Mexico City – Half of all children in Latin America live below the poverty line, the vice chairman of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, Argentine pediatrician Norberto Liwski, told Efe here on Tuesday.
The recurrent economic crises in the region over the past decade have increased the number of children who are obliged to work, he said, citing his own country as an example.
The number of working children in Argentina rose from 210,000 in 2001 to 1.2 million in 2003 because of the hard times during the four-year slump that saw the country’s economy shrink by 20 percent.
Liwski, who is in the Mexican capital to give the federal government the committee’s recommendations on its policies regarding children, mentioned Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Ecuador as the countries of the region where there is the most child labor.
Most of the children in Latin America who work do so in agriculture, where it is more difficult to get access to social protection mechanisms, the U.N. says.
Liwski also blamed child labor for the region’s elevated school-dropout rates.
“Investment in education did not keep pace with the spread of the policies to increase attendance,” he said.
Liwski said that the typical “dropout” in Latin America leaves school at around age 13.
He said that the economic crises in the region have also facilitated an increase in sexual tourism controlled by organized crime.
“Suitable tools do not exist to legally protect children,” the U.N. official said.
Despite the fact that many countries of the region have approved the non-compulsory protocol on the sale of children, child prostitution and pornography, a “significant number” of nations have yet to incorporate into their penal codes specific laws governing those areas.
On Monday, Liwski presented to Mexican diplomats the recommendations of Unicef regarding children and suggested raising the legal age for marriage, modifying procedures for allowing children to participate in judicial matters and prohibiting corporal punishment, among others. EFE
