We find ourselves in the 21st century. A century in which science and technology advance rapidly in many of their fields: robotization, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, biotechnology… All these advances make it possible to carry out the unthinkable and unimaginable, but they also allow the intolerable and the inhuman in order to produce, increase profits, enslave or kill.
Let us not forget that many of these advances do not seek the good of man, but rather his dehumanization, and that their applications in the fields of politics, culture or the economy align with the poverty, exploitation and slavery of a large part of humanity, including millions of children throughout the world.
We are facing a neocapitalist market whose gears are the large conglomerates, the powerful, the international organizations –with their foundations, agendas and protocols–, the political parties and unions, the banking system and its financial vultures… All of them move in sync without scruples with the sole aim of reshaping the world according to the sacrosanct market economy that they direct. In this neocapitalist economy, childhood is dragged through the teeth of such machinery, destroying their lives. Because the life and blood of these boys and girls, their impoverishment, their hunger and even their slavery, are favorable to these dehumanizing structures, since they are the lubricant that moves their great machinery. The countries that have reached the supposed “capitalist paradise” are not spared: according to a recent study, Spain is the country in the EU where there is the most child poverty.
The powerful have turned the world into a great battlefield, where there are billions of victims, including children. In an even more infamous way, 400 million slave children are placed on the front line. Meanwhile, a privileged minority settles in front of their screens behind which platforms, networks and media outlets work in a planned way to promote our indifference, nullifying and annihilating our conscience and our soul.
Every April 16 tribute is paid to Iqbal Masih, that Pakistani boy who, for demanding freedom for other slave children like himself, was murdered at the age of 12. This day is not only a reminder of his tenacity and courage or of his struggle, but also a direct denunciation of a global system where the market puts a price on human life in a true war against childhood.
Today we still have reasons to claim April 16 as the International Day against Child Slavery, because there still exist more than 400 million slave children spread across all sectors of the economy: in the mines, in brothels, in wars, in industry, in the fields, in the organ market… and because the real protection and defense of childhood continues to be a secondary objective; also for us, society.
Let us denounce that organized crime which is the capitalist market and which has granted itself the power to buy or sell children, to enslave them to satisfy the interests of the powerful and of this materialistic and nihilistic society, turning them into market objects.
Let us not accept that they are called working children; let us not accept the reduced figures that are offered to us; let us not accept new deadlines for the eradication of this tragedy of Child Slavery, …
Let us fight for these boys and girls, but not only by claiming April 16 as the international day against child slavery, but by demanding, every day, that there not be a single slave child in the same way that we would do if they were our own children, because we still have sufficient reasons to do so.
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