The Colonial Legacy Is Perpetuated – Antonio García

By: Antonio García, Primer Comandante of the ELN

The international financial system alone transfers 30 million US dollars every hour from the countries of the South to the richest 1 percent in the global North.

Every year OXFAM generates a report for the summit of the richest, in Davos. This year was no exception.

Report after Report shows a timeline that shows how progress has been made in the construction of a world system in favor of the super-rich, accentuating inequalities and specifically the immoral accumulation of wealth.

Three thousand six hundred million human beings today live below the poverty line, that is, they live on less than 6.86 dollars a day, on the other hand the one thousand millionaires increased their wealth by almost 100 million dollars a day.

Now, how is this accumulated wealth generated?

The mass media owned by these same elites, sell the idea that these billionaires have earned that place with effort, hard work and discipline, sell their image and history as the new “saints” of the market god.

The truth is that the elites have benefited profoundly from extractivism in the global south (minerals, industrial agriculture, timber, etc.) thanks to policies that favor the exploitation of resources, accumulation and land grabbing at the expense of the present and future of the communities.

The adaptation of the normative and political infrastructure of states, their norms and institutions, thanks to the capture of democracy and now the capture of the state apparatus by these elites, facilitates and institutionalizes the transit of these resources to the global North, further enriching themselves by controlling the supply chain themselves.

International entities such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are there to facilitate this extractive logic throughout the global South, as well as to promote the agile transit of these resources to the elites of the global North.

Extreme poverty, lack of access to economic opportunities, extreme concentration of wealth, reveal a systematic pattern of wealth accumulation, which is based on deep-rooted structures of inequality and on both economic and social exploitation, perpetuated throughout history.

Precarious working conditions, low wages, access to privatized basic services, with high costs, etc., an entire system that perpetuates inequality, sustained impoverishment and open injustice.

The number of people living in poverty and extreme poverty has hardly changed since 1990.

How was this possible?

State structures sustain an extractive colonial legacy, a system that favors elites and facilitates the extraction of wealth from the global South to the North.

The growing power in the hands of monopolistic companies has allowed the control of markets under the logic of real mafias, a de facto criminal order. Thus, these companies control markets, set prices, condition labor rules, and also condition the electoral system, generating an open capture of democracy.

Global and local tax structures have prevented fair taxation, the growing financialization of the economy has promoted privatization and has generated an environment where the interests of sectors of great economic power are prioritized.

These powerful economic elites have managed to structure the institutions and norms of the State to favor their interests, clientelism has been established as a “normalized” phenomenon, as well as illegal corruption, but also legal corruption such as political lobbies, campaign financing, among other ways that twist the gear in their favor.

This system of injustices is perpetuated, the concentration of wealth resulting from hyper-exploitation does not stop, which now with fascist governments are a “normalized” reality.

There is an urgent need to change this system, to break this sustained evil, this context of perpetuated injustices that result from colonial logics, dynamics and relations, of domination and subordination. This is an unsustainable, irrational reality, of open injustice, it is a hopeless reality.

Thus, a person who is born into an impoverished family, in this context, could get out of that situation, if the conditions are favorable, in 290 years.

This reality ratifies without a doubt, the right and duty of peoples to rebellion.

https://insurgenciaurbana-eln.net/el-legado-colonial-se-perpetua/

https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=17155