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| Adolfo
Perez Esquivel |
Nobel Laureate Adolfo
Perez Esquivel Condemns Economic Terrorism
Thad Dunning, Department
of Political Science
On October 10th, Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel spoke to an audience
of over one hundred people in UC Berkeley's Stephens Hall.
He discussed the causes and consequences of global conflict
and criticized the toll of what he termed "economic
terrorism" on human rights and national sovereignty
around the world.
"When we look at
the 'silent bomb' of hunger and poverty, we have to understand
this as a form of terrorism," said Perez Esquivel, an
Argentine who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 for
his work with the organization, Servicio Paz y Justicia. "One
thing is clear: war will not bring about a change," he
said.
Reflecting on the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th,
Perez Esquivel delivered a message that was both compassionate
and critical. "We (in Latin America) know and understand
your suffering and pain, because we have also survived and
struggled," he said. In 1977 Esquivel had the experience
of being detained and held without charges for fourteen months
by the Argentine military dictatorship.
"But we have to
understand the causes of conflict," he continued. "While
we in Latin America suffered the terrorism of the state,
today we need to focus on a terrorism of the market that
takes its toll every day." He informed the audience that
the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
recently published a report documenting that 3,615 children
died of hunger and malnutrition on September 11th. "No
government was moved by this report. The Pope said nothing
and the United Nations issued no resolutions," he said.
Just days before, Perez
Esquivel and other Nobel Peace Prize laureates, including
Rigoberta Menchú Tum of Guatemala and Máiread
Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland, met in New York with
the Presidents of the United Nations Security Council and
General Assembly and with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
They urged the convocation of a General Assembly meeting
devoted to defining the causes of terrorism, including economic
terrorism. They called upon UN leaders to strengthen the
role of the United Nations during global crisis.
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| Professor
Francine Masiello |
"We have to make
sure that international law is respected, even by a superpower," stated
Perez Esquivel. He suggested that an International Criminal
Court would be the "ideal place to judge people guilty
of crimes against humanity," including terrorists, and
reminded his audience that the United States has been one
of the key countries to refrain from ratifying the Court.
The Court's statute, approved by the unrecorded vote of 120
countries in 1998, requires ratification from 60 countries
but has received it from only 42.
"We have to ask
why (the U.S. has not ratified the International Criminal
Court)," Perez Esquivel told his audience of students,
faculty, staff, and Berkeley community members. "It
is urgent that the United States change its relations with
the rest of the world."
In his talk, given in
Spanish with English translation, Perez Esquivel suggested
that within the United States there is misunderstanding of
the actions taken by the United States beyond its borders. "There
is a great disinformation campaign-as if what does not appear
on TV does not exist," he said. "But we have to
move away from a unitary mindset," what the Uruguayan
writer Eduardo Galeano once called "pensamiento unico," towards "pensamiento
propio," or thoughts of one's own.
"In a world without
a soul, each of us is compelled to think of a world not of
people but of markets," he said. "There are not
citizens but consumers; not nations but enterprises; not
cities but conglomerations. Everything has a price, but nothing
has value."
"But human dignity,
cultural identities, and life itself are values that can't
be traded on a stock exchange," Perez Esquivel stated.
Perez Esquivel served
as a member of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal which, in
1988, helped lodge an accusation against the IMF and World
Bank regarding treatment of foreign debt. In March of 1999,
he was a keynote speaker for the World Forum on Debt Cancellation,
held in Brussels, Belgium. He told his Berkeley audience
that "market terrorism" threatens to overwhelm "peoples' rights" when
more than half of the Gross Domestic Product of many developing
countries goes to payment of foreign debt. When this occurs,
he asserted, "we have lost our sovereignty."
In response to questions
from the audience about conditions that would justify a war,
Perez Esquivel said that war is never the answer. "We
have to ask how and why we got to the war. There is complicity,
a process, acquiescence, and treason." He reminded the
audience that Osama Bin Laden was once an implicit ally of
the United States, having been trained, equipped, and armed
to fight against the Soviet Union. "Now that Bin Laden
is enemy number one," he commented, "Saddam Hussein
has been demoted to enemy number two."
Perez Esquivel also commented
on the U.S. role in what he called the "remilitarization" of
Latin America. "We see U.S. military bases being installed
in almost every country in Latin America," he said,
referring to the construction of forward operations posts
at the Manta base in Ecuador, Aruba, and Curaçao,
and to increasing operations in many Andean countries under
the control of the U.S. Southern Command. He asked, "Why
is the U.S. training troops to take part in Plan Colombia or
other actions where our own peoples are the enemies?"
The Nobel laureate expressed
his concern for civil liberties all around the world during
this time of crisis. During his recent trip to New York to
meet with leaders at the United Nations, he was surprised
to see armed guards carrying automatic weapons and to be
awakened at two in the morning by the sound of helicopters.
He said he looked around this "city under siege" and
asked himself, "Am I in the United States or in Latin
America?"
At a moment when "it
seems like the world is bursting apart," Perez Esquivel
told the audience that the challenge is to recover the value
of human rights, which in his understanding comprise social
and economic rights. "We must have critical consciousness
to strengthen our capacity to discern between values and
anti-values and to recover the identities of our peoples," he
said. He reminded his audience of the exhortations of the
student movements of 1968: "Let's be realistic, and
ask the impossible."
