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Children at risk
Some 20 million working children between the ages of 5
and 15 are exploited and at risk in dangerous workplaces in Latin America, according to the International Labor Organization.
Meeting in November in San José, Costa Rica, labor ministers from Central America and the Dominican Republic and ILO
officials looked at how to reduce child labor and create protective legislation. The check is in
the mail
Immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in the United States
send an annual $8 billion back home, according to a study by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and
the Caribbean (CEPAL). In El Salvador, remittances from immigrants equal 18 percent of gross domestic product and half of
income from exports. cepal experts found a tendency among immigrants to pool their remittances and specify they be used for
development projects in their native communities. Advancing deserts
Even worse than losing forests is gaining deserts, and this is what Latin America is facing on a massive scale if
environmental trends continue, warned United Nations experts at a November conference in Recife, Brazil. Some 10 million
hectares of arable land are lost each year to the desertification, and among the most affected places are the northeast and north of
Brazil, northern Venezuela, Chile and Argentina, the Peruvian and Bolivian altiplano, Central America, Mexico, Haiti and
Cuba. Mayors join hands
The mayors of more than 200 cities in the
Americas meeting in Miami in November decided to create a hemispheric organization that will spur regional integration and
political decentralization. At the close of the conference, IDB President Enrique V. Iglesias said that decentralization was
essential, but also warned that transferring power to lower levels of government implies risks in areas such as inappropriate
money transfers, political patronage and corruption.
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