Eduardo Galeano: Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

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Chatting with a swarm of street kids, the ones who cling to the bumpers of buses in Mexico City, reporter Karina Avilés asked about drugs.

“I feel great, I get rid of all my problems,” said one. “When I come down and I’m just me,” he added, “I feel trapped like a bird in a cage.”

These children are regularly harassed by the police and their dogs in the Northern Bus Terminal. The company manager assured the reporter, “We don’t let these children die, because in some way they are human.”

In nearly all these tasks, except war, which tradition decrees and reality teaches is a male affair, girls’ hands are just as useful as boys’. But the labor market treats girls the same way it treats women. They always earn less than the meager bit paid to boys, when they earn anything at all.

Prostitution is the fate of many girls and fewer boys around the world. Astonishing as it seems, there are at least a hundred thousand child prostitutes in the United States, according to a 1997 UNICEF report. But the vast majority of child victims of the sex trade work in the brothels and on the streets of the southern part of the globe. This multimillion-dollar industry, with its networks of traffickers, intermediaries, travel agents, and procurers, operates with scandalous ease. In Latin America, it is nothing new: child prostitution began in 1536, when the first “tolerance home” opened in Puerto Rico. Today half a million Brazilian girls sell their bodies for the benefit of adults — as many as in Thailand, but not as many as in India. On some Caribbean beaches, the prosperous sex tourism industry offers virgins to whoever can pay the price. The number of girls placed on the market is rising steadily: according to estimates by international organizations, at least a million girls swell the ranks of the global supply of bodies every year.

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In the streets of Mexico City, a girl inhales toluene, solvents, glue, you name it. When she stops trembling, she says: “I hallucinated the Devil, I mean I went into the Devil and right then, whoa! I was at the edge, I was about to jump, the building was eight stories high, and I was about to jump, but just then my hallucination stopped, the Devil left me. The hallucination I liked best was when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared before me. I saw her twice.”

The number of poor children who work, in their homes or out, for their families or for whomever, is uncountable. They work outside the law and outside statistics. And the rest? Many are superfluous. The market doesn’t need them, nor will it ever. They aren’t profitable; they never will be. From the point of view of the established order, they begin by stealing the air they breathe and soon steal anything they can lay their hands on. Hunger or bullets tend to shorten their voyage from crib to grave. The system that scorns the old also fears the young. Old age is a failure, childhood a threat. Ever more poor children are “born with a tendency toward crime,” according to specialists. They are the most dangerous category of the “surplus population.” The child as public threat: “the antisocial conduct of youth in Latin America” has been a recurring theme at the Pan-American Children’s Congress for years. Governments and some experts on the subject share this obsession with violence, vice, and perdition. Each child is a potential El Niño, and the disasters he or she may cause must be prevented. At the first South American Police Congress, held in Montevideo in 1979, the Colombian delegate explained that “the rising daily increase in the population under eighteen leads us to expect a higher POTENTIALLY DELINQUENT population” (uppercase in original).

In Latin American countries, the hegemony of the market severs ties of solidarity and tears the social fabric to shreds. What fate awaits the nobodies, the owners of nothing, in countries where the right to own property is becoming the only right? And the children of the nobodies? Hunger drives many, who are always becoming many more, to thievery, begging, and prostitution. Consumer society insults them by offering what it denies. And then they take vengeance, united by the certainty of the death that awaits them. According to UNICEF, in 1995 there were eight million abandoned children on the streets of Latin America. According to Human Rights Watch, in 1993 death squads linked to the police murdered six children a day in Colombia, four a day in Brazil.

Between the extremes lies the middle. Between the prisoners of opulence and the prisoners of destitution are the children who have quite a bit more than nothing but much less than everything. They, too, are less and less free. “To be allowed to be or not to be allowed to be, that is the question,” Spanish comic Chumy Chúmez liked to say. The freedom of these children is confiscated by societies that venerate order as they generate disorder. Fear of fear: the floor creaks under their feet and there are no guarantees. Stability is unstable, jobs evaporate, money vanishes. Just to make it to the end of the month is a feat. “Welcome, middle class,” is the greeting on a billboard at the entrance to one of the worst barrios of Buenos Aires. Middle-class people still live as impostors, pretending to obey the law and believe in it, pretending to have more than they have. But never before has it been so difficult for them to keep up this exhausting charade. Suffocated by debts and paralyzed by fear, the middle class raises its children in a state of panic. Fear of living, fear of falling, fear of losing your job, your car, your home, your possessions, fear of never having what you ought to have in order to be. In the widespread clamor for public security, imperiled by lurking criminal monsters, the members of the middle class shout loudest. They defend order as if they owned it, even though they’re only tenants overwhelmed by high rents and the threat of eviction.

So the Deaf Will Hear

The number of malnourished children in the world is growing. Twelve million children under the age of five die every year from diarrhea, anemia, and other illnesses caused by hunger. A 1998 UNICEF report, full of such statistics, suggests that the struggle against child hunger and death “become the world’s highest priority.” To make it that, the report turns to the only argument that seems to work today: “The lack of vitamins and minerals in the diet costs some countries the equivalent of more than 5 % of their gross national product in lives lost, disability, and lower productivity.”

Caught in the trap of terror, more and more of their children are condemned to suffer the humiliation of perpetual imprisonment. In the city of the future, which is becoming the city of the present, telechildren watched by electronic nannies will contemplate the street from a window of their telehomes: the street, off-limits thanks to violence or fear of it, the street where the dangerous and sometimes prodigious spectacle of life takes place.