Bolivia: The Social Consequences of Debt
Dennis, Marie
Bolivia's vulnerability as a heavily indebted country has narrowed its opportunities to choose policy options that would improve the quality of life of its poorest and most vulnerable...
...while convincing millions of poor citizens it is their duty to pay off unjust debts by tax reform and export production...
...counternarcotics strategies...
...El Financiero, January 29, 1997...
...See Carl Jayarajah, William Branson and Binayak Sen (World Bank Operations Evaluation Study), Social Dimensions of Adjustment: World Bank Experience, 1980-93...
...Many stunos picking coca leaves in the Yungas Region of Bolivia...
...As a result, financial markets did not have adequate data to evaluate the true monetary situation of the country, a fact which contributed to speculation...
...n 1989, after four years of debt-driven austerity and economic reform, 54 Catholic missionaries working in Bolivia sent a letter to the U.S...
...Treasu and others call wl has happened th "Bolivian miracle Others who live a work close to th still-impoverishe, Bolivian majorit claim it is a humid and environment disaster...
...The least one can say is that Bolivia's vulnerability as a heavily indebted country has narrowed its opportunity to choose policy options that would improve the quality of life of its poorest and most vulnerable communities...
...Furthermore, debt relief "would release the productive potential of marginalized communities and help create a framework for more self-reliant growth...
...Reform must not increase the burden on the poorest members of society, but should maximize benefits and minimize costs for all categories of people living in poverty...
...All social service and health care expenditures were drastically cut...
...investment in human capital is being undermined by repayments on debts which are self-evidently unpayable...
...Between 1985 and 1989, about $900 million was paid out in debt service, an amount equal to about 40% of export earnings...
...sanitation was poor...
...Maternal mortality rates are comparably high at 650 per 100,000 live births...
...by 1992 the figure rose to 18% and now is approaching 30...
...The Siles government responded to the crisis by printing new money, and inflation skyrocketed to a rate of 23,500% a year-the highest in the world...
...The group writes: "To be just, economic reform measures must contribute to a social framework in which property ownership and use, productive activity and commerce occur at a level and in a manner suitable for meeting the basic needs of all, serving the common good, alleviating poverty and preserving the natural environment...
...While coca is a native plant traditionally used for medicinal and nutritional purposes in the Andean region, its rapid commercialization coincides with the increase of rural poverty and the disappearance of jobs in mines and factories...
...3 Since 1988, Bolivia has made a concerted effort to address its unbearable debt burden, reaching accords, for example, in 1988 and 1992 for commercial debt reduction of about $600 million...
...The drug-war "certification" process, used as leverage since 1986, threatens a loss of U.S...
...and Howard Handelman and Werner Baer, eds., Paying the Costs ofAusterity in Latin America (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989...
...According to a recent report, during 1996 this huge financial bailout cost Mexico the equivalent of 8.6% of total GNP, a sum greater than bank bailouts in any other country in recent years...
...Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) estimates that the 40,000 families engaged in coca farming in 1992 produced 80,300 metric tons of coca leaf...
...those missionaries -Id described the continued lack of con- ry sensus: "The parhat ties in government change but the poliie cies continue...
...4. UNDP, 1996 Human Development Report...
...Many other men in the barrio have made the same trip, a reality that has divided families and forced them into debt as they borrow money to finance the journey...
...Others who live and work close to the still-impoverished, mostly indigenous Bolivian majority claim it is a human and environmental disaster.1 2 The sparseness and unreliability of statistical data collected in the Bolivian countryside give considerable weight to firsthand reports from the lived experience of the largely rural population, which insist that life is not getting better...
...Shortages were widespread, international reserves were depleted and huge arrears in debt service owed to international creditors had accumulated...
...Between 1970 and 1981, through the regime of General Luis Garcia Meza, there were no unthwarted elections in Bolivia, no Congress and no free press to debate government planning or spending...
...Portfolio Investment in Latin America, 1900-1986 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987...
...Sixteen percent of all Bolivian children under five are malnourished...
...9 One of the roots of Bolivia's deep-seated structural poverty is the quality of and lack of access to education...
...She earns two bolivianos (about 40 cents) per skirt for a job that takes 12 hours of uninterrupted sewing...
...froze pub- lic-sector wages for for new loans to three months...
...Doctors, teachers, nurses and other civil servants were laid off as government services were cut or eliminated...
...Thousands of miners, oil workers and other professionals in nationalized state companies were fired to pave the way for privatization...
...Food and transportation subsidies were ended...
...an opportunity Subsequent marketoriented economic reto demand forms were designed to stimulate exports and Bolivian encourage foreign and local investment...
...Attention must be paid to the experience of a people who have suffered and waited long enough for the benefits of adjustment to come their way...
...14, July 21, 1997, pp...
...Again, William Cline, International Debt Reexamined is the basic source here...
...Letter from Rev...
...3. Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy...
...A detailed overview is found in Rosario Green, La deuda externa de Mexico, 1973-1987: De la abundancia a la escasez (Mexico City: Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores/Nueva Imagen, 1988...
...commercial bankers and government officials is found in Fernandez Sotelo, "El 6ltimo rescate," Tesis en ciencias y tecnicas de la informaci6n, Universidad Iberomericana, 1994...
...opposition to new loans from multilateral development banks and possible trade sanctions if Bolivia fails to comply or to meet eradication quotas...
...Bolivian economist Pablo Ramos notes that in 1989 Bolivia used 9.8% of the federal budget to service the public debt...
...6. The Development GAP, Structural Adjustment and the Spreading Crisis in Latin America, (Washington: The Development Gap, October 1995), p. 27...
...5 The coca-cocaine market has now become the key to the Bolivian economy...
...The U.S...
...39 39 VOL XXXI, No 3 Nov/DEC 1997REPORT ON THE DEBT According to a recent report of the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), between 1990 and 1995, 84 of every 100 new employees in Latin America worked in the informal sector...
...4, p.56 27...
...Six years after the missionaries' open letter to the U.S...
...Their job is to sell off the national assets (oil, gas, land, etc...
...Michael J. Gilgannon, a Kansas City missionary in La Paz, December 10, 1996...
...national savings and domestic investment have improved...
...and received reductions on terms from Argentina, Brazil, the former Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia totalling about $690 million...
...Clearly, the country's debt problems are enormous, and the burden weighs heavily on the shoulders of those who are poor...
...World trade, financial markets and aid or loans from international agencies are now totally interdependent," the missionaries wrote...
...7. Data from Jose Angel Gurria, La politica de la deuda externa (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1993), and Secretaria de Hacienda, Deuda externa p~blica mexicana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 1988), Final Appendix...
...It was only after the crisis in early 1996 that the Bank of Mexico published a detailed report on dollar reserves during the key year of 1994: see Banco de Mexico, Informe Anual 1995, March, 1996 19...
...d, The people are unprepared for what y has taken place without a real social an consensus...
...No apparent effort was made in the early days of adjustment to build a popular consensus around the shape or timing of reform...
...Conference of Bishops describing some of the worst effects of economic adjustment on the country's development process...
...and educational programs were seriously lacking...
...7, No...
...and introduced gave the "free contracting" to all firms, allowing manUnited States agement to hire and fire at will...
...9. Charles Lipson, Standing Guard: Protecting Foreign Capital in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Berkeley...
...74, No...
...9. Secretaria de Hacienda Deuda externa...
...The ,, last two years have "seen an avalanche nd of reforms that have completely changed e the face of Bolivia...
...6. Patricio Silva, "Technocrats and Politics in Chile: From the Chicago Boys to the CIEPLAN Monks," Journal of Latin American Studies, 23:2 (May, 1991), 385-410...
...The informal sector of the economy expanded and the coca-cocaine economy grew in significance...
...Oxfam International asserts that debt relief is a moral imperative in the face of the poverty and human suffering that cry out for carefully applied financial resources...
...Albert O. Hirschman, Journeys Toward Progress (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1965...
...In the early 1990s, the required involvement of the Bolivian military-not just civilian law enforcement agencies-in the drug war met with tremendous opposition in Bolivia, a country with a long and painful history of repression under military dictatorships...
...Forbes (June 1997) currently estimates Slim Helu's fortune at over $6 billion...
...Incredibly, until 1995, the Bank of Mexico only published reports of levels of hard curency reserves three times a year...
...During the first three years of the New Economic Plan, coca production in Bolivia expanded at an annual rate of 13%, faster than any other commercial crop in the country...
...See the articles by Martin Werner, Director of Public Credit of the Mexican government published in La Jornada, August 14 and 15, 1997...
...Alicia Salgado, "Subi6 a 212 mil millones el costo del recate bancario," El Financiero, January 28, 1997, p. 3. 23...
...and (Washington: World Bank, 1996), p. 195...
...Bolivians absorbed an across-the-board valueadded sales tax paid by rich and poor alike, as well as other tax reforms on income and property...
...William Weigand, Bishop of Salt Lake City, Chairperson, Subcommittee on Third World Debt, U.S...
...established NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON THE DEBT a single, flexible exThe country's need change rate...
...Robert Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America: The Supply Side of the Story (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989...
...The corner of a peasant home near the city of Cochabamba...
...From 1982 to 1985, the democratically elected government of Hernin Siles Zuazo sought to preserve social services and food subsidies rather than make payments on debt to foreign creditors...
...Eurodad Information Sheet No...
...9. See UNICEF, "The Progress of Nations," 1996 and "The State of the World's Children," 1996 and UNDP, 1994 Human Development Report, (New York: UNDP, 1994...
...20017...
...When President Jaime Paz Zamora met President Bush at the Cartagena drug summit in February, 1990, he pointed out that more than half his country's imports were financed by coca-cocaine traffic and that 70% of its GDP was cocaine related...
...If narcotics were to disappear overnight," says Flavio Machicado, a former finance minister, "we would have rampant unemployment...
...Tuberculosis, malaria and mal de Chagas were widespread...
...4, pp...
...dents repeat grades or drop out of school altogether...
...Only 55% of the people have access to safe water and only 67% to health services...
...6. During the 1970s, the important annual information resource of the World Bank, World Debt Tables, regularly underestimated the total growth of public and particularly private foreign debt of Latin American nations...
...5. Paul W. Drake, The Money Doctor in the Andes: The Kemmerer Missions, 1923-1933 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989...
...virtuby its foreign debt ally eliminated workers' benefits...
...6 The drug economy in Bolivia now employs about 500,000 people, about 20% of the workforce...
...There would be open protest and vio- Campesi, lence...
...In addition, Bolivian social indicators, which already were the worst in South America, continued to deteriorate...
...See article by Manuel Duran, "Alarma a inversionistas la deuda de Cemex," El Financiero, July 5, 1997, p.13...
...See the information in a careful study published in article by Roberto Gonzalez Amador in La Jornada, February 7, 1995, based on analysis of stock exchange and public debt transactions registered...
...In 1997 amortizations due on external debt in 1997 will surpass $40 billion, of which 60% is private debt: Banco Nacional de Mexico, Examen de la situacid6n econ6mica de Mexico (June, 1997) p. 240...
...The IMF reports that Bolivia is spending more now on health and education per capita than it was in 1985, though other sources note that Bolivia's per-capita public spending on health and education is a third lower today than in 1980.10 Most officials of the U.S...
...quasi-fiscal deficit and recapitalization of the central bank and the passage of investment laws that enabled joint ventures between private investors and public enterprises in the mining and hydrocarbon sectors...
...The election of Hugo Banzer to the presidency this past August offers a fitting backdrop to a discussion of the social consequences of Bolivia's debt, and illustrates the country's circuitous route to democracy and development...
...The high rates of economic return resulting from investment in improved health, education and sanitation are well established...
...Catherine M. Conaghan, "Reconsidering Jeffrey Sachs and the Bolivian Economic Experiment," in Drake, Money Doctors, 236-266...
...After processing, this amount of coca would have had a street value of $22.9 billion, over three times Bolivia's GDP for that year...
...The task of evaluating the social impact of Bolivia's debt burden over the past decade is difficult for a number of reasons...
...531.7 million was received in new credit...
...E Vol XXXI, No 3 Nov/DEc 199741 VOL XXXI, NO 3 Nov/DEC 1997 41REPORT ON THE DEBT The Vicious Cycles of Mexican Debt 1. The most penetrating analysis of the loan boom of the 1970s is still Jos6 Manuel Quijano et al, Finanzas, desarrollo economic y penetraci6n extranjera (Puebla: Universidad Aut6noma de Puebla, 1985...
...About 21% of the adult population is illiterate, although functional illiteracy may be as high as 55...
...4 The economic adjustment endured by the poorest of Bolivia's people cannot bear judgement by these criteria...
...Once the decision was made that payments on the debt were a priority, Bolivia's ability to eliminate the misery endured by so many of its people was seriously hampered...
...It should be underlined that the $13 billion credits extended to Mexico by the IMF between 1995 and 1996 were the largest in the history of that institution...
...8. Jeffrey D. Sachs, Developing Country Debt and Economic Performance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989...
...For example, Jorge Castafeda, The Mexican Shock (New York: The New Press, 1996...
...Inflation has stabilized at 8% or lower...
...Yet the macroeconomic indicators are impressive...
...International Monetary Fund, International Capital Markets, August, 1995, p. 53...
...These three policy goals, however, became the primary objectives of Bolivia's economic reform program, called the New Economic Policy, initiated by Paz Estenssoro under the guidance of the IME The New Economic Policy removed restrictions on imports and exports...
...8, July, 1995, p. 13...
...The indigenous population, especially the women, bear the brunt of the social burden...
...5. The details are in Quijano, Finanzas, pp...
...Every Bolivian now owes foreign creditors about $600-almost as much as the average Bolivian earns in an entire year...
...These participation included public enterprise restructuring, liberin U.S...
...The most detailed analysis of the origins and implementation of the Brady bonds can be found in William Cline, International Debt Reexamined (Washington: Institute for International Economics, 1995...
...93-94...
...She has Marie Dennis is Associate for Latin America, Maryknoll Society Justice and Peace Office, Washington D.C., and the chair of the Religious Working Group on the World Bank and IMFE been getting the same price for three years from a contractor in the informal sector and says that if she doesn't do the sewing, there are many others who are willing to take her place...
...Foreign Financial Advising, 1898-1929," Journal of American History 74 (June, 1987), 59-82...
...8. Secretaria de Hacienda Deuda externa...
...Thus the unending strikes and street battles in La Paz...
...74, No...
...In addition, the country has obtained debt relief stretching into 2004 of about $620 million through the Paris Club of bilateral creditors...
...A recent study on this new financial/industrial elite is that of Elvira Concheiro B6rquez, El gran acuerdo: gobierno y empresarios en la modernizacion salinista (Mexico City: UNAM/ERA, 1996...
...Yet...
...2. Quijano, Finanzas, p. 85...
...The changes he described have been significant, and the evaluation of all the reforms and adjustments differs dramatically from one account to another, from one perspective to another...
...The Mexican debt, however, was not linked to arms buying...
...2 (Bolivia), April 25, 1997, "Bolivia and the HIPC Initiative: Too Little, Too Late...
...According to Father Gregorio Iriarte, a Bolivian economist, nearly 72% of the loans made to Bolivia during the Banzer regime were redeposited in U.S...
...28-44...
...3 Beyond the negative consequence of resources diverted to service the debt-an estimated $350 to $400 million per year-the particular shape of Bolivia's economic reform program should be reexamined to determine whether the adjustments themselves are exacerbating poverty or precluding its resolution...
...These creditors, including the United States, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and commercial banks, reacted quickly, cutting Bolivia off from any new loans...
...BY MARIE DENNIS aria and Rodrigo P6rez live with their six chil- dren in two small rooms on the outskirts of Cochabamba, one of Bolivia's larger cities...
...only 37 37 VOL XXXI, No 3 Nov/DEC 1997REPORT ON THE DEBT 10% have access to drinking water in or near the house...
...26, No...
...By 1988, inflation was reduced to 20% and payments made on the public debt had accumulated to almost $5 billion...
...Only wealthy Mexicans could participate in this financial gambling since each tesobono cost $100,000...
...Meanwhile, overall poverty persists as a grave problem...
...and 93% lack any basic sanitation...
...Box 29132, Washington D.C...
...foreign assistance, U.S...
...Catholic Conference, July 25, 1989...
...After Venezuela, this informal sector is growing most rapidly in Bolivia, at 6.4% per year...
...School supplies are scarce or too expensive, and even modest fees preclude school attendance by the poorest children...
...gave state companies one month to pressure created present programs for downsizing staff...
...8. "Bolivia: Human Rights Violations and the War on Drugs," Human Rights Watch, Americas, Vol...
...banks, often in personal accounts, and never used to benefit the Bolivian people...
...Conference of Bishops, however, one of The IMF, the Wor Bank, U.S...
...In the country as a whole, according to recent World Bank reports, nearly 70% of the population lives beneath the poverty line...
...The Religious Working Group on the World Bank and IMF, of which the author is a member, has suggested some criteria for evaluating structural adjustment or economic reform programs...
...In 1985, the newly elected president, Victor Paz Estenssoro, inherited a rapidly deteriorating economy...
...3. See Robert Devlin, Debt and Crisis in Latin America: the Supply Side of the Story (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989...
...5. Presencia, La Paz, Bolivia, April 9, 1997...
...Bolivia: The Social Consequences of Debt 1. "A Profile of Latin America and the Caribbean," The State of World Rural Poverty, (Washington: IFAD, 1993...
...Although the infant mortality rate has significantly declined, at 74 per 1,000 live births, it is still nearly double the average for Latin America...
...7 In conflict with Bolivia's need for jobs and a lucrative export product, the country's need for new loans to alleviate the pressure created by its foreign debt gave the United States an opportunity to demand Bolivian participation in U.S...
...Rosemary Thorp and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Latin American Debt and the Adjustment Crisis (Hampshire: MacMillan/St...
...The new democracies of the 1980s in Latin America are bankruptcy referees...
...alization of the exchange and trade counternarcotics system, the closing of all state-owned banks, the elimination of the strategies...
...Maria sews pleats by hand on traditional indigenous skirts...
...An important economic analysis which proposes ways of getting out of the crisis is Macario Schettino, Para reconstruir Mexico, (Mexico City: Oceano, 1996...
...In its own debt sustainability analysis, the Bolivian government recently underscored the fact that despite repeated and successful attempts to reduce the debt burden, Bolivia's debt continues at high levels, limiting the country's growth and its ability to reduce poverty levels, especially in rural areas...
...Imperatives for Addressing Structural Adjustment and Economic Reform Measures," Religious Working Group on the World Bank and IMF, P.O...
...When 30% or more of export income is committed to servicing the debt, resources left to address issues of endemic poverty are desperately limited...
...IMF Survey, Vol...
...It must ensure that people struggling to overcome poverty have access to productive assets, benefit from public and private investment and are served by the generation of sustainable livelihoods...
...Latin Finance, March, 1997...
...Moises Naim, "Latin America the Morning After," Foreign Affairs, (July/August, 1995), Vol...
...3. Letter from missionaries to Most Rev...
...The Money Doctors 1. Riordan Roett, ed., The Mexican Peso Crisis: International Perspectives (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996...
...The debtor nations must export, according to the theory, so they deny workers' rights and urge labor unions and campesino organizations to keep production costs low...
...The fields and roads of their barrio, once part of a lush agricultural area, are perpetually dusty...
...Teach:al ers, farmers, business people, indigenous peoples, doctors, retired people, young people, all have been affected by changes they do not understand...
...and foreign direct investment has increased...
...In March commercial banks provided $5 billion to Mexico and in June the Paris Club advanced another $2 billion in the way of commercial credits...
...Anthony College, 1987...
...The IMF, the World Bank, U.S...
...228-229...
...Its military forces remained small...
...Few argued with international analysts who counseled that hyperinflation had to be arrested, but consensus did not exist about the desirability of opening the Bolivian economy to foreign investment or the need for Bolivia to earn sufficient foreign exchange to service its growing debt and appease angry creditors...
...4. Emily S. Rosenberg and Norman L. Rosenberg, "From Colonialism to Professionalism: The Public-Private Dynamic in U.S...
...7. Eva Bertram, Morris Blachman, Kenneth Sharpe and Peter Andreas, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.16...
...A Study in American Imperialism (New York: The Viking Press 1925...
...7. On the debt disaster of the 1980s, see Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, Latin American Debt (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988...
...By then, the gross domestic product (GDP) was contracting for the fifth consecutive year...
...2. The best sources on foreign investments in Latin America are provided by Carlos Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 18201930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), and Barbara Stallings, Banker to the Third World: U.S...
...To explore the 1930s debt debacle, see Rosemary Thorp, ed., Latin America in the 1930s: The Role of the Periphery in World Crisis (London: MacMillan 1984...
...The details are in the book written by the government functionary in charge of supervising the privatization process: Jacques Rogozinski, La privatizaci6n en Mexico (Mexico City: Trillas, 1997...
...In rural areas illiteracy is still predominant...
...The annual per-capita income is now about $770...
...A small stream carries a trickle of water and sewage through their community, which has no access to potable water, indoor plumbing or sewage facilities...
...To be just, economic reform measures must be accompanied by a definitive cancellation of the crushing international debt of poor countries...
...Jacques Rogozinski, La privatizacion en Mexico...
...A journalistic account of the 1987/88 negotiations between the Mexican negotiating team and the U.S...
...Oxfam International, "Multilateral debt: The Human Costs," (London) February 1996...
...8 The escalating social conflict and human rights violations resulting from this policy and its national implementation have been very serious...
...Lauchlin Currie, The Role of Economic Advisers in Developing Countries (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981...
...Malnutrition was rampant...
...Debt relief must not be rigidly conditioned on adjustment that further burdens people living in poverty, and it must be implemented in ways that primarily benefit the ordinary people who have borne the major burden of their countries' indebtedness...
...In his first term (1971-78), Banzer established a ruthless national-security state system under a brutal dictatorship...
...Despite these agreements, external public and publicly guaranteed debt burdens have remained high, ranging from over 100% of GDP at $5.57 billion in 1986 to 61% of GDP at $4.6 billion in 1996...
...In those years, Bolivia's debt mushroomed from $700 million in 1971 to almost $4 billion in 1981...
...An interesting critique of the Washington Consensus is found in Paul Krugman, "Dutch Tulips and Emerging Markets," Foreign Affairs (July-August, 1995), Vol...
...removed fixed prices for alleviate the most goods and ser- vices...
...A detailed analysis of the rescue package is in Carlos Marichal, "La devaluaci6n y la nueva crisis de la deuda externa mexicana: reflexiones y reomendaciones," Este Pals, (Mexico) June 1995, no...
...The infant and maternal mortality rates were very high...
...The work of street vendors and small neighborhood shopkeepers, money changers and dealers in contraband became central to popular economic life...
...Treasury and other international creditors and investors call what has happened the "Bolivian miracle...
...After 12 years of radical economic reform, social indicators like infant mortality, life expectancy, illiteracy and access to sanitation and safe water are considerably below the regional average...
...Treasury and the international financial institutions seem satisfied with the reality described by NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON THE DEBT these indicators and do not acknowledge a connection between poverty, unemployment, human rights violations, coca-cocaine traffic and the debt or shape of adjustment...
...For the poorest Bolivians, this was a frustrating and largely painful process...
...Last year Rodrigo, who has been unemployed for two years, went to Argentina on an unsuccessful search for work...
...real GDP growth is averaging 4...
...42 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASREPORT ON THE DEBT 2. "Curso-Taller de Informacion y Anglisis Sobre La Deuda Externa en Bolivia," Cochabamba, October 30-31, 1991...
...An August 1997 press report quotes Juan Antonio Morales, president of Bolivia's Central Bank, as tagging the country's total foreign debt in 1997 at $5.2 billion with projections of debt levels in that vicinity for at least the next three years...
...4. A third factor was the propensity of military governments-particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru-to take large loans for acquisition of huge amounts of sophisticated modern weaponry in the 1970s...
...procured cancellations of $372 million of debt from the United States, $31 million from Switzerland, $40 million from Germany, $17 million from Denmark, $10 million from Belgium and $1 million from Austria...
...Since 1980, unemployment and underemployment have increased, and by 1992, real earnings per employee had declined by .8%.4 "Occasional" and parttime work have become much more common...
...University of California Press, 1985...
...Bolivia's vulnerability as a heavily indebted country has narrowed its opportunities to choose policy options that would improve the quality of life of its poorest and most vulnerable communities...
...According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development, more than 90% of Bolivia's rural population lives in conditions of poverty-60% at a level of critical poverty.' In the highlands and inter-Andean valleys, only 7% of the dwellings have electricity...
...By 1988, according to CLAR, the Bolivian Conference of Catholic Religious, 25% of the Bolivian workforce was unemployed and 42% had moved into the informal sector...
...2 Debt has remained a problem for Bolivians ever since, despite repeated attempts to resolve it and despite over a decade of regular payments...
Vol. 31 • November 1997 • No. 3
