"About one billion people worldwide live in slums, of whom 134 million are in Latin America and the Caribbean"
By Gustavo González
SANTIAGO, Jun 23 (IPS) - In Uruguay, 16,000 families have a proper home as a result of housing construction cooperatives, while in Bolivia people living in the ravines of La Paz have a system to deal with housing risks thanks to a non-governmental network.. And further south, in Chile, self-build social housing projects are mushrooming.
Improvement in urban living conditions, mainly ensuring basic sanitation, drinking water, security of tenure, adequate size and safety of location, is one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2000. The world target is to achieve significant improvement in the living conditions of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.
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"In economic life there is extreme inequality and exploitation. Although colonialism no longer exists openly in the political and economic sphere, still it persists indirectly, and this should not be tolerated... In this respect you should remember that in economic life, we will have to guarantee the minimum requirements of life to one and all... There cannot be any sort of adjustment as far as this point is concerned. The minimum purchasing requirement must be guaranteed to all. Today these fundamental essentialities are not being guaranteed. Rather, people are being guided by deceptive economic ideas like outdated Marxism, which has proven ineffective in practical life and has not been successfully implemented in any corner of the world. Why do people still believe in such a theory, which has never been proved successful? The time has come for people to make a proper assessment of whether they are being misguided or not." |
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"Human beings have still not been able to form a human society, and have still not learned to move with the spirit of a pilgrim. Although many small groups, motivated by self-interest, work together in particular situations, not even a small fraction of their work is done with a broader social motive. By strict definition, shall we have to declare that each small family unit is a society in itself? If going ahead in mutual adjustment only out of narrow self-interest or momentary self-seeking is called society, then in such a society, no provision can be made for the disabled, the diseased or the helpless, because in most cases nobody can benefit from them in any way... in that case there always remains the possibility of some people getting isolated from the collective. All human beings must attach themselves to others by the common bond of love and march forward hand in hand; then only will I proclaim it a society." |