“From collapsing ecosystems to collapsing economies, our communities have been battered by a storm of climate chaos, debt distress, deepening inequality, and systemic exploitation. These crises are the direct result of a global economic system built to extract from our lands, our people, our futures—so the rich and powerful can thrive off our suffering.”
That was the message May 29 of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD), a Manila-based network that calls for change in debt, climate, economic and development systems.
In June 2024, Pope Francis and other church leaders around the world launched a new Jubilee campaign for debt cancellation. In Canada, the call is taken up by KAIROS, the Canadian Council of Churches and by Development and Peace (D&P) — among others. KAIROS launched a “Turn Debt into Hope” Jubilee 2025 petition that by June 13 had been signed by more than 36,400 Canadians.
Promoters of the campaign gathered for a People’s Forum in Calgary this past weekend ahead of the G7 summit and joined Sunday’s protests in the heart of the city. The Catholic Register reported on the event:
Salome Owuonda, executive director at the Africa Centre for Sustainable and Inclusive Development (Africa CSID), spoke about the consequences of crushing debt in Kenya…. She told participants that in her East African country “50 per cent of revenue generated is directed toward paying debt” and that puts health care, education, climate action and food security at risk. “And things are not getting better,” said Owuonda. “The government is calling for more taxes as they have to try and pay the debt.”
Dean Dettloff, a research and advocacy officer at D&P, shared that over “3.3. billion people in the world live in countries that spend more paying the interest of their debt than health care and education.” He added that many nation states also direct more funds to these expenditures than safeguarding the environment.
Tarek Al-Zoughbi, a Palestinian Christian who serves as the project and youth coordinator at Wi’am: The Palestinian Conflict Transformation Centre in the West Bank, spoke about the suffering in Gaza and many countries around the world.
Al-Zoughbi said that during this Jubilee year, we “must begin to recognize this image of God that is in each of us and that is in the spirit of creation.” He called for an end to environmentally exploitative practices that contribute to ecological debt.
Some readers will recall the the Millennium Jubilee of 2000, which mobilized millions globally to demand debt cancellation for nations in the Global South. KAIROS reminds us:
In Canada, this movement took shape as The Canadian Ecumenical Jubilee Initiative, the country’s most successful faith-based advocacy campaign. This powerful campaign, led by church-based justice organizations, KAIROS’ predecessor coalitions, and the Canadian Council of Churches, played a crucial role in achieving over $100 billion in global debt relief.
Yet, 25 years later, a worsening global debt crisis continues to affect vulnerable populations, exacerbated by rising interest rates, climate change, and economic inequality. An unacknowledged “ecological debt” owed by the North to the South and Indigenous Peoples further exacerbates the crisis.
Global “Financing for Development” system is part of the problem
When Pope Francis launched the new Jubilee debt campaign a year ago, he called for a “new international financial architecture” that breaks the financial-debt cycle that has contributed to a current global debt now estimated at $313 trillion.
That APMDD statement that I referred to above presses hard on that global financial architecture, describing a “rigged system” that favours creditors. It criticizes the Financing for Development (FfD) process, which was created to ensure fair and just financing for development and climate action—especially for the Global South. “Instead, it has become another space for the Global North to rewrite the rules to protect their power, shirk their responsibilities, and advance false solutions. Their hypocrisy is most glaring when it comes to climate finance.”
At the end of June, world leaders will gather in Seville, Spain, for the fourth international conference on financing for development, dubbed FfD4. (I attended an ecumenical pre-event at the first FfD conference in Monterrey, Mexico, in 2002 and wrote about it here.) In recent months, negotiations on the outcome document have sparked intense civil society campaigning.
The Global Policy Forum said June 17 that the final draft retains an intergovernmental process for managing debt, but weakened its mandate to making “recommendations”. Critics argue that this could kill whatever hope remains for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as “debt crises strangle fiscal space and derail the implementation of the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development.” Global Policy Forum describes some of what is gone from the outcome document (referred to now as the “Compromiso de Sevilla”):
The paragraph on phasing out fossil fuel subsidies (27i) has been deleted entirely, as well as the specification of asset types to be covered by national and global asset registries (28g). The language around the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Convention was also softened just two months before the first round of negotiations starts: “We support” was downgraded to “we encourage support” (28b). A similar change occurred in the paragraph on investor-state dispute settlement, where the “we undertake reform” was replaced by “we support efforts to reform” (43l).
Meanwhile, the rich countries led by the United States are cutting international aid and increasing their military spending.
The G7 meeting near Calgary issued a series of statements (CBC, left) but one searches in vain for anything about debt cancellation or development assistance. The statement on “migrant smuggling” fails to address the question of why people leave their homes or how development aid and peace-making strategies can ease the problem.
The APMDD statement concludes:
“We are here to expose the Global North—not just for failing to deliver climate finance, but for actively sabotaging it in bad faith. This is no accident. It is a calculated strategy to protect their profits and deny justice to those they have exploited for centuries…. We see through every lie. We reject every excuse.”
I take my title today from a subhead in a column by Enrique Galvan Ochoa in the Mexico City daily La Jornada. I’ll translate and summarise from his text here:
Not even Karl Marx would dare to imagine such a spectacular coup against neoliberalism and globalization as that carried out by President Donald Trump with his explosion of tariffs to the whole world on April 2 in the Rose Garden of the White House. The cathedrals of capitalism tumbled, from Wall Street to all the other global stock markets. In just a week, investors fled in search of refuge for their money: in gold, government bonds—swallows in search of a nest. The blow from that unpredictable businessman installed in Washington will have lasting effects. And it will hit the poor as well as the rich.
With respect, I am not so sure that it was a blow against neoliberalism so much as its logical next step: away from unrestricted movement of capital and toward concentration of wealth in ever-fewer hands.
But that’s my point: I’m not sure. Daily—this has been going on since Trump began his run for political office a decade ago—new opinion pieces land in my inbox, many of them making strong historical analogies. Is he trying to restore a golden age/Belle Époque—think of the 1870s through to the start of the First World War and the beginning of income tax—for oligarchic billionaires and their closest allies, the mere millionaires?
I loved seeing the rapper Lizzo on Saturday Night Live this past weekend wearing a cropped t-shirt emblazoned TARIFFIED. On the right: Trump in a storm.
What to make of these tariff wars and consequent stock market losses? I find myself pushed to go deeper.
You don’t have to be a Marxist—I think here of sociologist Max Weber and Canadian social democrat Tommy Douglas—to see how societies (including the liberal ones) are divided between the dominant structures defended by the elites and the counter movements supported by those with fewer privileges.
And you don’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate his writing. A passage in The Communist Manifesto describes how love and poetry, religion and community, are “drowned in the icy waters of selfish calculation.” All of these are drowned so that personal worth becomes exchange value—you sell your labour—and numberless freedoms are abolished in favour of “that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.” *
We might be forgiven if we thought free trade was invented at the time of the great debates ahead of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, or the Canada-U.S. agreement in 1989, or the advent of the common market in Europe in the 1960s. Some might know that elections in Canada were fought and lost at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries over various proposals for free trade with the United States: “No truck or trade with the Yankees!” cried the Conservatives in 1911, defeating the Liberals of Sir Wilfred Laurier.
Just before Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels published their Manifesto in 1848, debate raged in Britain over the “Corn Laws.” These were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food enforced between 1815 and 1846. Large land-owners wanted the tariffs kept high to keep out competition. Industrialists wanted them lowered because cheaper food meant they could pay workers less. (The industrialists won.) In a speech in Brussels in January 1848, Marx said protectionism was conservative and free trade was destructive. But he also saw that free trade in that context “hastens the social revolution” and thus merited his support.
I like to say that I have been fighting free trade since 1848. But truth is the first time I wrote about the free trade debate was in 1986 (above).
My issue wasn’t so much having about rules for international trade—and we always press for protection for labour, the environment and human rights—as it was the protections that were built into the trade agreements for corporations (always referred to as “investors”). Under those waves of free trade deals, governments were blocked from protecting public health or the environment. Corporations would bring their complaints to an “investor-state” dispute resolution tribunal. Most times, the tribunals would rule in favour of the corporation and the state would be on the hook for the corporation’s imagined future earnings. Or they would succumb to the threat of the suit, as Panama is doing now in the face of a $20-billion suit.
Now that Trump has thrown away the rule book, it may seem that people like me are suddenly defending free trade. I think we’re defending the idea of at least having rules. Even as we fight specific battles (I think of the lawsuit brought by Canadian mining companies against El Salvador), we learned to live with economic integration: even after the havoc caused in Canada to industrial jobs and farmers after the 1989 FTA with the United States; even after U.S. abandonment of its industrial workers; and even after two million Mexican farmers were forced from their land and into the cities and across the border after NAFTA in 1994.
But let’s not lose sight of longer-term objectives. In the face of this crisis in capitalism, what are the opportunities? The “social revolution” envisioned by Marx may be distant, but in these last 40 years, social movements have never ceased to uphold human rights broadly understood: economic, social, cultural and environmental.
Manuel Pérez Rocha works now with the Institute for Policy Studies and writes an occasional column for La Jornada. (In the late 90s, we both worked with the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, RMALC). Recently, he pointed to a long list of actions taken together by Mexican, Canadian and U.S. organizations. He continued:
“Under Trump, we suffer from a savage neoliberalism that evades treaties, written rules, and multilateral organizations. He sees no friends and only enemies. The only laws are those of the strongest and ‘I’m in charge.’ Mexico must respond by demanding a thorough review of the USMCA [called CUSMA in Canada and T-MEC in Mexico], chapter by chapter, since its purpose and content are largely the same as those of NAFTA: to make Mexico an export platform to take advantage of cheap labour. Together with Canada, we must promote this review by generating spaces and resources for democratic participation, not only for business leaders but also for grassroots organizations in all three countries.”
Meanwhile, Charlie Angus continueshis resistance campaign. (In the current federal election, he is not running again.) On April 14, he reminded his Substack readers of Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.
Angus points to what Alinsky would say about our collective sense of loss over what is happening in the world today:
“Do one of three things. One, go and find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing – but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organize, build power.”
* Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), The Communist Manifesto in Essential Works of Marxism (18th ed., 1979), New York: Bantam, p.15.
A headline and a photo in the Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 caught my eye today. Together with a photo of Saint Óscar Romero was this phrase: “Justice and snakes only bite bare feet.” *
The writer, Alejandro Slokar, is a judge in Argentina’s federal court for appeals of criminal cases (Cámara Federal de Casación Penal). Here, he is writing about the International Day for the Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and the Dignity of Victims—or more simply, the Right to Truth Day, marked now every March 24.
March 24 is not only the date when we recall the martyrdom of San Salvador’s archbishop, the human rights defender Óscar Romero in 1980. It’s also when Argentineans recall the 1976 military coup that ushered in a “dirty war” against the popular movements of the impoverished—those with bare feet—along with trade unionists, journalists, writers, artists and human rights defenders. As many as 30,000 people were killed or disappeared over the next five years.
In El Salvador, about 80,000 people were killed or disappeared between 1979 and the end of the civil war in 1992. In both countries, as elsewhere across Latin America, movements to find the “historical truth.”
In recent weeks, families of people who disappeared during Mexico’s long “war on drugs” have drawn attention to a half-hectare farm in Teuchitlán, about 60 km west of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. The farm had been used to recruit new traffickers, but also to execute those who refused the cartel’s orders. State and federal authorities had known about the site since last September but did nothing to secure it or to identify human remains and other items found on the land. Predictably, state and federal authorities point fingers of blame at each other.
About 120,000 people have gone missing in Mexico since 2006 when then-President Felipe Calderón launched a military-led offensive against the drug cartels in an attempt to curb their violent turf wars. Instead, the violence became worse. And Calderón’s security chief, Genaro García Luna, was convicted in October in a U.S. court for his deep ties to the Sinaloa cartel.
Among the disappeared (still) are 43 students from a training school for rural teachers in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state, taken in 2014.
The “right to truth” cannot only be about historical cases. It must be the demand now in the case of the young men taken by the Trump regime and dumped into El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT). Certainly, some of the 238 Venezuelans may be criminals who were members of the “Tren de Aragua” gang but, as stories leak out, it’s clear that some of those deported were never accused, much less tried or convicted, of any crime.
TIME magazine published a stunning photo essay about the deportations. The photojournalist, Philip Holsinger, included this description of one of his encounters: “One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member.I’m gay. I’m a barber.’ I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.”
Drop Site News reported that another deportee was a Venezuelan professional soccer player and youth soccer coach with no criminal record. “The family only discovered that their loved one, Jerce Reyes Barrios, had been sent to El Salvador when they saw him in viral videos posted by the Trump administration, in which it celebrated what it said was the mass deportation of violent members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.”
The LGBTQIA+ Advocate magazine shared reporting on PBS by Rachel Maddow about a gay makeup artist who was among the deported prisoners—forcibly removed from the United States without a court hearing or deportation order.
Those stories, combined with reports of detentions of visa holders and other visitors, and harassment of legal residents and citizens, suggest that what happened in Argentina and El Salvador has begun in the United States. Can paramilitary death squads be far behind?
Writing of historical events and of the present-day right-wing populist regimes of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Javier Milei in Argentina, Slokar’s article argued that such abuses derive from the “neocolonial models”—European feudalism—applied in throughout the Americas. “While those responsible die in their beds without sanction, the consequences are almost infinite, farce and tragedy at the same time, and expressed in the inhumane neoliberal experiment that laughs at the Constitution, bitcoin, extractivism and punitive demagoguery that converge in the present.”
* The quote is variously attributed to both Óscar Romero and to the Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano. It may be that Galeano was quoting Romero, but I cannot find the original source: just partial citations.
Unwrapping Development 