- Tens of thousands of South America's intellectual and
professional classes are fleeing the continent at a rate not seen since
the military dictatorships of the 1970s because of spiralling violence
and economic misery. Hardest hit is Argentina where the mood of despondency
is so widespread that one in three people told a recent survey that they
would leave the country if they could. More than half a million doctors,
professors and writers have left Ecuador in the last two years. Large numbers
of people are also abandoning Colombia and Venezuela.
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- Unlike the 1970s when the main destination was America,
many are moving to Europe. The exodus is provoking considerable concern
in Spain, which issued 20,000 passports last year to Argentinians claiming
European ancestry and more than 6,000 visas to Ecuadoreans, far more than
double the number issued in previous years.
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- The Spanish consul in Buenos Aires warned last week that
it is unable to deal with daily queues of more than a thousand people,
as well as a further hundred applications by internet. Carlos Vinuesa,
the consul general, in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais,
said: "We are besieged by people claiming their grandparents were
Spanish. We are not just giving visas. We are giving hope."
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- The main motive for emigrating from Argentina is the
country's continuing recession and high unemployment. Ten years of privatisation
of bloated state enterprises has left more than 2.1 million unemployed
- 16 per cent of the population.
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- Many of those leaving are professionals, worried about
the future of their children. Enrique Lopez, a 48-year-old professor, queued
every day for a week starting at 3am to get his Spanish passport to move
his two sons to Spain.
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- Mr Lopez said: "I don't know if Argentina has a
future. We have been through many bad situations that we have recovered
from but I don't know if we will get through this one with the government
we have."
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- Such comments are paradoxical in a country which at the
beginning of the last century was seen as the Promised Land by hundreds
of thousands of Spanish and Italians who left Europe to start a new life
there. Now their descendants are trying to move back.
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- Language schools in Argentina are experiencing a huge
demand for Italian classes. In Colombia, which is the world kidnap capital,
where entire church congregations have been kidnapped by guerrillas, 600,000
people have fled the ongoing drugs war in the last three years. They include
the country's top economists, newspaper editors, judges and scientists
and 80,000 recent graduates.
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- The International Labour Organisation recently published
a study warning that so many intellectuals were leaving that the country
was losing competitiveness and facing economic collapse. The recent intervention
by the Americans, who are spending £700 million on the controversial
Plan Colombia, sending in military advisers and Blackhawk helicopters to
try to end the drugs trade, has heightened tensions and led to more people
leaving.
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- Ecuador is also undergoing the biggest exodus in its
history with more than half a million of its 11 million population abandoning
the Andean country because of an economic crisis which brought down the
last government after thousands of peasants came down from the mountains
and stormed the capital. The new government recently adopted the US dollar
as its currency to improve confidence.
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- The latest country to be affected is Venezuela. Once
considered among the safest places in Latin America, an unprecedented wave
of violent crime brought about by an economy in freefall and rampant unemployment
is sweeping the country, driving the murder rate to record levels.
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- According to official projections, violent crime rose
by around 70 per cent last year. On an average weekend there are some 100
killings and over Christmas the body count was closer to 150.
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- As the mayhem spreads, police officers are routinely
executing suspects, while growing public fury has seen an increase in lynchings
of known offenders. Sales of guns for self-protection are soaring and the
private security business is booming as prosperous suburbs in Caracas,
the crime-plagued capital, are transformed into heavily patrolled fortresses.
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- For the city's less fortunate inhabitants, everyday life
has become so dangerous that a senior local politician likens them to "animals
for the slaughter". Cars are hijacked so often in broad daylight that
police advise drivers not to halt at traffic lights.
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- Muggings are so common that funeral homes employ guards
to protect mourners. Shop owners fed up with being robbed now pack a pistol
to ward off marauders.
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- In the shantytowns of Caracas such as La Agricultura,
frustrated residents are turning to vigilantism to protect themselves.
In one incident on New Year's Day, a notorious rapist and thief, known
as "The Pig", was beaten and stabbed to death after being caught
in the act of stealing shoes. In the space of a week in the capital, an
enraged crowd threw a suspected mugger off a motorway bridge and another
robber was shot dead.
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- Most Venezuelans attribute the soaring violence - only
a handful of Latin American cities like Medellin, the drug cartel capital
of Colombia, record a higher murder rate per capita - to the dire state
of an economy in which, despite the country receiving billions in oil revenue,
four fifths of the population of 25 million live in dire poverty. A harsh
recession last year sharply pushed up unemployment, worsening social inequalities.
One senior official in the state prosecutor's department said: "The
increase in crime was caused by such misery."
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- Although Venezuela's authoritarian leader, President
Hugo Chavez, a swashbuckling former paratroop colonel who led a failed
coup, was easily re-elected last July, his promised "social revolution"
has not yet materialised. The country's chronic lawlessness has undoubtedly
contributed to this, as worried foreign corporations shut down local plants
and Venezuelans, who have had enough of living dangerously, try to emigrate.
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- http://www.cin.org/archives/cinjustann/200101/0015.html
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