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CENTRAL
AMERICA:
Anti-Poverty
Programmes Abound, but Poverty
Deepens
Diego
Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, (IPS) -
Government anti-poverty
initiatives in Central America
tend to pick up speed around
election campaign time, then
quickly lose steam.
They are almost always tainted
by the blot of corruption - and
with a very few exceptions, they
have been completely
ineffective, say researchers and
local activists.
The last decade has seen a
succession of new programmes
replacing old ones every four or
five years, usually coinciding
with general elections.
The next changes are therefore
most likely to be seen in
Nicaragua, where voters will
cast their ballots in October,
Honduras, where presidential
elections will take place in
November, and Costa Rica, whose
next elections are scheduled for
February.
A total of 43.2 million people
live in Central America, and
over half of them are poor. The
lowest levels of social
development are seen in El
Salvador, Honduras and
Nicaragua, where the proportion
of the population living in
poverty - as measured by the
possibility of satisfying basic
needs - is over 60 percent.
The situation is especially grim
in Honduras and Nicaragua, where
45 percent of children live in
extreme poverty, deprived of the
resources required to meet even
minimum nutritional needs.
Apart from a few exceptions in
Costa Rica and Panama, the
Central American nations with
the highest degrees of economic
and social development, there
are no long-term strategies to
combat poverty in this subregion,
observed both Pablo Sauma, a
development expert at the
University of Costa Rica, and
Alfredo Ruiz, research
coordinator at the Central
American University in
Nicaragua.
The vast majority of
anti-poverty policies are
short-term, ad hoc initiatives,
and many are tainted by
corruption, they concurred.
"If we truly want to eradicate
injustice at its very roots, we
would have to do away with these
disposable programmes that
basically provide charity and
serve the purposes of political
corruption, since they are
implemented to buy votes or hand
out favours to business owners,"
said Rafael González, a
Guatemalan indigenous activist
and chair of the Committee for
Campesino Unity (CUC).
According to a recent report
from the Economic Commission for
Latin America and the Caribbean
(ECLAC), titled "The Millennium
Development Goals: A Latin
American and Caribbean
Perspective", it appears highly
unlikely that El Salvador,
Honduras and Nicaragua will meet
the poverty reduction targets
set by the United Nations
General Assembly in September
2000.
The first Millennium Development
Goal (MDG), to combat extreme
poverty and hunger, establishes
the specific targets of reducing
by half the proportion of people
living on less than one dollar a
day and the proportion of people
who suffer from hunger, between
1990 and 2015.
Although Central America has
experienced consistent growth in
gross domestic product since the
late 1990s, ranging from 4.5
percent in 1999 to 3.8 percent
in 2004, this economic progress
has not translated into a
significant decline in poverty
or improvements in the areas of
employment and education,
according to ECLAC.
Central America, the poorest
region in the hemisphere, is
still plagued by the
after-effects of the civil wars,
political upheavals and natural
disasters it has suffered over
the last three decades.
"Anti-poverty programmes change
from government to government,
they are constantly being
replaced, and many are just
window-dressing used to capture
votes," maintained González.
Guatemala lived through a bloody
civil war stretching from 1960
until 1996, which left 200,000
dead (including 45,000
"disappeared), the vast majority
of them at the hands of
government security forces.
During the course of the war,
half a million people were
displaced within Guatemala,
500,000 sought refuge in Mexico
alone, and 250,000 children were
orphaned.
El Salvador was also engulfed in
a civil war throughout the 1980s
and early 1990s, when clashes
between leftist guerrilla forces
on one side and government
security forces and paramilitary
groups on the other left 75,000
dead and 7,000 disappeared.
Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, the
overthrow of the Somoza
dictatorship and subsequent
armed conflict between the
ruling left-wing Sandinistas and
the U.S.-backed Contra rebels
claimed 50,000 lives in the
1970s and 1980s.
The 1990s brought an end to
civil strife throughout the
subregion, and peace accords
established wide-reaching
commitments to bring an end to
the injustices that were the
root cause of the armed
conflicts.
But whatever progress was
achieved towards promoting
greater development and social
equality was soon wiped out by a
series of catastrophic natural
disasters.
In 1998, Hurricane Mitch caused
more than 9,000 deaths and
massive damages in Honduras and
Nicaragua.
In 2001, El Salvador was hit by
two earthquakes, which left
1,142 people dead, over 8,000
injured, and more than 1.6
billion dollars in economic
losses, the equivalent of 13
percent of the country's GDP,
according to ECLAC figures.
The international community
began to focus attention on
Central America in the 1980s.
Dozens of multilateral agencies
and non-governmental
organisations established aid,
cooperation and advisory
programmes aimed at combating
poverty in the subregion.
"Unfortunately, the end result
has not been an improvement in
the situation, but on the
contrary, a deepening of
poverty. And that is because
there are no structural
anti-poverty programmes, only
isolated and short-lived
initiatives," stressed Ruiz, who
is currently participating in a
project undertaken by Catholic
universities to combat poverty
in Central America and the
Caribbean.
Of the various social programmes
currently implemented by Central
American governments with
funding and loans from
multilateral agencies, one of
the most laudable is the Family
Allowance Programme in Honduras,
said the University of Costa
Rica's Sauma, a consultant on
poverty-related issues.
Aimed at breaking the cycle of
intergenerational poverty, the
programme provides income
assistance to 350,000 people on
the condition that the children
from the families receiving this
aid attend school and receive
basic health care.
But there are elections coming
up soon in Honduras, which means
there is a good possibility that
this policy will undergo
changes, noted Sauma. Moreover,
there is no clear means of
financially sustaining this
programme over the long term, he
added.
"What we have observed is that
there are varying and
insufficient resources for the
majority of government
anti-poverty programmes in
Central America, and they do not
attack the root causes of the
problem," said Sauma.
"But I believe that the main
problem is corruption," he
stressed, noting that
governments do not adequately
account for the funds placed at
their disposal, and many of the
resources that are meant to be
used to combat poverty are
actually used to win votes.
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