Nationwide roadblocks against austerity measures in Argentina

By Marcela Valente

By Marcela Valente Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 31 (IPS)— A congress of the unemployed decided last week to organize simultaneous 24-hour roadblocks countrywide to protest cutbacks in public sector wages and pensions, and on Tuesday they were joined by students, farmers, pensioners, doctors, teachers and public employees. The demonstrators announced that next week they would hold 48-hour blockades in other locations, and 72-hour roadblocks the week after. The protesters are demanding that the government revoke its recently approved cuts in public spending and that it continue public works programs that pay a small monthly stipend to the unemployed. A monthly average of 11 roadblocks were staged in 1997, when that form of protest began to be widely used in this Southern Cone country of 37 million. Blockades of traffic, known locally as “piquetes” or picket lines, then began to multiply, especially after recession broke out in 1998. In 1999 the monthly average stood at 21, in 2000 at 42, and in the first half of this year at 71. In the past, blockades have been held in heavily populated suburbs of Buenos Aires, the northwestern provinces of Jujuy and Salta, Neuquen and Ushuaia in the south, and Santa Fe, a province near Buenos Aires. Since the growing wave of roadblocks began, the death toll among the protesters, or “piqueteros”, has climbed to seven. “Today is the first time we’ve held a national ‘piquete’,” said town councilor Luis D’Elía, one of the leaders of the protest movement. “We are organizing civil resistance throughout the country, and although we had foreseen around 50 roadblocks, we know that more than 100 have been set up.” Traffic was cut off Tuesday on roads in and around the capital as well as in every province, and in some districts more than one blockade was organized. Women comprised a majority of the demonstrators, as speakers, organizers and even cooks. A number of children also took part, in an attempt to ensure that the protests remained peaceful, said D’Elía. The roadblocks included arts festivals, silent marches and original forms of protest like teachers swapping their traditional white coats for black clothing as a sign of mourning. Tuesday’s central event was held in the Buenos Aires suburb of La Matanza, D’Elía’s area of influence. The demonstrators gathered in front of the Paroissien Hospital, and doctors and nurses joined in the protest, several of them as speakers. “From now on we will protest together,” Dr. Diego Saccone told the crowd. “They told us it was impossible to organize the unemployed together with workers, but we demonstrated that if the will is there, it is possible,” D’Elía, the head of the Congreso de los Trabajadores Argentinos, a central trade union, said Tuesday as he met with legislators, town councilors, doctors and teachers who expressed their support for those opposed to the government’s austerity measures. While roadblocks have been mainly used in recent years to demand subsidies for the unemployed, this time the list of grievances was longer. The protesters demanded, for example, the release of some 2,800 members of their movement who were taken into custody for their involvement in blocking traffic. They also urged that public works programs and subsidies for the unemployed be continued despite the severe fiscal crisis that led the government to adopt the stringent pension and public salary cuts. Meanwhile, a group of unemployed people peacefully occupied a branch of the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires Tuesday, after they were summoned for the fifth time to pick up their June stipends and turned away once again with empty hands. The demonstrators demanded the repeal of the new law that will cut pensions and public sector wages, which was approved by Congress in the early hours of Monday morning. Critics charge that the spending cuts will only deepen the recession and reduce tax revenues, which will lead the government to further expand the cutbacks. The latest package of austerity measures is the sixth adopted by the government of Fernando de la Rúa since it took office 18 months ago. The Economy Ministry, headed by Domingo Cavallo, the architect of Argentina’s currency board scheme, claims there is no other way to generate confidence among investors and creditors than to drastically reduce the imbalance in the public accounts. With that argument, and in order to stave off a cessation of payments, the government announced its plan to spend only what it collects in tax revenues. The salaries of public employees will be cut 13 percent this month, as will all pensions above 500 dollars a month. Approval of the adjustment measures coincided with widespread fears of a currency devaluation, triggered by the flight of six percent of bank deposits. But analysts and traders warn that the heavy popular resistance to the measures could frustrate their implementation. .

US Congress wavers on Cuba embargo

July 25-- The US House of Representatives voted 240-186 in favor of an amendment introduced by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) stipulating that the US Treasury Department may not use its funds to enforce restrictions on travel to Cuba. The amendment was added to a $30 billion Treasury Department appropriations bill. The restrictions are an important part of the embargo the US has maintained against Cuba for 40 years in order to weaken its leftist government. The House voted 227-201 against another amendment, introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), which would have eliminated the legislative mechanisms that keep the embargo in operation. “The concentration of interests against the embargo is really extraordinary,” rightwing Cuban-America Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL) remarked. “There are interests ranging from business people to traditional friends of Castro and now even to people who call themselves dissidents.” Despite the victory for embargo opponents, the House Republican leadership is expected to kill the travel amendment during conferences with the Senate. A similar bill passed in the House in 2000 but failed in the Senate. On July 26, the day after the embargo vote, the Cuban government sponsored a huge march it had planned to show Cuban resistance to US policies, especially the embargo, and to a Miami jury’s June 8 conviction of five Cubans for espionage against the US. Some 1.2 million Cubans — more than 10% of the population — turned out for the march along the Malecon road in Havana to honor the 48th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks led by Fidel Castro Ruz. Castro, president since 1959 and set to turn 75 in August, walked with the marchers for a little less than half the 3.5-mile route. Meanwhile, the 20-year-old Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), the most powerful of the rightwing Cuban-American organizations, is suffering from internal conflicts. Longtime CANF spokesperson Ninoska Perez Castellon, a popular radio talk-show host, and her husband Roberto Martin Perez, who was a prisoner for 28 years in Cuba, quit the group on July 19, apparently feeling that the current leadership is too soft. A major issue has been lobbying by Jorge Mas Santos, who took over after his father’s death in 1997, to have the Latin Grammy Awards held in Miami. Hardliners are afraid artists from Cuba may be invited to perform or may come to accept awards.

Source: Weekly News Update on the Americas; wnu@igc.org

Venezuela debates entry to Americas-wide trade pact

By Pascal Fletcher

Caracas, Venezuela, Aug. 1— Supporters and opponents of Venezuela’s entry to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) squared off Wednesday in a public debate over whether the move would mean economic benefits or surrender to US “imperialism.” The debate, organized by the National Assembly, took place against the backdrop of President Hugo Chavez’s strong public reservations about joining the proposed hemispheric pact, agreed upon by leaders from across the Americas in Quebec in April. Chavez, an outspoken, left-leaning nationalist, took a dissenting stand at the Quebec Summit of the Americas by objecting to the 2005 target date for creating the FTAA. Pedro Palma, a leading businessman and first speaker in Thursday’s debate hosted by the parliament, argued strongly against any hesitation in joining the planned Americas-wide trading bloc stretching from Canada to Chile. “The FTAA is there, knocking at our door. There is no time to lose,” Palma, who heads the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce, told the audience, which included government and opposition deputies, businessmen, economists and journalists. Palma said FTAA membership, if negotiated seriously and skillfully, could bring real benefits to oil-rich Venezuela by boosting its trade and industry, attracting fresh foreign investment and improving the living standards of its people. In what seemed a direct response to the Venezuelan president’s public reservations, he said bluntly that doubts about, or opposition to, FTAA entry were “a waste of time.” But other speakers, echoing Chavez’ doubts, presented the US-backed FTAA plan as a strategy by Washington to extend its economic and political dominance over Latin America. “It’s nothing more than an attempt to destroy Latin America’s integration efforts,” said economist Francisco Mieres, adding the FTAA reflected what he called the “highly imperial policy” of President Bush. Palma argued the proposed trade bloc, like globalization of the world economy, was an unavoidable reality. “What we can do is extract the best possible advantage from that reality. What we can’t do is turn our backs on it,” he said. Chavez has expressed fears that poor, underdeveloped Latin American states will not be able to compete with industrialized giants like the United States and Canada if hemispheric trade barriers are lifted across the continent under the FTAA. Last week, he repeated his view that Venezuelan entry to the FTAA was “an option, not a destiny.” “I, Hugo Chavez, don’t think its in our interests,” he told a conference in Caracas, adding his government would propose a national referendum on the issue. Mieres urged Latin American nations to rally against the FTAA by increasing their own economic and political unity. “We urgently need to adopt an alternative position ... we need to find a Latin American alternative to globalization,” he said. Other speakers, such as economist Eduardo Mayobre, took a more moderate view, arguing it would irresponsible for Venezuela to commit itself blindly to the FTAA without first seriously examining the potential consequences. Mayobre also stressed the need for strengthened Latin American integration, through regional trade groups like the southern Mercosur bloc and the Andean Community. In his pro-FTAA arguments, Palma cited Mexico and its membership of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he said had had a highly positive impact on both Mexico’s economy and the living standards of its people. But Mieres was scathing about the example of Mexico, and noted that Mexican president Vicente Fox had once headed the local unit of US soft drinks giant Coca-Cola. He warned Latin America against following “the path of Fox and Coca-Colonization.”

Source: Reuters

Israel’s peace movement buoyed by huge turnout at rally

Jerusalem, Aug. 5— Israel’s beleaguered peace movement received a boost late Saturday when a surprise turnout of 10,000 supporters lent strength to its largely unheeded appeals for the government to halt its military escalation in the face of a 10-month Palestinian uprising. “The size of the rally took us by surprise, since the peace movement has been virtually paralyzed since the start of the intifada and in the face of the growing violence,” said Aryeh Arnon, one of the Tel Aviv rally’s organizers. “The rally gives voice to the feeling that the national unity government led by Ariel Sharon is leading the country towards disaster,” said Arnon, an economics lecturer at Beer Sheva university in southern Israel. But he admitted that the peace camp was still a minor movement and that the 10,000 demonstrators paled in comparison to the rallies held by right-wing hardliners, and even those of the pro-peace lobby in recent years. In parliament, the peace movement can muster around 30 deputies in the Knesset, including the 10 members representing the Arab Israeli community. The rally, held under the slogans “No to a pointless war,” and “We don’t want to kill or die for the settlements,” was organized in front of the defense ministry by the Peace Now group, which opposes controversial Jewish settlements built in the Palestinian territories. The demonstrators massed on the square where prime minister Yitzak Rabin was gunned down in 1995 by a Jewish extremist infuriated by his peace policy toward the Palestinians. They carried flags calling for the deployment of international monitors, as well as banners showing a Palestinian and Israeli flag on two interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Former Labor Party minister Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the 1993 Oslo peace accords and Yossi Sarid of the opposition Meretz party, also joined the demonstration. “The liquidation of Palestinian activists is the only policy the government has and it leads nowhere,” Sarid told the crowd, while appealing to Palestinians for moderation and warning them against attacks on Israel. “Opposition to the liquidations is growing in Israel, not just for moral reasons but because it provokes bloody reactions from the Palestinians and because they hit innocent civilians and political representatives,” said Arnon. The Israeli army stepped up its much-criticized policy of assassinating Palestinian hardliners on Saturday, firing rockets which injured a militant in the entourage of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghuti in the West Bank town of Ramallah. The attack came just four days after an Israeli helicopter killed six members of the hardline Islamic group Hamas in Nablus, a strike which also sprayed shrapnel on two young brothers, killing them both. The Israeli cabinet gave the green light to the policy of “intercepting terrorists,” and vowed to press on in the name of self-defense, saying the men it targeted posed a serious threat to Israeli citizens. The Palestinians say the assassinations have wiped out more than 40 activists, prompting infuriated cries for vengeance across the Palestinian community. The intifada, which erupted in September last year, has claimed 687 lives in 10 months of spiraling violence, including 540 Palestinians and 128 Israelis. Many more on both sides have been injured. According to a public opinion survey in July, only 16 percent of Israelis favor a unilateral cease-fire. And, in a sign that the backlash was already underway, a lone Palestinian gunman Sunday wounded 10 people, including eight soldiers, in front of the defense ministry in Tel Aviv, before being shot and critically injured himself.

Source: Agence France Presse

Changes in welfare rules deemed discriminatory

By Paul Weinberg

Toronto, Canada, Aug. 6 (IPS)— Canadian employers have long used literacy tests to discriminate against immigrants, minorities, and the poor. Now, the country’s most populous and ethnically diverse province is proposing to use the tests as a requirement for receiving welfare, or social assistance. Those who fail would have to take remedial courses. Yet, at the same time, the province of Ontario has cut back funding for adult education programs. Provincial government officials say the program, dubbed ‘Ontario Works’, will be in place by next March. But opponents are weighing a legal challenge under the Charter of Rights in Canada’s constitution. The forced testing “just reinforces the stigma of the lazy welfare bum,” and therefore is a form of discrimination, says Jacquie Chic, a Toronto lawyer. One of Canada’s leading civil liberties experts adds that poor people facing economic destitution are treated differently from the rest of the population in Ontario, and that the inequality of treatment will get worse under the new initiative. “Ontario has established a regime of ordeal or an obstacle course for disadvantaged people that includes literacy testing, drug tests and workfare,” where welfare recipients are obliged to work a certain number of hours in order to receive benefits, says Alan Borovoy, counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. When the measures are enacted, Ontario will be the first jurisdiction in North America to force welfare recipients to take literacy and mathematics tests or risk losing their benefits, says Jamie Peck, a British-born professor of economic geography at the University of Wisconsin in the United States and author of the book ‘Workfare States’. Ontario is not alone in making welfare a tougher and more bureaucratic business. “It’s happening in the United States, Canada and Britain,” says Peck. In many ways, he adds, Canadian welfare programs remain more liberal than those in the other two countries. However, the racial implications of literacy testing have made even the most punitive welfare administrators in the other countries leery about going to the lengths that Ontario is now proposing, says Peck. In the United States, he notes, literacy testing carries a stigma because it has been used to bar black voters, generally poorer than the rest of the US population, from registering to vote in elections. Officials say the mandatory testing will target welfare applicants and recipients with less than a grade-12 education or equivalent. However, mothers with under-aged children and immigrants who lack sufficient English will be exempt. This means that recent immigrants are less upset over the tougher eligibility requirements, says Basil Martin of the Ontario Council of Agencies serving immigrants. However, he notes, Toronto residents of African, Asian and Indigenous origin are more likely to be unemployed, regardless of skills and education, and receive poorer incomes and housing than those of European descent. These minorities will be at risk of further setbacks. Toronto, with a population of some three million, is Ontario’s principal town and reputedly is Canada’s most multi-ethnic city. About 53 percent of its residents are non-white. The overall unemployment rate is about six percent. But among Africans and blacks, it ranges from 23 percent to 45 percent and among South Asians it is 20 percent, according to a recent municipal analysis of 1996 national census data. No system is fool-proof and recent immigrants who fall prey to Ontario Works but who come from authoritarian countries are less likely than others to join political protests or complain about their treatment, says Susan Nielsen, who heads the Toronto Adult Student Association. “Those born here in Canada have a greater understanding of welfare being a right in this country,” Nielsen says. Efforts to improve literacy and math skills are not a bad thing, she adds, but the approach adopted by Ontario Works appears intimidating. In particular, she worries that people with unacknowledged learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, will forgo benefits to which they are entitled rather than go through the humiliation of testing. “It is a matter of self esteem,” says Nielsen. Of grave concern to advocates and service providers alike, the provision of adult literacy and education programs — without which Ontario Works will serve only to bar welfare applicants — has dwindled. “Two years ago, they (the Toronto School Board, whose budget is set by the province) cut all of the programming to all of the adult-based schools in the city. It is clear that the province’s main motivation is not about transforming the literacy skills of people on welfare,” says Ellen Long, a national literacy consultant and researcher. Rather, she says, policy seems to be designed to discourage people from applying for welfare in the first place. As a result of budget cuts, Toronto’s largely volunteer-run, under funded non-profit programs have been left to carry the load. They are able to provide only 3,500 spaces in a city where, on average, 75,000 adults receive welfare per year. Mike Van Soelen of the Ministry of Community and Social Services says that if community-based literacy programs can’t keep up with the demand, privately-owned training companies “have the experience” to provide the necessary classes. Ontario Works case workers at the municipal level will ultimately determine whether a welfare recipient’s plans to find employment should include extra literacy and math instruction. Officials maintain the emphasis on skills is designed to help people into the workforce. A spokeswoman for the Ontario Federation of Labor, however, says that some employers use testing and excessive credentials “to weed out” job applicants — for example, by demanding that applicants have a grade-12 education in order to perform basic assembly work. Anti-poverty activist Josephine Grey says she has seen a copy of the proposed literacy and math test. She says it includes questions that seem to be less about applicants’ skills needs and more about “assessing willingness to enter the workforce.” This is no accident, according to Long. Pressure by Ontario Works also has made many of the provincially funded literacy programs more narrowly focused on the immediate hiring needs of employers rather than on developing self-confident and well-rounded citizens and job-seekers who have been stuck in poverty. At the Preparatory Training Program (PTP) in Toronto’s west end, for example, hundreds of welfare recipients a year are taught in short courses to read items like memos, waybills, instructions and schedules linked to specific types of jobs. This is the kind of program endorsed by Van Soelen, the government spokesman. However, Tracy Mollins, a spokeswoman for the Toronto Advocacy Council for Adult Literacy, says PTP’s approach is about “shoving people into short-term, dead-end jobs.” John O’Leary, executive director of Frontier College, a nationwide volunteer literacy education group, says “rates of literacy are lower in low-income communities and (among) people living in poverty. The issue isn’t literacy. It is poverty and injustice. Literacy is a way of getting at that.” “We don’t feel it is necessary to coerce people to learn,” O’Leary says. “The challenge is to make the learning meaningful and accessible.” Even educators who would seem to be natural boosters for Ontario Works have kept their distance from the scheme. John MacLaughlin says he takes exception to the government’s “harsh” emphasis on literacy testing, adding that he would have preferred the more neutral-sounding “basic skills assessment.” “If I run a literacy program, I have a real problem attracting clients. But if I call it workplace skills, there is a line-up outside my door,” says MacLaughlin. While Ontario Works strikes some as unwelcoming, Borovoy, at the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, says it is also unforgiving. The program imposes a mandatory lifetime ban from welfare against anyone convicted of fraudulently receiving benefits. “Nobody else is subjected to such mandatory provisions,” says Borovoy, who notes that Canadian judges have plenty of latitude in sentencing people convicted of other offenses.

Two killed in Colombia farmers strike

Bogota, Colombia, Aug. 3— Two demonstrators were killed and 24 were injured in clashes with police and soldiers trying to clear a farm protest roadblock, protest leaders and police said on Friday. The police said the two protesters died on Thursday in cross-fire between army units responding to leftist guerrillas who allegedly infiltrated the roadblock on a stretch of highway between the towns of La Plata and Garzon in the southwestern province of Huila. But leaders of the four-day-old nationwide protest — started by peasant farmers to demand the cancellation of their debts and a suspension of imports of farm products — blamed the authorities for the deaths. “For these events, we hold responsible President Andres Pastrana, who went over the heads of governors and mayors and public opinion and gave an order to crack down on the national farm strike,” said the National Association for Farm Salvation in a news release. Thursday’s clashes in Huila happened between security forces and about 10,000 peasant demonstrators. Police said the peasants wielded clubs and threw stones and Molotov cocktails. The strike, which began Tuesday, will continue until the government meets the demonstrators’ demands, the organizers of the protest, which includes roadblocks of major highways throughout much of the country, warned Wednesday. The president of Unidad Cafetera, Jorge Robledo, said that “the spirit of sacrifice of peasant farmers, indigenous people, workers and the owners of agribusiness enterprises has been manifested in the blockades” of 29 roads in 16 of Colombia’s 32 departments. Robledo, whose association represents small coffee-growers from central Colombia, said the situation in the countryside was critical due to misguided policies like the opening of the economy to large-scale imports of food products, and the high cost of credit for farmers. Rodolfo Ramírez, a commentator with the public National University’s radio program UN Analysis, echoed Robledo’s arguments, stating that the opening of markets that began in the early 1990s jeopardized food security in Colombia. The government’s liberalization policies, meanwhile, were not accompanied by measures aimed at protecting the agriculture sector from the impact of growing imports, he added. Colombia, which used to have an economy based on agriculture, went from importing 17,000 tons a year of corn in 1990 to 1.7 million tons in 1997, because the government believed the country was not “competitive” in producing grains, said Ramírez. Other analysts say that in 1999 alone, food purchases abroad led to the loss of 130,000 local jobs, and unemployment climbed from around nine percent in 1990 to 20 percent last year. In the case of coffee, only recently surpassed by oil as Colombia’s leading export product, which provides work for 350,000 families, external factors like a price slump led to a drop in production from 16 million 60-kg sacks in 1999 to nine million sacks a year later. The reduction of demand for locally produced food crops also pushed thousands of small farmers into producing illicit crops like coca, poppy and marijuana, which are covering growing stretches of land despite US-backed spraying of herbicides by the anti-narcotics police. The area planted in coca grew from 112,500 hectares in 1999 to 122,500 hectares in 2000. Ricardo Vargas with Acción Andina, a think-tank specializing in the question of drug trafficking in the region, blamed that phenomenon on what he described as President Andrés Pastrana’s “failed US-backed anti-drug policy.” Farmers complain that the government has failed to deliver on its repeated promises of efforts to strengthen the rural sector, such as the installation of a center on farm technology and information, incentives for the creation of jobs in the rural sector, and the design of a comprehensive export policy. In addition, interest on credit for the agriculture sector shot up to 36 percent last year, which meant many small farmers were unable to meet their payments due to the low prices their products fetched and the lack of market to negotiate better prices.

Source: IPS, Associated Press

Call for Europe to form anti-riot force

Rome, Italy, Aug. 6— A pan-European police squad trained in the latest riot control techniques was proposed yesterday because of fears that anti-globalization protesters — spurred on by the recent police riots in Genoa during the G8 meeting of world leaders — could prevent international summits being held in major cities. Senior ministers in the German and Italian governments called for a mobile strike force to ensure that leaders could continue to meet where and when they want without public intervention. The two governments want EU partners to join them in setting up a multi-lingual force to pool intelligence, monitor borders, intercept riot ringleaders and develop tactics to prevent mass demonstrations. Germany’s interior minister, Otto Schily, won the backing of his Italian counterpart, Claudio Scajola, after two days of talks in Rome. They will tell other EU states this week that only coordinated policing can prevent repeats of the blood-soaked police brutality that occurred in Genoa. Mr. Scajola said: “There is the need for a new and stronger collaboration among European countries, a different formation of men to confront this problem and a European anti-riot force that could manage the phenomenon with the contribution of local police.” British police are unlikely to go along with an international anti-riot force. The Association of Chief Police Officers gave the idea a cool reception yesterday, indicating there would have to be a lot of debate at a high level if such a corps were ever to be a reality. “We would approach any proposals for the UK police to be involved in an EU riot corps for policing summits with a great deal of caution,” a spokesman said. “Whilst we already provide advice and guidance to many foreign forces, we do not have an international operational role.” Britain’s operational relationship with other specialized policing units on the continent is currently limited to providing intelligence and “spotters” to help prevent trouble at international football matches. Italy’s overt police brutality at Genoa last month, in which a poorly trained conscript in the carabiniere shot and killed a protester, and police assaulted other protesters, wounding hundreds, provoked an international outcry. Mr. Schily said the new force could be modeled on the European border police who are being trained to work in European countries that allow travel without passports. The proposals were expected to provoke criticism from civil liberties groups, which have condemned previous initiatives to contain protests, such as suspending the free travel between borders enshrined in the Schengen accords, to which several continental EU members are signatories. Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has suggested that the UN’s food agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization, should move its November summit out of Rome — preferably to Africa. No formal request for a move has been lodged, so the venue is unclear. Four of Italy’s eight judicial inquiries into Genoa’s violence are focusing on the police. Mr. Scajola, who survived a parliamentary vote of no-confidence for his ministry’s handling of security at the G8 summit, last week transferred three senior police commanders said to be implicated in the violence. Dozens of German protesters, along with Italians and Britons, accused the police of torture.

Source: The Guardian

Mexican farmers protest Fox’s policy

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, Aug 1 (IPS)— Mexican President Vicente Fox, who prides himself on being a “farmer and rancher at heart,” is facing difficulties on the rural front, where 75 percent of the country’s extreme poverty is concentrated. Small farmers’ associations are planning to hold demonstrations in the capital next week to protest Fox’s “lack of an agriculture policy.” The protests will be similar to those held here in July by sugar cane growers demanding timely, fair payment for their work. The farmers said they would hold marches and occupy public buildings like the ministries of agriculture and the economy. “Other surprises” were also in store, said Emiliano Serra, a member of the National Union of Regional Campesino Organizations (Unorca). “We don’t know how many farmers will participate, but there will be at least several thousand,” he said. Organizations of indigenous people, in the meantime, announced roadblocks and demonstrations in the capitals of several states to protest the constitutional reform on the rights of native communities that has already been approved by Congress and by a majority of the state legislatures. The amendments, which must yet be signed into law or vetoed by the executive branch, did not meet the expectations of indigenous groups like the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas regarding demands for autonomy and self-determination for ethnic communities. “The countryside is in ruin, and Fox will go down along with it,” said parliamentary Deputy Miguel Luna of the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a former leader of a small farmers’ organization. Extreme poverty is concentrated in rural areas, which are home to just under 25 percent of Mexico’s 100 million people, including most of the country’s 10 million Indians. Nearly 70 percent of people living in rural areas have no remunerated farmwork, according to official studies. Most rural residents are involved in subsistence farming, petty trade, or making and selling crafts. Mexico’s trade liberalization, the accent put by the country’s governments on urban development, migration to cities and the fall in subsidies to the rural sector have all contributed to the rise in poverty and the growing social unrest in the countryside, said Manuel Contreras, an expert on farm issues. “A veritable time bomb is ticking away in the countryside,” warned Contreras. While Mexico’s economy grew 1.9 percent in the first quarter of this year, the farm sector fell 5.5 percent, according to the National Institute of Geographic and Informatics Statistics. In the past five years, yields of beans, wheat, rice and soy beans dropped by as much as 30 percent. Only the production of corn rose, by 1.9 percent. In order to meet domestic demand, meanwhile, imports of corn shot up more than 94 percent, wheat imports climbed 73 percent and soy bean imports rose 50 percent.