Mr. Eduardo Ballón
Presedent, ALOP and Centro de Estudios y Promoción del Desarrollo, Peru

Exclusion, inequality and poverty in
Latin America and the Caribbean

     After many years of social policies and general social spending guided by the region’s modernization processes and dictated by the market, the question of how to avoid the significant risks of social disintegration in Latin America and the Caribbean remains. A major priority must be to reconcile the discussions of various summits and conventions with reality.

     Obviously, the notion of poverty cannot be addressed without also considering the inequality that is associated with it. The neoliberal argument with respect to this issue states that a long period of strong economic growth in an open and deregulated context leads to less inequality. Chile’s experience, the region’s main example, has proven exactly the opposite: without subsidies or any type of protection and driven by the private sector and the market, Chile’s economy grew significantly from 1984. However, it is widely accepted today that Chile now has more inequality than in 1970 and 1975 and that income is more concentrated than before, with the poor participating even less.

     By focusing solely on poverty, social policy does not address our primary problem and hinders the fulfilment of one of the mandates of the Copenhagen Summit and other international forums such as OAS, which maintain that “social and economic development should be seen as separate parts of the same process and viewed in an integral and coherent way.” 

     Overall opinion in the region mirrors this belief. According to the Latin Barometer, a high number of those polled (82% in Argentina, 68% in Bolivia, 67% in Colombia, 72% in Ecuador, 82% in Mexico, 92% in Venezuela and 50% in Peru) believe that poverty has increased significantly in the past years. Similarly, a high percentage (66% in Argentina, 69% in Bolivia, 66% in Colombia, 69% in Chile, 80% in Ecuador, 57% in Mexico, 69% in Peru and 65% in Venezuela) believe that it is the government’s responsibility to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. 

      It is therefore clear that, given the situation, we must reconsider the development model and a large number of the macroeconomic policies our countries have adopted. In short, we must look at the issue from a fresh angle. Poverty will not be eradicated by improving management and the use of targeted poverty reduction systems, but rather by initiating a significant change in wealth distribution. Democracies are not strengthened solely by efficient institutions; they must be representative and equitable. Civil society organizations contribute to the eradication of poverty, not through their professionalization but rather, through their mobilization to create equality. Essentially, development is more the result of an increase in the skills and freedoms of the people than an aspect of economic growth.

In this way, I would like to draw your attention to two issues that represent a challenge for NGOs, and for which we are gathering here today. On one hand, we feel an urgent need to expand the debate on poverty and social exclusion in an attempt to revisit the issues of development and social change in the region. On the other hand, there is pressure to advance the mobilization process of all civil society, not only of NGOs. This effort must be carried out on at least three levels: i) at the national level, by forging strategic alliances with various social movements, universities and different civil society organizations; ii) at the regional level, by strengthening and expanding the various networks and platforms that enable us to act and put pressure on the global stage; and iii) at the global level, in which a global civil society seems to be slowly taking shape.