Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

162 PLANET OF SLUMS
1990s were largely retrofitted in response to this extraordinary eruption
of global protest.
The international dimensions of austerity are recognized symbolically in
attacks on travel agencies, foreign automobiles, luxury hotels, and inter­
national agency offices. Protests take varied forms, often appearing as
classic food riots (Morocco, Brazil, Haiti) and at other times as.peaceful
protest demonstrations that turned violent (Sudan, Turkey, Chile) or as
general strikes (Peru, Bolivia, India). Frequently, however, protest
initiated with one of these tactics is transformed to another - demon­
strations turn to riot, spontaneous violence is rechanneled in political
organization.
The food riot as a means of popular protest is a common, perhaps
even universal, feature of market societies - less a vestige of political­
industrial evolution than a strategy of empowerment in which poor and
dispossessed groups assert their claims to social justice. In the modern
system of states and international economic integration, the explosive
point of popular protest has moved, with most of the world's popula­
tion, to the cities where the processes of global accumulation, national
development, and popular justice intersect.39
The first wave of anti-IMF protests peaked between 1983 and 1985,
only to be followed by a second wave after 1989. In Caracas in
February 1989 a hugely unpopular IMF-dictated increase in fuel prices
and transit fares sparked a riot by angry bus riders and radical univer­
sity students, and police batons quickly turned the confrontation into a
semi-insurrection. During the week-long Caracazo, tens of thousands
of poor people came down from their hillside barrios to loot shopping
centers, burn luxury cars, and build barricades. At least 400 were killed.
A month later Lagos erupted after student protests against the IMF: 50
died in three days of looting and street fighting in a city where most
poor people probably shared the boiling anger of "the King" in Chris
Abani's novel Graceland:
39 Ibid., p. 43.
SAPING THE THIRD WORLD
De majority of our people are honest, hardworking people. But dey are
at de mercy of dese army bastards and dose tiefs in the IMF, de World
Bank and de U.S . ... Now we, you and I and all dese poor peple, owe de
World Bank ten million dollars for nothing. Dey are all tiefs and I despise
dem - our people and de World Bank people!4o
The Utopian Decade?
According to both neoclassical theory and World Bank projections, the
1990s should have righted the wrongs of the 1980s and allowed Third
World cities to regain lost ground and bridge the chasms of inequality
created by the SAPs - the pain of adjustment should have been
followed by the analgesic of globalization. Indeed, the 1990s, as The
Challenge f Slums wryly notes, were the first decade in which global
urban development took place within almost utopian parameters of
neoclassical market freedom.
During the 1990s, trade continued to expand at an almost unprece­
dented rate, no-go areas opened up and military expenditures decreased.
. . . All the basic inputs to production became cheaper, as interest rates
fell rapidly along with the price of basic commodities. Capital flows were
increasingly unfettered by national controls and could move rapidly to
the most productive areas. Under what were almost perfect economic
conditions according to the dominant neoliberal economic doctrine, one
might have imagined that the decade would have been one of unrivalled
prosperity and social justice.41
However, according to the UN's Human Development Report 2004, "an
unprecedented number of countries saw development slide backwards
in the 1990s. In 46 countries people are poorer today than in 1990. In
25 countries more people are hungry today than a decade ago."42
Throughout the Third World a new wave of SAPs and self-imposed
neoliberal programs accelerated the demolition of state employment,
40 Abani, Grace/and, p. 280.
41 Challenge, p. 34.
42 United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2004,
New York 2004, p. 132.
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