NOVEMBER/DECEMBE R 199 8

Brazilian tribespeople are being threatened with extinction after mass sterilizations were performed

in exchange for votes in this month's general elections.

Roland Lavigne, a politician and doctor, cut the fallopian tubes of 63 women from the dwindling Pataxo Ha ha hae tribe himself.

Sterilization, which, for many of the Pataxo is their only available method of birth control, wins politicians between 7 and 25 votes per operation.

The local farmers, or fazendieros, who have been battling with tribespeople for many years over land, are equally happy about the sterilizations. Their disputes began in the fifties when the fazendieros started snatching land from the Pataxo's 50,000-hectare estate. The Pataxo people, who have been left with just 2,000 hectares, are fighting for the return of their land. When a tribal leader took the campaign to Brasilia, a group of youths attacked him at a bus stop, poured petrol over him and set him alight.

The Brazilian authorities are now investigating the barbaric electoral bribing system.

The scandal has already provoked international outrage. The Washingtonbased Centre for Justice and International Law is considering reporting Brazil to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

"This is genocide," states Roberto Liebgott, of the Missionary Council for Indigenous Affairs. "I t was a deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire tribe."

Liebgott believes Lavigne took advantage of the tribal women's misunderstandings as to the full effects of sterilization. The mass surgeries, which were performed on groups of 3-4 to a bed, have already caused medical complications.

Dr Lavigne is a member of the Right-wing Liberal Front, a party that is supported by many powerful land-owners in the north-east of Brazil.

For further information contact Richard Garside at Survival on survival®gn.apc.org , http://www.survial.org.uk/', 11-15 Emerald Street, London WC1N 3QL, UK. Tel +(0) 171 242 1441 Fax: + (0) 171 242 1771

Ill tbil e After the Second World War, Germany would only agree to spend 3.5 per cent of its export income on debt repayments. It argued that anything higher would be 'unsustainable'.

Today, the world's creditor nations, including Germany, are demanding that the world's poorest nations spend up to 25% of their export incomes on debt repayment.

The cost of this hypocrisy is devastating. Mozambique now spends $US 107 million every year servicing its debt - $US6.60 for every Mozambican child, man and woman. In contrast, the country spends only $US2 per person per year on health and $US4 on education. Similarly, Ghana spends

an average of US$4 per person a year on health. In 1996. debt service cost Ghana US$26 per person.

Zambia's infant mortality rate in 1970 was 106 per 1,000 live births. In 1996 it had worsened to 112 per 1,000. Since 1990 the country has paid a total of $US4.8 billion in debt service - about one and a half times its total annual economic output.

International loans have become the instruments of neo-slavery. The response from the West is that the debts are legally binding, and that debtor countries have a duty to pay.

But is this fair? During the 1980s President Mobutu of Zaire received $US8.5 billion in secret loans from Western institutions that knew that the loans were being corruptly diverted. Under what duty are the people of Zaire obliged to repay this debt?

And what about South Africa? The country is labouring under a $US70 billion debt. Interest payments alone are the second highest expenditure after education. To what extent are black South Africans obliged to repay the loans of an oppressive regime they could not elect?

While the world's debtor nations stagger under the weight of crippling debts, creditor nations pretend to help.

Under their Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) Initiative, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund wil l partly clear a country's debt i f the nation agrees to undergo a six-year period of IMF-supervised 'structural adjustment'. Such Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) require the debtor country to liberalize their markets and discard 'luxuries' such as statefunded education.

Yet, liberalization of a fragile economy provides open access for exploitative investors and currency speculators, as well as the destabilizing impact of vagaries in the global market.

And for many debtor countries, debt cancellation makes little difference anyway. In Mozambique, for example, the HIPC programme cleared a $1.4 billion debt. But Mozambique would never have been able to repay this amount. As Joseph Hanlon from the debt relief campaign Jubilee 2000 argued, "Mozambique would have had more chance of sending a football team to France for the World Cup than paying those debts." So even after this 'debt relief, Mozambique wil l continue to spend as much on debt service as on health and education combined.

The inadequacy of HIPC is part of the reason why Jubilee 2000, the international campaign for a one-off cancellation of Third World debt, is gathering strength.

I f you would like to support this campaign, email the 'Guardian' on http://reports.guardian.co.uk/debt/petition.html

Alternatively, contact Dr.Lynette J. Dumble, Co-ordinator, Global Sisterhood Network, Senior Research Fellow, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic , 3052, Australia http://www.onelist.com/suscribe.cgi/globalsisterhood

Email: globalsisterhood@onelist.com

For more information contact Mathew Townsend on mdt@ozemail.com.au

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INFORMATION ~ 1

fFFLWlNT INFORMATION 1%H] I 1 •

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In Brief is compiled by Lucinda Labes at The Ecologist, Unit 18, Chelsea Wharf, 15 Lotts Road, SW10 OQJ

tel: 0171 351 3578 fax: 0171 351 3617 email:lucinda@labes.demon.co.uk

The Ecologist - In Brief, Vol. 28, No 6, November/December 1998