Debt

It was a hot summer's afternoon when cartoonist Brick dropped into the NI offices with examples of his work. He'd come from Third World First, the student campaign organization just up the road where the seeds of what was to become New Internationalist were first sown more than 20 years ago. Brick had been collaborating with them on a campaign against Third World debt and they had suggested he come and see us too.

We had not used his work before - and immediately wondered why not when he was so clearly on the same wavelength. He was doing with cartoons what we at NI try to do mainly with words and photographs - devising stimulating, imaginative and lucid routes into important, dense and complex subjects.

Debt is just such a subject. We know that it is probably the single most powerful cause of poverty and misery in the world today. And there is important and innovative research being done in this area. But how many of us rush to read the latest book on the debt crisis? And even if we do how many of our friends or relatives or students can we persuade to do the same?

That's where this month's NI steps in aiming to bring new, eye- opening ideas in a startling format that can be quickly understood and used in campaign or classroom. This comic - called Alice in Latasica - is largely inspired by the most recent work of radical economist Susan George, author of the Keynote in this issue of NI. She has produced 'the boomerang theory', which explains how Third World debt harms not only most people in the debtor countries but also most people in the creditor countries too.

It's a significant departure from the conventional wisdom that Third World debt is essentially a Third World problem from which the rich world profits. George argues that its effects rebound on most of us - encouraging unemployment, environmental collapse, crime and drug addiction, to name but a few. Such thinking can only help strengthen a growing global network of people's movements against debt and IMF- imposed structural-adjustment policies.

This comic pulls no punches. Brick does not speak in the euphemisms of the financial institutions - he exposes them in all their obscenity. Alice in Latasica should leave you with no doubt about the outrageousness of what is happening - and might galvanize you to take those bits of action you can take against this monstrous creation of the banking world.

And if you can't stand comics, well I'd urge you to give this one a chance. It might just convert you. And if it doesn't we'll be back with a more verbal approach next month and a special human-rights issue in collaboration with Amnesty International.

Meanwhile, welcome to Latasica - a mythical compound of Latin America, Asia and Africa - and may the trip be as illuminating for you as it was for Alice.

Alice in Latasica
Things aren't altogether hunky dory in the home of Alice and Jack, your average couple living in your average town in your average recession-ridden country of the North. But when Alice starts talking back at walls things get strange... A campaign comic on debt in three chapters by Brick.

Pulp cookies
'About as nutritious as afat lip - but they make you feelfull.' Alice, who's fallen down a hole and landed in Latasica, savours a structurally-adjusted speciality and afew more distasteful realities like 'retro- development', the IMF, the World Bank and the ways of piranhas...

Sea of icebergs
The tips are big and bad enough, but what's underneath is worse still. Alice's Latasican guides break it to her gently, explaining the hidden connections between bankers, drugs, famine, war, multinationals and ozone holes. Losing her ignorance and finding her anger, A lice reaches the only conclusion a half-way sane individual could...

ACTION
What the hell can I do?' asks Alice. We give a few suggestions.

Keynote: The debt boomerang
Susan George explains how the harmful effects of Third World debt come back to the North.

Letters
Letters from Lahore
Updates
Reviews: plus Billy Wilder classic
Curiosities
Endpiece: by Criselda Yabes
Country profile: Egypt

FRONT COVER: THE IMF MONSTER,
WITH ITS G7 HEADS, BY BRICK.
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER