Word: coppers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chair is bolted to the floor near the back of a 12-ft. by 18-ft. room. You sit on a seat of cracked rubber secured by rows of copper tacks. Your ankles are strapped into half-moon-shaped foot cuffs lined with canvas. A 2-in.-wide greasy leather belt with 28 buckle holes and worn grooves where it has been pulled very tight many times is secured around your waist just above the hips. A cool metal cone encircles your head. You are now only moments away from death...
...developing nations' products, mainly raw materials, slumped. As a consequence, between 1980 and today, world commodity prices, excluding oil, have fallen by 35% to the lowest real levels in three decades. Sugar, a principal Brazilian export, dropped from $495 to $120 per ton; Zambia's copper price plunged from 950 per Ib. to 690. Tanzania's President Julius Nyerere put it plainly: to buy a seven-ton truck in 1981, his country had to produce four times as much cotton, or three times as much coffee, or ten tunes as much tobacco, as it took to purchase...
...always so gloomy. In the early 1970s, after nearly a decade of civil strife, the former Belgian Congo had achieved a measure of political stability under the dictatorship of President Mobutu Sese Seko. More important, the country was recognized as a treasure trove of gold, diamonds, oil, copper and cobalt. Banks rushed to extend credit. They were to rue the day. Notes one foreign banker in Kinshasa: "We did not do our sums properly...
Aside from export setbacks-prices for copper and cobalt dropped sharply-much of the loan money that flowed in was not spent wisely. Among Mobutu's development projects was a huge undertaking to dam the Zaïre River and to build a 1,100-mile-long power line to the Shaba copper-producing region at a total estimated cost of about $1 billion. Eight months after the power was finally turned on in 1981, the current was switched off. Shaba province happens to be self-sufficient in electricity. Says one Western diplomat: "If ever there was a white...
...country because it borrowed to stay afloat as sales plummeted, teetered throughout the year on the brink of outright collapse, surviving on credits from reluctant bankers and suppliers. Hardest hit of all in the downturn were the nation's producers of basic metals such as steel and copper. As demand for metals lurched lower and layoffs swelled, the once pulsing industrial belt that stretches from Illinois across to western New England took on the grim, ground-down demeanor of a half-century earlier, acquiring the glumly descriptive epithet of Rust Bowl. By December, the nation's steelmakers were...