAN ).

³¹ Science, Dec. 20, 1991; Economist, Jan. 4, 1992.

³² CAR, June 14; Aug. 16, 1991; Aug. 21, 1992. IPS, San José, Feb. 23; Excelsior, July 31, 1992 (CAN ).

³³ CAR, Oct. 18, 1991; Reuters, SFC, Aug. 1, 1992 (CAN ).

³⁴ Envío (Managua), April 1991. Madhura Swaminathan and V.K. Ramachandran, Frontline (India), Dec. 6, 1991. See Herman, Real Terror Network, ch. 3, on the pre-1980 version.