Today, 3.4 billion people (42% of the world’s population) live in countries that spend more on debt interest than on health and education.
Debt as a weapon of war against people and families.
A record number of 61 countries spent at least 10 percent of their government revenues on debt payments to financial institutions, in a permanent hemorrhage of North–South plunder. The effects have been devastating around 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on servicing debt interest than on health and education. And this situation worsens year after year, since in 2024 low-income countries saw their interest payments increase by more than 10% compared with the previous year.
These countries paid 25 billion more in interest than they received from new sources of financing, resulting once again in a net outflow of funds. The poorest countries have to pay up to four times more in interest than higher-income countries, revealing the perversity of a system that profits from the blood of the poor. A growing share of this debt is in the hands of private creditors who impose their extortionate conditions without any kind of oversight or transparency.
In addition to commercial banks, private creditors include bondholders such as pension funds, private-equity funds belonging to wealthy families, and especially “vulture funds” and large investment funds, which buy the debt of countries in distress and demand full repayment as has happened recently in Argentina’s debt crisis.
In order to meet debt and interest payments, impoverished countries are forced to cut essential public and social services while attempting to restructure their debts. A clear example is South Sudan which, while facing a severe humanitarian crisis, the resurgence of diseases such as cholera, and the arrival of thousands of refugees fleeing the war in neighboring Sudan, must allocate 47% of its revenues to debt payments following a lawsuit filed in the United Kingdom by the Afreximbank fund.
These large funds and private institutions, run by a global financial elite, possess the legal means to demand full repayment in the event of default, remaining detached in their offices from all the suffering this causes in countries with scarce economic resources. Their financial power is immense, and when they purchase a sovereign bond they wield far greater power than the borrowing state, influencing economic policies, fiscal priorities, and the conditions for debt restructuring.
The financial system becomes a perverse mechanism of theft and exploitation that perpetuates hunger and misery, aided by the complicity of governments and the silence of the wealthiest societies.
The Jubilee in the Judeo-Christian tradition reminds us of the need to cancel debts and restore lands to their original owners. This is an example that should be followed for reasons of justice since these debts have been repaid many times over and also to create a future of hope, above all for peoples who have been impoverished as victims of debt; but also for the usurious lenders themselves, who may be freed from the path of ruin and meaninglessness to which greed inevitably leads.
