Hopes for better life dashed on the rocks of woe and despair?
<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic news Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2003 By: Francisco Rivero
Date: Tue, 06 May 2003 09:03:18 -0400 From: Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com To: Editor@VHeadline.com Subject: Reply to Mr. Elio Cequea
Dear Editor: To Mr. Elio Cequea.
Quote: <a href=www.vheadline.com>Anyway, does this sound contradictory to him "... right on the surging of urban slums and shanty towns ... wrong to disprove robust economic growth." It does to me ... I thought economic growth reduces the other one.Unquote
Beware of your common sense! Your mind is operating on the following track ... urban slums and shantytowns are today’s flagship of misery and depravation in Venezuela ... so anything that triggered its surging could not be a good thing...
Wrong! let me give you a different perspective ... you are living in a country with a large and poor farming population living (¿really?) in appalling agricultural dwellings ... all of a sudden such a country’s economy goes into overdrive expanding at breakneck speed over a fairly long period ... (I know this fact is emotionally unacceptable to you because it does not fit your hair-brained theory of exploitation, decline and degeneration since discovery day ... masterly exposed in your letter “In Venezuela, even the Virgin Mary plays politics” and summed up in the following line “what have brought us where we are”).
Those humble families, at the end of their wits, scraping a life, saw better opportunities for them and their children around the industrial and urban poles of development. Plenty of work opportunities and well paid jobs awaited them. The spectacular growth of the economy triggered a massive shift from farm to city ... those people were not fools ... they knew better ... they knew what a hopeless life they were leaving behind ... humble families in the 60s did have hopes for better lives (not so for today’s humble families, and you can speak volumes about “the future remains to be seen”).
Why were those hopes for better life were dashed on the rocks of woe and despair?
We simply stopped growing ... sometime around the late 70s our national economy tanked and went into a long and unstoppable decline ... and the compensating and beneficial effects of a growing economy were not anymore there to cope with the initial surge from farm to city and the inertial population increases caused by better perspectives and better health care ... gross economic mismanagement for sure ... its roots could certainly be found in the period of fantastic economic growth and improving well-being ... however that does not invalidate the undeniable fact that such a thing really happened in Venezuela.
Your theory notwithstanding, there was an historical period in our history that the forces you stated did not operate...
Quote <a href=www.vheadline.com>In Venezuela we have both "world class wealth and world class poverty" ... one is getting wealthier and wealthier the other one, poorer and poorer.Unquote
That is absolutely true ... and nowadays things are really speeding up ... I can foresee we will solve this problem pretty soon ... the very very few numbers of the old-rich will leave the country and the entire Venezuelan population will scrape their lives with less than a dollar a day ... of course with the sweet little exception of the very very few numbers of the new-and-revolutionary-fluent-rich...
That is what we really need to stop!
Francisco Rivero riverofjr@hotmail.com Caracas, Venezuela