The most visible tragedy in Latin American cities has been the appearance of millions of street children. Like the tip of an iceberg, the appear-
ance of the street children represents a tragedy of much greater proportions. Beneath the street-
children phenomenon lies a mass of less visible
suffering, characterized Dy the stunted lives of child workers, the terror of child prostitution, and the poverty of indigenous children and children in peas- ant communities. The street children remind us that while poverty remains most acute in rural areas, the rapid urbanization of Latin America has made poverty– most visibly-an urban phe- nomenon. Seventy percent of the Latin American population and 57% of the poor now live
in urban areas. These figures sharply contrast with the world’s other developing regions where the majority of children live in rural areas. In
1985, for example, 64% of Latin
American children under the niadren in a squ age of 15 lived in cities, as Managua.
opposed to only 29% of the African population of the same age. It is in cities that the relative depri- vation of living standards and social rights is most acute.
The difficult conditions borne by millions of Latin American children-and their families-were particularly sharpened during the “lost decade” of the 1980s. The precarious situation in which the majority of Latin American children are growing up has been further aggravated by the policies of economic adjustment adopted by most govern- ments in response to the debt crisis, the major eco- nomic problem of the 1980s. Adjustment policies often produced a reduction of employment and wages, rising prices of basic goods (especially food), and reduction of public spending on public and social services. As a result of the economic cri- sis and the policies of adjustment, the percentage of families living in extreme poverty rose dramati- cally during the first half of the 1980s: from 12% to 16% in Santiago de Chile for example, and from 17.3% to 29.4% in San Jose, Costa Rica. Studies show that impoverishment has hit families with the most children the hardest.
Eugenia Maria Zamora Chavarria is the director of the Instituto Interamericano del Nillo in Montevideo, Uruguay. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
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Reduced spending on social services and falling
family incomes have a negative impact on the qual- ity of care that can be offered to children in extreme poverty. As a consequence, infant mortali-
ty continues to be a problem in the region. For every thousand live births, 50 children die before
tneir rlthn birthday. Tins rate is six times higher than in the Unit-
ed States and Canada. In Haiti
and Bolivia, the under-five mor-
tality rate has reached alarming
levels, 133 and 118 respectively.
Easily prevented diseases like
diarrhea and respiratory infec-
tions, along with malnutrition,
are the principal causes of these
childhood deaths. It is estimated that four million children under five die each year from diarrhea. The sudden reappearance of
cholera, an epidemic thought to be eradicated a century ago, constitutes dramatic evidence of
the precarious conditions of health among a large part of the Latin American population. The reduction of income rein-
tter settlement in forced the necessity of child labor, frequently in unhealthy conditions, in order to support family subsistence. It is an error to suppose, in this context, that the child of the street has been “spontaneously generated” and lacks any family, In the majority of cases, these children form a part of a “family of the street” pro- viding mutual aid to one another. Into this bleak landscape, some hope has been introduced in the form of the World Convention of Children’s Rights. The years leading up to the World Convention were characterized in Latin America by profound economic and political crises. Most of the countries in the region had deeply authoritarian governments, typically installed by military coups. In this sense, the arrival of the decade of the 1980s, while it sharpened the eco- nomic crisis, signalled at the same time a democra- tic political opening. This democratic opening rep- resents a special condition for Latin America, and the great challenge of the 1990s is to maintain it. In this context, the living conditions of the great masses of the urban and rural poor, especially young people, will have a determinate influence on the consolidation of the democratic system. The problems of our children are important for their own sake, but in addition, their solution is impera- tive for the future of a democratic system which can’t exclude them if it is to survive.
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