Durante el fin de semana, lei sobre la enfermedad que esta causando problemas para todo el mundo - llamado swine fever aqui en los Estados Unidos. Se origino en Mexico pero ha contaminado a algunos viajeros quienes regresaron a su pais con ella como en Nueva Zelandia.
No se que accion va a tomar el gobierno de Mexico (o los Estados Unidos) para parar esta enfermedad pero me acuerdo de un caso parecido en Haiti en los 80s. Cuando SIDA se hizo un problema mundial y entro a los Estados Unidos, muchas personas buscaban la fuente. El gobierno estadounidense dijo que los haitianos les daban la enfermedad a los viajeros norteamericanos (la verdad es que era el contrario - los norteamericanos a los haitianos). Una creencia era que la enfermedad vino de los cerdos en Haiti. Entonces el militar estadounidense fue a Haiti y mato todos los cerdos alli - aunque ellos no eran la causa. Eventualmente el gobierno norteamericano se dio cuenta de eso, pero ya era tarde. Han matado a todos los cerdos haitianos - un especie particular y una gran parte de la dieta haitiana. Bueno, para resolver la situacion, los Estados Unidos le daba a Haiti cerdos estadounidenses pero esos no podian acostrumbrase del clima en Haiti y muchos murieron del calor u otras cosas tropicales (enfermedades) o nunca se engordaban. Ellos no valian nada.
Con esta historia, estoy curioso de ver si el gobierno estadounidense va a hacer algo en Mexico.
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Me gusta el e-mail que recibimos hoy de la U. Dice que Swine Flu no es una epidémia ... pero si *fuera* una epidemia, estarían preparados a hacer algo ... pero hay que recordar que no es una epidemia. Jejeje.
ReplyDeleteQué horror! No sabía esto de la matanza de cerdos en Haiti.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,951249-2,00.html
ReplyDeleteAqui esta un articulo de Time (de 1984). La unica diferencia es que ellos dicen que la matanza era el resultado de una epidemia de Swine Fever y que los haitianos pidieron la ayuda de los Estados Unidos. Como yo dije, yo oí que era el resultado de SIDA y que no pidieron ayuda pero es probable que me equivoque (no seria la primera vez).
Encontré este artículo que dice que Swine Fever no tenia nada que ver con SIDA.
http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/misctopic/pigs/gaertner.htm
Swine Slaughter
ReplyDeleteThe exodus from the countryside, so eagerly desired by the international banking and aid agencies, was not easily engineered. Living on tiny plots of land was a long-established way of life in Haiti, but the international agencies' program received an important boost due to a fortuitous epidemic of swine fever. In 1978, African swine fever was detected in the pigs of the Dominican Republic, and that caused the United States to launch an investigation of pigs in Haiti, some of whom were found to be infected with the disease, although the actual numbers appear to have been small and the Haitian pigs seemed to be resistant to the disease. At any rate, if African swine fever ever made its way to the United States, the University of Minnesota estimated it would wreak $150 million to S 5 billion worth of damage [see "Porkbarreling Pigs in Haiti," Multinational Monitor, December 1985 J.
Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist who has worked in Haiti for over a decade, describes the pig debacle in his book AIDS and Accuscction: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. In 1981, North American farm experts thought swine fever in Haiti might end up threatening the U.S. Pig business. They organized the African Swine Fever Eradication and Swine Industry Development Program (PEPPADEP), a S23 million program to kill all the pigs in Haiti and repopulate the country with pigs from the United States. There were 1.3 million pigs in Haiti, and they were an important part of the rural economy. "The peasant subsistence economy is the backbone of the nation, and the pigs were once the main components of that economy," Bernard Diederich wrote in the Caribbean Review in 1985. "With no banking system available to him, the peasant relied on hog production as a bank account to meet his most pressing obligations: baptism, health care, schooling, funerals, religious ceremonies and protection against urban-based loan sharks who would grab his land at the first opportunity."
The slaughter of the pigs began in May 1982 and ended a year later. By August 1984, Haiti was officially declared rid of African swine fever.
Together with U.S. AID and the Organization of American States, the Haitian government went to work replacing the pig herd, arranging for importation of pigs from Iowa. However, Farmer writes, "In order to receive Iowa pigs as a 'secondary multiplication center,' program participants were required to build pigsties to specifications and also demonstrate the availability of capital necessary to feed the pigs. This effectively eliminated the overwhelming majority of peasants."
The Iowa pigs did not take to Haiti. "The pigs looked little like the lowslung, black Creole pigs that had populated Haiti for centuries. Although the new pigs were very large, they were manifestly more fragile than their predecessors. They fell ill and required veterinary intervention: they turned their noses up at the garbage that had been the mainstay of the native pigs' diet. The kochon blan ('foreign pigs') fared well only on expensive wheat-based, vitamin-enriched feed- a commodity also sold by the government. Although public proclamations assured the people that the price of pig feed would be controlled, artificially created shortages soon led to a thriving parallel market that netted fortunes for a few of the Duvalier clique and its successors. The cost of feed each year for an adult pig ran between $120 and $250, depending on the black market."
Farmer goes onto describe how an effort to redistribute pigs ran into one problem after another. Efforts by Haitian community leaders to speed up the process by distributing the pigs communally brought charges of communism. Some pig owners accused neighbors of poisoning their animals. Pigs had unusually small litters, and the project just broke down. Even now, 10 years after the eradication, there are still efforts afoot to bring in foreign pigs that can adapt themselves to the Haitian setting.
The killing of the pigs was devastating. Luc Joseph is a resident of Kay, a settlement of refugee peasant farmers displaced over 30 years ago by Haiti's largest hydroelectric dam. He told Farmer that he viewed the slaughter of the pigs as "the very last thing left in the possible punishments that have afflicted us. We knew we couldn't have cows. We knew we couldn't have goats. We have resigned ourselves, because we at least had our pigs." Diederich, quoting an economist who put the nominal value of the pig herd at $600 million, argued, "the real loss to the peasant is incalculable ... [The peasant economy I is reeling from the impact of being without pigs. A whole way of life has been destroyed in this survival economy. This is the worst calamity to ever befall the peasant."
For some Haitians, the killing of the pigs was part of a larger U.S. development plan to push the peasants off their tiny subsistence farms into the cities where they could take jobs in the burgeoning U.S. -owned plants that assembled toys and clothing for the U.S. market. And whether one cares to accept this as part of a cynical plot, the pig fiasco fits in remarkably well with the overall redirection of the Haitian economy.
Cito de este sitio: http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1994/03/ridgeway.html
Tambien he leído AIDS and Accusation de Paul Farmer y es un libro sumamente interesante sobre el desarrollo de SIDA en Haiti y su relacion con los Estados Unidos. Incluso hay relatos personales de los campesinos que demuestran varias perspectivas de SIDA.