ABIBE,
A film producer and heir to a dairy fortune, Goggel
is offering nine-acre plots rent-free to poor men and women who agree
to have vasectomies and tubal ligations. He pays for all the surgical
procedures, including the 10 operations performed late last month in
Monteria, the capital of Cordoba state, about 30 miles south of here.
Goggel, a 61-year-old father of two who had a vasectomy 10 years ago, says his offer is aimed at alleviating
grinding poverty, which he insists is directly proportional to the size
of peasant families. If population growth trends persist, he predicts
an apocalyptic future for
“The middle-class lifestyle as we know it, with a
car, a refrigerator and a good education for the kids, is out of the
question for these people,” said Goggel, whose slight build and shock
of gray curly hair hint at his hippie past. “They are in a vicious
cycle that a high rate of reproduction perpetuates. Big, poor families
are in an economic hole that they can’t see out of.”
So far about 46 couples, the majority with three or
four children, have taken him up on the offer. Most are landless
sharecroppers or day laborers native to the region who have settled in
this village and grow subsistence crops of plantain, beans and sesame
seeds. Goggel is distributing 25 more parcels this month.
“It was not a hard decision at all. Before Erwin, every day was a struggle to survive. Now I can live on what I produce,” said
34, father of four. “More than one guy has made fun of me, saying I’ve
been castrated, that I’ll leave women behind. But I don’t mind. What
matters is what I think, not what others say.”
Goggel acknowledges that the response has been less
than overwhelming to the offer he first made in 2002. He blames
“machismo and ignorance” about vasectomies and the fact that he doesn’t
give the peasants who take up his offer title to the land, allowing
instead “sanctioned squatting.”
Vasectomies and tubal ligations are legal in
but the Roman Catholic Church, a powerful social force, frowns upon
them. So far, however, Goggel said, the church hasn’t put any obstacles
in his way.
“We are still very small scale,” he said. “The church probably figures, why make a fuss?”
Public health professor
reproductive habits deflects attention from the responsibilities of the
state to provide for its poorest citizens.
“It’s not just individual behavior but also social
policy that sometimes keeps us from maintaining conditions of human
dignity,” said Garay, who is with the
Goggel’s hopes that other landowners and even the Colombian government would embrace his idea have so far come to nothing.
the director of Goggel’s House and Land Foundation, said one
neighboring landowner responded to Goggel’s request that he give land
to the poor by saying: “The only thing I’ll give you is a bullet in the
head.”
Still, Goggel, who has spent more than
to buy 900 acres for the program, says he will press on. He will not
change his current practice of not transferring deeds to the poor
families, fearing many would sell the property and revert to the
rootless lifestyles many led.
That would defeat one purpose of his program: to
provide a stable environment for the children of the poor couples,
Goggel said. So, instead his foundation holds the title to the parcels.
“We’re trying to give the country an idea how to
approach the problem, hoping for a snowball effect,” Goggel said. “But
most people don’t see the planet is doomed. They are face down in their
own bowl of soup and can’t see any farther.”
Even those who do not share Goggel’s apocalyptic view of the future agree that
According to a United Nations survey,
has a birthrate of 20.6 annual births per 1,000 inhabitants, above the
relatively high Latin American average of 19.1 births, and 50 percent
higher than
More distressing, said Garay, the public health
professor, is the surge in teenage pregnancies to 90 births per 1,000
girls in 2005 from 70 in 1985.
“This is causing alarm, above all because the girls
are getting pregnant despite knowing all the consequences that early
maternity brings,” said Garay, who maintains that sex education has
improved in recent years.
Goggel’s late father, Walter, emigrated from
largest dairy producers. But Erwin showed little interest in business.
He pursued social causes and a career in theater and film production.
A self-described former Maoist, Goggel said it was
his effort to establish an ecological reserve near here that opened his
eyes to the region’s grinding poverty. When wild animals, including
armadillos, iguanas and herons kept disappearing, he discovered that
peasants were capturing and eating them to survive.
Further investigation showed that peasant families,
often with six, seven or eight children, “were living in terrifying
misery and that their vision of the future extended no farther than
avoiding hunger for a day.”
Each generation was worse off. “It was the exception to come across sons who were better off than their fathers.”
Asked how she and her husband had made out since accepting Goggel’s offer last June,
“Even with the two children we have, it’s still a
battle against hunger. But I didn’t want to reach the point of choosing
which child to give Christmas presents to,” she said. “How many more
children does the world need, or must God send?”
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(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.
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