Date: Sun, 15 Feb 1998 05:21:44 +0000
Subject: M-G: Children in Fujimori's Peru



Red-haired and white-haired children playing in garbage heaps in 
the shanty towns and slums of the Third World; I have seen them too. 
Except that the hair color is not natural but UNNATURAL caused by 
severe malnutrition and lack of food. 

Below is another story of the genocidal character of the "free 
market" as seen from the bottom up. It comes from the land of the 
Incas which is today ruled by the tyrant and mass murderer Alberto 
Fujimori who has been forcibly imposing, at the point of machine 
guns, the neo-liberal economy (feudalism + bureaucrat and comprador 
capitalism) on the backs of the long-suffering people of the Andes at 
the behest of his masters. That bunch of international parasites and 
criminals who are drinking the blood of billions in a Dracula-like 
fashion. And strangling the life-giving processes on the planet as 
they go about satiating their insatiable and unquenchable thirst for 
more and more and more and more............. What can one say; for in 
the streets of Sao Paolo, the police and the drug lords kill the 
street children; eliminating the unwanted and those not fit to live, 
not fit to belong to the human race, just like what happened over 50 
years ago. And is happening all around us today; invisibly.

We are living through a period of the darkest of reaction with 
monsters astride our chests and cackling in our ears their song of 
victory that the night will never end. Yet, through the pitch 
darkness, one can occasionally glimpse what appears to be the
faint glow coming from a rising sun and the far-away rumblings of 
a great battle coming our way. The faint stirrings of a giant who is 
rubbing his eyes and trying to come out of his deep slumber so that 
he can untie the ropes which tie him down.

Lord, make the sun come soon.

Sid  
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Subject: PERU: Malnutrition: Silent, Invisible - and Fatal


/** ppn.peru: 206.0 **/
** Topic: IPS: DEVELOPMENT-PERU: Malnutrition: Silent, Invisible - and Fatal **
** Written 12:37 AM  Feb  5, 1998 by newsdesk in cdp:ppn.peru **
       Copyright 1998 InterPress Service, all rights reserved.
          Worldwide distribution via the APC networks.

                      *** 01-Feb-98 ***

Title: DEVELOPMENT-PERU: Malnutrition: Silent, Invisible - and Fatal

By Zoraida Portillo

LIMA, Jan 27 (IPS) - In Peru the color of a person's hair is
a status symbol -- the lighter the better. So Maria Espinoza
was delighted to see her fifth daughter's hair becoming finer
and lighter. By the time she was three-years-old, the girl's
hair was a
lmost white.

But when Maria took her daughter to a clinic with acute diarrhea,
the doctor confronted her with the harsh reality that her daughter
was suffering from chronic malnutrition. The changing color of
her hair was a symptom of her precarious health!

Maria's child is among the 45 percent of children under the
age of five in Peru suffering from some degree of malnitrition,
according to government statistics.

''Many women are happy that their children's hair changes color
because they are not aware that de-pigmentation is a sign of
an advanced state of malnutrition,'' says pediatrician Cesar
Bernales, of the health clinic of Cruz de Motupe, a shantytown
in ea
stern Lima.

''De-pigmentation is a dramatic sign of hunger and of greater
damage to a child's organism, which will later manifest itself
in retarded growth, limited intellectual and physical capacity,
and weakening of the immune system,'' he says.

The neighbourhood of Cruz de Motupe, with its dusty roads,
shacks made of straw and cardboard lacks all basic services.
It is inhabited by people who fled the violence in the Andes
with their children and the community illustrates the poverty
in which fo
ur out of ten people live in Lima, a city of six million
inhabitants.

Children with inflated bellies, half-naked and with soft
discolored
hair play in the foothills of the mountains.

''In general, their mothers are also malnourished, with advanced
degrees of anemia and too-frequent pregnancies, which is harmful
for them as well as for the child who is quickly displaced from
the maternal breast to make room for the newborn sibling,''
says the physician.

''You could say that these children come to the world with
congenital hunger,'' he adds.

Studies carried out by the Institute of Nutritional Health
reveal that half of Peruvian women of child-bearing age suffer
some degree of nutritional anemia.

''In order to prepare lunch first I need to see how much money
I have, then I see what is least expensive and according to that
I decide what I will make,'' says Elvira Sifuentes, who lives
in Cruz de Motupe and has seven children between the ages of
six
months and 15 years. Her husband is a bricklayer who works
when he can find a job.

''Meat is never part of my calculations,'' she says. ''I make
vegetable soup, spaghetti, and locro de ollucos (an Andean dish
prepared with the tuber ullucus tuberosus).''

For her, the freakish weather of the past few months, associatedd
with the El Nino phenomenon, has been a boon as it has lowered
the price of some types of fish -- like perch. Gnerally, the
closest that her family gets to eating fish is grated tuna --
us
ed in industrialized countries as cat food.

In many parts of Lima, there are children who eat just once
a day, and they do so thanks to the survival organizations, such
as mothers' clubs and communal soup kitchens, which are maintained
by the people who use them.

The situation is even worse in the more distant towns and
villages
in the rural zones of the highlands and the jungle, where seven
of every ten inhabitants are poor, every five of which live in
extreme poverty.

In these areas, three of every five children suffers chronic
malnutrition, and of every 1,000 live births, 74 die, on average,
before their first birthday. The average in urban areas is 36
deaths per every 100,000 live births. Taking as a reference the
i
nfant mortality rate, the rural areas of Peru are 20 years behind
the urban areas.

The main causes of infant death are perinatal heart conditions,
respiratory illness and diarrhea, despite the fact that these
illness could be dealt with by using simple, low-cost measures.

The Ministry of Health and nongovernmental organizations have
initiated a campaign to combat pneumonia and dehydration caused
by diarrhea after proving that in the rural areas children are
sick 13 to 20 percent of the year, which causes them to lose
valu
able nutrients.

''In the rural highlands, three-fourths of children reach school
age with retarded growth, which means that they have been
chronically
exposed to hunger and infections that affect their nutritional
state,'' says a document a the Institute of Nutritional
Health.

Other studies show that infant malnutrition in most Peruvian
children begins at the age of six months, when mothers stop
feeding
children exclusively with breast milk and children are often
fed with inappropriate diets.

At the same time, only one of every five pregnancies in rural
areas receives attention prior to and during childbirth, one
of the lowest rates of the region. In Latin America prenatal
attention averages 82 percent, and it is 98 percent in Chile.

The persistence of other problems, such as the lack of potable
water, aggravates the nutritional situation of the Peruvian
people.
Forty-five percent of Peruvian households lack access to
sufficient
amounts of potable water, while 84 percent of the rural
Andean population lack this service completely.

Another nutritional problem is the deficiency in the consumption
of iodine, which causes problems such as goiter and mental
retardation.
Iodine deficiency affects 88 percent of Andean localities situated
2,000 meters above sea level, despite the efforts
of authorities, who have installed dozens of factories to make
iodized salt. (END/IPS/zp/ag/he/hd/jmb/mk/98)

Origin: Amsterdam/DEVELOPMENT-PERU/
                              ----

       [c] 1998, InterPress Third World News Agency (IPS)
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** End of text from cdp:ppn.peru **

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