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Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean. The Chavez government has reduced poverty by half and extreme poverty by over 70%! And they have vastly improved access to health care and to educational opportunities. (College enrollment has doubled under the Chavez government, for instance.) Let's name names, shall we? The Chavez government is largely responsible for turning this region around on poverty.
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"...in a region which has made significant strides in reducing poverty."
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"Latin America and the Caribbean remains the most socially unequal region in the world, the head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said on Friday, highlighting the measures required to tackle the problem in a region which has made significant strides in reducing poverty".
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Those strides have been ENTIRELY due to LEFTIST government--to the LEFT winning elections in the huge leftist democracy movement that has swept the region, led by Venezuela, the pioneer in throwing off U.S. corporate/war profiteer domination and interference, the pioneer in rejecting U.S. "neo-liberal"/IMF/World Bank policies (the rich get richer), and the pioneer in the "raise all boats" philosophy of the Chavez government, later joined by Brazil and most of the region. First Venezuela--with the Venezuelan people themselves turning back the U.S.-instigated coup against their elected government--and the Chavez government, against all odds, then implementing a "New Deal" for Venezuelans. This was quickly followed by leftist victories in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Paraguay, and, in Central America, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras (until the U.S.-supported rightwing coup in Honduras in 2009).
These LEFTIST governments are dramatically changing the economic/political landscape of Latin America. They are united on issues of social justice and independence of the region. And their anti-"neo-liberal" views on regulation of the banksters, for instance, are why this region actually landed on its feet in the Bushwhack-induced Depression that spread round the world.
The countries that continue to suffer the worst poverty in Latin America are the ones still under U.S. hegemony (the rich get richer), Colombia being the prime example, which has the one of the worst rich/poor discrepancies in the region.
This article is very low on details and high in bureaucratic "development" gobble-de-gook, but one detail it does mention is "insecure property rights." What it doesn't say is that, in Colombia, in addition to the MURDER of thousands of advocates of the poor--trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers and others--FIVE MILLION peasant farmers have been displaced from their lands--THE worst human displacement crisis on the earth--with the lands given to the rich, to rightwing political cronies, to death squad members and to drug dealers. This horror was funded by $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid and U.S. support and encouragement. The object was to create a "free trade zone" for U.S.-based transglobal corporations and a Pentagon "forward operating location" for controlling the region.
So one sure way to REDUCE poverty in Latin America is for the U.S. to get the fuck out.
Helen Clark is a popular former PM of New Zealand. But interestingly the photo at her wiki site shows her with Paul Wolfowitz. She supported the Bushwhacks' "war on terra" and sent NZ troops to Afghanistan, which, after the Iraq War, is one the worst U.S. abominations in the world. She is now the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). I don't know if she's masking good intentions or bad intentions in her meaningless language as reported in this article. And I don't know the relationship between her and/or the UNDP with the World Bank/IMF (which Wolfowitz headed for the forces of darkness). But frankly I wonder what she's up to, in statements like this:
"Miss Clark stressed that countries in the region needed to address inequality through specific public policy instruments, rather than treat it as a by-product of successful poverty reduction programmes."
Is this just poor reporting or is it something else? I really don't know. The "it" in the latter part of the sentence turns the sentence into mush. So it's hard to even know what the sentence is saying. (Someone is treating "inequality" as "a by-product of successful poverty reduction programmes"??) But the rest of the article isn't much better. WHAT is she saying? To WHOM? What does she mean by "specific policy instruments"? What does she mean by anything?
The CREDIT for reducing poverty in Latin America belongs entirely to the LEFT, with Venezuela in the lead. It is premised, for one thing, on anti-U.S. corporate policies, such as the use and control of Latin American resources--oil, for instance--for the benefit of the people who live there. As a supporter of the war on Afghanistan, Clark has bought into the U.S. corporate/war profiteer agenda of grabbing control of countries, of pipeline corridors, of oil and other resources, for the benefit of the rich and the corporate. So I suspect such an agenda in her blather (as reported) about "policy instruments" and "by-products."
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