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Despite new awareness, child labor persists in Central America
Antonio Pavon gets up at four in the
morning because he has to wash the bus before it
starts its rounds through the steep neighborhoods of Tegucigalpa. After
spending the day climbing
over passengers to collect fares, the 13-year old doesn't get home
til late afternoon. “They like me
because I'm small,” he admits. “I don't take up much room, so more
people can fit inside.”
Fourteen months ago a global march against
child labor passed through Honduras, yet not
much has changed for children like Pavon. “They told me about the march,
but I had to work that
day,” Pavon says.
About one-third of a million children
under 18 work in Honduras, and at least another
million work in neighboring Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and
Nicaragua. Despite the
magnitude of the problems those children face, child advocates claim
they're making some
headway. “Just two years ago no one spoke about child labor as a problem,
but rather as a
solution to economic problems. That argument excused them from having
to work for important
transformations in favor of the children,” says Carmen Moreno, coordinator
of the International
Labor Organization's International Program on the Elimination of Child
Labor (IPEC) in Central
America and the Caribbean.
IPEC is working with regional governments
to develop strategies and plans to combat
child labor. In Honduras, as in neighboring countries, IPEC helped
establish a Programa de
Eliminacion Gradual y Progresiva del Trabajo Infantil. The program
is coordinated by a
committee that includes representatives of government, private business,
and nongovernmental
agencies working with children.
According to committee member Nelson
Delgado, the 16-year old president of the
Movimiento de Niños y Niñas Trabajadores, since beginning
its work last September the
committee has been contracting consultants to research the issue. “Based
on the recommendations
of these experts, they'll look for solutions. We in the movement want
to be present to talk about
what's happening in reality, and have some influence in the decisions
the committee makes,” says
Delgado.
There has been “a lot of discord” in
the coordinating group, according to Delgado. “The
government says it wants to do away with child labor by substituting
more education. But what
will happen with children who work to survive? The government can't
answer that. It has no
alternative to offer in place of work that will allow them to survive,”
says Delgado. “If the
government can't solve the problem of poverty, it can't solve the problem
of child labor.”
Delgado said the government insists
that building more schools and obligating kids to
attend will solve the problem. “It won't work,” Delgado claims. “Before
kids can study, they have
to eat. If they don't work, they don't eat.”
Primary education only reached 86.5
percent of Honduran children before Hurricane
Mitch. During the disaster, 2,465 classrooms around the country were
destroyed or damaged and
the headquarters of the Secretaría de Educación was laid
waste by flooding in Tegucigalpa. Such
destruction added at least 100,000 children to the ranks of the unschooled
this year.
But even if the government could build
school facilities fast enough, other problems of the
educational system seem more serious. A 1996 nationwide study of unschooled
kids between 7
and 13 showed that only 1.7 percent lacked a school to attend; 9.1
percent said they had to work,
37.6 percent said they lacked resources like school clothes and notebooks,
and 30.7 percent said
they simply didn't like school.
“Much of our educational system is archaic,”
argues Delgado. “It needs to be more
practical, with schedules and teachers that are more flexible. The
government wants to put more
schools and obligate children to attend. Unless they put a different
kind of school, it won't work.”
The interagency committee is also developing
strategies to implement provisions of the
country's children's code and other legislation regarding child labor.
Honduras adopted a new
children's code in 1996, and similar codes have since been adopted
in Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Guatemala's Congreso approved a children's code in 1996, but opposition
from conservative
groups has so far blocked its implementation.
The codes provide a variety of guarantees
that can be most easily enforced in formal
workplaces, and authorities throughout the region have taken advantage
of the regulations to go
after the most dangerous work. That's allowed Guatemala's government
to crack down on kids
working in fireworks factories, and Nicaraguan authorities to pull
kids out of battery factories.
Costa Rican police detain kids under 15 selling vegetables in the market.
Honduras, encouraged
by northern anti-sweatshop activists, has been able to ensure relatively
high compliance with
minimum age requirements in maquilas, though as a result many of the
girls who aren't old enough
to work in maquilas end up in even more exploitative work situations.
In the burgeoning informal sector, where
many business enterprises are family affairs and
formal business records scarce, it's another story. Official agencies
and non-governmental
organizations have a harder time intervening, as much of the work,
according to Moreno, is
“invisible,” especially domestic work in which girls are kept at home
to look after their siblings,
while often their mother works outside the home.
Activists also claim new forms of abuse
are developing, including the exploitation of child
workers in the melon industry in southern Honduras. Sexual tourism
is also a booming industry in
the region that affects child workers. Four U.S. citizens were arrested
in April in the northern
Honduran city of San Pedro Sula and charged with pimping underage girls.
The nightclub that
two of the men ran had operated for months with the complicity of city
officials, and police acted
only after child activists pressured judicial officials into action.
- From Tegucigalpa, Paul Jeffrey
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