Mortgaged to Death
By Father Eugene Ryan, SSC
Bursar General of the Columban Fathers
ONE TRILLION DOLLARS. This is the amount owed by Third World countries to the richer nations I did not gradually mount up over a period of 30 or 40 years: It mushroomed in the last 15, and is still growing alarmingly.
This debt is effectively strangling the Thrird World and reducing it to a state that border on slavery. It is tearing apart the economic and social fabric of Latin America and bringing with it what Pope John Paul II recently called a ‘state of inhuman poverty.’ Even the Wall Street Journal refers to the ‘intractability’ of this debt problems and ‘its crushing human toll.’