Civil Society, Development & Aid, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Population, Poverty & SDGs

SOUTH AMERICA: Call Against Poverty Takes Aim at Inequality

Fabiana Frayssinet*

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 15 2007 (IPS) - More than two years after the launch of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), social movements in South America are putting the accent on the fight against social inequality and criticism of the neoliberal economic model, which they see as hindering development.

GCAP was born as a one-year campaign in the World Social Forum 2005, held in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

But it is now a growing alliance of hundreds of trade unions, community, women and youth organisations, faith groups, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other campaigners working together through national platforms to eradicate poverty and inequality.

Organisations and movements in more than 100 countries are involved in the national campaigns that form part of the Global Call, working in a broad range of sectors, including human rights, the environment, social and economic development, democracy-building, gender equality and poverty eradication.

The campaign is encouraging governments to meet their international commitments to fight the poverty in which more than one billion people in the world today are steeped.

On the initiative of organisations from Latin America and the Caribbean, the current campaign incorporated the phrase “Alliance for Equality”, which is “as important for this region as the fight against poverty,” Jair Barbosa Jr., with the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies (INESC), which is involved in the coordination of the Brazilian national GCAP coalition, told IPS.

Brazil has the most unequal distribution of income and wealth in Latin America – which is itself the region in the world with the most unequal distribution of wealth.

Another face of inequality in the region is discrimination against women, homosexuals, blacks and indigenous people.

“We have finally made the link between the issues of poverty and social inequality,” said INESC’s Iara Pietricovsky. “Although the two go hand in hand, inequality has a greater impact than poverty in terms of destroying the social fabric.”

The GCAP campaign in Brazil has focused this year on gender questions, “because poverty in Brazil has a female face,” said Barbosa. Around 65 percent of the poor and 70 percent of illiterate people in Brazil are women.

This year Brazil announced that it had met the first of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the members of the United Nations in 2000: to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, from 1990 levels, by 2015.

According to official figures, between 1990 and 2005, the number of people living on less than a dollar a day was reduced by 52 percent.

Although Pietricovsky acknowledged that the poverty rate had shrunk, she stressed that “the authorities are still in debt in terms of effectively combating inequality.”

One hurdle to achieving greater mobilisation around the GCAP goals, said Barbosa, is that it is difficult to group all of the struggles of social movements “under the umbrella of the fight to eradicate poverty.”

In Argentina, Jorge Carpio of the Citizen Forum of Participation for Justice and Human Rights, which is coordinating the GCAP efforts in that country, lamented that the campaign for the Oct. 28 presidential elections “has overshadowed the debate instead of giving it greater visibility.”

But although the GCAP campaign did not achieve “all that was necessary,” said Carpio, he pointed out that the National Forum Against Poverty, made up of 17 leading cultural and religious personalities, as well as prominent human rights activists, helped civil society take up the issue.

Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics and Census reported that 23.4 percent of the population of 37 million is currently living below the poverty line, and 8.2 percent in extreme poverty.

In Peru, where 44.5 percent of the population of 28 million lives in poverty and 16 percent in extreme poverty, according to official figures, the GCAP campaign has taken a more political focus.

Activists in Peru have taken part in demonstrations demanding a modification in the neoliberal economic policies that began to be adopted during the term of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) and have continued to be followed by President Alan García, who took office in July 2006.

“The government’s policies have led to a concentration of wealth and have generated poverty in the form of a lack of decent jobs, large numbers of lay-offs, low wages and the impoverishment of schools, hospitals and other social services, and this will continue to occur until the economic model is modified,” the coordinator of GCAP in Peru, Héctor Béjar, told IPS.

Ttrade unions, social organisations and political groupings in Peru have formed a committee with a common platform, demanding changes in government policies, and they have been joined by the members of the local chapter of GCAP.

Teachers, construction workers and miners voiced their protests and demands in a huge demonstration on Jun. 11, and are planning a new mobilisation on Nov. 9.

“We have no hope that the government and the elites will change of their own free will. That is why we are joining these demonstrations,” said Béjar.

In Chile, GCAP activities are being coordinated by the Chilean Association of NGOs (ACCION) and the Council of All Lands, a Mapuche Indian organisation lead by Aucán Huilcamán.

A socioeconomic survey carried out by the government in 2006 found that 13.7 percent of Chile’s 16.5 million people are poor and 3.2 percent live in extreme poverty.

The president of ACCION, Miguel Santibáñez, told IPS that the weaker impact achieved in this region by the global campaign is explained by the different focus on poverty taken by NGOs in rich and poor countries.

In Latin America, he said, the struggle against poverty is “institutionalised” and the focus is on concrete problems like pensions, health care, housing, education, labour rights or the environmental damages caused by mining and oil companies.

That approach, based on steady, well-focused efforts, means the mobilisation is less hurried, said Santibáñez, who added that NGOs in Europe and other regions tackle poverty as a generic issue, without breaking it down into more specific areas, which makes a massive response easier to bring about.

Last year, the Chilean chapter of GCAP organised a seminar on innovative development financing mechanisms, whose significance lay in the fact that it “made the issue of poverty public for the first time in this country,” said Santibáñez.

In civil war-torn Colombia, 49 percent of the population of 43 million is poor, according to official figures, although unofficial estimates put the proportion at 66 percent.

Several demonstrations have been held in Colombia, including a protest against the cut-off of public services for households unable to afford to pay their bills in poor neighbourhoods in the western city of Medellín, where around 14,000 people took to the streets under the theme “We Either Eat or Pay Our Bills”.

In that city of two million, “some 80,000 families are without water, electricity, telephone services or (heating and cooking) gas, cut off by one of the most profitable companies in Latin America,” Alberto Yepes, coordinator of the “Colombia Without Poverty” campaign, told IPS.

On Wednesday, Oct. 17, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, activists in South America – with the exception of Peru – will not hold demonstrations, but instead will organise activities focused on reflection, analysis and debate.

In Brazil, a seminar will be held in the city of Fortaleza to discuss the relationship between poverty, inequality and gender.

In Argentina, the main activities will take place in schools in La Matanza, a working-class neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, with the participation of teachers and school authorities. Academics and representatives of civil society will also hold a debate in Congress and a rally in the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the seat of government.

GCAP Peru will present a report to Congress on progress made towards compliance with the MDGs on Wednesday. The document will also be submitted to government officials.

In addition, a protest will be held outside the Ministry of Women and Social Development, which is in charge of most of the government’s anti-poverty initiatives, deemed ineffective by activists.

In Chile, a walk against poverty will take place in downtown Santiago, and ACCION will hold a seminar on Oct. 23 on “Social Cohesion, Inequality and Democracy”.

About 30,000 students from 25 schools in Colombia will take part Wednesday in a day of reflection on poverty in Colombia and the world. And on Tuesday, Oct. 16, World Food Day, some 400 small farmers will sell their products at stands in a park in the centre of Bogota.

“We will call attention to the importance of food security, which is increasingly being undermined by the use of productive areas for growing crops to produce biofuels,” said Yepes.

* With additional reporting by Daniela Estrada in Santiago, Helda Martínez in Bogota, Milagros Salazar in Lima and Marcela Valente in Buenos Aires.