We may recall, in passing, that the main victims are indigenous people, who constitute over half the population. Their travail began long ago. "At no time before the [Spanish] conquest," Susanne Jonas writes, "did the Indians suffer the systematic material deprivation that has characterized Guatemala since 1524," and "although Bartolomé de Las Casas's figure of 4-5 million Indian deaths in Guatemala between 1524 and 1540 may be exaggerated, its thrust is accurate. An estimated two-thirds to six-sevenths of the Indian population in Central America and Mexico died between 1519 and 1650."²²

Child slavery has long been documented in the traditional service areas. India alone is reported to have some 14 million child laborers, aged six and up, many working under conditions of virtual slavery for up to 16 hours a day. As always, this is a reflection of general social conditions. A detailed study in a leading Indian journal of "one of South India's most fertile and productive regions" found "a story of narrowing options, desolation and despair -- and, increasingly, of death" from starvation and suicide, with at least 73 starvation deaths among weavers in two months of 1991. The deteriorating conditions result from the "frenzied export drive" and accompanying "strategy of taxing the poor and pampering the rich," policies to be accelerated under the IMF-designed structural adjustment policies for which India is now widely praised.²³

The situation in Thailand has long been notorious, condemned by international and Thai human rights groups while Thailand is hailed in the West as another "success story for capitalism." The Bangkok press alone offers harrowing testimony. Cambodia specialist Michael Vickery provides a recent sample, including the case of teenagers "freed...from a factory where they were allegedly detained for slave labour and tortured," tied up and beaten when they became too tired to work after 18-hour shifts; eighteen girls aged 12-14 rescued from a textile mill where they worked over 15 hours a day "for almost no pay"; teenagers fleeing from poverty in the Northeast dragooned into factories or forced into brothels for European and Japanese tourists. A leading Thai political scientist comments:

In Thailand, we occasionally hear stories about young children sold into bondage by their parents. These young indentured servants work under harsh conditions...and for many, the bondage will be renewed when the parents make out another loan from the employer. [Young girls] would be forced to work in a factory normally not registered with the Minister of Industry... as young as nine -- would be literally imprisoned by the boss for up to 12 hours a day...those who complained or attempted to escape would be harshly punished.

"Year after year, such incidents are revealed in the Thai press," Vickery observes, "and although the authorities express shock each time, no substantial reform ever results. This is because such atrocities, and we must call them by their true name, are systemic in the Thai type of capitalism" -- more generally, in the "economic miracles" that are the "success stories of capitalism." It is all more "irony," given the locus of the plague. Another "irony" is illustrated by Vickery's acid comment on the treatment of Cambodia and Vietnam, tortured and strangled by US-run economic warfare, in comparison to Thailand, a major aid recipient: "While Vietnamese farmers are getting greater control over land and its produce, Thai farmers are losing theirs and their children are forced into types of exploitation which have not been discovered in Vietnam since 1975, even by the most hostile observers."²⁴

Surveying the Latin American region in a Peruvian Church journal, Uruguayan journalist Samuel Blixen reports that in Guatemala City, the majority of the 5000 street children work as prostitutes. In September 1990, three bodies of children were found with their ears cut off and eyes gouged out, a warning about what would happen to witnesses of abuse of children by the security forces, formal or informal. In Peru, children are sold to the highest bidder to pan for gold; according to a young campesina who escaped, they work 18 hours a day in water up to their knees and are paid with a daily ration sufficient to keep them alive. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, some 100,000 children from 4 to 14 work 10- to 12-hour shifts for low wages, many of them victims of sexual abuse. "In Panama the Minors Protective Tribunal buildings were bombed during the 1989 US invasion, rendering work nearly impossible. Following the invasion the number of criminal gangs robbing stores in search of food increased," with about 45 percent of robberies attributed to children using stolen military weapons. UNICEF reports that 69 million children in Latin America survive by menial labor, robbing, running drugs, and prostitution. A study released by the health ministers of the Central American countries in November 1991 estimated that 120,000 children under five die annually in Central America from malnutrition (one million are born annually), and that two-thirds of the survivors suffer from malnutrition.

"Until recently," Blixen writes, "the image of the abandoned Latin American child was of a ragged child sleeping in a doorway. Today the image is of a body, lacerated and dumped in a city slum -- those who survive that far."²⁵

A leading Mexican journal reports a study by Victor Carlos García Moreno of the Institute for Law Research at the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), presented at a conference on "International Traffic in Children" in Mexico City. He found that about 20,000 children are sent illegally to the United States each year "for supplying illegal traffic in vital organs, for sexual exploitation, or for experimental tests." Mexico's leading daily, Excelsior, reports that "Another element of abuses against minors [in Guatemala] is the existence of various illegal `crib houses' responsible for the `fattening' of newborns who are sent out of the country for their organs to be sold in the United States and Europe." A Professor of Theology at the University of São Paulo (Brazil), Father Barruel, informed the UN that "75 percent of the corpses [of murdered children] reveal internal mutilation and the majority have their eyes removed." The President of the Episcopal Council of Latin America, Archbishop Lopez Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, stated in July 1991 that the Church "is investigating all the charges concerning sale of children for illegal adoption or organ transplant."

²² Jonas, Battle. David Santos, Excelsior, June 20, 1992 (CAN); CAR, Jan. 17, 1992; Florence Gardner, "Guatemala's Deadly Harvest," Multinational Monitor, Jan./Feb. 1991; Report from Guatemala, Spring 1992. On US government perspectives on Guatemalan democracy, see DD, chs.3.6, 8.3, 12.5.

²³ Edward Gargan, NYT, July 9, 1992. Frontline (India), Dec. 6, 1991.

²⁴ Vickery, "Cambodia After the `Peace'," ms. (Penang, Malaysia, Dec. 1991). See his Cambodia for comparative discussion of Cambodia and Thailand. For a small sample of the plague of child slavery, see TNCW, 202, 283.

²⁵ Blixen, op. cit.; Excelsior (Mexico), Nov. 5, 1991 (CAN ).