CNS STORY: Dominicans discuss poverty, failed economic policy in Latin America

The whole CNS
public Web site
headlines, briefs
stories, etc,
represents less
than one percent
of the daily news
report.

Get all the news!

If you would like
more information
about the
Catholic News
Service daily
news report,
please contact
CNS at one of
the following:
cns@
catholicnews.com
or
(202) 541-3250

Copyright:

This material
may not
be published,
broadcast,
rewritten or
otherwise
distributed.

Copyright
(c) 2006
Catholic News
Service/U.S.
Conference of
Catholic Bishops.

CNS Story:

LATAM-ECONOMY Feb-7-2007 (870 words) xxxi

Dominicans discuss poverty, failed economic policy in Latin America

By Barbara J. Fraser
Catholic News Service

LIMA, Peru (CNS) -- From his vantage point 170 miles south of the U.S. border, Bishop Raul Vera Lopez of Saltillo, Mexico, sees the people who pass through his diocese on their way to seek work in the United States as testimony to decades of failed economic policy in Latin America.

The migrants from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and places like the southern Mexican region of Chiapas, where the bishop worked in the 1990s, are victims of "a deliberately exclusive economy that makes an option for big business and excludes everyone else," he said.

"It is no longer a matter of marginalizing them -- it's exclusion," he said.

Despite decades of loans and economic adjustment packages -- and more recently economic growth -- more than 40 percent of Latin Americans still live in poverty.

Economic policies adopted in recent years have made it difficult to change that figure, Bishop Vera told Catholic News Service Feb. 2, while in Lima for a meeting of Dominican provincials from Latin America and the Caribbean. Bishop Vera is a Dominican.

"A new president can take office with great promises and plans but be unable to fulfill them because of the terrible conditions imposed by the global economy and requirements that macroeconomic figures be kept at a certain level," he said. "This means favoring capital growth and generally neglecting social responsibilities."

In that sense, he said, the region has changed little -- and for the worse -- since the second general conference of Latin American bishops in Medellin, Colombia, in 1968, when the region's church leaders declared their "preferential option for the poor."

Latin America today is "in a political and social situation even worse than the one that existed at the time of Medellin," Bishop Vera said.

He said he hopes that when the region's bishops meet in Aparecida, Brazil, May 13-31, their decisions "will be even more radical than the decisions the Latin American Catholic Church made at Medellin."

The meeting, which will begin at the end of a five-day visit by Pope Benedict XVI, should be a time for the church to renew its "prophetic charism," the bishop said. "I hope it will raise a strong voice against this system that is destroying the earth and that the Latin American church will be a light for international society."

Meanwhile, the rapid globalization of the world's economy in the decades since Medellin, with free-trade agreements and the renegotiation of foreign debt, poses a danger to the church as well as poor Latin Americans, said Father Joao Xerri. Father Xerri, a Brazilian Dominican friar, is assistant to the master of the order in Rome and a member of the team coordinating the Dominicans' work in Latin America and the Caribbean.

"It has been globalization of the rich to the exclusion of the majority," he said. "It's like colonialism. Colonialism was called discovery. This is exclusion, and it's called globalization."

With countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Brazil and Chile headed by presidents who come from leftist parties or appeal to revolutionary ideals, religious orders must ask themselves, "What side of society are we on?" Father Xerri said.

If religious communities become too comfortable and feel threatened by events like those that unfolded last year when Bolivian President Evo Morales forced petroleum companies to renegotiate their contracts to give the government a bigger share of their revenues, it is a sign "that we have become contaminated ourselves with globalization," he said.

However, Father Xerri sees the oscillation between progressive and conservative attitudes as part of a worldwide trend.

"Conservatism is not (just) a problem with the church. The world has become more conservative," he said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when many of the region's countries were governed by dictators, "church institutions went to the left," he said. With more progressive governments in office now, "we are shifting toward the other side."

He said he finds hope in the same grass-roots movements that made the Latin American church so vibrant around the time of the Medellin meeting.

"Nowadays these groups are smaller, but they are more steadfast. Their mystique is much deeper," Father Xerri said. "I admire them more. I think they are more committed."

Commitment to the poor is deeply rooted in Dominican tradition. In 1511, in what is now the Dominican Republic, a group of 14 friars signed their names to a homily protesting the Spanish colonists' inhumane treatment of the native people.

That protest could easily be made today, said Father Brian Pierce, whose job as "promoter of the Dominican family" takes him around the region to listen to friars, sisters and laypeople and to encourage them to collaborate in their ministries.

"We live in a world where people purposely turn away. We put walls up around poor neighborhoods. We don't listen to the cry of the poor," Father Pierce said. "One of the powerful challenges for us today is to have the courage to say, 'You aren't seeing, you aren't hearing,' to governments that talk about how (the) gross national product has soared this year," when so many people still live in poverty.

END

Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
CNS · 3211 Fourth St NE · Washington DC 20017 · 202.541.3250