The Clinton administration has been bragging about the extra $580 million in premium profits that the U.S. rulers extracted through the recent "bailout" of the Mexican peso. Meanwhile Mexico's foreign debt stood at $98 billion last year - 38 percent of the country's gross domestic product - and working people faced growing unemployment, a cap on wage increases well below the inflation rate, and skyrocketing sales taxes and other fees that hit the toilers hardest.

The situation in Mexico is by no means unique. The conditions there are part of the long-term debt slavery imposed on peoples throughout Latin America, Asia, and Africa as a mechanism to transfer massive wealth from the labor of workers and peasants in the region to the coffers of the capitalists in New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, and other imperialist centers. The debt crisis exploded in the 1980s. Lacking sufficiently profitable ways to invest money capital in the expansion of industrial capacity, the imperialist rulers foisted gigantic loans onto governments and groups of capitalists in the semicolonial countries at exorbitant rates.

For bankers and other financiers, debts are assets, not problems as they are for most workers. They take the form of paper used as contracts for superexploitation. They register the social relationship between the exploiting families of finance capital and their states on one side, backed by the imperialist armed forces, and the capitalists and governments of the oppressed countries on the other.

As the interest due mounts - quickly outstripping the principal - the imperialists bring their enormous economic and military power to bear on governments in the semicolonial countries, pressing them to squeeze out funds for payments by imposing ever harsher austerity measures on the workers and peasants. These include currency devaluations, abolition of price subsidies on food and other necessities, wage cuts, longer hours, speedup, and sharp cutbacks in spending for health, education, and housing. In exchange for "rescheduling" portions of the debt, governments throughout the Third World have been forced to hand over entire factories, mines, and tracts of land to imperialist interests.

This debt is immoral and unpayable. The revolutionary government in Cuba took the lead in the mid-1980s in calling for its cancellation as a necessary component of the fight to improve the conditions of the toilers in the Third World.

Working people in imperialist countries must champion this demand today as part of combating the national divisions the rulers try to foist upon us. The call to cancel the debt goes hand in hand with demanding equal rights for immigrants and for a world without borders - for international working-class solidarity.  
 
 
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