In South Africa’s case, we are told that the “apartheid debt” loaned by the bankers makes them complicit with the “genocide.” South Africa’s current democratically elected government insists on paying down the debt, despite the protests of groups like Jubilee South Africa. But here, as elsewhere, the atrocities committed under apartheid are emphasized mainly in connection with foreign banks and companies.
In the Philippines, one third of the budget since 1986 has been spent on foreign debt payments. The debt was racked up under the kleptocracy of the infamous Ferdinand Marcos. Because of their willingness to deal with such dictators, economist Hero Vashwani says, “Bankers have no morality. They are like lawyers…, bankers are the worst prostitutes on earth.” Such a description might instead better fit Marcos or his wife Imelda. Whatever guilt of corporations and banks that exists is that of association with the origin of such evil itself.
Such is the general thrust of the video. The complex causes of poverty in these developing nations are simplified into a single villain: transnational banks. The evil of the various dictators is highlighted only in relationship to the loans they were able to garner from the IMF, World Bank, and other financial institutions.
The vigor of the DVD’s depiction of the problems is precisely its greatest weakness. The simplistic depiction of the problem (international debt) and the proposed solution (debt relief) displays an underlying naïvete and hostility toward free economies.
The question the film raises, “whether it is fair that innocent poor people in the world today should pay the debt of their dictators in the past,” is an important and a legitimate one. But this does not obviate the greater guilt of the actual perpetrators of brutality and oppression: the dictators themselves.
The assumption is that international engagement, trade, and investment allowed these regimes to last longer than they otherwise would have. They presumably would have collapsed far sooner if they had been isolated. But this assumption is highly speculative. It is hard to imagine more isolated regimes than North Korea under Kim Jong Il or Castro’s Cuba, but brutal rule has lingered on and on, while the respective populace ekes out a living under grinding poverty.
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