We tend to criticize previous generations’ apathy toward injustices being committed all… We tend to criticize previous generations’ apathy toward injustices being committed all around them in the name of their tacit consent. How could they live with and tolerate slavery for so long without doing anything? How could they subjugate women for so long? How could European peoples support colonialism? How could the Germans sit silently in the night while they heard their Jewish neighbors being taken away?

We ask these things, and our professors tell us, that’s just the way it was back then. We accept this as true, although we don’t quite understand. Then we sit back in our chairs and think, “If something that horrible was that rampant nowadays, I’d know. I’d know and I’d do something. I’d rise up against it.”

But our internal proclamation is weightless, for we recognize that such ingrained and systematic injustice is a thing of the past. In this realization, we are wrong.

This is a new time, and injustice has taken new forms. Its means are harder to see now, harder to isolate, harder to protest. But its ends are as tragic as ever. Here is an introduction to this injustice, a general account of the motivations and processes that bring it about.

Millions of people across Latin America and the Caribbean have been robbed of their right to govern themselves and their potential to prosper – and it is largely our fault.

Their poverty is a separate issue, and the fact that it exists cannot be blamed on any specific institution or set of ideas. But the fact that the these people will continue to suffer, without any foreseeable chance of prosperity, is the fault of a few key institutions which operate with a stringent, jingoistic dogma and are powered by interests based in the United States and Europe.

What, in essence, has occurred, is that we have worked to enslave millions of people in the third-world population. It’s enslavement, gilded with illusions of freedom and opportunity; it’s the slavery of the new millennium, and here is how it works:

The perpetrators, namely the Bretton Woods institutions – the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank Group, and the World Trade Organization – wait for a country to falter. In the case of Bolivia, that meant getting looted by military generals. Much of the Caribbean found itself in trouble after the oil crisis in the ’70s. Bad policy led Argentina to near crisis. The Bretton Woods institutions, thought to bring good will and economic wisdom, stepped in to help.

Up to this point, everything is fine. There is no problem with these institutions existing. Their stated purpose is noble. They’re designed to help develop struggling countries. But when this purpose is brought in line with the methods used, the shining armor falls away.

They give the suffering countries money, which is good. But then they mandate how the money must be spent. They mandate policy decisions that must be made for the flow of money to continue. The countries are promised that this won’t have to go on very long, that the changes will bring development, and soon they will be able to continue on their own. But the changes don’t bring development.

Poor, not-yet-industrialized nations are forced to open their borders to trade with major global powers. Subsidies to local industries are prohibited, and funding for social programs is eliminated. The countries have to comply because they accepted the money.

In the short term, things appear to be getting better. All of the sudden, food and clothing products from the United States and Europe arrive on the market at extremely low prices. The consumers feel good. The consumers don’t realize that the money they give to buy these things goes straight out of their country. And, since the goods are, in fact, cheaper, local stores are driven out of business. It becomes impossible for a local corporation to rise to a position of wealth and become a competitor in this game of “free trade.”

Also, export quotas are established, so it is certain that the rest of the world will enjoy what this country has to offer: sugar cane from the Caribbean, bananas from central America, natural gas from Bolivia. The rest of the people, since there are no local industries to employ them, end up doing sewing and other grunt work for transnational corporations.

The countries must continue to do what they are told, since they cannot pay back the loans. In the end, the people are forced to do the jobs allowed to them – the ones that only help foreign interests – take the menial wages they make, then give them to the foreign companies that have flooded their market. There is no development. The poverty continues. The indentured servant has become a slave.

The pain I write of is real. Tens of thousands protested in Honduras last week over a new IMF accord. And, in Bolivia over the past month, more than 60 people have died protesting their now-resigned president’s approval of this system.

But here in the nation that benefits most from this relationship, we are safe and secure. We sit in our classrooms, wear our Gap clothing, drink our Bolivian coffee and wonder at how anyone could sit so idly while injustice was happening all around them.

Will Minton can be reached at [email protected].