In Mexico there is an old man who owns telephone companies, tobacco companies, mining companies, financial companies, hotels, paper mills, entire neighborhoods, a good chunk of the country. New York Timesa museum, 82 years old, some gold teeth, 300,000 people working for him, more than 100 billion dollars. And right there there is another minor one who has mines, oil, trains, cinemas, construction companies, buildings, shopping malls, lots of hair, waterfalls of ties, 70 years old and about 30 billion dollars. Their names are Carlos Slim and Germán Larrea and they are surely two very nice gentlemen, their suits impeccable. They are also the two richest rich people in Latin America and between the two of them they have about 130 billion dollars: it is the same amount owned by the poorest half of Latin Americans, 334 million people. Equality, we were taught in school, is simple: 1=1, 2=2… Inequality can be more complicated: 334,000,000=2. If someone wanted to summarize what the famous Latin American inequality means, they could use this direct formula: 334,000,000=2.
But perhaps we should reconsider: we are often comforted by imagining inequality in terms of numbers, diagrams, drawings. But inequality is, in reality, many millions of people – many people – who, day after day, cannot cure their illnesses, educate their children, feed them: who do not live the lives they deserve. This Oxfam report He tells us, for example, that an average person in the region would have to work 90 years to earn the same as a billionaire earns in a single day.
We know it, we forget it: Latin America is the most unequal region in the world. The numbers are conclusive: the richest one percent in Latin America concentrates almost 55 times more wealth than its poorest half; in the European Union, the richest one percent concentrates seven times more than its poorest half. That means that Latin America is eight times more unequal than Europe; the question that remains is why.
One answer is that, in these idiotic days, it seems normal to many that two people have the same assets as 334 million: it is an extraordinary cultural achievement, just what the joker billionaire Warren Buffet pointed out when he said that there had been class struggle and that his class had won it.
But the basic answer is, as so often, given by Dr. Pero Grullo: Latin America is the most unequal because it can. Or, better yet: because the rich Latin Americans can. These gentlemen have always lived off the extraction and export of raw materials – gold, silver, bananas, meat, soy, coffee, coca, copper, wheat, oil, sugar, lithium and many more. These exploitations do not require a large or highly qualified workforce: the rich Latin Americans do not need their poor to work. And, since their products are exported, their internal market matters little to them: the rich Latin Americans do not need their poor to consume. If they do not need them to work or consume, they can afford to keep them in poverty and marginality. They can afford so much inequality.
For this, they need, above all, the states. The rich Latin Americans often complain that they pay a lot of taxes and that their states do not provide them – as they do in Europe – with health, education, security. They say – and it is true – that they buy these services from private companies and why should they pay taxes to a State that is of no use to them. It is blindness or cynicism: what they buy when they pay taxes is their security. They pay so that their states contain these poor people, prevent them from destroying everything: if possible, with subsidies and handouts; if necessary, with force.
But they believe that a little is enough for that. That is why their personal income taxes are – on average – the lowest in the world, and have been halved in the last four decades. And yet they avoid them with ease. Oxfam’s report shows that throughout the region the poorest half give 45% of their scarce money in taxes; the richest one percent pay less than 20%.
In order for the poorest to receive the attention they deserve – to reduce inequality – Oxfam proposes, among other things, a tax on large fortunes. Its numbers are clear: 2% per year on net worth for those with more than 5 million dollars, 3% for those with more than 50 million and 5% for those with more than 1,000 million. This is what people like Javier Milei call the “aberration of social justice”, an “armed robbery”. In the most brutal robbery, if someone has 1,000 million and hands over 50, they still have 950 million left: enough to eat almost every day – and preserve inequality.
But these taxes, without seriously harming anyone, would raise more than 60 billion dollars a year, which would be enough to end hunger in the region – and so many other achievements. If these rich people were smart, they would do it: it would be better for them to give up a small slice to keep the cake for themselves and continue enjoying it in peace. Because this extreme inequality is causing many millions of Latin Americans to despise democracy: how can we expect them to defend it when it is an endless series of privileges and differences, when it is nothing more than the system in which they live unhappy lives?
Inequality is not just an ethical problem: it produces more hunger, more suffering, more violence, and that anger that millions feel. For now, those rich people manage to channel it: they have been able to invent and impose characters who criticize the political system while deepening economic differences, but the trick will not last forever – and then they will miss those times when they could have given up something to keep almost everything.
Sign up for the free EL PAÍS Mexico newsletter and to WhatsApp channel and receive all the latest news on current events in this country.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Slim #Larrea #rich #poorest #Latin #Americans