Slavery: Third World

1. Land: The Hope of the Oppressed on Every Continent

At the start of the 1990s, while the Berlin Wall and the authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe toppled, Latin American communities and clergy who were operating under the banner of liberation theology began throwing off the yoke of oppression.

The uprising of subjected peoples around the world lends immediacy to the search for genuine liberation. While many emphasize political matters, equally critical are the ethical and economic underpinnings of liberation. To ignore these will likely result in a tragic disillusionment for the people who have made the enormous sacrifices to chart new courses.

In How the Other Half Dies, Susan George wrote that "The most pressing cause of the abject poverty which millions of people in this world endure is that a mere 2.5% of landowners with more than 100 hectares control nearly three quarters of all the land in the world - with the top 0.23% controlling half." To recognize this social plague for what it is, and to avert a backlash of despair, requires a clear understanding of two great themes: the Promised Land and the Wasteland.

The Promised Land is the hope of the landless, literally, land, the gateway to opportunity. Abraham in Mesopotamia and the Israelites in bondage in Egypt so wished for their own land that they left homes and familiar surroundings and risked death to seek the distant place God had promised, a land rich in milk and honey, where a day's labor would put food on the table and allow their children to grow into adulthood. This exodus pattern has been repeated over and over, from the migrations of prehistory to the boat people of our day. For centuries, immigrants have poured into the Americas, looking for the inheritance denied to them in the Old World — their portion of land.

But the Promised Land is not so much a geographic place as it is a hope and a vision of a just social order. Modern society has many wondrous features, but it certainly is not the Promised Land in its full glory. Indeed, we are "modern captives" who sense the Promised Land as a primitive instinct, as a deep longing, and as a cry from the depths of our captivity that the world should be different.

All of us, no less than the Hebrews in Egypt, are captives of structures imposed upon us. To enslave people, today as three thousand years ago, is to rob them of the value of their labor. Millions of working people living in severe poverty are robbed of the fruits of their labor. Through various forms of exploitation, especially the monopolization of land rights, large segments of humanity are oppressed, dehumanized, held in bondage. One factor enabling governments to legalize land theft and lend respectability to exploitative landlordism is the general silence of religious and intellectual leaders about humanity's common rights to land.

We begin to penetrate and overcome this silence when we realize that the Wasteland is wasted land, unfulfilled potential, producing no "milk and honey." Speculators in both urban and rural areas hoard land on which the hungry, the homeless, and the jobless could feed, shelter, and employ themselves. Keeping valuable lands idle causes artificial shortages that drive up rents which poor people must pay for poor land. Land hoarding deserves much of the blame for creating the Wasteland: it forces people into the "desert." There, people find the oases controlled by more land monopolists who must be paid a ransom for access to nature's life-sustaining water. And as we will see, the primary focus of Biblical economic laws was the prevention of precisely this sort of usurpation of God's gifts to all creatures.

The midbar, the biblical Wasteland, is only part desert. It has towns and pastures, but it lacks the "fullness of life." This anomaly is mirrored in the modern Wasteland, crowded with factories, skyscrapers and mansions — along with ugly blight and squalid slums.

The point of departure of liberation theology is the recognition of the awful fact that millions lead subhuman lives. The rural landless seek refuge in cities, often becoming squatters in barrios or favelas with open sewage and no safe water supply. They may earn fifteen dollars a month if they find work at all. Children live in the streets and go to bed hungry. Illness and drought, and even complaining of their lot, may lead to premature death. And they can see the Mercedes behind the iron gates of walled mansions. (Ironically, mercedes is also a Spanish legal term denoting title to a large grant of land.) Like poor Lazarus in the parable of Jesus (Luke 16:19-31), they survive on the crumbs that fall from the rich man's table. When judgement comes to the rich man, he receives no mercy because he had shown none.

 

2. Latin American Colonialism and its Legacy of Bondage

Just as the Hebrews in Egypt toiled beneath the yoke of Pharaoh and his taskmasters, so did the peoples of Latin America for centuries endure bondage to colonial rulers.

And just as remnants of the slave mentality persisted among the Hebrews in the wilderness, so does the legacy of colonial attitudes and institutions persist in Latin America today.

The image of Christ dying in passive agony on the cross, and the image of the Blessed Virgin as a dolorous woman in mourning and pierced by a sword, are common in popular Latin American Catholicism. They speak of centuries of impotence under Spanish and other foreign masters. Even today many practicing Roman Catholics approach carnival as a temporary relief from suffering — a reality that was present yesterday and will be here tomorrow, always. In this sense, carnival is escapism — for a few days. Then real life continues.

The origins of this suffering are clearly to be found in the aristocratic system imposed by papal bull and the armed might of Spain and Portugal, a system that relegated the indigenous Indian population to a life of slavery, at best. In Inter Caeteris, Pope Alexander VI designated King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella "lords and masters" of the New World. Thus were the treasure stores of gold and silver, and later coffee and beef, thrown open — to a well-defined elite.

The encomienda was the basic instrument used by the Spanish empire for settling Latin America. This was a grant of Indians to an encomendero who assumed the obligation, in principle, of Christianizing and civilizing them. The Indians, "in exchange," were required to provide labor and tribute to Spain. We look back upon this epoch as a period of brutal and cynical "pacification" of the indigenous people by conquering exploiters. But it is important to recognize that the encomenderos who were charged with "Christianizing" the natives took their jobs seriously enough to allow the clergy to move in and do their evangelical works without interference. It may be tempting, now, to view those early missionaries as merely cynical agents of colonial expansionism — but in fact, it could not have been so. The enduring pervasive influence of the Catholic Church in Latin America attests to the success of those missionaries on the front lines. Had they not been motivated by a sincere Christian faith, they could not have left such an indelible mark on an entirely different culture.

However, religious works cannot avoid their political context (an insight of the liberation theologians). Although in theory the encomienda was not a grant of land, in practice many of the encomienderos were also granted mercedes, or legal title to vast tracts that gave rise to the late estates. After the encomienda system was abolished, this control of land allowed the economic exploitation of the natives to continue.

Two types of large landed estates survive to this day from the colonial period:

• the hacienda (or fazenda, in Portuguese), raising cattle and a diversity of crops for local use or sale; and
• the plantation, raising a single exportable crop.

Initially, Indians were given as slaves to the landholders. Later, the "freed" natives were tied to the landowners through debts brought on by a subsistence wage system. The shortage of good land off the estate made it easy for the landlord to attract or coerce labor onto his estate.

This pattern continues today with an underclass largely descended from the Indian and African slaves, along with other dispossessed groups. The haciendas and plantations are noted for their inefficient husbandry. Landowners face few social or economic pressures to become good managers, and often live in the cities leaving the estates to be run by overseers. Consequently, the landowners often do not make large profits, but that is not their objective. Their primary concern is the maintenance of the two paramount features of the status quo, which go hand in hand.

• First, labor is very cheap, because workers have no alternative place to employ themselves, even though massive tracts of good land are held nearly idle by the land barons.
• Second, the cost of holding on to huge estates — i.e., the taxes charged by the public for the privilege of retaining possession — are low or effectively nonexistent.

Strong incentives for good stewardship are as absent as the landlords.

There is also little incentive to productivity; most of the population has no share in the fruits of the land or the profits of the estates. The colonial system of land tenure discourages the creation of capital, with most of the surplus from the land going to purchase luxury goods that are produced at the expense of more useful manufacture or more often are imported, thereby straining the country's balance of payments. The situation in the cities is no better for the poor. who are drawn there by word of mouth, radio, television and films that present the cities as if they are the Promised Land. Of course, the image is false. So many landless folk seeking employment in the cities have turned them into places of great degradation. Urban land monopoly and speculation create tremendous housing difficulties for the poor. For example, in 1950, 36% of Brazil's people lived in cities, in 1988, 75% do so. Thus, the city of Sao Paulo has grown from ca. 2.2 million in 1950 to ca. 17 million in less than forty years. Of these, we are told that one third are favelados, landless urban squatters, and over 2.5 million are street children.

Indeed, the primary purpose of holding vast amounts of land, as Andre Gunder Frank writes in On Capitalist Underdevelopment, "is not to use it but to prevent its use by others. These others, denied access to the primary resource, necessarily fall under the domination of the few who do control it. And then they are exploited in all conceivable ways, typically through low wages."

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