Jordi Évole does not find what went to look for Cambodia

I was choosing some clothes online when I have been writing this text.I read that "Jordi Évole is a daring journalist who likes to go comfortable with a casual style".This ephemeral work of adulation and uncontrolled exaltation appears on a web page dedicated to selling clothes used on television by presenters and actors.As we do not want to advertise, imagine that it is called something like the TV cabinet.And I like the clothes that Évole uses, branded and made of knowing where.

The fact is that I have to write about what the official conscience agitator of the sixth offered us this Sunday.After spending the week on Twitter collecting photographs of clothing labels (and complaining that they were not Spanish) his last saved arrived.Évole traveled to Cambodia to inspect the country's textile industry.He is a great traveler: he has also been in the United States, Ecuador, Bolivia, Greece, Germany or France.Interestingly, it always underlines the bad of all countries, except if they have Bolivarian governments.It is a coincidence, that you are already starting to Malpensar.

Let's go to the report.According to Évole, he arrives in Cambodia, meets a peaceful protest at the entrance of a factory.It is what was missing: you are looking for slaves and you are workers with a strike right.It is to become Spain at that time.But Évole is still there.Accompanies the workers in their sitting.The presenter looks with an interested party while answering him in Camboyano.They put us subtitles while he doesn't find out.Workers protest the dismissal of some colleagues.Little to scratch.

Then the program introduces us to a humble home in which four young women who work in the textile industry live.It's a small place.One of the women is interviewed and tells that he works between eight and twelve hours for a salary of $ 140 that, with extra hours, can approach $ 200.Évole teaches women a sweater from a Spanish store that is sold here for the equivalent of $ 25.The incisive presenter warns the girl that her salary is equivalent to the price of five jerseys (the salary of the worker, not that of the presenter, please).The woman shows a certain disappointment before the discovery.

It is evident that companies manufacture in countries like Cambodia for their low wages.But the comparison could hardly be more cheat, for ignoring all costs, for confusing final sale price and real benefit and for mixing the Cambodian and European reality and a Cambodian salary with a Spanish price.Because a salary of $ 140 in Cambodia is a good salary, equivalent to that of a teacher.

But the disappointment of the girl does not help Évole, who then explains that many young Spaniards do not have many difficulties to buy this sweater."How would you explain to the young Spaniards all the work, and sometimes also the suffering, behind this sweater?" Adds the journalist.The woman, far from talking about suffering, answers smiling: "I would tell her to buy a lot because we will have work and better salary".My mother!, Just sink.What a destruction.That woman understands the system better than the presenter.Second opportunity to return to Spain that despises Évole, who prefers to continue rummaging.

Now it is a Spanish businessman who opens the doors of his factory to the program.There Évole finds order and cleanliness, European schedules and high salaries for those latitudes.It is not ideal for the report, but it is the only place that has been allowed to access.The businessman says he could not compete with other companies if he did not have the factory in Cambodia, although he would like to have the factory "twenty kilometers from home.You have to adapt to how things are today ".

In that factory the average salary with extra hours is $ 250, compared to that of a Cambodian official, of $ 138, according to the interviewee.Évole remembers that the salaries of that factory are also very low because the big brands "have tremendous commercial success".The answer: "And if there were no brands and factories, would the workers be better?".This phrase, the third opportunity for Évole to return home, is followed by what looks like an editing cutting.And just talk about the matter.

The feared conditional goes out again to annoy the brave Évole, who tries to scratch on the other hand, remembering that the minimum age to work is fifteen years.The businessman says they do not hire minors of eighteen.Everything is bad news for the program, so Évole converts the interview into a "Why the hell is the world?"that ends with answers of the type "And what does it tell me?".

This is a classic in Évole, try to discharge the guilt of all miseries (of Cambodia, Asia and the entire planet) about the person in front.He asked even for Camboyan.There are poor people, damn, humble and ask forgiveness!

The data that Evole hides

Salvados has never been a friend of the data or to talk about the past.Take air.That 60% of Inditex's production is generated in Europe and Morocco, that Cambodia's life expectancy has not stopped rising since the fall of communism, that the per capita income of Cambodia has multiplied by three in the last tenyears or that the poverty rate has gone from 53% to less than 20% in the same period, they are data that the obvious (hidden) report not to mislead the main message.You don't have to lite the viewer and that Évole knows perfectly.What are the World Bank data against a foreground testimony of a randomly chosen person (or not so at random)?They are useless.

At the end of the program I keep the feeling that I have not learned much and that Évole, despite casual dress, has not found what I was looking for in Cambodia: Pathetic images of workers in working conditions of full slavery to which to saveheroically.So what should be an exciting saved, with its manipulation and bias, remained in a plane research team with its exaggerations and yellowing and without the dramatic and oversized voice of Gloria Serra.

I think Évole achieved the opposite effect to the one who was looking for and now we are disappointed both.To top it off (and what they will say), he will have a problem for choosing clothes during the rest of his life, having to focus on garments made of hemp from Teruel or Esparto de Pontevedra.This saved as much would excite Le Pen or Donald Trump, clueless patrioters and enemies that their companies use people outside the borders of their countries.First those at home, cleaning Cambodia.

I only hope that this absurd campaign with xenophobic dyes is not the advance of any new slogan of Podemos to force Spanish companies to produce in their country of origin, as Trump intends to do with Apple if he comes to power.What would happen, then, if the European and North American textile or technological sector left Asia?It is better not to know.But let's not talk about conditional.

Resort to "and if" is very ugly.So let's talk about the present, of reality: in Cambodia the minimum age to work is 15 years, they told us;In Bolivia it is 10.The daring journalist Jordi Évole was in the Andean country last year and casually saw nothing.What a clueless is this good man.