Latin America

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Mr. Blizzard). He is chair of the all-party Latin America group; I am one of its vice-chairs and a member of a number of other groups on Latin American countries. In those groups, we have had many learned discussions about the need for debates on Latin America, and everybody at the meetings says that it is a terribly good idea, but unfortunately they have not been able to carry it into practice by actually turning up for this debate. That is a matter of deep regret, but I am sure that they are all busy dealing with park benches in the local election campaign. It is excellent that we are having this debate, which we have to put in the context of the incredible poverty that still exists in Latin America. The business pages often learnedly refer to Latin America as being made up of middle-income countries. Indeed, when arriving at any Latin American capital city, one finds a very European feel about their centres and business districts. The languages spoken are European, the businesses are often owned by European or north American companies, and there are high standards of living. However, we do not have to travel far outside those capital cities to see the poverty, the discrimination behind it and the sense of social dislocation that it brings. My hon. Friend referred to the election of Evo Morales as President of Bolivia, which is significant because he is one of the first leaders to be elected in the region who is not of European descent and whose first language is not European. He represents an interesting and powerful social phenomenon throughout Latin America. There is terrible poverty throughout the region: 26 per cent. of the 524 million population of Latin America and the Caribbean live on less than $2 a day; in other words, 132 million people there live in desperate poverty. Haiti, and now Nicaragua, are the poorest countries in the region. Some 80 per cent. of Nicaragua's population of 5 million live on less than $2 a day, so there is massive poverty. Even in Brazil, which has one of the highest per capita incomes in the region, 24 per cent. of the population live on less than $2 a day. Those levels of poverty are a disgrace in every sense and completely unnecessary. They lead to violence, crime, drug dealing and social dislocation and we have to address those issues. Perhaps, as the DFID programme suggests, we should tackle Latin American poverty differently from African or Asian poverty, but nevertheless it has to be addressed. I have had the good fortune to have visited many countries in Latin America. I have seen that poverty for myself. I have never forgotten arriving in Bolivia in 1969, and finding people wearing bowler hats and chewing coca leaves. The experience was extraordinary—I thought it an extraordinary place—but I have also never forgotten the unbelievable poverty that existed then, and still exists, in the mountain villages and towns. One does not have to go far—to Potosi, for example, where the Spanish made billions from the silver, or to the tin mining areas where British companies made billions—to understand the passion of Bolivian people when they say, ““We lost our silver to the Spanish and our tin to the British and others; we're not going to lose our gas and oil in the same way.”” We have to understand that important message. I have not understood all the details of the statement issued by President Morales last night about taking over the gas and oil fields, but essentially he is ensuring that Bolivia gets at the very least a far higher proportion of the revenue from its gas and oil than hitherto. He is fulfilling an election pledge, which was to take the resources as a whole into public ownership. The statement was met immediately with large demonstrations on the streets of La Paz in support. We have to remember that the radical tradition in Latin America is a very strong one. The issues also relate to land ownership and access to land. Early this year, I visited Guatemala. I was travelling by bus, and the main road to Guatemala City from the Mexican border was closed for about a week, with gaps on and off when it was opened, because of a peasant demonstration about land ownership which had occupied the main highway. The reaction of the travellers on the bus and at the bus station was interesting. They were all greatly inconvenienced, because they had to wait 24, 36 or 48 hours to travel, but they showed great sympathy for the peasants who had occupied the road to stop the traffic going through. Guatemala has come through the most horrific civil war. In its aftermath, the levels of crime are unbelievably high, as many demobilised fighters from both sides have kept their weapons and turned to crime instead. That brings up questions about structures of government, human rights and all the accompanying issues in the region. Some countries have changed dramatically and have overcome the worst vestiges of poverty in many ways. The most obvious example is Cuba, which from a position of enormous poverty in the 1950s and 1960s, has achieved possibly the region's highest standard of living, and certainly the highest standards of literacy, access to higher education and health care, to the extent that it is now a major resource of health care throughout the region. Indeed, many of the health improvements in Venezuela, Bolivia and Peru have come from having Cuban doctors in those countries. I understand that the Government and many others are not totally at one with the Cuban political system, but they should understand the incredible achievements that have been made in Cuba and the esteem in which it is held by many of the region's poorest people. The improvements that are now taking place in Venezuela, and the support that exists for Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian revolution should be put in the historical context. In a sense, it represents the unfinished business of the independence movement of the 1820s against the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Independence was gained, but it was largely grabbed by the landowning classes rather than the peasants. Chavez sees himself as carrying through the Bolivarian revolution. We must understand the historical context if we are to understand the present situation. The political change to which my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney referred is not a unified continuum throughout the region, but a huge swathe of political change has happened throughout Latin America. There was a period of considerable radicalism in the 1960s and early 1970s, when several countries elected moderately radical Governments or very radical Governments committed to land reform and change. There was then the nightmare period when the military took over in a large number of countries, famously in Chile and Argentina, but they were certainly very powerful in many other countries too. The imposition of a crude form of market economics by the United States throughout the region led to the debt revolt of the 1980s and to arguments about debt forgiveness and debt write-off well in advance of what happened anywhere else. Those issues must be borne in mind. The radical movements that are now happening—the election of Chavez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia, the current Peruvian elections and the welcome election of Michelle Bachelet as President of Chile—show that change is possible. Having visited Chile many times, I know that the idea of a single mother being elected President of Chile would have been unbelievable until recently. I congratulate her and what we hope will be her successful programme for poverty eradication and the improvement of social care and social issues there. How we treat Latin America is important. Before I make a couple of comments about DFID's strategy and programme, I should say that we must remember that the continent came out of, and led the way against, European imperialism in the 19th century. The Monroe doctrine ensured that the United States guaranteed enormous power for itself throughout the region. The US has attempted to impose various trade deals throughout Latin America, which famously exploded at the Buenos Aires trade conference last year. Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba are pushing for a Latin American internal trade deal that has poverty reduction and education improvement targets within it , which is unusual for any kind of trade-oriented pact. The wish of the United States for a very different kind of trade pact is currently supported mainly by Colombia and by President Fox of Mexico, but I suspect that should Mr. López Obrador succeed in winning the Mexican elections later this year—I hope he does—there will be a change of approach there. It is important to put things in that context. The influence in the region now is not the United States or Europe; the huge investment that is currently going into Latin America is Chinese. I was at a lecture last week at Canning house that detailed the levels of investment that the Chinese are putting in to each country, most of which is in the form of soft loans tied to the sale of natural resources and to the import of Chinese goods into the continent, including the massive infrastructure projects—new ports, railways and roads—to which my hon. Friend referred. That is currently the biggest influence in Latin America. The Chinese strategy appears radically different from the US strategies of the past, which have always been to encourage the involvement of private sector companies—mainly American—and an obsessive meddling in local politics; the US cannot help itself when it comes to meddling in local politics. The Chinese approach is very different: it is blunt, crude, straightforward economic dealing. The Chinese keep well out of any local political movements or developments. That will be the feature of Latin America in the next few years. I read the interesting DFID strategy document last night and re-examined it this morning. The issues that it highlights concerning AIDS, human rights, poverty reduction and education are good. The first issue to examine is that of human rights and governance. The problems encountered in the region often involve human rights abuses, illegal imprisonment and the wholesale murder of people on the streets. I mentioned Chile, where under Pinochet at least 7,000 people perished. Proportionally speaking, a similar number perished in Argentina, although the actual number was much greater, and similar things occurred in many other countries in the region. I also mentioned what happened in Guatemala during its civil war and what continues to happen: illegal killings, gang warfare and the like. Mexico is certainly not the region's poorest county, but its level of human rights abuses and discrimination against the non-Spanish-speaking people, the deaths of women in Ciudad Juárez on the border, and the drug rackets and all the other things that feed that are extremely serious. Whatever efforts we can make in respect of supporting human rights organisations and a system of legal processes that is independent of the political process are important and welcome. I certainly welcome that section of DFID's strategy document for the region. We must examine Britain's relations with the region, first in terms of its politics and what we are doing. I welcome DFID's strategy document in that sense, but I question how it sits with our closing embassies and British Council and DFID offices in the region. Do we expect to have any influence from this country or from the European Union? The presence of a British embassy in a country indicates that we are serious about relations with it. To close an embassy and tell people that the nearest one is in the neighbouring country or in the next but one, and is several hundred or several thousand miles away—making such a journey is extremely difficult for most people—does not create a good image. I hope that the Minister will be able to offer some good news on that front. The British aid programme is quite small in the context of the region as a whole. The bilateral aid system, with European and UN money going in, is important, but we must remember that the levels of poverty and discrimination, and the lack of education are a product of the historic injustices in the region, and the thirst for change is strong. I cited Cuba earlier, and we should note that the support that Chavez has in Venezuela is partly because he is seen as somebody who is outside the traditional political system in the country—and he certainly is that—and partly because his Government are seen to be trying to do something in terms of delivering health care, education and housing for the poorest people in the country. Such is the thirst for change in the region. Conquering poverty in the region comes, yes, from assistance and from fair trade arrangements, but it also comes from the significant political change that is happening throughout the region. Latin America has an incredible past in terms of its civilisations and the history that comes from them. It is a past that is understood in a popular sense. Museums in the United States talk about conquering the west, and European expansion and settlement. Museums in Mexico or any other Latin American country talk about the glory that was destroyed by the Spanish invasion and the attempt to write it out of history. The image of how Latin American civilisations were damaged by Europe is still very powerful, and it has become a powerful political force in the countries that I have mentioned. This debate is about British strategy in respect of Latin America. We must do all we can to support good governance, decent human rights organisations, campaigns to improve the position and rights of women, and above all the campaign for the rights of indigenous people in multilingual societies throughout Latin America. We must understand all those matters. The dominant themes of the region are its huge natural resources, its amazingly efficient farming in very difficult circumstances and its astonishing cultural diversity. Our country has made a great deal of money over the centuries from trade with Latin America. It is now up to us to trade honourably with Latin America and to support it in getting decent and fair trade arrangements with the rest of the world.