A Looted Central America Highly Vulnerable to Swine Flu

April 30, 2009 (LPAC)—Looted for years by the free-trade predators operating from Washington and the City of London, the nations of Central America and the Caribbean are now desperately seeking ways to withstand the swine flu.

The region's impoverished populations are highly vulnerable to any form of disease. There is concern that once the flu appears in Guatemala, which borders Mexico, it could spread like wildfire. One half of all of Central America's poor — 3 million people — are Guatemalan, a large number of whom are under the age of 5.

Throughout the region, food is unattainable. Even after last year's crisis over food scarcity and high prices, conditions have only worsened. Today, in most of these countries, prices of basic staples — i.e. corn to make tortillas — are higher than they were a year ago.

As Nicaragua's Health Minister Guillermo Gonzalez put it succinctly, following an April 28 meeting of Central American and Caribbean Health Ministers in Managua, "we effectively lack the capabilities to deal with whatever dimension this epidemic might represent." While the health ministers agreed on a number of monitoring and preventive measures to be immediately applied, they also stated that their countries have no financial resources, and require urgent help from the World Health Organization, and other advanced-sector nations.

Nicaragua, for example, has no stocks of Tamiflu. Every government has declared a health emergency, and is asking the Mexican government to show "flexibility" by not deporting Central American citizens who entered that country illegally.

In the first quarter of this year, an already dire situation was compounded by the impact of the global financial crisis: 77,000 people lost their jobs in the foreign-owned sweat shops known as maquiladoras, which are shutting down around the region. Remittances sent from relatives in the U.S. have declined dramatically, as has trade.