Summit of the Americas: Philanthropy for Profits

CARTAGENA, COLOMBIA, April 16 — At the Summit of the Americas, the celebrity singer Shakira sang the Colombian anthem. She portrayed a microcosm of what imperialism has in store for Latin America. 

Shakira announced that she’s sponsoring new educational projects throughout Latin America covering 6.200 children of the 35 million who have no access to any type of education. This educative philanthropic project, which earns her great economic dividends, will “resolve” the educational problems of 0.018 percent of the continent’s children. 

Lecturing hundreds of the Summit’s capitalists about her “new” education idea, she said that investment in early education is a promising business which can net surprising profits. She maintained that each dollar invested could reap $17 in profit in adulthood. She knows this from the tax privileges she has enjoyed in Colombia and in other countries.  She repeated the usual formula that education can end poverty and that her 17-year philanthropic project in education has redeemed six million children. 

She criticized as “obsolete and old fashioned” the idea that the State must provide education. “Education not only helps masses emerge from poverty” but “is a virtue converting them into potential clients.” Thus, investors win double: gaining direct returns in education and assuring future buyers of their products, earning profit as businessmen and world fame as philanthropists, like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros.

This capitalist lecture about education is not new. It’s the same one repeated by a bunch of technocrats and economists made in USA: university deans, Board of Education speakers, the World Bank and the fascist educators. But what’s new is that an out-of-tune singer presented this project. She declared that capitalist philanthropy is the best way to solve poverty and achieve “the sure prosperity that we deserve and have always dreamt.” As we know, capitalism’s dreams are workers’ nightmares.

Lesson No. 1: Capitalist Philanthropy

What happened in the orgy that Obama’s secret service agents organized in Cartagena matches what U.S. ambassadors, secret service agents, military advisers and mercenaries are used to doing: sexist imperialism. They transform places they visit into brothels and prostitute young native girls, carried out with a death threat, as if it were an honor for women in those lands. This is how U.S. capitalists see Latin American countries and their people: as brothels occupied by poverty-stricken prostitutes, with their governments as unconditional pimps. The Colombian government, protected by U.S. imperialists, just demonstrated this in fine detail.

Lesson No. 2: The Free Trade Agreement

The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between Colombia and the U.S. is exploitation on a grand scale, a product of inter-imperialist contradictions. In Colombia, where part of these contradictions develop, its capitalists kneel before bosses from China, Spain and North America, fighting for control of the country’s natural resources.

With a smile of betrayal from those that know they have traded Colombia’s riches for a plate of lentils to the imperialist U.S., various Colombian government speakers announced that starting May 15th the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will go into effect. In reality, this happened since the Cartagena Summit. 

Unemployment will increase with the arrival of U.S. products, but the official advertisers and their media of misinformation assure that new jobs will be created more than ever.  

While the FTA increases harassment and murders of union members and workers’ leaders in Colombia, U.S. governmental circles and those in Colombia maintain the agreement is a “blessing” for unions. The insatiable search for natural riches and the construction of infrastructure routes to transport products to the U.S. will destroy ecosystems, seas, rivers and forests but journalists say this will mean more environmental protection and exploitation of these riches.

What remains of education will be privatized, but they assure us that such measures will improve services and the flow of private businessmen who will take us out of poverty and underdevelopment, like Shakira. But all they do is generalize illiteracy and ignorance. The brutal import of U.S. junk food will destroy the feeble foundations of agricultural production, but they assure us that our diet and nutritional habits will improve eating this trash. 

Lesson No. 3: ‘Humanism’ of the Colombian State

In a clear demonstration of state humanism, the Colombian State’s oppressing forces swept Cartagena street by street, house by house, to oust the poor from the city’s center because they “made it ugly” and were a bad showcase for the sale of Colombia to transnational capital. They even removed the dogs, along with the homeless, the street vendors, popular cooks and anyone else in the way.

Avenues were remodeled so that Barack Obama’s caravan of about 20 limousines and expensive cars wouldn’t have to stop anywhere in its way. The city militarized itself as never before, employing thousands of police, military, secret agents, divers and pilots to guard it.    

The price of these security measures, along with the Summit’s expenses, may have reached $100 million, while schools, hospitals, parks or universities go wanting. This shows how public resources are only used in big measures to pay the external debt and finance the war against Colombia’s exploited.  

Workers Great Potential

The world’s workers have risen and organized themselves under reformist ideas. Struggles from Brazil to Afghanistan have shown the great potential we workers have, but we will only see change if the workers are led by communist ideas. Our Party will be present on May Day, commemorating the day of struggle of the international working class. Conscious that there’s still much to do, we will raise our red communist flags to continue the road that communists from the past began. Workers’ class struggles have taught us that communist ideas are needed to destroy this parasitic and murderous system, to build with the Progressive Labor Party a communist society that will free us from slavery.