The Boston Globe - A 'New Deal' for Latin America is needed - by Mark L. Schneider

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A 'New Deal' for Latin America is needed - by Mark L. Schneider

The overwhelming misery of millions of rural peasants -- who comprise the majority of Latin America's indigenous peoples -- is a basic reason why Chávez's populism and revolutionary bombast have produced such an echo in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, where there have been decades of rural abandonment and indigenous exclusion.

Recent statistics show that in the Andean countries more than 80 per cent of the rural population lives in poverty.In Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, 80 percent of the indigenous population are poor and over half are among the extreme poor. The inequality in the region is the most garish worldwide. The World Bank states that the "richest one-tenth of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean earn 48 percent of total income and the poorest tenth earn only 1.6 percent." In Bolivia, the richest one-tenth earn on the order of 140 times the bottom one-tenth.