Mexico in particular, which depends on the United States for 80 percent of its exports and 75 percent of its imports, is directly impacted by the fate of the U.S. economy. Countries where the U.S. dollar has been imposed as the official currency such as Ecuador, El Salvador, and--in practice--Argentina, will be especially hard hit.

El Salvador is a glaring example of what imperialist domination means for millions of working people today. For the vast majority of people in that Central American nation, replacement of the national currency with the U.S. dollar means higher prices for basic necessities and reduced buying power for their wages. With many farmers driven off the land, while the country's natural wealth is plundered and its labor superexploited by U.S. and other foreign capitalists, more than 2 million people have been forced to migrate to the United States. This devastation is aggravated today by the effects of the earthquake, a social disaster created by imperialist domination and underdevelopment--marked by lack of adequate medical care, shelter, nutrition, and transportation.

Apart from meager material aid, the most "generous" help from the White House has been to temporarily suspend deportations of undocumented Salvadorans living in the United States. Those detained will be held in immigration jails, to be deported later. Instead of this brutal arrogance, Washington should immediately end all deportations of Salvadoran and other Central Americans, period.

One of the primary ways in which the semicolonial nations are exploited by U.S., European, and Japanese finance capital is through the foreign debt squeeze. This debt bondage is a social relation, through which the imperialists siphon wealth out of these countries and extend their tentacles throughout their economies, seeking privatization and control of their state-owned industries, accompanied by austerity demands on the working class.

The Third World debt to imperialist creditors stands at a staggering $2.4 trillion--four times what it was in 1982, des-pite the fact that semicolonial nations forked out more than $3.4 trillion in interest payments between 1982 and 1998.

Working people in the United States need to join with our sisters and brothers in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to demand cancellation of the Third World debt. We should join with workers in Ecuador, who have taken to the streets to protest the dollarization measures and debt squeeze, as well as unionists in Argentina marching against the dismantling of the pension system and other austerity measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund.

To address the prospect of growing unemployment in this country, labor needs to fight for a shorter workweek with no cut in pay to create jobs. A massive public works program should be launched to build and repair roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and housing that would create hundreds of thousands of additional jobs.
 
 
Related article:
U.S. downturn will hit Latin America, Asia hard  
 
 
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