The response of the U.S. rulers has been criminally callous. The big-business media has virtually blacked out this situation, which threatens the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of working people in Nicaragua and Honduras in particular. Washington, the wealthiest government in the world, has offered a bare pittance of aid, releasing $6 million in bags of food that will last for only a short period and will not cover even half of the affected population.

The U.S. government should immediately send massive aid--with no strings attached--in food, clothing, medicine, transportation, and health-care personnel.

The drought and famine is not primarily an inevitable "accident of nature." These conditions--millions threatened with hunger, disease, unemployment, and lack of housing, medical care, and other basic needs--are man-made. It is a social disaster, one in which the culprit is not the workers and farmers affected by the crisis, as the defenders of the status quo would have us believe, but imperialist domination and capitalist rule.

The consequences of the drought are the result of underdevelopment created by more than a century of plunder by Washington and other imperialist powers. Imperialist domination deforms the economies of Central American nations. Agricultural production is geared for exports profiting the U.S. and other imperialist monopolies, at the expense of food self-sufficiency. Unequal terms of trade have a devastating impact on the prices that Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other nations in the region receive for their goods, while paying higher prices to import machinery and manufactured goods from the most industrialized countries. The exploiters are concerned only about their profits, not spending money on good roads, communications, health care, decent housing, and other basic needs.

Peasants, denied easy access to equipment, seed, and credit, are being driven off the land by capitalist landowners. Coffee workers and other rural toilers are plagued by seasonal work that leaves them jobless for much of the year. These workers are justly demanding jobs and economic protection.

Meanwhile, working people in Central America are forced to pay tribute to the imperialist bankers and creditors in Washington and elsewhere through the ever-mounting foreign debt. The U.S. rulers' only solution is more loans--more debt slavery.

Working people in the United States should demand the immediate and unconditional canceling of the foreign debt of all Central American nations. This demand is part of the perspective of an international fight by working people for jobs, land, and a decent livelihood.

In contrast to Washington's brutal indifference, revolutionary Cuba, with less resources, has been sending volunteer doctors and health-care workers to the most remote areas of several Central American nations, and training hundreds of youth from those countries at the Latin American School of Medicine free of charge. Cuba offers an example of international working-class solidarity, and shows what is possible when working people make a revolution and take power into their hands.

Immediate, massive relief aid to Central America!

Cancel the debt of Central America and the Third World!
 
 
Related articles:
Peasants, facing drought and famine, demand aid now in Central America
Guatemala protests condemn tax increase
Peasants in Colombia demand debt relief
Sugar cane growers, peasants in Mexico protest growing crisis  
 
 
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