Modern-Day Slave Trade
The modern-day slave trade is alive, well, and thriving in Juárez, Mexico and other urban areas just south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Abraham Lincoln is turning in his grave, as the U.S., Japan, and other so-called industrial giants of the world exploit the poor to give to the rich, a reversal of the Robin Hood philosophy. With employment in the south of Mexico at a premium, and the few jobs available going to younger workers, an older, migrant Mexican workforce has been lured to Northern Mexico with the promise of a salary, any salary, and food on the table. At what is comparable to $4.00 U.S. dollars a day, this highly unskilled workforce has sold its soul, its health, and its self-esteem to the new robber barons of the industrialized world and their henchmen, the low-paying factories known as maquilas. While the latter were originally conceived as a symbiotic boon to all parties involved, providing jobs to the poor on the one hand and increasing profit margins on the other, beware of what you wish for! They have turned into a proverbial nightmare, being directly or indirectly responsible for overpopulation of Mexico’s northern cities, for an upswing in their crime rates, and for the creation of colonias, a romantic-sounding term for none other than slums. The “carrot” held out to the poor of Mexico by the industrialized nations, to entice them to travel to Northern Mexico to work at low-paying maquila jobs, has been transformed into a pike on which to impale them. With hardly enough money to pay for life’s essentials, let alone adequate health care, those poor factory workers, living in overcrowded colonias with no running water, sanitation at a minimum, domestic heating in the form of combustible automobile tires, and diarrhea, dehydration, infectious diseases, chronic debilitating illnesses, and lack of childhood immunizations bred on a daily basis, have traded the dignity of poverty in their hometowns for the promise of full stomachs in faraway places, sanctioned by the thirty pieces of silver paid to faceless intermediaries. Yes, the modern-day slave trade is alive and well, and Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and Hugo Chavez have looked up from their card game in the netherworld to take notice.
With the governments of the U.S. and Mexico often up in arms with one another in regard to drug trafficking and transport of illegal aliens across international borders, it is amazing that the two crybabies reached an agreement in 1985 to permit the operation of maquila plants on Mexican soil. Mexican workers, predominantly from the country’s interior, were hired to work in the maquilas for the pittance of the Mexican minimum wage, which in 1988 amounted to less than $4.00 U.S. dollars per day. Meanwhile public health experts, researchers, and health care professionals began to see cracks in the pavement on the road to hell originally paved with good intentions. Garbage dumps sprang up in the midst of grocery stores and playgrounds, as children walked hand-in-hand along byways strewn with litter, human waste, and non-biodegradables. What had started out as a multinational experiment to elevate the human socioeconomic condition had degenerated into a public health nightmare and a pitched battle with hepatitis A, streptococcal infection, amebiasis, scabies, dehydration, diarrhea, contaminated water, and the fleeting hallucinations of a health education infrastructure.
That was then and this is now. What has changed? Not much. Inadequate resources, low socioeconomic status, and utter lack of education still run rampant in many indigent communities south of the border. Those communities, for better or worse, and with the intervention of outside experts when needed, must find ways to educate and financially remunerate community health promoters. They must also establish connections with governmental agencies, in Mexico, the U.S., and perhaps even in the “Land of the Rising Sun,” in order to secure much-needed financial backing and educational tools directed at enhancement of social reinforcement. Social planning and action phases are certain to follow community-wide raising of awareness. With communities themselves at the vanguard of their manifest destiny via a linkage approach between big business, health and innovation resources, health promoters, and community members themselves, development and implementation of health-related interventions stand a relatively good, though not certain, chance of success. At that point, immunizations can be administered, medicines can be dispensed, sewers and stagnant pools can be drained, and I can shut up.
Only when healthy minds and bodies become a reality on both sides of the border, can all eyes be turned to our next formidable adversary, the “modern-day slave trade!”
© 2008, Albert M. Balesh, M.D. All rights reserved.
With the governments of the U.S. and Mexico often up in arms with one another in regard to drug trafficking and transport of illegal aliens across international borders, it is amazing that the two crybabies reached an agreement in 1985 to permit the operation of maquila plants on Mexican soil. Mexican workers, predominantly from the country’s interior, were hired to work in the maquilas for the pittance of the Mexican minimum wage, which in 1988 amounted to less than $4.00 U.S. dollars per day. Meanwhile public health experts, researchers, and health care professionals began to see cracks in the pavement on the road to hell originally paved with good intentions. Garbage dumps sprang up in the midst of grocery stores and playgrounds, as children walked hand-in-hand along byways strewn with litter, human waste, and non-biodegradables. What had started out as a multinational experiment to elevate the human socioeconomic condition had degenerated into a public health nightmare and a pitched battle with hepatitis A, streptococcal infection, amebiasis, scabies, dehydration, diarrhea, contaminated water, and the fleeting hallucinations of a health education infrastructure.
That was then and this is now. What has changed? Not much. Inadequate resources, low socioeconomic status, and utter lack of education still run rampant in many indigent communities south of the border. Those communities, for better or worse, and with the intervention of outside experts when needed, must find ways to educate and financially remunerate community health promoters. They must also establish connections with governmental agencies, in Mexico, the U.S., and perhaps even in the “Land of the Rising Sun,” in order to secure much-needed financial backing and educational tools directed at enhancement of social reinforcement. Social planning and action phases are certain to follow community-wide raising of awareness. With communities themselves at the vanguard of their manifest destiny via a linkage approach between big business, health and innovation resources, health promoters, and community members themselves, development and implementation of health-related interventions stand a relatively good, though not certain, chance of success. At that point, immunizations can be administered, medicines can be dispensed, sewers and stagnant pools can be drained, and I can shut up.
Only when healthy minds and bodies become a reality on both sides of the border, can all eyes be turned to our next formidable adversary, the “modern-day slave trade!”
© 2008, Albert M. Balesh, M.D. All rights reserved.
posted by Dr. Al at
2/29/2008 09:13:00 AM
|
0 comments
