Marches and Rallies Throughout Spain Against the Causes of Starvation, Unemployment and Child Slavery

Within the context of the 25^th-year Campaign for Justice in North-South Relations, during the last two weekends, EL MOVIMIENTO CULTURAL CRISTIANO – Christian Cultural Movement, CAMINO JUVENIL SOLIDARIO  – Solidarity Youth Path, and SAIn Political Party held protest marches and rallies throughout Spain to denounce the causes of Starvation, Unemployment and Child Slavery

Some of the places where these marches took place were A Coruña, Albacete, Badajoz, Barcelona, Burgos, Córdoba, Granada, Gijón, Huelva, Jaén,  Alcalá de Henares, downtown Madrid, Getafe, Las Palmas, Málaga, Murcia, Oviedo, Pamplona, Santiago, Santander, Seville, Torrelavega, Úbeda, Valladolid, Villafranca, Zaragoza…  

These marches join the solidarity fights of the impoverished, who go into the streets to denounce they are hungry because they are plundered of their wealth, to denounce centuries of hollow charity, alms, and development aid, which have been band-aid solutions perpetuating poverty.

Every day 100,000 people die of starvation; half of them are children. Eight out of ten people in the world suffer from hunger; this being the primary political problem because it is the primary cause of mortality in the world. The demonstrators denounced that the world has the resources to feed more than twice the world’s current population and that therefore, hunger-related deaths are preventable, that they are murders!

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been promoting the privatization of services such as water, health and education in impoverished countries, by attaching this condition to grants and loans, which has brought about an even worse standard of living for their populations and a higher number of deaths.

Another reason for marching was to condemn the Spanish Immigration Law, which criminalizes immigrants who are arrested as if they were delinquents; they are taken to (CIEs, in Spanish) Immigration Detention Centers, inhumane jails for innocent people, where human rights are violated, where immigrants are victims of mistreatment and torture.

Regarding unemployment, the protesters demanded permanent full employment for every worker and a fair salary, exclaiming that labor must have priority over capital.  It was claimed that unemployment fosters fear and division among workers, that this is business, that the so-called crisis caused by the powerful intends to get workers to accept working conditions of greater exploitation and leads to an even greater concentration of riches.

In addition, one of the harshest realities condemned was child slavery and the imperialist economy that has children at its disposal as if they were cheap goods; there is unemployment for adults and slavery for children. Child slavery is on the rise. Children account for over 10% of workforce in the world.

There are slave children in agriculture, in the shoe and textile industries, and in the food industry. There are slave children in the domestic service, sex slave children… More than 500,000 children fight in armed conflicts, in guerrilla and paramilitary groups, in official armies, in gangs of drug traffickers… There are even weapons that have been especially designed for children. Spain sells ammunition to countries where there are child soldiers. Nowadays there is a veritable war against childhood.

This Campaign for Justice in North-South Relations emphasizes that it is high time we fought against the imperialist strategy of making us believe that nothing can be done; time to boost a solidarity moral and political strand that can join us to the fight of the impoverished, whose scream demands that we take side with them in favor of the fight against the causes of hunger, unemployment and child slavery, which can be immediately solved if we want to.