Legislator pushes for migrant votes in Mexico election
Stockton Record
October 8, 2005
STOCKTON -- A Mexican state legislator urged leaders of Stockton's migrant community to help educate and register migrants in the United States who are eligible to vote in Mexico's presidential election in July.
In June, Mexico passed a law allowing anyone with a voter ID card living abroad the right to vote. Each voter ID card bears its owner's photograph and fingerprint.
Jesus Martinez-Saldana, a member of the Michoacan state congress in Mexico, met with farm labor organizers from Stockton this week to make sure Mexicans living in the United States understand the complicated, step-by-step, absentee-voting process. He hopes to help Mexicans living here understand what is required to cast absentee ballots in the July 2 election.
"This is the very first time migrants are allowed to vote," said Martinez-Saldana, a former Fresno State professor and a member of Mexico's Party of the Democratic Revolution. "It's a right that took many years to obtain, and we want to make sure they enjoy that right."
At Stockton's Mexican-American Community Center, La Jamaica, Martinez-Saldana met with more than 50 members of the Organizacion de Trabajadores Agricolas de California about the process.
The legislator is especially targeting people from his home state of Michoacan, in southwest Mexico.As many as 60,000 immigrants from Michoacan live in the county, said Luis Magaña, head of the Stockton group meeting with the legislator. That's more than 25 percent of the more than 200,000 people of Mexican descent that live in San Joaquin County, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.
One of them, Rigoberto Valenzuela, 30, came to Stockton to live in 1999. He has a voter ID card and plans to apply for a ballot. He sees voting as a way to help his mother, father and siblings who still live in his ancestral home.
"It's important, because all my family still lives there," he said.
More than 4 million Mexicans living abroad have voter ID cards, according to estimates from Mexico's Federal Election Institute. Martinez-Saldana said as many as 1.6 million of them live in California. The ID cards are an integral part of the Mexican voting process. Mexicans casting votes from the United States must fill out a form to obtain a ballot. The form can be obtained online at www.ife.org.mx or at the Mexican consulates in San Francisco, Sacramento or Fresno. Voters must also provide a copy of their ID card and proof of U.S. residence.
The completed ballot application should be sent by certified mail to the Federal Election Institute for review. A ballot will then be mailed to the voter, Martinez-Saldana said.
Voters will have from April 1 to July 1 to return their marked ballots to Mexican election officials, he said.Magaña's group will help eligible voters fill out requests for ballots.
"The consulate officials don't help people fill out the forms," Magaña said. "Someone has to help people do that."
The Federal Election Institute and representatives of Mexican political parties will begin tallying the vote at 6 p.m. on July 2.Mexican nationals in the United States who do not have a voter ID card still have time to return to their country and apply for one, said Martinez-Saldana, but they should do so before December.
President Vicente Fox, a member of the National Action Party, is prohibited from seeking re-election in 2006. The Party of the Democratic Revolution candidate for president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is considered a leading candidate, but Martinez-Saldana said he is not campaigning for Obrador.
Rather, he is focusing on migrants -- especially those from Michoacan, he said.
"Migrants now have real power," Martinez-Saldana said. "In order to attract the vote, parties have to offer them something."
Contact reporter Emil Guillermo at 209 546-8294 or e-mail eguiller@recordnet.com
Saturday, October 08, 2005
Friday, October 07, 2005
Fears mount as US opens new military installation in Paraguay
By Benjamin Dangl - Contributor
Excalibur
Wednesday, 05 October 2005
Controversy is raging in Paraguay, where the US military is conducting secretive operations. Five hundred US troops arrived in the country on Jul. 1, 2005 with planes, weapons and ammunition. Eyewitness reports prove that an airbase exists in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay, which is 200 kilometres from its border with Bolivia and may be utilized by the US military. Officials in Paraguay claim the military operations are routine humanitarian efforts and deny that any plans are underway for a US base. Yet human rights groups in the area are deeply worried. White House officials are using rhetoric about terrorist threats in the tri-border region (where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet) in order to build their case for military operations, which are in many ways reminiscent of the build up to the invasion of Iraq.
The tri-border area is home to the Guarani Aquifer, one of the world's largest reserves of water. Near the Estigarribia airbase are Bolivia's natural gas reserves, the second largest in Latin America. Political analysts believe US operations in Paraguay are part of a preventative war to control these natural resources and suppress social uprisings in Bolivia.
Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel commented on the situation in Paraguay and warned, "Once the United States arrives, it takes a long time to leave. And that really frightens me."
The Estigarribia airbase was constructed in the 1980s for US technicians hired by the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and is capable of housing 16,000 troops. A journalist writing for the Argentinian newspaper, Clarin, recently visited the base and reported it to be in perfect condition, capable of handling large military planes. It's oversized for the Paraguayan air force, which only has a handful of small aircrafts. The base has an enormous radar system, huge hangars and an air traffic control tower. The airstrip itself is larger than the one at the international airport in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital. Near the base is a military camp which has recently grown in size.
"Estigarribia is ideal because it is operable throughout the year ... I am sure that the US presence will increase," said Paraguayan defense analyst Horacio Galeano Perrone.
Denials and immunity
"The national government has not reached any agreement with the United States for the establishment of a US military base in Paraguay," states a communiqué signed by Paraguayan foreign minister Leila Rachid. The US Embassy in Paraguay has also released statements officially denying plans to set up a military base in the country. The Pentagon used this same language when describing its actions in Manta, Ecuador, now the home of an $80 million US military base. First, they said the facility was an archaic "dirt strip", which would be used for weather monitoring and would not permanently house US personnel. Days later, the Pentagon stated that Manta was to serve as a major military base tasked with a variety of security-related missions.
Paraguayan political analyst and historian Milda Rivarola said that, "In practice, there has already been a [US] base operating in Paraguay for over 50 years." The US armed forces have had an ongoing presence in the country, she said. "In the past, they needed congressional authorization every six months, but now they have been granted permission to be here for a year and a half."
On May 26, 2005 the Paraguayan Senate granted the US troops total immunity from national and international criminal court jurisdiction until Dec. 2006. The legislation is automatically extendable. Since Dec. 2004, the US has been pressuring Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Paraguay into signing a deal which would grant immunity to US military. The Bush administration threatened to deny the countries up to $24.5 million in economic and military aid if they refused to sign the immunity deal. Paraguay was the only country to accept the offer.
Coup warning in Bolivia
The proximity of the Estigarribia base to Bolivian natural gas reserves, and the fact that the military operations coincide with a presidential election in Bolivia, has also been a cause for concern. The election is scheduled to take place on Dec. 4, 2005. Bolivian Workers Union leader Jaime Solares and Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) legislator Antonio Peredo, have warned of US plans for a military coup to frustrate the elections. Solares said the US Embassy backs right wing ex-president Jorge Quiroga in his bid for office, and will go as far as necessary to prevent any other candidate's victory.
The most recent national poll showed left wing MAS congressman Evo Morales was barely one point behind Quiroga in the race. Solares said there were calls in Jun. 2005 for a military coup during the massive protests that toppled president Carlos Mesa. Recent US military operations in neighboring Paraguay would facilitate such an intervention.
The Bush administration played a key role in the 2002 coup against president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the 2004 ousting of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide.
The Tri-Border terror theory
In March, William Pope, the US State Department's principal deputy coordinator of counterterrorism, said that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is believed to have visited the tri-border area for several weeks in 1995. Defense officials say that Hezbollah and Hamas, radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, "get a lot of funding" from this tri-border area, and that further unrest in the region could leave a political "black hole" that would erode other democratic efforts.
Military analysts from Uruguay and Bolivia maintain that the threat of terrorism is often used by the US as an excuse for military intervention and the monopolization of natural resources. In the case of Paraguay, the US may be preparing to secure the Guarani water reserves and Bolivia's natural gas.
In spite of frequent attempts to link terror networks to the tri-border area, there is little proof of the connection. However, this did not prevent the US from "liberating" Iraq in 2003. As secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld argued during the debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, "Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."
Paraguayan and US officials contend that much of the recent military collaborations are based on health and humanitarian work. However, State Department reports do not mention any funding for health works in Paraguay. They do mention that funding for the Counterterrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP) in the country doubled for 2005.
The report explained, "Bilateral relations between the US and Paraguay are strong, with Paraguay providing excellent cooperation in the fight against terrorism ... CTFP provided funds for Paraguayans to attend courses on the dynamics of international terrorism, and the importance and application of intelligence in combating terrorism."
Col. Hugo Mendoza of the Paraguayan army said he's thankful the US military is helping Paraguay meet security threats through the joint exercises. "We're learning new things and working with new equipment and the latest technology which we would not be able to afford otherwise."
Journalist and human rights activist Alfredo Boccia Paz said, "These missions are always disguised as humanitarian aid ... what Paraguay does not and cannot control is the total number of agents that enter the country."
Meanwhile, neighboring countries have not warmly received the news of the military activity. The Chilean Communist Party demanded that Paraguayan president Nicanor Duarte "reconsider and cancel" recent military deals with the US as they are "extremely serious for Latin America."
In Paraguay, human rights and activist organizations have mobilized against the military activity. When Donald Rumsfeld visited the country in August, protesters greeted his entourage with chants such as, "Rumsfeld, you fascist, you are the terrorist!" as a military band welcomed him by playing the "Star Spangled Banner".
Excalibur
Wednesday, 05 October 2005
Controversy is raging in Paraguay, where the US military is conducting secretive operations. Five hundred US troops arrived in the country on Jul. 1, 2005 with planes, weapons and ammunition. Eyewitness reports prove that an airbase exists in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay, which is 200 kilometres from its border with Bolivia and may be utilized by the US military. Officials in Paraguay claim the military operations are routine humanitarian efforts and deny that any plans are underway for a US base. Yet human rights groups in the area are deeply worried. White House officials are using rhetoric about terrorist threats in the tri-border region (where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet) in order to build their case for military operations, which are in many ways reminiscent of the build up to the invasion of Iraq.
The tri-border area is home to the Guarani Aquifer, one of the world's largest reserves of water. Near the Estigarribia airbase are Bolivia's natural gas reserves, the second largest in Latin America. Political analysts believe US operations in Paraguay are part of a preventative war to control these natural resources and suppress social uprisings in Bolivia.
Argentinian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel commented on the situation in Paraguay and warned, "Once the United States arrives, it takes a long time to leave. And that really frightens me."
The Estigarribia airbase was constructed in the 1980s for US technicians hired by the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner, and is capable of housing 16,000 troops. A journalist writing for the Argentinian newspaper, Clarin, recently visited the base and reported it to be in perfect condition, capable of handling large military planes. It's oversized for the Paraguayan air force, which only has a handful of small aircrafts. The base has an enormous radar system, huge hangars and an air traffic control tower. The airstrip itself is larger than the one at the international airport in Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital. Near the base is a military camp which has recently grown in size.
"Estigarribia is ideal because it is operable throughout the year ... I am sure that the US presence will increase," said Paraguayan defense analyst Horacio Galeano Perrone.
Denials and immunity
"The national government has not reached any agreement with the United States for the establishment of a US military base in Paraguay," states a communiqué signed by Paraguayan foreign minister Leila Rachid. The US Embassy in Paraguay has also released statements officially denying plans to set up a military base in the country. The Pentagon used this same language when describing its actions in Manta, Ecuador, now the home of an $80 million US military base. First, they said the facility was an archaic "dirt strip", which would be used for weather monitoring and would not permanently house US personnel. Days later, the Pentagon stated that Manta was to serve as a major military base tasked with a variety of security-related missions.
Paraguayan political analyst and historian Milda Rivarola said that, "In practice, there has already been a [US] base operating in Paraguay for over 50 years." The US armed forces have had an ongoing presence in the country, she said. "In the past, they needed congressional authorization every six months, but now they have been granted permission to be here for a year and a half."
On May 26, 2005 the Paraguayan Senate granted the US troops total immunity from national and international criminal court jurisdiction until Dec. 2006. The legislation is automatically extendable. Since Dec. 2004, the US has been pressuring Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Paraguay into signing a deal which would grant immunity to US military. The Bush administration threatened to deny the countries up to $24.5 million in economic and military aid if they refused to sign the immunity deal. Paraguay was the only country to accept the offer.
Coup warning in Bolivia
The proximity of the Estigarribia base to Bolivian natural gas reserves, and the fact that the military operations coincide with a presidential election in Bolivia, has also been a cause for concern. The election is scheduled to take place on Dec. 4, 2005. Bolivian Workers Union leader Jaime Solares and Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) legislator Antonio Peredo, have warned of US plans for a military coup to frustrate the elections. Solares said the US Embassy backs right wing ex-president Jorge Quiroga in his bid for office, and will go as far as necessary to prevent any other candidate's victory.
The most recent national poll showed left wing MAS congressman Evo Morales was barely one point behind Quiroga in the race. Solares said there were calls in Jun. 2005 for a military coup during the massive protests that toppled president Carlos Mesa. Recent US military operations in neighboring Paraguay would facilitate such an intervention.
The Bush administration played a key role in the 2002 coup against president Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and the 2004 ousting of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide.
The Tri-Border terror theory
In March, William Pope, the US State Department's principal deputy coordinator of counterterrorism, said that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed is believed to have visited the tri-border area for several weeks in 1995. Defense officials say that Hezbollah and Hamas, radical Islamic groups from the Middle East, "get a lot of funding" from this tri-border area, and that further unrest in the region could leave a political "black hole" that would erode other democratic efforts.
Military analysts from Uruguay and Bolivia maintain that the threat of terrorism is often used by the US as an excuse for military intervention and the monopolization of natural resources. In the case of Paraguay, the US may be preparing to secure the Guarani water reserves and Bolivia's natural gas.
In spite of frequent attempts to link terror networks to the tri-border area, there is little proof of the connection. However, this did not prevent the US from "liberating" Iraq in 2003. As secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld argued during the debate over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, "Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist."
Paraguayan and US officials contend that much of the recent military collaborations are based on health and humanitarian work. However, State Department reports do not mention any funding for health works in Paraguay. They do mention that funding for the Counterterrorism Fellowship Program (CTFP) in the country doubled for 2005.
The report explained, "Bilateral relations between the US and Paraguay are strong, with Paraguay providing excellent cooperation in the fight against terrorism ... CTFP provided funds for Paraguayans to attend courses on the dynamics of international terrorism, and the importance and application of intelligence in combating terrorism."
Col. Hugo Mendoza of the Paraguayan army said he's thankful the US military is helping Paraguay meet security threats through the joint exercises. "We're learning new things and working with new equipment and the latest technology which we would not be able to afford otherwise."
Journalist and human rights activist Alfredo Boccia Paz said, "These missions are always disguised as humanitarian aid ... what Paraguay does not and cannot control is the total number of agents that enter the country."
Meanwhile, neighboring countries have not warmly received the news of the military activity. The Chilean Communist Party demanded that Paraguayan president Nicanor Duarte "reconsider and cancel" recent military deals with the US as they are "extremely serious for Latin America."
In Paraguay, human rights and activist organizations have mobilized against the military activity. When Donald Rumsfeld visited the country in August, protesters greeted his entourage with chants such as, "Rumsfeld, you fascist, you are the terrorist!" as a military band welcomed him by playing the "Star Spangled Banner".
Hugo Chavez and His Bolivarian Revolution
A veteran Latin America correspondent on the past, present, and possible future of Venezuela's president.
By Julian Brookes
Mother Jones
October 04 , 2005
What to make of Hugo Chavez? By the lights of the Bush administration, the President of Venezuela is an anti-American rabble rouser, a devoted friend to the loathed Fidel Castro, a rogue state unto himself, given to playing politics with Venezuela's oil industry, which supplies about 15 percent of the U.S.'s crude. To his increasingly frustrated political opponents in Venezuela, Chavez, a former army colonel, is a leftist demagogue who stirred up a wave of class and racial resentments and rode it to the presidency, and who, in office, has dealt himself new powers at every chance, on his way to becoming an out-and-out caudillo. And to a certain school of international opinion, exemplified by The Economist magazine, Chavez is an wacky utopian who sooner or later will run the Venezuelan economy into the ground.
True, Chavez is, for a world leader, refreshingly free with his opinions of the Bush administration. (And often, as at the United Nations last month, entertainingly so.) He makes a show of railing against US "imperialism," cheerfully baits and ridicules George W. Bush, and matter-of-factly denounces the U.S. as a "terrorist state." Most days, it seems, he surfaces somewhere in the media alleging dark White House plots against his life. (Pace Pat Robertson, this seems farfetched.) And he's quite convinced that the Bush administration backed, or at least countenanced, a coup attempt against him in 2002 (which seems quite plausible). Also true, his governing style is frankly populist, and he routinely excoriates Venezuela's elite class, which dominates the political opposition and which, until the rise of Chavez, dominated the country's politics. Certain of his reform laws—in particular one regulating the media and another reshuffling the judiciary—have drawn protests from international rights groups. And yes, there's the matter of la lista, the list of signatures submitted in 2004 to demand a referendum on Chavez's recall, which, so signatories claim, now functions as a black list, deployed by the Chavez government to deny them jobs and services.
Then again, there's no gainsaying the fact that Chavez first won office, in 1998, in a fair election with 56 percent of the vote, or that since then he has prevailed in several electoral tests—not to mention a general strike and a coup attempt—growing steadily in popularity each time. Nor is there any denying that he has brought into the democratic process, for the first time, large numbers of Venezuela's poor, most of whom live in the ranchos, or shanty towns, that ring the cities. (As for his alleged class baiting, in a country where the poor account for about 80 percent of the population and where income inequality is extreme and glaring, democratic politics can’t help but involve issues of class—and race: Venezuela's poor are disproportionately black and indigenous.) Through a string of "missions" the Chavez government has brought healthcare and education to many of the ranchos and rural areas, which before now have seen little of either. The missions are financed by proceeds from Venezuela's oil industry, control of which Chavez seized after the 2002 (another sore point for opponents), and which, against expectation, is humming along quite nicely. (Also worth noting: for all that he fulminates against "neo-liberalist" free trade, and for all that he has expanded the role of the state in Venezuela's economy, Chavez's economic policy is fairly eclectic: he's pushed hard to have Venezuela admitted to Mercosur, the South American free trade bloc, and he's an energetic courtier of foreign investment.)
That Chavez is genuinely popular in Venezuela, and increasingly throughout Latin America, is cause for neither surprise nor alarm, according to Richard Gott, whose book, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso), recently updated and reissued, is the first account in English to place Chavez in historical and intellectual perspective. In Gott’s sympathetic account, Chavez is a magnetic personality of the Clintonian type, “a genuinely original figure in Latin America,” a radical left-wing nationalist, to be sure, but a pragmatic improviser, and certainly no dogmatic socialist. Chavez’s program for Venezuela remains somewhat vague, even to the man himself, but his concern for the country’s poor and marginalized is, in Gott's view, sincere and his vocation is essentially democratic.
Gott, who has been reporting on Latin America for four decades, is a former correspondent and features editor for the London Guardian. He’s the author of Guerrilla Movements in Latin America and Cuba: A New History, among other books. He talked to Mother Jones recently by phone from his home in London.
Mother Jones: Does Chavez really think the U.S. is out to have him killed?
Richard Gott: You have to understand the fear that sweeps Latin America whenever a progressive government comes to power. Chavez has to take the possibility of assassination very seriously. He has now expressed his great solidarity with the Cuban revolution and gone so far as to say that if the United States were to invade Cuba then Venezuela would be at Cuba's side. Even so, to my mind, the idea that the United States is planning to do assassinate him seems highly improbable. But I think for Chavez it's a very real possibility.
MJ: Still, there's clearly no love lost between Chavez and the United States government. Why does Chavez delight in provoking the Americans?
RG: Well, I think he gets out of it a lot of popularity at home. People in the United States tend not to appreciate how extremely disliked they are in much of the world and particularly in Latin America, for old-fashioned historical reasons. The United States has intervened all over Latin America for more than 100 years. They're still in Cuba at the base in Guantanamo, since 1898. So there's this tremendous legacy of hostility that's absolutely open to any progressive regime to exploit.
MJ:And Pat Robertson's recent comments—that the US should go ahead and take him out—presumably played into that hostility.
RG: Yes, it's obviously very convenient when the United States lives up to its stereotype as a Big Brother that's prone to intervene at any given moment. But when Chavez started six or seven years ago he didn't have this fearsome anti-American rhetoric that he has today. He unleashes it today because he has good reason to believe the Americans knew about the coup in 2002 and didn't do anything to warn him, or prevent it. So he gets a lot of mileage out of pushing a strongly anti-American line, and specifically an anti-Bush, anti-neoconservative line. But gets on well with Jimmy Carter and with Clinton—you know, with less extreme figures.
MJ: A big irritant for the United States, of course, is Chavez's closeness to Fidel Castro. What should we make of that relationship?
RG: One tends to forget in the United States or in Europe how popular and significant Castro is for Latin America. He remains this extraordinary bulwark against the United States, and he's regarded as the great Latin American figure of the 20th century. And Chavez belongs to a strand in Venezuelan life, and Latin American life, essentially of nationalism, and socialism, and support for the Cuban revolution, and he's never made any secret of that. But of course he has no plans to emulate the particular Soviet form of the Cuban economy, or the particular form of Cuba's political arrangements, which owe a lot to the fact that it's under an embargo and in a sort of state of war. But he does appreciate Castro's advice; they talk on the phone every night. They're very, very close.
MJ: And the Cuban-exile lobby doesn't take well to that ...
RG: No. Anyone who is friendly to Cuba becomes an enemy of the Miami-Cuban mafia, and that's what's wagging the American policy towards Latin America. Chavez, who has teamed up with Castro on many many things, is implicitly just another enemy. But when you look at it—has Chavez expropriated American companies? No. Has he affected American business interests? No, he hasn't. There's still McDonald's in Caracas, and you can still be an American businessman in Venezuela.
MJ: But it's not just the Miami Cubans who dislike Chavez. The English-language media is pretty hostile towards him.
RG: Yes, that's true. For example, the correspondents for the Economist and the Financial Times in Caracas during the Chavez era—it's been the same guys throughout--are essentially disillusioned leftists of yesteryear who've moved over to the right. They've accepted the arguments of the opposition and have been endlessly critical of Chavez since the beginning, but always adopting the latest opposition line. And the opposition, which is essentially the Venezuelan elite, is now saying Chavez is moving to the left and he's going to show his true socialist colors. Okay, it's true that Chavez, for the first time this year, has used the word "socialism"—he talks about a "21st Century Socialism"—but he's given absolutely no indication that he wants to emulate Soviet socialism, Cuban socialism, or indeed the sort of state capitalism that existed in Europe for much of the late 20th century.
MJ: Do you have a sense—for that matter, does he have a sense—of what he means by "21st century socialism"?
RG: No, I don't think he does. He is keen on buzzwords like "participation," he talks a lot about "participatory democracy," but he hasn't really fleshed out these ideas. He likes the idea that workers' representatives should be on the boards of companies, which is quite an old-fashioned and interesting idea. But he's not particularly interested in trade unions themselves becoming a significant force. He's a very unusual leftist in the sense that he's not much interested in trade unions or political parties.
MJ: Early on in the book you call him a "genuinely original figure" in Latin America. In what sense is he that?
RG: He certainly comes from an unusual background. It's unusual to have a progressive military figure, although there have been half a dozen or so figures in the 20th century—[Omar] Torrijos, in Panama, for example—who emerged from the military and established progressive military regimes. What I find interesting about him is his open-mindedness and his willingness to experiment. He arrived on the scene without any dogmatic ideas. One of his principal heroes is Simon Rodriguez, this extraordinary 19th century figure who was Simon Bolivar's tutor. He had this wonderful slogan that Latin America had to be "original." He had a debate with Bolivar, who was a child of the European Enlightenment, influenced by the French Revolution, and who wanted to import a lot of those ideas into Latin America. Simon Rodriguez said, No, we can't import them wholesale into Latin America; we have to think of original ways of dealing with the problems of our continent on our own. I think Chavez has taken that to heart. He's always casting around for ideas. He's one of the most open-minded Latin American leaders I've ever come across. Whenever you see him he says, "What's new? What's happening? What books should I be reading?"
MJ: And yet he very deliberately styles himself as an heir to Simon Bolivar, the great 19th century hero of Latin American independence. In what sense are Chavez and his project for Venezuela "Bolivarian"?
RG: I think he still recognizes the significance of the ideas of Bolivar. He's more interested in culture than in economics. All leftist revolutions in the past have been based on an economic restructuring of society. Chavez isn't so fascinated by that, but he is fascinated by the need for Latin America to reestablish its cultural identity outside of American cultural imperialism—everybody watching American TV and American movies. He's saying No, we should be thinking about Latin America and thinking about our own culture. He's set up a television channel called Vive, which is devoted to bringing aspects of Venezuelan culture to the screen. He has also promoted the television station Telesur, the idea being to have a Latin American perspective on the news, and he's made a deal with Iran whereby Venezuelans are learning from the Iranians how to make cartoon films, in order to escape from the American idea that everything has to be Walt Disney.
MJ: Chavez remains popular in Venezuela. How is he viewed in Latin America more broadly?
RG: Yes, I think it's changed significantly in the years he's been in power. To begin with they didn't really know what to make of him, and it took them quite a long time to figure out that he was a very serious and intelligent politician. I suppose, too, that after a while his capacity to survive in itself becomes impressive, and the fact that he has not only survived but continues to be high in the opinion polls, winning election after election, gives him added credibility in the rest of Latin America.
MJ: As you say, his resiliency has been extraordinary. How has he managed to survive—thrive, even?
RG: Well, two things are absolutely crucial. One is that he has the support of the great mass of the people, who are poor, and also black and Indian. There’s a really interesting racist element to politics in Venezuela, and in the rest of Latin America. So Chavez has this huge popularity among the poor, and he’s seen to be delivering. And even where he’s not delivering, they believe that he will. The other thing of course is that he has the absolutely solid backing of the armed forces. The coup in 2002 allowed him to fire 60 generals and to get rid of the entire upper reaches of the armed forces. So the people running the army today are absolutely unconditional supporters of Chavez. Not only that, he's extremely popular with the troops, because they come from the poor and forgotten parts of the population, and Chavez always makes huge efforts to make sure he talks not just to the generals but also to the troops.
MJ: Of course Chavez is a former soldier himself. To what extent does that explain who he is and where he comes from?
RG: I think it's very significant indeed. The Venezuelan military is unlike other militaries. They've often had relationships with the left. They are simply not the sort of generals with dark glasses that one associates with Chile and Argentina, say, and they tend to come not necessarily from the higher social strata, they often come from the provinces. It's been quite a democratic army. They also in the 1970s and 1980s started studying at the universities and colleges, and became somewhat integrated into civilian life.
You have to bear in mind, too, that entire political structure of Venezuela has collapsed, the old political parties have disappeared, evaporated, and Chavez hasn't really created much of a new organized political movement of his own. The bureaucracy is in the hands of the middle-class opposition, and it's very difficult to get any sort of reform through the existing government machine, so Chavez does rely on the military to get things done, as his own political party.
MJ: The military aside, lacking an organized political movement he seems to hold on in part through sheer force of personality. Is there a danger that when he withdraws from the scene, voluntarily or not, his reforms and achievements will go with him?
RG: I think that's a very legitimate question. Things are better from that point of view than they were four or five years ago. I think if Chavez had disappeared even two or three years ago, that would have been the end of that. I think now that things are becoming more organized, less chaotic, the regime looks stable, and people are beginning to join in on the grounds that this is going to last. For a long time members of the opposition said, we're going to get rid of Chavez tomorrow, and so they waited till tomorrow came. But when that didn't happen, I think a lot of people who weren't particularly keen on Chavez are now beginning to realize that this is the government they're going to have to deal with for the next ten years. And I think that if Chavez disappeared tomorrow, there are enough good, competent people, and that the system is now stable enough, and that it will continue. I think what is significant is that there has been a revolution, a collapse of the ancien regime, so it's impossible to imagine going back to the system that existed before.
MJ: Not least because Chavez has brought into politics a large portion of the population—the poor—that wasn't involved before.
RG: Yes, I think that may turn out to be Chavez's most significant achievement. In a way that's what made the old, elitist opposition unhappy -- this democratization of the country, bringing in this underclass, even a lumpen class, into the body politic. A lot of the programs, the projects he's developed—not just the health programs but the education programs, too—they're really aimed at the 16-25 age group, the young people who weren't getting into college or into training. He's making sure that a huge amount of money will be spent on this one generation to get them into education, into work, and essentially into politics, because they're the people who will ultimately decide the nature of the system.
MJ: Now, he's able to make this huge investment because Venezuela is flush with oil money. What happens if and when that flow of money slows?
RG: Well, I don't think the price of oil is going to come down in the foreseeable future, and anyway he is only trying to do this as a crash program for one generation. After that, Venezuelans will have to decide which direction to go in. But he will have a much larger group of motivated people than existed in the 20th century.
MJ: You talk about Chavez's "new politics of oil." What's been his innovation there?
RG: First of all came the discovery, in the 1980s, that simply nationalizing the oil industry didn't result in huge flows of money for development, for the simple reason that the people who took over the industry ran it the same way it had been run in the days of Shell and Exxon, when the money disappeared into speculation or into the hands of the directors. Chavez has completely altered the way the oil company is run, pointing out that the money ought to be invested in Venezuela.
MJ: It's never healthy for an economy to rely to heavily on one industry, as Venezuela does on oil. Is the Chavez government working to diversify the economy?
RG: Absolutely. A lot depends on this new generation of people emerging, and then the possibility of investing in other activities. Chavez has the old, sort of 19th century belief in trying to develop the infrastructure all over the country, to try to reverse the movement of people from the countryside to the cities. And I think his scheme is to try to revive local economies and make the countryside more of a pole of development so that people don't endlessly drift into the cities, which is of course the bane of the whole of Latin America, not just Venezuela.
MJ: So, Chavez came into office promising radical reform—a Bolivarian revolution. Has he delivered?
RG: I think the jury is still out on the entire project. It's extremely open-ended as to where it's going to go, and I'm sure it's going to change and develop in time. Chavez is a very pragmatic leader who's moving forward gradually on a number of fronts but doesn't have any kind of blueprint for the eventual organization of society in Venezuela. For example, on two or three cases they've taken over factories that have collapsed and the workers have demanded that they should be taken over. I don't think that's the model, but it's happening. So I think there'll be a sort of pluralism of different projects, some cooperative, some state-owned, some privately owned. That's more or less what's happening at the moment and I expect that to continue. I think that because they depend so much on oil and it takes time to develop alternative economic activities it remains to be seen how all that will work.
MJ: Have the poor and historically disenfranchised seen real gains under Chavez?
RG: They've seen a large amount in terms of health and education in the shanty towns. That is very visible, and it's extraordinary. And the ones who haven't got it yet know about it and they're waiting for it and agitating for it to arrive. So, for example, I went to a shanty town outside Caracas next two or three months ago and nothing had happened, and they were extremely anxious for it to happen. They were sending protest demonstrations to the local mayor asking, when are the Cuban doctors going to come, and when is the education scheme going to reach our village. They are very well aware that improvements are in the offing and that they're going to come, though they obviously haven't got everywhere yet. I think the employment program is still in its infancy; getting people into jobs—that still has a long way to go.
MJ: The standard US line on Chavez is that his instincts are essentially autocratic. What do you make of that?
RG: I think it's entirely invented. It's true that he is a military figure who expects his orders to be obeyed. The two items that are endlessly picked on by the opposition are [his reforms of] the media and the judiciary. The judiciary was an unbelievable mess under the ancien regime. It has been reformed, they have managed to get control of it, and I think you'd expect any government to do that if it's building on the ruins of the past. You're not going to get a situation where the corrupt judges of the past have an influence over the system. You can call it raison d'etat if you like, but it seems to me to be a perfectly understandable measure for the government to take. I seem to remember that Franklin D. Roosevelt did something similar in the 1930s.
The complaint about the media law is a completely ridiculous red herring. All they've done is introduce some legislation that's probably less repressive than what we have in Western Europe. It's really the modern way of introducing a certain amount of regulation into television in a world that had hitherto been totally unbridled. And indeed anyone knows who's been there the media are having a field day and are about 80 percent anti-Chavez. So there isn't much to complain about there.
MJ: If Chavez's revolution succeeds, what do you think Venezuela look like ten years from now?
RG: I think Venezuela will be a model for the rest of Latin America—a society that's come to terms with its black and indigenous poverty-stricken populations, and where those populations participate fully in the democratic process. Because it's a new generation it's a little open-ended as to what will happen, but Chavez recognizes that. He says "Let the people decide," and I think he means it.
Julian Brookes is the editor of MotherJones.com.
By Julian Brookes
Mother Jones
October 04 , 2005
What to make of Hugo Chavez? By the lights of the Bush administration, the President of Venezuela is an anti-American rabble rouser, a devoted friend to the loathed Fidel Castro, a rogue state unto himself, given to playing politics with Venezuela's oil industry, which supplies about 15 percent of the U.S.'s crude. To his increasingly frustrated political opponents in Venezuela, Chavez, a former army colonel, is a leftist demagogue who stirred up a wave of class and racial resentments and rode it to the presidency, and who, in office, has dealt himself new powers at every chance, on his way to becoming an out-and-out caudillo. And to a certain school of international opinion, exemplified by The Economist magazine, Chavez is an wacky utopian who sooner or later will run the Venezuelan economy into the ground.
True, Chavez is, for a world leader, refreshingly free with his opinions of the Bush administration. (And often, as at the United Nations last month, entertainingly so.) He makes a show of railing against US "imperialism," cheerfully baits and ridicules George W. Bush, and matter-of-factly denounces the U.S. as a "terrorist state." Most days, it seems, he surfaces somewhere in the media alleging dark White House plots against his life. (Pace Pat Robertson, this seems farfetched.) And he's quite convinced that the Bush administration backed, or at least countenanced, a coup attempt against him in 2002 (which seems quite plausible). Also true, his governing style is frankly populist, and he routinely excoriates Venezuela's elite class, which dominates the political opposition and which, until the rise of Chavez, dominated the country's politics. Certain of his reform laws—in particular one regulating the media and another reshuffling the judiciary—have drawn protests from international rights groups. And yes, there's the matter of la lista, the list of signatures submitted in 2004 to demand a referendum on Chavez's recall, which, so signatories claim, now functions as a black list, deployed by the Chavez government to deny them jobs and services.
Then again, there's no gainsaying the fact that Chavez first won office, in 1998, in a fair election with 56 percent of the vote, or that since then he has prevailed in several electoral tests—not to mention a general strike and a coup attempt—growing steadily in popularity each time. Nor is there any denying that he has brought into the democratic process, for the first time, large numbers of Venezuela's poor, most of whom live in the ranchos, or shanty towns, that ring the cities. (As for his alleged class baiting, in a country where the poor account for about 80 percent of the population and where income inequality is extreme and glaring, democratic politics can’t help but involve issues of class—and race: Venezuela's poor are disproportionately black and indigenous.) Through a string of "missions" the Chavez government has brought healthcare and education to many of the ranchos and rural areas, which before now have seen little of either. The missions are financed by proceeds from Venezuela's oil industry, control of which Chavez seized after the 2002 (another sore point for opponents), and which, against expectation, is humming along quite nicely. (Also worth noting: for all that he fulminates against "neo-liberalist" free trade, and for all that he has expanded the role of the state in Venezuela's economy, Chavez's economic policy is fairly eclectic: he's pushed hard to have Venezuela admitted to Mercosur, the South American free trade bloc, and he's an energetic courtier of foreign investment.)
That Chavez is genuinely popular in Venezuela, and increasingly throughout Latin America, is cause for neither surprise nor alarm, according to Richard Gott, whose book, Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso), recently updated and reissued, is the first account in English to place Chavez in historical and intellectual perspective. In Gott’s sympathetic account, Chavez is a magnetic personality of the Clintonian type, “a genuinely original figure in Latin America,” a radical left-wing nationalist, to be sure, but a pragmatic improviser, and certainly no dogmatic socialist. Chavez’s program for Venezuela remains somewhat vague, even to the man himself, but his concern for the country’s poor and marginalized is, in Gott's view, sincere and his vocation is essentially democratic.
Gott, who has been reporting on Latin America for four decades, is a former correspondent and features editor for the London Guardian. He’s the author of Guerrilla Movements in Latin America and Cuba: A New History, among other books. He talked to Mother Jones recently by phone from his home in London.
Mother Jones: Does Chavez really think the U.S. is out to have him killed?
Richard Gott: You have to understand the fear that sweeps Latin America whenever a progressive government comes to power. Chavez has to take the possibility of assassination very seriously. He has now expressed his great solidarity with the Cuban revolution and gone so far as to say that if the United States were to invade Cuba then Venezuela would be at Cuba's side. Even so, to my mind, the idea that the United States is planning to do assassinate him seems highly improbable. But I think for Chavez it's a very real possibility.
MJ: Still, there's clearly no love lost between Chavez and the United States government. Why does Chavez delight in provoking the Americans?
RG: Well, I think he gets out of it a lot of popularity at home. People in the United States tend not to appreciate how extremely disliked they are in much of the world and particularly in Latin America, for old-fashioned historical reasons. The United States has intervened all over Latin America for more than 100 years. They're still in Cuba at the base in Guantanamo, since 1898. So there's this tremendous legacy of hostility that's absolutely open to any progressive regime to exploit.
MJ:And Pat Robertson's recent comments—that the US should go ahead and take him out—presumably played into that hostility.
RG: Yes, it's obviously very convenient when the United States lives up to its stereotype as a Big Brother that's prone to intervene at any given moment. But when Chavez started six or seven years ago he didn't have this fearsome anti-American rhetoric that he has today. He unleashes it today because he has good reason to believe the Americans knew about the coup in 2002 and didn't do anything to warn him, or prevent it. So he gets a lot of mileage out of pushing a strongly anti-American line, and specifically an anti-Bush, anti-neoconservative line. But gets on well with Jimmy Carter and with Clinton—you know, with less extreme figures.
MJ: A big irritant for the United States, of course, is Chavez's closeness to Fidel Castro. What should we make of that relationship?
RG: One tends to forget in the United States or in Europe how popular and significant Castro is for Latin America. He remains this extraordinary bulwark against the United States, and he's regarded as the great Latin American figure of the 20th century. And Chavez belongs to a strand in Venezuelan life, and Latin American life, essentially of nationalism, and socialism, and support for the Cuban revolution, and he's never made any secret of that. But of course he has no plans to emulate the particular Soviet form of the Cuban economy, or the particular form of Cuba's political arrangements, which owe a lot to the fact that it's under an embargo and in a sort of state of war. But he does appreciate Castro's advice; they talk on the phone every night. They're very, very close.
MJ: And the Cuban-exile lobby doesn't take well to that ...
RG: No. Anyone who is friendly to Cuba becomes an enemy of the Miami-Cuban mafia, and that's what's wagging the American policy towards Latin America. Chavez, who has teamed up with Castro on many many things, is implicitly just another enemy. But when you look at it—has Chavez expropriated American companies? No. Has he affected American business interests? No, he hasn't. There's still McDonald's in Caracas, and you can still be an American businessman in Venezuela.
MJ: But it's not just the Miami Cubans who dislike Chavez. The English-language media is pretty hostile towards him.
RG: Yes, that's true. For example, the correspondents for the Economist and the Financial Times in Caracas during the Chavez era—it's been the same guys throughout--are essentially disillusioned leftists of yesteryear who've moved over to the right. They've accepted the arguments of the opposition and have been endlessly critical of Chavez since the beginning, but always adopting the latest opposition line. And the opposition, which is essentially the Venezuelan elite, is now saying Chavez is moving to the left and he's going to show his true socialist colors. Okay, it's true that Chavez, for the first time this year, has used the word "socialism"—he talks about a "21st Century Socialism"—but he's given absolutely no indication that he wants to emulate Soviet socialism, Cuban socialism, or indeed the sort of state capitalism that existed in Europe for much of the late 20th century.
MJ: Do you have a sense—for that matter, does he have a sense—of what he means by "21st century socialism"?
RG: No, I don't think he does. He is keen on buzzwords like "participation," he talks a lot about "participatory democracy," but he hasn't really fleshed out these ideas. He likes the idea that workers' representatives should be on the boards of companies, which is quite an old-fashioned and interesting idea. But he's not particularly interested in trade unions themselves becoming a significant force. He's a very unusual leftist in the sense that he's not much interested in trade unions or political parties.
MJ: Early on in the book you call him a "genuinely original figure" in Latin America. In what sense is he that?
RG: He certainly comes from an unusual background. It's unusual to have a progressive military figure, although there have been half a dozen or so figures in the 20th century—[Omar] Torrijos, in Panama, for example—who emerged from the military and established progressive military regimes. What I find interesting about him is his open-mindedness and his willingness to experiment. He arrived on the scene without any dogmatic ideas. One of his principal heroes is Simon Rodriguez, this extraordinary 19th century figure who was Simon Bolivar's tutor. He had this wonderful slogan that Latin America had to be "original." He had a debate with Bolivar, who was a child of the European Enlightenment, influenced by the French Revolution, and who wanted to import a lot of those ideas into Latin America. Simon Rodriguez said, No, we can't import them wholesale into Latin America; we have to think of original ways of dealing with the problems of our continent on our own. I think Chavez has taken that to heart. He's always casting around for ideas. He's one of the most open-minded Latin American leaders I've ever come across. Whenever you see him he says, "What's new? What's happening? What books should I be reading?"
MJ: And yet he very deliberately styles himself as an heir to Simon Bolivar, the great 19th century hero of Latin American independence. In what sense are Chavez and his project for Venezuela "Bolivarian"?
RG: I think he still recognizes the significance of the ideas of Bolivar. He's more interested in culture than in economics. All leftist revolutions in the past have been based on an economic restructuring of society. Chavez isn't so fascinated by that, but he is fascinated by the need for Latin America to reestablish its cultural identity outside of American cultural imperialism—everybody watching American TV and American movies. He's saying No, we should be thinking about Latin America and thinking about our own culture. He's set up a television channel called Vive, which is devoted to bringing aspects of Venezuelan culture to the screen. He has also promoted the television station Telesur, the idea being to have a Latin American perspective on the news, and he's made a deal with Iran whereby Venezuelans are learning from the Iranians how to make cartoon films, in order to escape from the American idea that everything has to be Walt Disney.
MJ: Chavez remains popular in Venezuela. How is he viewed in Latin America more broadly?
RG: Yes, I think it's changed significantly in the years he's been in power. To begin with they didn't really know what to make of him, and it took them quite a long time to figure out that he was a very serious and intelligent politician. I suppose, too, that after a while his capacity to survive in itself becomes impressive, and the fact that he has not only survived but continues to be high in the opinion polls, winning election after election, gives him added credibility in the rest of Latin America.
MJ: As you say, his resiliency has been extraordinary. How has he managed to survive—thrive, even?
RG: Well, two things are absolutely crucial. One is that he has the support of the great mass of the people, who are poor, and also black and Indian. There’s a really interesting racist element to politics in Venezuela, and in the rest of Latin America. So Chavez has this huge popularity among the poor, and he’s seen to be delivering. And even where he’s not delivering, they believe that he will. The other thing of course is that he has the absolutely solid backing of the armed forces. The coup in 2002 allowed him to fire 60 generals and to get rid of the entire upper reaches of the armed forces. So the people running the army today are absolutely unconditional supporters of Chavez. Not only that, he's extremely popular with the troops, because they come from the poor and forgotten parts of the population, and Chavez always makes huge efforts to make sure he talks not just to the generals but also to the troops.
MJ: Of course Chavez is a former soldier himself. To what extent does that explain who he is and where he comes from?
RG: I think it's very significant indeed. The Venezuelan military is unlike other militaries. They've often had relationships with the left. They are simply not the sort of generals with dark glasses that one associates with Chile and Argentina, say, and they tend to come not necessarily from the higher social strata, they often come from the provinces. It's been quite a democratic army. They also in the 1970s and 1980s started studying at the universities and colleges, and became somewhat integrated into civilian life.
You have to bear in mind, too, that entire political structure of Venezuela has collapsed, the old political parties have disappeared, evaporated, and Chavez hasn't really created much of a new organized political movement of his own. The bureaucracy is in the hands of the middle-class opposition, and it's very difficult to get any sort of reform through the existing government machine, so Chavez does rely on the military to get things done, as his own political party.
MJ: The military aside, lacking an organized political movement he seems to hold on in part through sheer force of personality. Is there a danger that when he withdraws from the scene, voluntarily or not, his reforms and achievements will go with him?
RG: I think that's a very legitimate question. Things are better from that point of view than they were four or five years ago. I think if Chavez had disappeared even two or three years ago, that would have been the end of that. I think now that things are becoming more organized, less chaotic, the regime looks stable, and people are beginning to join in on the grounds that this is going to last. For a long time members of the opposition said, we're going to get rid of Chavez tomorrow, and so they waited till tomorrow came. But when that didn't happen, I think a lot of people who weren't particularly keen on Chavez are now beginning to realize that this is the government they're going to have to deal with for the next ten years. And I think that if Chavez disappeared tomorrow, there are enough good, competent people, and that the system is now stable enough, and that it will continue. I think what is significant is that there has been a revolution, a collapse of the ancien regime, so it's impossible to imagine going back to the system that existed before.
MJ: Not least because Chavez has brought into politics a large portion of the population—the poor—that wasn't involved before.
RG: Yes, I think that may turn out to be Chavez's most significant achievement. In a way that's what made the old, elitist opposition unhappy -- this democratization of the country, bringing in this underclass, even a lumpen class, into the body politic. A lot of the programs, the projects he's developed—not just the health programs but the education programs, too—they're really aimed at the 16-25 age group, the young people who weren't getting into college or into training. He's making sure that a huge amount of money will be spent on this one generation to get them into education, into work, and essentially into politics, because they're the people who will ultimately decide the nature of the system.
MJ: Now, he's able to make this huge investment because Venezuela is flush with oil money. What happens if and when that flow of money slows?
RG: Well, I don't think the price of oil is going to come down in the foreseeable future, and anyway he is only trying to do this as a crash program for one generation. After that, Venezuelans will have to decide which direction to go in. But he will have a much larger group of motivated people than existed in the 20th century.
MJ: You talk about Chavez's "new politics of oil." What's been his innovation there?
RG: First of all came the discovery, in the 1980s, that simply nationalizing the oil industry didn't result in huge flows of money for development, for the simple reason that the people who took over the industry ran it the same way it had been run in the days of Shell and Exxon, when the money disappeared into speculation or into the hands of the directors. Chavez has completely altered the way the oil company is run, pointing out that the money ought to be invested in Venezuela.
MJ: It's never healthy for an economy to rely to heavily on one industry, as Venezuela does on oil. Is the Chavez government working to diversify the economy?
RG: Absolutely. A lot depends on this new generation of people emerging, and then the possibility of investing in other activities. Chavez has the old, sort of 19th century belief in trying to develop the infrastructure all over the country, to try to reverse the movement of people from the countryside to the cities. And I think his scheme is to try to revive local economies and make the countryside more of a pole of development so that people don't endlessly drift into the cities, which is of course the bane of the whole of Latin America, not just Venezuela.
MJ: So, Chavez came into office promising radical reform—a Bolivarian revolution. Has he delivered?
RG: I think the jury is still out on the entire project. It's extremely open-ended as to where it's going to go, and I'm sure it's going to change and develop in time. Chavez is a very pragmatic leader who's moving forward gradually on a number of fronts but doesn't have any kind of blueprint for the eventual organization of society in Venezuela. For example, on two or three cases they've taken over factories that have collapsed and the workers have demanded that they should be taken over. I don't think that's the model, but it's happening. So I think there'll be a sort of pluralism of different projects, some cooperative, some state-owned, some privately owned. That's more or less what's happening at the moment and I expect that to continue. I think that because they depend so much on oil and it takes time to develop alternative economic activities it remains to be seen how all that will work.
MJ: Have the poor and historically disenfranchised seen real gains under Chavez?
RG: They've seen a large amount in terms of health and education in the shanty towns. That is very visible, and it's extraordinary. And the ones who haven't got it yet know about it and they're waiting for it and agitating for it to arrive. So, for example, I went to a shanty town outside Caracas next two or three months ago and nothing had happened, and they were extremely anxious for it to happen. They were sending protest demonstrations to the local mayor asking, when are the Cuban doctors going to come, and when is the education scheme going to reach our village. They are very well aware that improvements are in the offing and that they're going to come, though they obviously haven't got everywhere yet. I think the employment program is still in its infancy; getting people into jobs—that still has a long way to go.
MJ: The standard US line on Chavez is that his instincts are essentially autocratic. What do you make of that?
RG: I think it's entirely invented. It's true that he is a military figure who expects his orders to be obeyed. The two items that are endlessly picked on by the opposition are [his reforms of] the media and the judiciary. The judiciary was an unbelievable mess under the ancien regime. It has been reformed, they have managed to get control of it, and I think you'd expect any government to do that if it's building on the ruins of the past. You're not going to get a situation where the corrupt judges of the past have an influence over the system. You can call it raison d'etat if you like, but it seems to me to be a perfectly understandable measure for the government to take. I seem to remember that Franklin D. Roosevelt did something similar in the 1930s.
The complaint about the media law is a completely ridiculous red herring. All they've done is introduce some legislation that's probably less repressive than what we have in Western Europe. It's really the modern way of introducing a certain amount of regulation into television in a world that had hitherto been totally unbridled. And indeed anyone knows who's been there the media are having a field day and are about 80 percent anti-Chavez. So there isn't much to complain about there.
MJ: If Chavez's revolution succeeds, what do you think Venezuela look like ten years from now?
RG: I think Venezuela will be a model for the rest of Latin America—a society that's come to terms with its black and indigenous poverty-stricken populations, and where those populations participate fully in the democratic process. Because it's a new generation it's a little open-ended as to what will happen, but Chavez recognizes that. He says "Let the people decide," and I think he means it.
Julian Brookes is the editor of MotherJones.com.
LABOUR-ARGENTINA: The 'Black' and 'Grey' Economy
By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 6 (IPS) - In Argentina, nearly five million people work in the black economy, nearly double the proportion registered in the 1990s. That includes workers employed by the state in the "grey" economy.
As in other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, informal sector employment ballooned in Argentina as unemployment climbed. The National Institute of Statistics and Census reports that 47.2 percent of workers in Argentina are active in the informal economy, lacking social security coverage and labour rights. Although the proportion has shrunk slightly, from 49.5 percent in 2003, it remains high.
Meanwhile, a grey economy also began to emerge in the 1980s as a way for the state itself to justify hiring professionals who were paid high fees.
Although workers in the black economy often receive a monthly income that they can count on, they are not officially employees in the companies that contract them, which thus do not make contributions to the social security system on their behalf. They also depend entirely on the goodwill of their employers for other rights like paid vacations or holiday bonuses, to which workers in this South American country are entitled by law.
The Labour Ministry warned this year that there will be "heavy sanctions and fines" for companies that fail to put all of their employees on the payroll, but it said nothing about the various loopholes used by a number of state entities.
"There is a lot of hypocrisy here, because the state, which is in charge of applying and enforcing the regulations, clearly violates them as an employer," Ernesto Kritz, head of the Labour Studies Society, told IPS.
He estimates that around 100,000 people in this country of 37 million are in this situation, including administrative workers, artists and teachers who receive part of their wages under the table, which means no social security contributions are made on that portion of their salary, with the subsequent effect on the pensions they will eventually receive.
Thousands of employees of the Buenos Aires city government have brought a lawsuit to demand the payment of the social security contributions that have not been made on their behalf since 1992.
This year, the city government began to regularise the situation and make the under the table wages an official part of the employees' salaries. But it still owes the social security payments not made on that portion of their wages for the past 13 years.
The federal government also launched initiatives this year to regularise the situation of workers in the grey economy, especially those who work steadily for companies but figure as "self-employed".
Under this arrangement, employees sign a "contract for services", which is renewed over and over again, often for many years, said Kritz.
"It is a dependent labour relationship that is concealed by a precarious contract," he added.
But these nominally self-employed workers are not part of the black economy either, since they themselves must assume the cost of registration in the social security system and make the payments towards their retirement pensions as a condition for receiving their professional fees, which consist of a previously agreed-upon sum.
"I have been working under a contract for services with the city of Buenos Aires government for six years," a professional who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS. "My mother has worked in another area for eight years, just like me, under a contract that is renewed every six months or once a year."
Because this kind of labour relationship means the employees do not have access to paid vacations, the workers must organise themselves and their work to be able to take at least a few days off a year. Nor do they have the right to sick or maternity leave, and they do not receive the mandatory payments to which employees are entitled when they get married or have or adopt a child.
Thus, there are workers on the payroll with stable jobs, good salaries, holiday bonuses, paid vacations and the right to severance pay if they are dismissed, and others who are supposedly "self-employed" but carry out the same functions, without social benefits and labour rights, and under the constant threat that their contracts will not be renewed.
To alleviate these contradictions, the centre-left government of Néstor Kirchner and several provincial governments are attempting to get those hired under a contract for services included on the payroll.
But there are legal hurdles, such as a Buenos Aires city statute that makes it necessary for posts in the public administration to be filled through a call for applicants.
To get around that barrier, the city government decreed this year that all workers contracted up to December 2004 will be put on a "transitional roster" of staff members who will enjoy nearly all the same benefits as the permanent functionaries. Those who are working under contracts for services will no longer have to make their own social security payments and will have paid vacations and receive holiday bonuses.
The assistant secretary of the Association of State Employees in Buenos Aires, Rodolfo Arrechea, told IPS that "the solution is not a definitive one," because by being placed on a transitional payroll, the contract employees will still be dependent on the renewal of their contracts every year. "It's just a small step," he said.
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 6 (IPS) - In Argentina, nearly five million people work in the black economy, nearly double the proportion registered in the 1990s. That includes workers employed by the state in the "grey" economy.
As in other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, informal sector employment ballooned in Argentina as unemployment climbed. The National Institute of Statistics and Census reports that 47.2 percent of workers in Argentina are active in the informal economy, lacking social security coverage and labour rights. Although the proportion has shrunk slightly, from 49.5 percent in 2003, it remains high.
Meanwhile, a grey economy also began to emerge in the 1980s as a way for the state itself to justify hiring professionals who were paid high fees.
Although workers in the black economy often receive a monthly income that they can count on, they are not officially employees in the companies that contract them, which thus do not make contributions to the social security system on their behalf. They also depend entirely on the goodwill of their employers for other rights like paid vacations or holiday bonuses, to which workers in this South American country are entitled by law.
The Labour Ministry warned this year that there will be "heavy sanctions and fines" for companies that fail to put all of their employees on the payroll, but it said nothing about the various loopholes used by a number of state entities.
"There is a lot of hypocrisy here, because the state, which is in charge of applying and enforcing the regulations, clearly violates them as an employer," Ernesto Kritz, head of the Labour Studies Society, told IPS.
He estimates that around 100,000 people in this country of 37 million are in this situation, including administrative workers, artists and teachers who receive part of their wages under the table, which means no social security contributions are made on that portion of their salary, with the subsequent effect on the pensions they will eventually receive.
Thousands of employees of the Buenos Aires city government have brought a lawsuit to demand the payment of the social security contributions that have not been made on their behalf since 1992.
This year, the city government began to regularise the situation and make the under the table wages an official part of the employees' salaries. But it still owes the social security payments not made on that portion of their wages for the past 13 years.
The federal government also launched initiatives this year to regularise the situation of workers in the grey economy, especially those who work steadily for companies but figure as "self-employed".
Under this arrangement, employees sign a "contract for services", which is renewed over and over again, often for many years, said Kritz.
"It is a dependent labour relationship that is concealed by a precarious contract," he added.
But these nominally self-employed workers are not part of the black economy either, since they themselves must assume the cost of registration in the social security system and make the payments towards their retirement pensions as a condition for receiving their professional fees, which consist of a previously agreed-upon sum.
"I have been working under a contract for services with the city of Buenos Aires government for six years," a professional who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS. "My mother has worked in another area for eight years, just like me, under a contract that is renewed every six months or once a year."
Because this kind of labour relationship means the employees do not have access to paid vacations, the workers must organise themselves and their work to be able to take at least a few days off a year. Nor do they have the right to sick or maternity leave, and they do not receive the mandatory payments to which employees are entitled when they get married or have or adopt a child.
Thus, there are workers on the payroll with stable jobs, good salaries, holiday bonuses, paid vacations and the right to severance pay if they are dismissed, and others who are supposedly "self-employed" but carry out the same functions, without social benefits and labour rights, and under the constant threat that their contracts will not be renewed.
To alleviate these contradictions, the centre-left government of Néstor Kirchner and several provincial governments are attempting to get those hired under a contract for services included on the payroll.
But there are legal hurdles, such as a Buenos Aires city statute that makes it necessary for posts in the public administration to be filled through a call for applicants.
To get around that barrier, the city government decreed this year that all workers contracted up to December 2004 will be put on a "transitional roster" of staff members who will enjoy nearly all the same benefits as the permanent functionaries. Those who are working under contracts for services will no longer have to make their own social security payments and will have paid vacations and receive holiday bonuses.
The assistant secretary of the Association of State Employees in Buenos Aires, Rodolfo Arrechea, told IPS that "the solution is not a definitive one," because by being placed on a transitional payroll, the contract employees will still be dependent on the renewal of their contracts every year. "It's just a small step," he said.
Hugo Chavez - showing the US who's master
Venezuela's president is rarely seen by foreigners for what he is: one of the world's most popular and democratic politicians. His strength may yet bring his downfall.
By Hugh O'Shaughnessy
New Statesman
Monday 10th October 2005
"Oh," said an acquaintance in a rather surprised voice, "so you take a reasonably favourable view of Hugo Chavez." "Well, yes," I stammered, "he was elected to office fairly, he's popular and he's trying to reform a once-moribund society."
A few days earlier, I had been in an ante-room at the square, white Miraflores Palace in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. I was chatting with one of President Chavez's secretaries, who was abruptly called away. "Back soon," he said. I knew what that meant and, after an hour or two chatting to the staff, I left. Would I never see the man of mixed race who was so despised by the whites and near-whites of Venezuela, but who was making so many tongues wag all over the western hemisphere?
I needn't have worried: the full Chavez experience was around the corner. He had summoned a meeting of the Organisation of American States (OAS), a generator of hot air based in Washington, DC. He wanted this glove puppet of the United States to create a social charter for the hemisphere and start doing something about its startling inequalities. So, the following day we trooped over to the tropical splendour of the Hilton hotel to watch and hear a powerful personality in full flow. The ideas and plans tumbled out like sparks off a grinding wheel - the people of Latin America given the right to eat as well as vote; cheap oil for the poor of the US; free literacy classes and free eyecare for everyone in the western hemisphere; an international referendum on US sanctions against Cuba; the replacement of the OAS by something that would reflect Latin rather than US interests . . .
Watching him perform, one realised he was not only younger, but more vigorous, concrete and coherent than his friend and mentor Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader (whom I have met sev-eral times) is, after all, in his twilight years. Next day, there was Chavez on Alo, Presidente!, his regular Sunday television show. Then he reappeared to give Jesse Jackson a medal. On each occasion the ideas poured out, jostling each other for attention.
Perhaps it's because Hugo Chavez will never use one word when a thousand will do and his rhetoric is not very British; perhaps it's because he was a paratroop colonel and likes to wear a plum-coloured beret; perhaps it's because he takes a dim view of the US not shared by some European bien-pensants; perhaps it is merely because he is a practitioner in the deeply devalued discipline of Latin American politics. For whatever reason, foreigners rarely see Chavez for what he is: one of the most popular and powerful political figures in the western hemisphere, seeking to build a basic welfare state on democratic foundations. He won 56 per cent of the vote in the 1998 multi-party presidential elections; then the new constitution he proposed was approved in December 1999 by 72 per cent of the vote; then he won a new six-year mandate in 2000 with 59 per cent; then he won a referendum last year, again with 59 per cent. Now he faces multi-party elections in December 2006.
Since he was first elected, Chavez has kept the voters' loyalty and begun forcing through reforms that economists in European governments, at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund merely write about, but never expect to see put into practice. He can afford to do it. With oil at $70 a barrel and reserves possibly bigger than Saudi Arabia's, Venezuela is swimming in money, and that has given the president the option of tackling a scandal of concentrated wealth amid widespread indigence.
Despite many decades of fat oil earnings, a series of corrupt but ostensibly democratic governments had left well over half of Venezuela's 25 million citizens in poverty. Chavez has attacked this mess frontally in assaults that he calls "missions". Mision Barrio Adentro, for instance, the scheme to get medical help to slum-dwellers, has mobilised 20,000 Cuban doctors, dentists and auxiliary staff whose services are paid for by Venezuela's cut-price oil sales to Cuba. In Caracas, and in towns and villages previously without permanent doctors or health services, the Cubans have built their modulos, small octagonal brick structures with an office on the ground floor and a cramped flat on the first floor. There, they have dispensed Cuban drugs and practised the preventive medicine that Venezuelan doctors, who rarely passed by, refused to consider.
"There was no money in preventive medicine, so Venezuelan doctors didn't do it," says Edgar of the health workers' union. Meanwhile, under Operation Miracle, thousands have been flown to Cuba for free eye operations.
Soon, Chavez promises, Mision Robinson, a reading and basic numeracy scheme, will herald the end of illiteracy in Venezuela. Mision Ribas gives secondary-school drop-outs a second chance with a two-year course and a small bursary. Twelve million poorer Venezuelans have access to cheap or free food through Mision Mercal. It's all part, he says, of "21st-century socialism".
Unlike Castro, Chavez has the money to establish real education, health and welfare, and not just for Venezuelans; he can afford to do much of the same abroad. Before long, Operation Miracle will be offering eye treatment to 600,000 patients a year throughout the western hemisphere for ten years, with the aim of saving the sight of six million people at no cost to them. Places have been reserved for 150,000 US citizens per year.
It is no surprise that Chavez challenges the ideas of the White House and US Department of State, and is detested by those who fear his reforms. There have already been determined domestic attempts to overthrow him, most notably in April 2002. The cock-eyed scheme involved the rather dim head of Fedecamaras, Venezuela's equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry, claiming to restore democracy and then closing Congress, dissolving the Supreme Court and sacking the elected provincial governors and mayors. The aspiring dictator, Pedro Carmona Estanga, had the backing of most of the press and television networks, whose biased anti-Chavez coverage made Rupert Murdoch's hard-right Fox News look like BBC Radio 3. Happily, the coup failed after 48 hours. The plotters were supremely incompetent, an inexpert US ambassador who for weeks had been in on the plot hesitated, and the crowds on the streets demanded an end to the unlawful detention of the man Venezuelans had freely chosen to lead them.
With the opposition unable to demonstrate any serious flaws in the voting procedures, Chavez's legitimacy is unassailable. Latinbarometro, a reliable public opinion survey of the region, found that Venezuela is the country where "the fewest people believe that the country is being governed for the few, and where the most believe that it is governed for the good of the people". The president has given voters hope, managing simultaneously to push down infant mortality and raise life expectancy.
The nationalists in the US have serious reason to be nervous and trigger-happy, as they used to be with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Chavez hopes that his Bolivarian revolution will rekindle the desire for Latin American unity expressed by the Venezuelan hero Simon BolIvar two centuries ago, which could threaten the US mastery over the western hemisphere that Washington has sought to maintain for 150 years. Precautions are being taken in Venezuela. Despite protests from the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Spain and Russia are selling Chavez guns and ships, the armed forces are being put on a higher state of alert, and a few hundred office workers have been given training as the pioneer members of a new Dad's Army that should ultimately be capable of backing up the regulars all over the country.
But Chavez, one feels, is not relying on his forces to defeat his opponents at home and abroad. The largesse with cut-price oil and the ambitious international aid programmes should bring support from other governments - or at least their electorates - if new attempts were made to topple him. Yet is Chavez doing enough to fight the great Venezuelan tradition of corruption? Is he keeping power too closely concentrated in the hands of his kitchen cabinet? Why isn't there a better party structure? Worries persist.
The other day, for instance, we all came out of the vast Teresa Carreno Theatre into the warm evening air in sombre mood. It had been the inauguration of the Three Continents Festival of Documentaries, and we had been watching Patricio Guzman's powerful film about Salvador Allende and the part the US played in his overthrow. "Has what we've just seen about Chile in 1973 and Allende got any relevance to Venezuela in 2005 and your President Hugo Chavez?" I asked people at random. They looked at me as if I were stupid. "Claro - of course. That's exactly what Bush is trying to do now," they replied unfailingly.
The US government has not disavowed Pastor Marion "Pat" Robertson, the millionaire politician and businessman who in August called for the assassination of Chavez. The Venezuelan's ideas and strategies are bold and long overdue, but he is vulnerable. Should he not think harder about how they will be implemented if he disappears before his time is due?
By Hugh O'Shaughnessy
New Statesman
Monday 10th October 2005
"Oh," said an acquaintance in a rather surprised voice, "so you take a reasonably favourable view of Hugo Chavez." "Well, yes," I stammered, "he was elected to office fairly, he's popular and he's trying to reform a once-moribund society."
A few days earlier, I had been in an ante-room at the square, white Miraflores Palace in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas. I was chatting with one of President Chavez's secretaries, who was abruptly called away. "Back soon," he said. I knew what that meant and, after an hour or two chatting to the staff, I left. Would I never see the man of mixed race who was so despised by the whites and near-whites of Venezuela, but who was making so many tongues wag all over the western hemisphere?
I needn't have worried: the full Chavez experience was around the corner. He had summoned a meeting of the Organisation of American States (OAS), a generator of hot air based in Washington, DC. He wanted this glove puppet of the United States to create a social charter for the hemisphere and start doing something about its startling inequalities. So, the following day we trooped over to the tropical splendour of the Hilton hotel to watch and hear a powerful personality in full flow. The ideas and plans tumbled out like sparks off a grinding wheel - the people of Latin America given the right to eat as well as vote; cheap oil for the poor of the US; free literacy classes and free eyecare for everyone in the western hemisphere; an international referendum on US sanctions against Cuba; the replacement of the OAS by something that would reflect Latin rather than US interests . . .
Watching him perform, one realised he was not only younger, but more vigorous, concrete and coherent than his friend and mentor Fidel Castro. The Cuban leader (whom I have met sev-eral times) is, after all, in his twilight years. Next day, there was Chavez on Alo, Presidente!, his regular Sunday television show. Then he reappeared to give Jesse Jackson a medal. On each occasion the ideas poured out, jostling each other for attention.
Perhaps it's because Hugo Chavez will never use one word when a thousand will do and his rhetoric is not very British; perhaps it's because he was a paratroop colonel and likes to wear a plum-coloured beret; perhaps it's because he takes a dim view of the US not shared by some European bien-pensants; perhaps it is merely because he is a practitioner in the deeply devalued discipline of Latin American politics. For whatever reason, foreigners rarely see Chavez for what he is: one of the most popular and powerful political figures in the western hemisphere, seeking to build a basic welfare state on democratic foundations. He won 56 per cent of the vote in the 1998 multi-party presidential elections; then the new constitution he proposed was approved in December 1999 by 72 per cent of the vote; then he won a new six-year mandate in 2000 with 59 per cent; then he won a referendum last year, again with 59 per cent. Now he faces multi-party elections in December 2006.
Since he was first elected, Chavez has kept the voters' loyalty and begun forcing through reforms that economists in European governments, at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund merely write about, but never expect to see put into practice. He can afford to do it. With oil at $70 a barrel and reserves possibly bigger than Saudi Arabia's, Venezuela is swimming in money, and that has given the president the option of tackling a scandal of concentrated wealth amid widespread indigence.
Despite many decades of fat oil earnings, a series of corrupt but ostensibly democratic governments had left well over half of Venezuela's 25 million citizens in poverty. Chavez has attacked this mess frontally in assaults that he calls "missions". Mision Barrio Adentro, for instance, the scheme to get medical help to slum-dwellers, has mobilised 20,000 Cuban doctors, dentists and auxiliary staff whose services are paid for by Venezuela's cut-price oil sales to Cuba. In Caracas, and in towns and villages previously without permanent doctors or health services, the Cubans have built their modulos, small octagonal brick structures with an office on the ground floor and a cramped flat on the first floor. There, they have dispensed Cuban drugs and practised the preventive medicine that Venezuelan doctors, who rarely passed by, refused to consider.
"There was no money in preventive medicine, so Venezuelan doctors didn't do it," says Edgar of the health workers' union. Meanwhile, under Operation Miracle, thousands have been flown to Cuba for free eye operations.
Soon, Chavez promises, Mision Robinson, a reading and basic numeracy scheme, will herald the end of illiteracy in Venezuela. Mision Ribas gives secondary-school drop-outs a second chance with a two-year course and a small bursary. Twelve million poorer Venezuelans have access to cheap or free food through Mision Mercal. It's all part, he says, of "21st-century socialism".
Unlike Castro, Chavez has the money to establish real education, health and welfare, and not just for Venezuelans; he can afford to do much of the same abroad. Before long, Operation Miracle will be offering eye treatment to 600,000 patients a year throughout the western hemisphere for ten years, with the aim of saving the sight of six million people at no cost to them. Places have been reserved for 150,000 US citizens per year.
It is no surprise that Chavez challenges the ideas of the White House and US Department of State, and is detested by those who fear his reforms. There have already been determined domestic attempts to overthrow him, most notably in April 2002. The cock-eyed scheme involved the rather dim head of Fedecamaras, Venezuela's equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry, claiming to restore democracy and then closing Congress, dissolving the Supreme Court and sacking the elected provincial governors and mayors. The aspiring dictator, Pedro Carmona Estanga, had the backing of most of the press and television networks, whose biased anti-Chavez coverage made Rupert Murdoch's hard-right Fox News look like BBC Radio 3. Happily, the coup failed after 48 hours. The plotters were supremely incompetent, an inexpert US ambassador who for weeks had been in on the plot hesitated, and the crowds on the streets demanded an end to the unlawful detention of the man Venezuelans had freely chosen to lead them.
With the opposition unable to demonstrate any serious flaws in the voting procedures, Chavez's legitimacy is unassailable. Latinbarometro, a reliable public opinion survey of the region, found that Venezuela is the country where "the fewest people believe that the country is being governed for the few, and where the most believe that it is governed for the good of the people". The president has given voters hope, managing simultaneously to push down infant mortality and raise life expectancy.
The nationalists in the US have serious reason to be nervous and trigger-happy, as they used to be with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Chavez hopes that his Bolivarian revolution will rekindle the desire for Latin American unity expressed by the Venezuelan hero Simon BolIvar two centuries ago, which could threaten the US mastery over the western hemisphere that Washington has sought to maintain for 150 years. Precautions are being taken in Venezuela. Despite protests from the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, Spain and Russia are selling Chavez guns and ships, the armed forces are being put on a higher state of alert, and a few hundred office workers have been given training as the pioneer members of a new Dad's Army that should ultimately be capable of backing up the regulars all over the country.
But Chavez, one feels, is not relying on his forces to defeat his opponents at home and abroad. The largesse with cut-price oil and the ambitious international aid programmes should bring support from other governments - or at least their electorates - if new attempts were made to topple him. Yet is Chavez doing enough to fight the great Venezuelan tradition of corruption? Is he keeping power too closely concentrated in the hands of his kitchen cabinet? Why isn't there a better party structure? Worries persist.
The other day, for instance, we all came out of the vast Teresa Carreno Theatre into the warm evening air in sombre mood. It had been the inauguration of the Three Continents Festival of Documentaries, and we had been watching Patricio Guzman's powerful film about Salvador Allende and the part the US played in his overthrow. "Has what we've just seen about Chile in 1973 and Allende got any relevance to Venezuela in 2005 and your President Hugo Chavez?" I asked people at random. They looked at me as if I were stupid. "Claro - of course. That's exactly what Bush is trying to do now," they replied unfailingly.
The US government has not disavowed Pastor Marion "Pat" Robertson, the millionaire politician and businessman who in August called for the assassination of Chavez. The Venezuelan's ideas and strategies are bold and long overdue, but he is vulnerable. Should he not think harder about how they will be implemented if he disappears before his time is due?
Spain's Zapatero Emerges as a Bold New Foreign Policy Factor in Latin America
Spain's Zapatero Emerges as a Bold New Foreign Policy Factor in Latin America
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Weekend Release: October 10, 2005
• In office for eighteen months, Prime Minister Zapatero has broken from his predecessor and rewritten the rules when it comes to his country’s relations with Latin America.
• He hopes to breathe new life into the Iberoamerican Summit to translate it from a talk shop into a serious forum where transformative issues can be discussed.
• The Iberoamerican Summit is likely to emerge as a pivotal hemispheric forum: Argentina’s Kirchner and Venezuela’s Chavez reverse previous decisions and now will attend the forum.
• The Spanish prime minister has mended Spain’s wounded relationship with Venezuela with ebullience.
• Zapatero looks to initiate a “second wave of Spanish investment” in the region.
• The prime minister conforms on Haiti and Colombia.
The 2004 elections in Spain pitted incumbent Prime Minister José María Aznar López of the conservative Partido Popular (Popular Party-PP) against the head of the liberal Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Worker’s Socialist Party-PSOE), Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Unlike any other electoral race since the return of democracy to Spain in 1978, the primary issue in this election was foreign policy: specifically, Aznar’s fervent goal of being Uncle Sam’s guy in the EU. This desire was the motivating factor behind his decision to support the American-led coalition in Iraq in the form of troops and equipment.
On March 14, days after a coordinated murderous terrorist attack on commuter trains in downtown Madrid shook the nation, Zapatero won a decisive electoral victory. In a strong break with his predecessor, Zapatero proceeded to put Latin America at the forefront of his foreign policy agenda with the hopes of returning Spain to a more central role in the region. On the eve of the annual Iberoamerican Summit, COHA will examine how Spanish foreign policy in Latin America has been transformed by Zapatero.
Looking South
Aznar’s foreign policy was largely based on his strategic relationship with the United States, which he routinely sustained by backing the Bush administration’s initiatives around the world, including in Latin America. These included the decisions to send troops to Iraq and enthusiastically join Washington’s hard-line crusade against Havana. In a sign of things to come, Zapatero quickly terminated the partnership when he removed all Spanish troops from Iraq shortly after taking office. Instead of relying on the United States as a strategic ally, the Spanish prime minister has opted in favor of a more multilateral stance, including an emphasis on Latin America as a vital component of such a strategy. In European affairs, Zapatero has turned away from the U.K., Aznar’s main regional ally, to focus his efforts on developing ties to the two major continental powers, France and Germany. By assuming a pro-continental, pro-Latin America stance, Zapatero has sought to position Spain as an important global player.
In his effort for new direction, Zapatero has been aided by a yawning diplomatic void in Latin America, stemming from the myopic focus of both the U.S. and a number of European governments who suddenly dropped Latin America to the basement of their agendas. The new Spanish government has seized this opportunity both to act in the near future as a major regional factor, as well as serve as a gateway to the EU for Latin American nations seeking greater integration with Europe. This renewed goodwill between Spain and its former colonies has mostly been based around a series of diplomatic and economic agreements and a renovated attitude intended to mutually benefit both sides’ economies, as well as to register each of their commitment to cooperative working relationships.
Not all of Zapatero’s initiatives have been so enlightened. He permitted Chile’s decidedly pro-U.S. president Ricardo Lagos to convince him to join in the U.S.-backed effort to provide peacekeepers for the controversial Brazilian-led force in Haiti, and he became an enthusiastic partner of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s plan to demobilize the right-wing vigilantes in his country, and basically grant them semi-immunity for murderous past crimes.
Las Cumbres Iberoamericanas
Part of Zapatero’s major regional diplomatic offensive has been his attempt to reinvigorate the Cumbres Iberoamericanas, which have been intended to unite the Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries of Latin America and Europe. The Cumbres, which began in 1990, have arguably decreased in importance in recent years to the point where they are widely viewed as peripheral. Building on the 2005 Cumbre, which will convene in the Spanish city of Salamanca on October 14 and 15, Zapatero has reemphasized the value of the gatherings and has stated that his goal is for the meetings to become a definitive forum for the member countries’ diplomatic relationships.
Toward this end, Spain took the unprecedented step of sending a high-level delegation to a number of key regional players in the months preceding the event. This summer, Spanish vice president María Teresa Fernández de la Vega traveled to Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay to discuss the upcoming meeting’s agenda and to encourage the active participation of those states. Yet even after the Vice President’s tour of South America to boost the upcoming summit, such notable figures as Presidents Chávez of Venezuela and Kirchner of Argentina were reluctant to commit themselves until late last month, when they acquiesced.
Such indecisiveness reveals that in spite of Zapatero’s best efforts, the Cumbre is not, as of yet, accorded the elevated status he would like to see it have with all of its members. Chávez’ hesitation especially could be seen by some as an unfortunate slap in the face for the Spanish leader who, in spite of Washington’s displeasure, went ahead with a major sale of Spanish naval vessels and aircraft to Venezuela earlier this year.
Zapatero’s heated efforts to reverse the summit’s waning diplomatic importance indicates an intent on his part to find a venue to strut Spain’s stuff as the best possible external partner for the region. Zapatero is showering attention on his new Latin American comrades, not to demonstrate his devotion to Spain’s colonist heritage, but to serve a broadly held perception in Spain of Latin America’s real value: the summit furnishes the best ambience for Spain to advance its regional diplomatic strategy. Up to now this strategy has not resulted in major breakthroughs for Spain, but the prime minister’s careful attention to his country’s bilateral relations with some of the more influential countries of the region has led to some movement toward the beginning of deeper cross-continental integration.
Changing Course
Since Zapatero came to office he has taken a decidedly divergent approach to many issues in Latin America from his right-wing predecessor, José María Aznar. In March, Zapatero organized a conference in the Venezuelan city of Ciudad Guayana which he convened along with the Presidents of Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia. Among the meeting’s main purposes was to facilitate the public rapprochement between Presidents Chávez of Venezuela and Uribe of Colombia. Relations between the two Andean nations had come to a standstill after the controversial Caracas abduction by Colombian authorities of guerrilla commando Ricardo Granda, of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The summit was also a chance for Zapatero to prove his commitment to regional issues and showcase his government’s desire to build trust among three of South America’s most important countries.
The Venezuelan summit also highlighted one of the most noticeable shifts in Spain’s bilateral relations with Latin American nations since Zapatero first took residence in the Moncloa Palace: the new entente with Hugo Chávez Frías’ controversial regime. Aznar’s confrontational relationship with the Venezuelan president, and Spain’s possible tangential involvement in the 2002 golpe de estado that briefly removed Chávez from power, had caused the fiery Venezuelan president to frequently target the Aznar government for scorching reproaches both in the press and at diplomatic gatherings. The ill will that had characterized the Aznar government’s dealings with Venezuela vanished after Zapatero’s inauguration in April 2004.
Selling Spain Abroad
Chávez traveled to Spain as part of the Venezuelan leader’s world tour that fall, where he received a warm welcome both in the streets and from the new government. In the ten months since Chávez’s trip, both sides have done more than just exchange protestations of goodwill and acts of solidarity. During Zapatero’s trip to the country in March, the Spanish prime minister spoke before the Venezuelan parliament and signed economic and military agreements. Zapatero was able to use his newfound good standing to secure a bigger role for Spain’s largest oil company, REPSOL YPF, in Venezuela’s oil-driven economy. Under the agreement, REPSOL will increase its exports from Venezuela by 60%, reaching 160,000 barrels a day, as well as become more integrated with Venezuela’s state-run Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
Zapatero’s visit to Venezuela also included the signing of a provocative arms deal between the two countries. In the transaction, Chávez purchased planes and patrol boats for $1.7bn (€1.3bn). Both sides defended the transaction by asserting that the equipment, which Spain says was sold without any weaponry, would be used to protect Venezuelan borders from narco-traffickers.
Those assurances, however, did little to allay the fears of Pentagon skeptics and at least one EU official, who claimed that the Venezuelan arms build up is only serving to further destabilize an already unstable region. Karl von Wogau, Chairman of the European Parliament Subcommittee on Security and Defense, went as far as to suggest to European Parliament President Josep Borrell (ESP) that parliament investigate the arms sale to see whether or not it violated the EU Code of Conduct on Arms and Exports, though a formal investigation was never conducted.
Indeed, the sale was somewhat challenging considering that in 2004 Zapatero cancelled an agreement which the Aznar government had signed with Colombia, which would have sent 46 tanks to that nation in a move supportive of the multi-billion dollar U.S. funded and now heavily militarized Plan Colombia. Zapatero cited regional stability when terminating the sale, but that explanation could be open to debate. For more information surrounding the arms sale, see COHA’s analysis of it in Memorandum to the Press 05.37 "Having it Both Ways: U.S. Protests Spanish Arms Sale to Venezuela while it Arms Latin America and the World."
In response to the ruffled feathers in Washington, Brussels and Bogotá over the Venezuelan arms deal, Zapatero decided to extend his South American trip to Bogotá to meet with Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, who had publicly protested the sale. Following the meeting, the announcement was made that Spain would lend Colombia three military planes and that it would try to help mediate peace talks between the warring factions in Colombia’s decades-long civil war. Indeed, Spain assumed a critical role in the Mexican-led peace talks on April 8, 2005, when the Spanish ambassador to Colombia, Carlos Gómez Múgica, joined by the Venezuelan and Brazilian ambassadors, met with National Liberation Army (ELN) spokesman Francisco Galán at his prison cell in Itagüi, Colombia, where they urged his organization to agree to a ceasefire.
The eventual result of those talks was the declaration of an armistice between the two parties, which just happened to coincide with Galán’s recent release from prison.
Zapatero, who now sees himself as Latin America’s point man in Europe, has continued his country’s involvement in Colombian peace negotiations after Uribe visited Madrid in July. Spain was one of the protagonists behind the EU resolution signed on October 3, which supports the Colombian “Ley de Justicia y Paz” (Justice and Peace Law). That measure, which was signed in June, is said to be a key part of the Colombian government’s demobilization plan. NGO’s and human rights groups around the world have protested the law as well as the EU’s sanctioning of it, saying that the law will create a “legal limbo” where human rights violators will be immune to prosecution. Zapatero’s backing of the Justice and Peace Law has somewhat tarnished his reputation for doing everything right when it comes to human rights.
Another regional relationship that has dramatically changed course under Zapatero is that involving Cuba and Spain. In September of last year, Spain moved to relax the sanctions that the EU placed on Cuba in 2003 in response to Fidel Castro’s imprisonment of 75 dissidents in June of that year. In attacking the EU strategy, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos stated that the EU’s policy was “the worst possible for improving the fate of dissidents and prisoners of conscience.” Zapatero has argued that relaxed sanctions could serve as an incentive for the Castro government to improve its human rights record. Since Spain renewed discussion of the Cuban question within the EU, Havana has resumed contact with all of the EU countries maintaining embassies in Cuba and has released some of the imprisoned dissidents, although the sanctions remain in place. By offering a fresh approach to an old problem, Zapatero brought a venturesome capacity for innovation to an array of nettlesome regional issues and went a long way in voiding Aznar’s particularly splenetic Cuban policy.
Taking Action
Zapatero has stated that the promotion of democracy and human rights around the world is one of his country’s main foreign policy priorities, but his actions regarding one of the western hemisphere’s most persistent diplomatic issues hasn’t exactly demonstrated his commitment to constructive regional engagement in all situations. Shortly after Zapatero came to office, he was urged by Chilean president Ricardo Lagos to send troops to Haiti as part of the Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping mission there. The Spanish prime minister followed through, requesting that his congress send troops to Haiti and Afghanistan, which they did in October 2004. Spain currently has 200 soldiers and 30 police officers participating in the flawed UN mission to Haiti, but they may not be there for much longer. In September, Spanish Defense Minister José Bono threatened to remove its troops from the beleaguered Caribbean island if the countries financing the mission don’t ante up and deliver upon the donations that they had previously promised. According to Bono, so far only $300 million of the $700 million in pledged assistance to the crisis-stricken island has actually arrived. Spain’s participation in the Haitian debacle reflects Zapatero’s misguided belief that if his country is to be perceived as a leader within a Latin American context, he needs to prove that it is willing to take an active role in confronting some of the region’s major problems.
Continued Economic Integration
In the Southern Cone, Zapatero has attempted to further integrate his country with Mercosur and the ever-expanding Chilean economy. In January, the Spanish prime minister traveled to Brazil, Argentina and Chile to speak with the leaders of those countries about economic issues and address tariff concerns raised by Spanish industries. During the tour he declared that he would like to initiate a “second wave of Spanish investment” in the region and told Chilean business leaders that Spain could be their “point of entry” to Europe and the Mediterranean. Chilean-Spanish trade has thrived in recent years and it continues to expand, thanks in large part to the free trade agreement Chile signed with the EU in 2002. In 2004, trade between the two nations reached $1.2 billion, a 31% increase over the previous year.
In meetings with Presidents Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva of Brazil and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, he declared that he would strongly back a Mercosur-EU free trade agreement. Spanish advocacy could help break the current stalemate over the proposed alternative to the U.S.-backed FTAA. Zapatero has also sought to help restore Argentina’s debt-ridden economy, telling Kirchner at a January meeting that he would support the Argentine leader’s proposed debt exchange plan. Since then, the Spanish prime minister has continued to back Argentina’s debt reduction efforts, meeting in December in Madrid with high level Argentine finance officials. At that reunion he defended the Argentine president against the International Monetary Fund, observing that it should have “more confidence in Argentina.” In New York, Zapatero also promised to meet with former Spanish finance minister and current IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato, at Kirchner’s urging.
Conclusion
By capitalizing on the diplomatic vacuum left in the wake of September 11, Prime Minister Zapatero’s efforts in Latin America make it clear that he is attempting to give Spain a new and more prominent role on the world stage by becoming the only extra-hemispheric leader willing to engage, with respect and deference Latin America on a variety of issues. While Washington’s stance towards the area has been generally tactless and at times outright belligerent, Madrid has taken a much more fraternal tone. Through his efforts, Zapatero has created for Spain a diplomatic liaison role of the highest importance in dealing with some of the more troubled countries of the region, while at the same time creating new investment opportunities for countries looking to expand in the globalized economy.
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Julian Armington.
COHA Staff Editor: Michael Lettieri.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.
To subscribe to our free press releases, send an email to coha@coha.org with "subscribe" as the subject.
Council on Hemispheric Affairs
Weekend Release: October 10, 2005
• In office for eighteen months, Prime Minister Zapatero has broken from his predecessor and rewritten the rules when it comes to his country’s relations with Latin America.
• He hopes to breathe new life into the Iberoamerican Summit to translate it from a talk shop into a serious forum where transformative issues can be discussed.
• The Iberoamerican Summit is likely to emerge as a pivotal hemispheric forum: Argentina’s Kirchner and Venezuela’s Chavez reverse previous decisions and now will attend the forum.
• The Spanish prime minister has mended Spain’s wounded relationship with Venezuela with ebullience.
• Zapatero looks to initiate a “second wave of Spanish investment” in the region.
• The prime minister conforms on Haiti and Colombia.
The 2004 elections in Spain pitted incumbent Prime Minister José María Aznar López of the conservative Partido Popular (Popular Party-PP) against the head of the liberal Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Worker’s Socialist Party-PSOE), Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Unlike any other electoral race since the return of democracy to Spain in 1978, the primary issue in this election was foreign policy: specifically, Aznar’s fervent goal of being Uncle Sam’s guy in the EU. This desire was the motivating factor behind his decision to support the American-led coalition in Iraq in the form of troops and equipment.
On March 14, days after a coordinated murderous terrorist attack on commuter trains in downtown Madrid shook the nation, Zapatero won a decisive electoral victory. In a strong break with his predecessor, Zapatero proceeded to put Latin America at the forefront of his foreign policy agenda with the hopes of returning Spain to a more central role in the region. On the eve of the annual Iberoamerican Summit, COHA will examine how Spanish foreign policy in Latin America has been transformed by Zapatero.
Looking South
Aznar’s foreign policy was largely based on his strategic relationship with the United States, which he routinely sustained by backing the Bush administration’s initiatives around the world, including in Latin America. These included the decisions to send troops to Iraq and enthusiastically join Washington’s hard-line crusade against Havana. In a sign of things to come, Zapatero quickly terminated the partnership when he removed all Spanish troops from Iraq shortly after taking office. Instead of relying on the United States as a strategic ally, the Spanish prime minister has opted in favor of a more multilateral stance, including an emphasis on Latin America as a vital component of such a strategy. In European affairs, Zapatero has turned away from the U.K., Aznar’s main regional ally, to focus his efforts on developing ties to the two major continental powers, France and Germany. By assuming a pro-continental, pro-Latin America stance, Zapatero has sought to position Spain as an important global player.
In his effort for new direction, Zapatero has been aided by a yawning diplomatic void in Latin America, stemming from the myopic focus of both the U.S. and a number of European governments who suddenly dropped Latin America to the basement of their agendas. The new Spanish government has seized this opportunity both to act in the near future as a major regional factor, as well as serve as a gateway to the EU for Latin American nations seeking greater integration with Europe. This renewed goodwill between Spain and its former colonies has mostly been based around a series of diplomatic and economic agreements and a renovated attitude intended to mutually benefit both sides’ economies, as well as to register each of their commitment to cooperative working relationships.
Not all of Zapatero’s initiatives have been so enlightened. He permitted Chile’s decidedly pro-U.S. president Ricardo Lagos to convince him to join in the U.S.-backed effort to provide peacekeepers for the controversial Brazilian-led force in Haiti, and he became an enthusiastic partner of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe’s plan to demobilize the right-wing vigilantes in his country, and basically grant them semi-immunity for murderous past crimes.
Las Cumbres Iberoamericanas
Part of Zapatero’s major regional diplomatic offensive has been his attempt to reinvigorate the Cumbres Iberoamericanas, which have been intended to unite the Portuguese and Spanish speaking countries of Latin America and Europe. The Cumbres, which began in 1990, have arguably decreased in importance in recent years to the point where they are widely viewed as peripheral. Building on the 2005 Cumbre, which will convene in the Spanish city of Salamanca on October 14 and 15, Zapatero has reemphasized the value of the gatherings and has stated that his goal is for the meetings to become a definitive forum for the member countries’ diplomatic relationships.
Toward this end, Spain took the unprecedented step of sending a high-level delegation to a number of key regional players in the months preceding the event. This summer, Spanish vice president María Teresa Fernández de la Vega traveled to Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay to discuss the upcoming meeting’s agenda and to encourage the active participation of those states. Yet even after the Vice President’s tour of South America to boost the upcoming summit, such notable figures as Presidents Chávez of Venezuela and Kirchner of Argentina were reluctant to commit themselves until late last month, when they acquiesced.
Such indecisiveness reveals that in spite of Zapatero’s best efforts, the Cumbre is not, as of yet, accorded the elevated status he would like to see it have with all of its members. Chávez’ hesitation especially could be seen by some as an unfortunate slap in the face for the Spanish leader who, in spite of Washington’s displeasure, went ahead with a major sale of Spanish naval vessels and aircraft to Venezuela earlier this year.
Zapatero’s heated efforts to reverse the summit’s waning diplomatic importance indicates an intent on his part to find a venue to strut Spain’s stuff as the best possible external partner for the region. Zapatero is showering attention on his new Latin American comrades, not to demonstrate his devotion to Spain’s colonist heritage, but to serve a broadly held perception in Spain of Latin America’s real value: the summit furnishes the best ambience for Spain to advance its regional diplomatic strategy. Up to now this strategy has not resulted in major breakthroughs for Spain, but the prime minister’s careful attention to his country’s bilateral relations with some of the more influential countries of the region has led to some movement toward the beginning of deeper cross-continental integration.
Changing Course
Since Zapatero came to office he has taken a decidedly divergent approach to many issues in Latin America from his right-wing predecessor, José María Aznar. In March, Zapatero organized a conference in the Venezuelan city of Ciudad Guayana which he convened along with the Presidents of Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia. Among the meeting’s main purposes was to facilitate the public rapprochement between Presidents Chávez of Venezuela and Uribe of Colombia. Relations between the two Andean nations had come to a standstill after the controversial Caracas abduction by Colombian authorities of guerrilla commando Ricardo Granda, of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The summit was also a chance for Zapatero to prove his commitment to regional issues and showcase his government’s desire to build trust among three of South America’s most important countries.
The Venezuelan summit also highlighted one of the most noticeable shifts in Spain’s bilateral relations with Latin American nations since Zapatero first took residence in the Moncloa Palace: the new entente with Hugo Chávez Frías’ controversial regime. Aznar’s confrontational relationship with the Venezuelan president, and Spain’s possible tangential involvement in the 2002 golpe de estado that briefly removed Chávez from power, had caused the fiery Venezuelan president to frequently target the Aznar government for scorching reproaches both in the press and at diplomatic gatherings. The ill will that had characterized the Aznar government’s dealings with Venezuela vanished after Zapatero’s inauguration in April 2004.
Selling Spain Abroad
Chávez traveled to Spain as part of the Venezuelan leader’s world tour that fall, where he received a warm welcome both in the streets and from the new government. In the ten months since Chávez’s trip, both sides have done more than just exchange protestations of goodwill and acts of solidarity. During Zapatero’s trip to the country in March, the Spanish prime minister spoke before the Venezuelan parliament and signed economic and military agreements. Zapatero was able to use his newfound good standing to secure a bigger role for Spain’s largest oil company, REPSOL YPF, in Venezuela’s oil-driven economy. Under the agreement, REPSOL will increase its exports from Venezuela by 60%, reaching 160,000 barrels a day, as well as become more integrated with Venezuela’s state-run Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).
Zapatero’s visit to Venezuela also included the signing of a provocative arms deal between the two countries. In the transaction, Chávez purchased planes and patrol boats for $1.7bn (€1.3bn). Both sides defended the transaction by asserting that the equipment, which Spain says was sold without any weaponry, would be used to protect Venezuelan borders from narco-traffickers.
Those assurances, however, did little to allay the fears of Pentagon skeptics and at least one EU official, who claimed that the Venezuelan arms build up is only serving to further destabilize an already unstable region. Karl von Wogau, Chairman of the European Parliament Subcommittee on Security and Defense, went as far as to suggest to European Parliament President Josep Borrell (ESP) that parliament investigate the arms sale to see whether or not it violated the EU Code of Conduct on Arms and Exports, though a formal investigation was never conducted.
Indeed, the sale was somewhat challenging considering that in 2004 Zapatero cancelled an agreement which the Aznar government had signed with Colombia, which would have sent 46 tanks to that nation in a move supportive of the multi-billion dollar U.S. funded and now heavily militarized Plan Colombia. Zapatero cited regional stability when terminating the sale, but that explanation could be open to debate. For more information surrounding the arms sale, see COHA’s analysis of it in Memorandum to the Press 05.37 "Having it Both Ways: U.S. Protests Spanish Arms Sale to Venezuela while it Arms Latin America and the World."
In response to the ruffled feathers in Washington, Brussels and Bogotá over the Venezuelan arms deal, Zapatero decided to extend his South American trip to Bogotá to meet with Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, who had publicly protested the sale. Following the meeting, the announcement was made that Spain would lend Colombia three military planes and that it would try to help mediate peace talks between the warring factions in Colombia’s decades-long civil war. Indeed, Spain assumed a critical role in the Mexican-led peace talks on April 8, 2005, when the Spanish ambassador to Colombia, Carlos Gómez Múgica, joined by the Venezuelan and Brazilian ambassadors, met with National Liberation Army (ELN) spokesman Francisco Galán at his prison cell in Itagüi, Colombia, where they urged his organization to agree to a ceasefire.
The eventual result of those talks was the declaration of an armistice between the two parties, which just happened to coincide with Galán’s recent release from prison.
Zapatero, who now sees himself as Latin America’s point man in Europe, has continued his country’s involvement in Colombian peace negotiations after Uribe visited Madrid in July. Spain was one of the protagonists behind the EU resolution signed on October 3, which supports the Colombian “Ley de Justicia y Paz” (Justice and Peace Law). That measure, which was signed in June, is said to be a key part of the Colombian government’s demobilization plan. NGO’s and human rights groups around the world have protested the law as well as the EU’s sanctioning of it, saying that the law will create a “legal limbo” where human rights violators will be immune to prosecution. Zapatero’s backing of the Justice and Peace Law has somewhat tarnished his reputation for doing everything right when it comes to human rights.
Another regional relationship that has dramatically changed course under Zapatero is that involving Cuba and Spain. In September of last year, Spain moved to relax the sanctions that the EU placed on Cuba in 2003 in response to Fidel Castro’s imprisonment of 75 dissidents in June of that year. In attacking the EU strategy, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos stated that the EU’s policy was “the worst possible for improving the fate of dissidents and prisoners of conscience.” Zapatero has argued that relaxed sanctions could serve as an incentive for the Castro government to improve its human rights record. Since Spain renewed discussion of the Cuban question within the EU, Havana has resumed contact with all of the EU countries maintaining embassies in Cuba and has released some of the imprisoned dissidents, although the sanctions remain in place. By offering a fresh approach to an old problem, Zapatero brought a venturesome capacity for innovation to an array of nettlesome regional issues and went a long way in voiding Aznar’s particularly splenetic Cuban policy.
Taking Action
Zapatero has stated that the promotion of democracy and human rights around the world is one of his country’s main foreign policy priorities, but his actions regarding one of the western hemisphere’s most persistent diplomatic issues hasn’t exactly demonstrated his commitment to constructive regional engagement in all situations. Shortly after Zapatero came to office, he was urged by Chilean president Ricardo Lagos to send troops to Haiti as part of the Brazilian-led U.N. peacekeeping mission there. The Spanish prime minister followed through, requesting that his congress send troops to Haiti and Afghanistan, which they did in October 2004. Spain currently has 200 soldiers and 30 police officers participating in the flawed UN mission to Haiti, but they may not be there for much longer. In September, Spanish Defense Minister José Bono threatened to remove its troops from the beleaguered Caribbean island if the countries financing the mission don’t ante up and deliver upon the donations that they had previously promised. According to Bono, so far only $300 million of the $700 million in pledged assistance to the crisis-stricken island has actually arrived. Spain’s participation in the Haitian debacle reflects Zapatero’s misguided belief that if his country is to be perceived as a leader within a Latin American context, he needs to prove that it is willing to take an active role in confronting some of the region’s major problems.
Continued Economic Integration
In the Southern Cone, Zapatero has attempted to further integrate his country with Mercosur and the ever-expanding Chilean economy. In January, the Spanish prime minister traveled to Brazil, Argentina and Chile to speak with the leaders of those countries about economic issues and address tariff concerns raised by Spanish industries. During the tour he declared that he would like to initiate a “second wave of Spanish investment” in the region and told Chilean business leaders that Spain could be their “point of entry” to Europe and the Mediterranean. Chilean-Spanish trade has thrived in recent years and it continues to expand, thanks in large part to the free trade agreement Chile signed with the EU in 2002. In 2004, trade between the two nations reached $1.2 billion, a 31% increase over the previous year.
In meetings with Presidents Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva of Brazil and Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, he declared that he would strongly back a Mercosur-EU free trade agreement. Spanish advocacy could help break the current stalemate over the proposed alternative to the U.S.-backed FTAA. Zapatero has also sought to help restore Argentina’s debt-ridden economy, telling Kirchner at a January meeting that he would support the Argentine leader’s proposed debt exchange plan. Since then, the Spanish prime minister has continued to back Argentina’s debt reduction efforts, meeting in December in Madrid with high level Argentine finance officials. At that reunion he defended the Argentine president against the International Monetary Fund, observing that it should have “more confidence in Argentina.” In New York, Zapatero also promised to meet with former Spanish finance minister and current IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato, at Kirchner’s urging.
Conclusion
By capitalizing on the diplomatic vacuum left in the wake of September 11, Prime Minister Zapatero’s efforts in Latin America make it clear that he is attempting to give Spain a new and more prominent role on the world stage by becoming the only extra-hemispheric leader willing to engage, with respect and deference Latin America on a variety of issues. While Washington’s stance towards the area has been generally tactless and at times outright belligerent, Madrid has taken a much more fraternal tone. Through his efforts, Zapatero has created for Spain a diplomatic liaison role of the highest importance in dealing with some of the more troubled countries of the region, while at the same time creating new investment opportunities for countries looking to expand in the globalized economy.
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Julian Armington.
COHA Staff Editor: Michael Lettieri.
The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha@coha.org.
To subscribe to our free press releases, send an email to coha@coha.org with "subscribe" as the subject.
US says may retaliate against Brazil over trade
By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent
October 6, 2005
BRASILIA (Reuters) - The United States may retaliate by removing trade preferences worth more than $2 billion if Brazil insists on asking the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the right to impose $1 billion in sanctions on U.S. goods in a row over cotton, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.
"There's always a danger in trade relations that things start to slip out of control ... If one decides to retaliate, who knows, maybe others will too," said Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick on a trip to the Brazilian capital.
Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative, spoke after Brazil on Thursday asked the WTO for the right to impose sanctions of up to $1.037 billion a year.
The Brazilian decision marred a visit in which Zoellick praised embattled President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's commitment to democracy and said the United States hoped to enlist Brasilia in an effort to help countries like Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, embroiled in political crises.
Brazil says the United States has failed to obey a WTO ruling outlawing some of its cotton policies, and it wants the right to hit back against U.S. interests.
But Zoellick, at a news conference with Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, said retaliation should only be taken when a trading partner is not trying to fix a problem.
The United States is working both through legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress and in the Doha round of world trade talks to address Brazil's cotton concerns, he said.
The United States has long been concerned about intellectual property rights violations in Brazil but, persuaded the government is trying to address the problem, has held off on withholding U.S. trade preferences worth $2.5 billion a year, he said.
"I think it's dangerous for people to go down this path because one retaliates and all of a sudden you might find something else happens," Zoellick added.
The sanctions, which Brazil said it would not necessarily impose immediately, would be in the areas of goods, services and intellectual property, like patent rights -- seen as something which could hit the powerful U.S. pharmaceuticals industry.
Zoellick's visit, ahead of a trip by President George W. Bush in November, came amid concerns that some fragile regional democracies are weakening and as Lula's government and party have been embroiled in a vote-buying scandal.
In Nicaragua on Wednesday, Zoellick condemned Sandinista and right-leaning opposition politicians he said had democracy under siege there.
By contrast, he said Brazil was involved in an internal debate over corruption but "has the institutions of democracy to handle these issues."
October 6, 2005
BRASILIA (Reuters) - The United States may retaliate by removing trade preferences worth more than $2 billion if Brazil insists on asking the World Trade Organization (WTO) for the right to impose $1 billion in sanctions on U.S. goods in a row over cotton, a senior U.S. official said on Thursday.
"There's always a danger in trade relations that things start to slip out of control ... If one decides to retaliate, who knows, maybe others will too," said Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick on a trip to the Brazilian capital.
Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative, spoke after Brazil on Thursday asked the WTO for the right to impose sanctions of up to $1.037 billion a year.
The Brazilian decision marred a visit in which Zoellick praised embattled President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's commitment to democracy and said the United States hoped to enlist Brasilia in an effort to help countries like Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, embroiled in political crises.
Brazil says the United States has failed to obey a WTO ruling outlawing some of its cotton policies, and it wants the right to hit back against U.S. interests.
But Zoellick, at a news conference with Finance Minister Antonio Palocci, said retaliation should only be taken when a trading partner is not trying to fix a problem.
The United States is working both through legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress and in the Doha round of world trade talks to address Brazil's cotton concerns, he said.
The United States has long been concerned about intellectual property rights violations in Brazil but, persuaded the government is trying to address the problem, has held off on withholding U.S. trade preferences worth $2.5 billion a year, he said.
"I think it's dangerous for people to go down this path because one retaliates and all of a sudden you might find something else happens," Zoellick added.
The sanctions, which Brazil said it would not necessarily impose immediately, would be in the areas of goods, services and intellectual property, like patent rights -- seen as something which could hit the powerful U.S. pharmaceuticals industry.
Zoellick's visit, ahead of a trip by President George W. Bush in November, came amid concerns that some fragile regional democracies are weakening and as Lula's government and party have been embroiled in a vote-buying scandal.
In Nicaragua on Wednesday, Zoellick condemned Sandinista and right-leaning opposition politicians he said had democracy under siege there.
By contrast, he said Brazil was involved in an internal debate over corruption but "has the institutions of democracy to handle these issues."
Simple 'Machuca' crosses worlds of rich and poor
By CATHERINE GRAHAM
Santa Cruz Sentinel
October 7, 2005
Have you noticed that suddenly a lot of movies are opening at once? All the more reason to pay attention to "Machuca," a little gem from Chile that could be easily buried beneath this pre-holiday onslaught of films that movie distributors want to get off the shelves before releasing the holiday blockbusters.
"Machuca" is simple but powerful, infused with the energy of a story that feels like it has been waiting patiently to be told. Set during the days of the military coup against Salvador Allende’s regime, the film is semi- autobiographical on the part of director/co-writer/producer Andres Wood, who was a young boy in Santiago in the early 1970s and experienced the military coup firsthand.
There’s a powerful moment in the film that re-creates Wood’s own earthshaking experience of military jets rattling the dishware inside his home, a rude and frightening announcement that democracy in his country had ended.
"Machuca" explores the best and worst of human nature as seen through the eyes of the children warily edging their way into adolescence. Though set in a specific time and place, the tale could have unfolded across the sea in Vietnam, or even today in the Middle East. It’s a spin on the coming-of-age film in which curiosity about sex is present but doesn’t take center stage; in this way, "Machuca" is closer to "The 400 Blows" than, say, "American Pie."
Adults behave in mysterious and often confusing ways, and the price to be paid is the loss of youthful innocence.
Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) is a poor boy living in the slums of Santiago. He’s sent with a handful of others to a private school run by a radical priest infused with Allende’s egalitarian spirit. There he befriends Gonzalo (Matias Quer), an upper middle class kid and alter ego for the film’s director Wood. Each introduces the other to his world, the rich kid to life in a colorful, noisy shantytown infused with extreme poverty, the poor kid to a world of middle class comfort and abundance rife with its set of problems.
Into the mix comes a girl from Pedro’s neighborhood, Silvana (Manuella Martelli), street smart and mouthy and wise beyond her years. The trio offers one of the best ensemble performances by young people I’ve ever seen. To conjure the friendly ghost of Truffaut again, there’s a kind of "Jules and Jim" dynamic between the trio, complete with age-appropriate sexual experimentation, friendship and betrayal.
Though director Wood is most sympathetic with the victims of the era’s military coup, he manages to serve up a remarkably balanced picture of life on both sides of the tracks (or, more accurately, the river in Santiago that separates rich from poor). History is never simple, and Wood doesn’t offer up false hope or sentimental conclusions. Human kindness and weakness thrive in both settings.
On a lighter note, it’s amusing to reflect how ugly the fashions were back then. The character flaws in Gonzalo’s weak-willed father seem embedded in that awful longish hair/bushy moustache combo made famous by the extras in "Saturday Night Fever." Wood got all the details right; it is worth keeping an eye out for future films by this talented filmmaker.
Contact Catherine Graham at svreeken@santacruzsentinel.com.
Santa Cruz Sentinel
October 7, 2005
Have you noticed that suddenly a lot of movies are opening at once? All the more reason to pay attention to "Machuca," a little gem from Chile that could be easily buried beneath this pre-holiday onslaught of films that movie distributors want to get off the shelves before releasing the holiday blockbusters.
"Machuca" is simple but powerful, infused with the energy of a story that feels like it has been waiting patiently to be told. Set during the days of the military coup against Salvador Allende’s regime, the film is semi- autobiographical on the part of director/co-writer/producer Andres Wood, who was a young boy in Santiago in the early 1970s and experienced the military coup firsthand.
There’s a powerful moment in the film that re-creates Wood’s own earthshaking experience of military jets rattling the dishware inside his home, a rude and frightening announcement that democracy in his country had ended.
"Machuca" explores the best and worst of human nature as seen through the eyes of the children warily edging their way into adolescence. Though set in a specific time and place, the tale could have unfolded across the sea in Vietnam, or even today in the Middle East. It’s a spin on the coming-of-age film in which curiosity about sex is present but doesn’t take center stage; in this way, "Machuca" is closer to "The 400 Blows" than, say, "American Pie."
Adults behave in mysterious and often confusing ways, and the price to be paid is the loss of youthful innocence.
Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) is a poor boy living in the slums of Santiago. He’s sent with a handful of others to a private school run by a radical priest infused with Allende’s egalitarian spirit. There he befriends Gonzalo (Matias Quer), an upper middle class kid and alter ego for the film’s director Wood. Each introduces the other to his world, the rich kid to life in a colorful, noisy shantytown infused with extreme poverty, the poor kid to a world of middle class comfort and abundance rife with its set of problems.
Into the mix comes a girl from Pedro’s neighborhood, Silvana (Manuella Martelli), street smart and mouthy and wise beyond her years. The trio offers one of the best ensemble performances by young people I’ve ever seen. To conjure the friendly ghost of Truffaut again, there’s a kind of "Jules and Jim" dynamic between the trio, complete with age-appropriate sexual experimentation, friendship and betrayal.
Though director Wood is most sympathetic with the victims of the era’s military coup, he manages to serve up a remarkably balanced picture of life on both sides of the tracks (or, more accurately, the river in Santiago that separates rich from poor). History is never simple, and Wood doesn’t offer up false hope or sentimental conclusions. Human kindness and weakness thrive in both settings.
On a lighter note, it’s amusing to reflect how ugly the fashions were back then. The character flaws in Gonzalo’s weak-willed father seem embedded in that awful longish hair/bushy moustache combo made famous by the extras in "Saturday Night Fever." Wood got all the details right; it is worth keeping an eye out for future films by this talented filmmaker.
Contact Catherine Graham at svreeken@santacruzsentinel.com.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Yes, Venezuela Is Reducing Poverty
Letter to the Editor
Washington Post
Wednesday, October 5, 2005; A22
Jackson Diehl misinformed readers when he wrote that President Hugo Chavez's policies had increased the rate of poverty. ["Buying Support in Latin America," op-ed, Sept. 26].
Under the U.S.-sponsored "Washington consensus," or "neoliberal," model, poverty rose in Venezuela from 28 percent in the early 1980s to 85 percent when Mr. Chavez took office.
In the years since, social expenditures have risen in net terms (despite the U.S.-backed coup and oil strike), to about $5 billion per year, increasing as part of gross domestic product from 7.8 percent to 12.3 percent. This represents a massive transfer of resources to the poor. It has wiped out illiteracy, provided 40 percent of the population with subsidized food and ensured that 18 million people have free health care.
According to a recent analysis by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, in the first quarter of 2005 the fastest-growing economies in Latin America were those that rejected the failed and flawed neoliberal model.
Indeed, Venezuela has the fastest-growing economy in Latin America, with growth rates in the first two quarters of 7.5 percent and 11.1 percent, respectively. It had a 17.8 percent growth rate in 2004. The non-oil sectors grew at a faster pace than the oil sector, rising 8.7 percent and 12.1 percent in the first two quarters of 2005. Venezuela's economy is growing at the second-fastest rate in the world, topped only by China.
BERNARDO ALVAREZ
Ambassador
Embassy of Venezuela
Washington
Washington Post
Wednesday, October 5, 2005; A22
Jackson Diehl misinformed readers when he wrote that President Hugo Chavez's policies had increased the rate of poverty. ["Buying Support in Latin America," op-ed, Sept. 26].
Under the U.S.-sponsored "Washington consensus," or "neoliberal," model, poverty rose in Venezuela from 28 percent in the early 1980s to 85 percent when Mr. Chavez took office.
In the years since, social expenditures have risen in net terms (despite the U.S.-backed coup and oil strike), to about $5 billion per year, increasing as part of gross domestic product from 7.8 percent to 12.3 percent. This represents a massive transfer of resources to the poor. It has wiped out illiteracy, provided 40 percent of the population with subsidized food and ensured that 18 million people have free health care.
According to a recent analysis by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, in the first quarter of 2005 the fastest-growing economies in Latin America were those that rejected the failed and flawed neoliberal model.
Indeed, Venezuela has the fastest-growing economy in Latin America, with growth rates in the first two quarters of 7.5 percent and 11.1 percent, respectively. It had a 17.8 percent growth rate in 2004. The non-oil sectors grew at a faster pace than the oil sector, rising 8.7 percent and 12.1 percent in the first two quarters of 2005. Venezuela's economy is growing at the second-fastest rate in the world, topped only by China.
BERNARDO ALVAREZ
Ambassador
Embassy of Venezuela
Washington
32 years later, legacies of Pinochet, Allende change
32 years later, legacies of Pinochet, Allende change
The 32nd anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende passed last month with one fact clear: The reputations of the two men are changing, with Pinochet's slumping and Allende's on the upswing.
By JACK CHANG
Knight Ridder News Service
SANTIAGO, Chile - More than 15 years after relinquishing power, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has few public friends left in the country he once ruled, while the reputation of Salvador Allende, the man whose government Pinochet destroyed, is making a comeback.
The reversal of fortunes is transforming a country that's still agonizing over its recent, violent past and debating how to move forward.
Government prosecutors are turning up daily damaging details about the role that Pinochet, now 89, played in the execution of thousands of dissidents and the hiding of millions of dollars during his more than 16 years in power.
ON THE DEFENSIVE
The ex-dictator has been on the legal defensive since he spent 16 months under house arrest in London in the late 1990s.
Most recently, investigations into hidden accounts with U.S.-owned Riggs Bank, where Pinochet allegedly stashed as much as $8 million, have implicated his wife and son, Marco Antonio Pinochet, who spent 22 days in jail last month after being arrested in connection with helping to funnel the illegal money.
Meanwhile, Allende's image, with his intense stare and dark, square glasses, is popping up around the Chilean capital.
On Sept. 11, angry marchers commemorating the day 32 years ago when Pinochet seized power from Allende invoked the slain president's name while demanding that many more of the country's former military rulers be prosecuted for human rights violations.
A new documentary that takes an admiring view of the socialist leader is showing in theaters around this capital city of 6 million residents, and it sold 20,000 tickets in the first two weeks after its Sept. 1 release.
The director, Patricio Guzman, said the film is set for a nationwide release.
Public opinion surveys have noted the change in recent years.
In September 1999, the Chilean research firm Centro de Estudios Publicos asked people to rate Allende's and Pinochet's governments from 1, for ''awful,'' to 7, for "excellent.''
Pinochet's did better with a 4 rating, to Allende's 3.7. By December 2004, opinion had flipped, with Allende earning a 4.2 rating, while Pinochet dropped to 3.8.
It is a major turnaround for a man whose name was rarely mentioned during the 1970s and '80s, while Pinochet's regime killed more than 3,000 people and tortured thousands more.
Schoolteacher Maria Elena Arroyo said young Chileans are re-evaluating their country's past and how that history has been taught over the years.
GENERATIONAL CHANGE
''There's a change in this generation,'' said Arroyo, after viewing Guzman's documentary only eight blocks from the La Moneda presidential palace where Allende is widely believed to have committed suicide after a farewell speech broadcast by radio.
Elected in 1970 after three runs for the presidency, the socialist Allende put into motion what he said would be a democratic revolution that included nationalizing copper and banking industries, redistributing land among poor farmers and expanding social programs.
Then came the Pinochet coup in 1973, with the aerial bombing of the presidential palace, mass arrests, illegal executions and disappearances and the suspension of Congress.
''For years, Allende has represented disorder and civil unrest, and no one wanted to remember him,'' said Guzman, the film director. ``I made this film to restore the memory of Chileans.
Among Pinochet's dwindling supporters, Allende remains the man who pushed Chile to a precarious edge, requiring a military response.
Former general and Pinochet family friend Guillermo Garin said Chileans owe their current economic success to that intervention, and that the leftist governments that have ruled Chile since the return of democracy in 1990 have systematically tarnished Pinochet's name.
''Chileans called the armed forces to step in and help avoid a civil war,'' Garin said. "This country had been totally destroyed. And we rebuilt and advanced every sector of this country.
"The majority of Chileans are still grateful to Pinochet for that.''
But instead of celebrating the Sept. 11 anniversary as a national holiday, as it had been observed until 1999, Pinochet's supporters this year held a closed ceremony and quietly visited the ex-general.
The 32nd anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende passed last month with one fact clear: The reputations of the two men are changing, with Pinochet's slumping and Allende's on the upswing.
By JACK CHANG
Knight Ridder News Service
SANTIAGO, Chile - More than 15 years after relinquishing power, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet has few public friends left in the country he once ruled, while the reputation of Salvador Allende, the man whose government Pinochet destroyed, is making a comeback.
The reversal of fortunes is transforming a country that's still agonizing over its recent, violent past and debating how to move forward.
Government prosecutors are turning up daily damaging details about the role that Pinochet, now 89, played in the execution of thousands of dissidents and the hiding of millions of dollars during his more than 16 years in power.
ON THE DEFENSIVE
The ex-dictator has been on the legal defensive since he spent 16 months under house arrest in London in the late 1990s.
Most recently, investigations into hidden accounts with U.S.-owned Riggs Bank, where Pinochet allegedly stashed as much as $8 million, have implicated his wife and son, Marco Antonio Pinochet, who spent 22 days in jail last month after being arrested in connection with helping to funnel the illegal money.
Meanwhile, Allende's image, with his intense stare and dark, square glasses, is popping up around the Chilean capital.
On Sept. 11, angry marchers commemorating the day 32 years ago when Pinochet seized power from Allende invoked the slain president's name while demanding that many more of the country's former military rulers be prosecuted for human rights violations.
A new documentary that takes an admiring view of the socialist leader is showing in theaters around this capital city of 6 million residents, and it sold 20,000 tickets in the first two weeks after its Sept. 1 release.
The director, Patricio Guzman, said the film is set for a nationwide release.
Public opinion surveys have noted the change in recent years.
In September 1999, the Chilean research firm Centro de Estudios Publicos asked people to rate Allende's and Pinochet's governments from 1, for ''awful,'' to 7, for "excellent.''
Pinochet's did better with a 4 rating, to Allende's 3.7. By December 2004, opinion had flipped, with Allende earning a 4.2 rating, while Pinochet dropped to 3.8.
It is a major turnaround for a man whose name was rarely mentioned during the 1970s and '80s, while Pinochet's regime killed more than 3,000 people and tortured thousands more.
Schoolteacher Maria Elena Arroyo said young Chileans are re-evaluating their country's past and how that history has been taught over the years.
GENERATIONAL CHANGE
''There's a change in this generation,'' said Arroyo, after viewing Guzman's documentary only eight blocks from the La Moneda presidential palace where Allende is widely believed to have committed suicide after a farewell speech broadcast by radio.
Elected in 1970 after three runs for the presidency, the socialist Allende put into motion what he said would be a democratic revolution that included nationalizing copper and banking industries, redistributing land among poor farmers and expanding social programs.
Then came the Pinochet coup in 1973, with the aerial bombing of the presidential palace, mass arrests, illegal executions and disappearances and the suspension of Congress.
''For years, Allende has represented disorder and civil unrest, and no one wanted to remember him,'' said Guzman, the film director. ``I made this film to restore the memory of Chileans.
Among Pinochet's dwindling supporters, Allende remains the man who pushed Chile to a precarious edge, requiring a military response.
Former general and Pinochet family friend Guillermo Garin said Chileans owe their current economic success to that intervention, and that the leftist governments that have ruled Chile since the return of democracy in 1990 have systematically tarnished Pinochet's name.
''Chileans called the armed forces to step in and help avoid a civil war,'' Garin said. "This country had been totally destroyed. And we rebuilt and advanced every sector of this country.
"The majority of Chileans are still grateful to Pinochet for that.''
But instead of celebrating the Sept. 11 anniversary as a national holiday, as it had been observed until 1999, Pinochet's supporters this year held a closed ceremony and quietly visited the ex-general.
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Poor Venezuelans Trade in Junk for Food
Poor Venezuelans Line Up for Chance to Trade in Junk for Food As Part of an Unusual Government Program
By IAN JAMES
The Associated Press
Oct. 4, 2005 - Men, women and children lined up at a scale to weigh their loot: bags filled with old clothes and newspapers, bent bicycle wheels, rusted bed frames and discarded auto parts.
The junk was tossed into trucks by city workers and the people were given tickets to redeem for bags of rice, cans of sardines, vegetable oil and other food as part of an unusual government program.
"I think it's good people can hand in things they don't need for food, because that's what people need food," said Maria Bonilla, a 50-year-old single mother who supports two children and a nephew on her job as a janitor.
She and other Venezuelans who came to turn in their trash in a Caracas slum last weekend said they felt grateful to President Hugo Chavez and his political ally, Mayor Freddy Bernal, who promoted the program as a way to clean up the streets while helping to feed the needy.
Chavez says he is leading a socialist "revolution" for the poor and has put billions of dollars in oil profits toward public works projects and social programs to build homes, fund health care programs and subsidize state food markets.
But a majority of Venezuelans remain poor, and many among the hundreds who showed up lugging bulging plastic bags and scrap metal said life remains a struggle despite some improvements. One man brought an old sofa that had been lying in the street.
Bonilla turned in a bag of clothes and a bag of newspapers weighing 18 pounds, and in exchange chose a bottle of cooking oil and a small bag of powdered milk.
"They only gave me a little bit, but it doesn't matter," said Bonilla, adding that it was a help since she has to support her family on $202 a month.
Some of Chavez's leading opponents accuse his government of running handout programs that help the poor just enough to win their political allegiance while not addressing deeper issues of poverty.
The leftist leader and his supporters insist major advances have been made and that within a generation they aim to eliminate poverty. The president, who has been in office since 1999, is up for re-election next year.
Gazing up at a hillside crowded with cinder block homes covered with barred windows, a city worker shouted into a microphone and loudspeaker: "Bring down all that trash!"
A poster with Chavez's smiling face was posted on a tent where adults lined up to trade in their tickets for food. A separate line of children snaked out in the courtyard, while salsa music blared over the loudspeaker.
"It's a lot of fun because we're all here," said 10-year-old Daniel Rios, who came with several friends and dropped off an armful of rusting pipes. The boy said his parents told him to get whatever food he could.
A few people emerged from the tent with long faces, saying they had hoped to receive more.
But 58-year-old Ermila Diaz came away smiling, carrying a box filled with packages of pasta, crackers, rice, beans and coffee after turning in bottles, newspapers and old rags. She said she still struggles to buy beef or pork on the small income she earns as a part-time seamstress, and her husband's meager pay working on-and-off as a security guard.
"Things are getting better, but there's still room for more improvement," Diaz said. As soon as she carried the food home, she said, she would be back with a second load of trash.
By IAN JAMES
The Associated Press
Oct. 4, 2005 - Men, women and children lined up at a scale to weigh their loot: bags filled with old clothes and newspapers, bent bicycle wheels, rusted bed frames and discarded auto parts.
The junk was tossed into trucks by city workers and the people were given tickets to redeem for bags of rice, cans of sardines, vegetable oil and other food as part of an unusual government program.
"I think it's good people can hand in things they don't need for food, because that's what people need food," said Maria Bonilla, a 50-year-old single mother who supports two children and a nephew on her job as a janitor.
She and other Venezuelans who came to turn in their trash in a Caracas slum last weekend said they felt grateful to President Hugo Chavez and his political ally, Mayor Freddy Bernal, who promoted the program as a way to clean up the streets while helping to feed the needy.
Chavez says he is leading a socialist "revolution" for the poor and has put billions of dollars in oil profits toward public works projects and social programs to build homes, fund health care programs and subsidize state food markets.
But a majority of Venezuelans remain poor, and many among the hundreds who showed up lugging bulging plastic bags and scrap metal said life remains a struggle despite some improvements. One man brought an old sofa that had been lying in the street.
Bonilla turned in a bag of clothes and a bag of newspapers weighing 18 pounds, and in exchange chose a bottle of cooking oil and a small bag of powdered milk.
"They only gave me a little bit, but it doesn't matter," said Bonilla, adding that it was a help since she has to support her family on $202 a month.
Some of Chavez's leading opponents accuse his government of running handout programs that help the poor just enough to win their political allegiance while not addressing deeper issues of poverty.
The leftist leader and his supporters insist major advances have been made and that within a generation they aim to eliminate poverty. The president, who has been in office since 1999, is up for re-election next year.
Gazing up at a hillside crowded with cinder block homes covered with barred windows, a city worker shouted into a microphone and loudspeaker: "Bring down all that trash!"
A poster with Chavez's smiling face was posted on a tent where adults lined up to trade in their tickets for food. A separate line of children snaked out in the courtyard, while salsa music blared over the loudspeaker.
"It's a lot of fun because we're all here," said 10-year-old Daniel Rios, who came with several friends and dropped off an armful of rusting pipes. The boy said his parents told him to get whatever food he could.
A few people emerged from the tent with long faces, saying they had hoped to receive more.
But 58-year-old Ermila Diaz came away smiling, carrying a box filled with packages of pasta, crackers, rice, beans and coffee after turning in bottles, newspapers and old rags. She said she still struggles to buy beef or pork on the small income she earns as a part-time seamstress, and her husband's meager pay working on-and-off as a security guard.
"Things are getting better, but there's still room for more improvement," Diaz said. As soon as she carried the food home, she said, she would be back with a second load of trash.
Monday, October 03, 2005
Lopez-Obrador attacks Fox on economy
Presidential front-runner campaigns in Matamoros
By SERGIO CHAPA
The Brownsville Herald
MATAMOROS, October 3, 2005 — Corruption and economic inequality have emptied entire villages in southern Mexico as the poor migrate to the United States in search of jobs they can’t find at home, Mexican presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador said in a Sunday evening campaign stop here.
The former Mexico City mayor and Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) presidential candidate spent Sunday on a tour of the northeastern Mexican border starting in Nuevo Laredo and then making stops in Reynosa, Rio Bravo and Matamoros.
In his Matamoros stop, Lopez-Obrador, who supporters have nicknamed either “AMLO” or “Peje” wore a white, long-sleeved guayabera and used common speech as he painted himself as both a political outsider and a “common man”.
The populist candidate delivered a fiery speech to a crowd of 2,500 to 3,000 criticizing the values and “corruption” of the administration of current president Vicente Fox and his National Action Party (PAN).
Lopez-Obrador said Fox’s economic policy has pushed desperate people out of their villages to the border and into the United States in search of work.
“With the exception of a few spots, there is no economic growth in this country,” Lopez-Obrador said.
The PRD candidate also addressed the drug-related violence that has plagued Tamaulipas and other border states over the last year.
“In order to stop the violence we have to reach the hearts and minds of the young people,” Lopez-Obrador said. “We need education and jobs not more police or stricter laws.”
According to political observers, the former Mexico City mayor is expected to easily secure his party’s nomination in December and become the leading contender in Mexico’s July 2006 presidential elections.
Lopez-Obrador is expected to leave for Mexico City from the Matamoros airport this morning, but numerous supporters said they came from Brownsville and as far away as Fort Worth and San Antonio to hear his Sunday evening speech.
For the first time in Mexican history, Mexican citizens living abroad will be allowed to vote for their president by mail but Mexican laws prohibit any candidate or party from campaigning outside of Mexico.
Fort Worth resident David Miranda with the Red Ciudadana or People’s Network said his group supports Lopez-Obrador and brought many supporters from across to Texas to hear the speech.
Miranda said Lopez-Obrador leads in several polls of Mexican nationals living in the United States, getting 60 percent to 70 percent of the vote.
“The assignment we have at the Red Ciudadana is to inform the people about their right to vote,” Miranda said of the group’s voter registration drive.
Jorge de la Rosa with the Red Ciudadana of Brownsville said voter registration for Mexican nationals living in the United States started Saturday and that forms are available through any Mexican consulate or the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) Web site.
schapa@brownsvilleherald.com
By SERGIO CHAPA
The Brownsville Herald
MATAMOROS, October 3, 2005 — Corruption and economic inequality have emptied entire villages in southern Mexico as the poor migrate to the United States in search of jobs they can’t find at home, Mexican presidential hopeful Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador said in a Sunday evening campaign stop here.
The former Mexico City mayor and Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) presidential candidate spent Sunday on a tour of the northeastern Mexican border starting in Nuevo Laredo and then making stops in Reynosa, Rio Bravo and Matamoros.
In his Matamoros stop, Lopez-Obrador, who supporters have nicknamed either “AMLO” or “Peje” wore a white, long-sleeved guayabera and used common speech as he painted himself as both a political outsider and a “common man”.
The populist candidate delivered a fiery speech to a crowd of 2,500 to 3,000 criticizing the values and “corruption” of the administration of current president Vicente Fox and his National Action Party (PAN).
Lopez-Obrador said Fox’s economic policy has pushed desperate people out of their villages to the border and into the United States in search of work.
“With the exception of a few spots, there is no economic growth in this country,” Lopez-Obrador said.
The PRD candidate also addressed the drug-related violence that has plagued Tamaulipas and other border states over the last year.
“In order to stop the violence we have to reach the hearts and minds of the young people,” Lopez-Obrador said. “We need education and jobs not more police or stricter laws.”
According to political observers, the former Mexico City mayor is expected to easily secure his party’s nomination in December and become the leading contender in Mexico’s July 2006 presidential elections.
Lopez-Obrador is expected to leave for Mexico City from the Matamoros airport this morning, but numerous supporters said they came from Brownsville and as far away as Fort Worth and San Antonio to hear his Sunday evening speech.
For the first time in Mexican history, Mexican citizens living abroad will be allowed to vote for their president by mail but Mexican laws prohibit any candidate or party from campaigning outside of Mexico.
Fort Worth resident David Miranda with the Red Ciudadana or People’s Network said his group supports Lopez-Obrador and brought many supporters from across to Texas to hear the speech.
Miranda said Lopez-Obrador leads in several polls of Mexican nationals living in the United States, getting 60 percent to 70 percent of the vote.
“The assignment we have at the Red Ciudadana is to inform the people about their right to vote,” Miranda said of the group’s voter registration drive.
Jorge de la Rosa with the Red Ciudadana of Brownsville said voter registration for Mexican nationals living in the United States started Saturday and that forms are available through any Mexican consulate or the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) Web site.
schapa@brownsvilleherald.com
Mexican presidential candidate details border security plan
By Mariano Castillo
San Antonio Express-News
October 3, 2005
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the early favorite to become the next president of Mexico, said he would "clean up" every agency from the department of justice to the smallest municipal police forces as part of his plan to defeat the drug cartels that have turned some parts of the border into war zones.
He also said illegal immigration is the key issue to work on together with the United States.
Lopez Obrador chose a speech Sunday in Nuevo Laredo, the epicenter of the violence, to unveil his border security plan.
The candidate for the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, favors a wide approach to quell the violence that would put as much emphasis on social programs to keep youth away from cartel recruiters as on law enforcement.
Touching a topic considered taboo by public officials, Lopez Obrador plainly said that associations between police forces and drug traffickers continue.
"If you can't tell where the organized crime ends and where the authorities begin, we won't be able to confront the traffickers," Lopez Obrador told hundreds of mostly PRD supporters.
The last official to promise to root out corrupt elements was Nuevo Laredo's former Police Chief Alejandro Dominguez. Assassins gunned down Dominguez just hours after he was sworn in.
"Let me be very clear: I will not tolerate (police forces) that fight against one cartel while protecting another," Lopez Obrador said before carefully adding, "I don't know if that is true or a legend."
The candidate visited four border cities on his first visit to this region — Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Rio Bravo and Matamoros.
Lopez Obrador made his mark as mayor of Mexico City, a position that he resigned from in July to campaign full time.
As the first leader of the leftist PRD with a real chance to win the presidency, Lopez Obrador has left many in the United States sifting for clues about what "left" means in this case.
Lopez Obrador's populist rhetoric — namely his promises to take action in the name of "the people" and blaming snags in his candidacy on conspiracies — has garnered comparisons to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of Washington's most reliable pains in the side.
Lopez Obrador may be part of the resurgence of leftist leaders in Latin America, but there were more clues Sunday that he would work with the United States rather than against it.
"It has to be a relationship of cooperation and mutual respect," he told reporters after the speech.
The priority in binational relations must be immigration, Lopez Obrador said.
"If the economy doesn't grow and new jobs aren't created, the immigration influx will be impossible to stop," he said.
In the past five years more than 2 million Mexican youths have crossed the Rio Grande to find work, Lopez Obrador said.
"The country is emptying because our economic policy has not been working," he said. "This will not be stopped by more border patrols or by threats of harsh punishment. There has to be growth in Mexico."
mcastillo@express-news.net
San Antonio Express-News
October 3, 2005
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the early favorite to become the next president of Mexico, said he would "clean up" every agency from the department of justice to the smallest municipal police forces as part of his plan to defeat the drug cartels that have turned some parts of the border into war zones.
He also said illegal immigration is the key issue to work on together with the United States.
Lopez Obrador chose a speech Sunday in Nuevo Laredo, the epicenter of the violence, to unveil his border security plan.
The candidate for the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, favors a wide approach to quell the violence that would put as much emphasis on social programs to keep youth away from cartel recruiters as on law enforcement.
Touching a topic considered taboo by public officials, Lopez Obrador plainly said that associations between police forces and drug traffickers continue.
"If you can't tell where the organized crime ends and where the authorities begin, we won't be able to confront the traffickers," Lopez Obrador told hundreds of mostly PRD supporters.
The last official to promise to root out corrupt elements was Nuevo Laredo's former Police Chief Alejandro Dominguez. Assassins gunned down Dominguez just hours after he was sworn in.
"Let me be very clear: I will not tolerate (police forces) that fight against one cartel while protecting another," Lopez Obrador said before carefully adding, "I don't know if that is true or a legend."
The candidate visited four border cities on his first visit to this region — Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Rio Bravo and Matamoros.
Lopez Obrador made his mark as mayor of Mexico City, a position that he resigned from in July to campaign full time.
As the first leader of the leftist PRD with a real chance to win the presidency, Lopez Obrador has left many in the United States sifting for clues about what "left" means in this case.
Lopez Obrador's populist rhetoric — namely his promises to take action in the name of "the people" and blaming snags in his candidacy on conspiracies — has garnered comparisons to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of Washington's most reliable pains in the side.
Lopez Obrador may be part of the resurgence of leftist leaders in Latin America, but there were more clues Sunday that he would work with the United States rather than against it.
"It has to be a relationship of cooperation and mutual respect," he told reporters after the speech.
The priority in binational relations must be immigration, Lopez Obrador said.
"If the economy doesn't grow and new jobs aren't created, the immigration influx will be impossible to stop," he said.
In the past five years more than 2 million Mexican youths have crossed the Rio Grande to find work, Lopez Obrador said.
"The country is emptying because our economic policy has not been working," he said. "This will not be stopped by more border patrols or by threats of harsh punishment. There has to be growth in Mexico."
mcastillo@express-news.net
Is a Redistributive Political Project Viable in Colombia?
by Garry Leech
Colombia Journal Online
October 3, 2005
While many countries in South America have taken a turn to the left, Colombia's presidency remains in the hands of right-winger Alvaro Uribe. Furthermore, many representatives in Colombia's Congress are ideologically aligned with the country's president. Consequently, the national government has done little to address the gross economic inequalities prevalent in Colombia. If anything, the neoliberal policies implemented by the Uribe administration have exacerbated the situation for the 64 percent of Colombians living in poverty. Meanwhile, next door in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez continues to implement his hugely popular "revolution for the poor." The stark contrast between the two governments' approach to poverty begs the question: Is a redistributive political project viable in Colombia?
On the national level, Colombia's politics remain dominated by the right. President Alvaro Uribe has willingly worked with the Bush administration to address security issues and with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to establish economic policy, which has resulted in Colombia becoming the latest poster child for neoliberalism. While Colombia's Congress contains a smattering of progressive political figures, it remains dominated by Uribistas and the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties. This scenario has placed Colombia at odds with those South American nations that have taken a turn to the left in recent years.
On the local level, however, Colombian politics more closely reflect those of its neighbors. The emergence of the Polo Democrático Independiente (PDI) in 2003 marked the first highly visible left-of-center political party in Colombia since the Unión Patriotica (UP) in the late 1980s. In the 2003 local elections, PDI candidates won several important races: Lucho Garzón became mayor of Bogotá, Sergio Fajardo became mayor of Medellín and Angelino Garzón won the governorship of the department of Valle de Cauca.
While several PDI members have been assassinated in the past couple of years by right-wing paramilitaries, the party has so far managed to avoid the slaughter endured by the UP in the second half of the 1980s when more than 2,000 party members were assassinated, including two presidential candidates and four elected congressmen. One significant difference between the UP and the PDI is the latter's desire to distance itself from Colombia's guerrilla groups and its rejection of armed struggle as a viable option.
The PDI's policy proposals are not very radical. In fact, they appear to be more in line with those of Lula in Brazil than Chávez in Venezuela. In other words, the PDI seeks to implement its social project within the neoliberal paradigm rather than outright challenging neoliberalism as Chávez has done in Venezuela with his Bolivarian Revolution.
Still, having said that, like Lula in Brazil, the PDI does seek to implement redistributive policies to the degree that it is possible under neoliberalism. For example, the PDI recently introduced a bill to reform the education system in order to provide universal and higher quality education. Sixty-four percent of Colombians live in poverty and the country's distribution of wealth is the second-most unequal in Latin America—after Brazil—and among the worst in the world. This inequality is reflected in Colombia's public education system.
According to UNESCO, children in the two countries with the most unequal distribution of wealth in South America—Brazil and Colombia—receive the fewest years of education in the region. Colombian children receive an average of 5.3 years of schooling, less than their counterparts in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Guyana and Bolivia. Colombia also ranks second lowest among the South American nations with regard to percentage of children enrolled in pre-school (33 percent) and secondary school (57 percent).
In an attempt to address the problem of inadequate access to education for Colombia's poor, the PDI's education reform bill proposes:
● the creation of positions for 1,602,648 new students in the next five years.
● that the government provide support to mothers in the poorest strata to reduce substantially the cost of sending children to school. Mothers would receive a monthly sum that would depend on the place of dwelling, the age of the child and the courses to be studied.
● that the Department of Education provide free courses in math and physics at the National University to help teachers achieve academic excellence.
In addition to the PDI's education proposals, Antonio Navarro Wolf, the party's candidate for the May 2006 presidential elections, is also promising to improve the public healthcare system if elected. Navarro Wolf is calling for, among other things, a "50 percent increase in funding for the public health system as well as the construction of a hundred fixed doctor's offices and a hundred mobile doctor's offices to provide basic medical care throughout the country."
Even if the PDI were to prove victorious in both congressional and presidential elections next year it would still have to contend with IMF loan conditionalities. When the IMF approved a $2.1 billion loan to Colombia in January 2003, it stated that Colombian "authorities intend to take the measures needed to ensure public debt sustainability and maintain Colombia's record of servicing its debt. Accordingly, the program calls for … key structural reforms and administrative improvements in the public sector."
The IMF demanded that Colombia reduce its deficit to 2.5 percent of GDP in 2003 and 2.1 percent in 2004. And under a $613 million loan agreement signed in April 2005, the IMF established deficit targets of 2.0 percent for 2005 and 2006. Given the ongoing conflict in Colombia, any future government is unlikely to cut military spending in order to achieve the IMF-imposed deficit goals. Consequently, it is social programs—including education and healthcare—that would continue to bear the brunt of public spending cutbacks in order to make money available to service the country's foreign debt. The IMF is calling on Colombia to reduce its public debt from its current level—52 per cent of GDP—to between 40-45 percent of GDP by 2010.
Navarro Wolf, if elected, would likely follow the Lula route of trying to implement poverty alleviation projects while abiding by IMF demands. The Brazilian government, however, has had only limited success in combating poverty. At the same time, Lula's appeasement of the IMF has turned many of his staunchest supporters into his fiercest critics. During his term in office, President Uribe has worked closely with the IMF and, as a result, has implemented a series of economic reforms that have included the privatization of the country's telecommunications company, Telecom, and the restructuring of the state oil company, Ecopetrol. Clearly, there is little likelihood that the neoliberal paradigm would be seriously challenged regardless of whether Uribe or Navarro Wolf were to prove victorious in May 2006.
According to a September poll that assumed Uribe would run for re-election, almost 70 percent of respondents said they would vote for the current president. Only 1.4 percent supported Navarro Wolf. However, when asked who they would vote for if Uribe is not allowed to run for re-election, the race looked to be much closer with 16.3 percent of respondents choosing long-time Liberal Party member Horacio Serpa, while 14.2 percent supported Enrique Peñalosa, 10.6 percent backed Antanas Mockus and 6.8 percent selected Navarro Wolf.
Like most opinion polls in Colombia, this poll was conducted by telephone with 600 Colombians in the cities of Barranquilla, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cali and Medellín. Consequently, it mostly reflects the opinions of the country's urban middle and upper classes. While Colombian polls fail to reflect the opinions of all Colombians—many of the urban poor do not have telephones and the opinions of the rural poor are also rarely solicited—this poll likely accurately reflects the attitudes of most Colombian voters. Why? Because Colombia's leftist parties have found it difficult to win national elections due to the strategy implemented by right-wing paramilitaries in the urban barrios and rural regions they control that force citizens to vote for right-wing candidates. Meanwhile, in rebel-controlled regions, the guerrillas often force citizens to abstain from voting, contributing to the country's habitual low voter turnout. In both scenarios, the left vote is thwarted.
Clearly, if Colombia's Constitutional Court allows Uribe to run for re-election, there will be little likelihood of any significant redistributive project being initiated before 2010. If the court prohibits the current president from running, then the PDI has a chance of gaining the presidency and the opportunity to implement its redistributive project. There is, however, still another obstacle to any PDI attempt to implement redistributive policies: congressional opposition.
Following the August approval of the Justice and Peace Law by the Colombian Congress, several demobilized right-wing paramilitary leaders made clear their desire to enter the country's political fray. The paramilitaries already maintain a substantial influence in Congress, as paramilitary leader Vicente Castaño recently told Colombia's Semana magazine:: "I think that we can affirm that we have more than 35 percent of Congress as friends, and for the next elections, we're going to increase that percentage of friends."
In November 2003, the 800-member urban paramilitary force known as the Cacique Nutibara Bloc (BCN) in Medellín officially demobilized. The group's political chief, Givanni Marin, and other former members of the BCN, have formed a political-social organization known as the Democratic Corporation, which operates in the same poor barrios that were controlled by the paramilitaries. Marin has announced his intention to run for Congress in the March 2006 elections.
According to a September 2005 Amnesty International report, however, the November 2003 "demobilization" of the Cacique Nutibara Bloc did not end that group's paramilitary activities in Colombia's second-largest city. The Amnesty International report reveals that two years after their demobilization:
"Paramilitaries continue to operate as a military force, to kill and threaten human rights defenders and local community activists, to recruit and to act jointly with the security forces. However, rather than operating in large, heavily-armed and uniformed groups as they did in the past, they are now increasingly cloaking their activities by posing as members of private security firms or by acting as informants for the security forces."
Another troubling aspect of the demobilization process is the government's recent announcement that some 2,000 ex-paramilitary fighters would be incorporated into the country's police force. Clearly, paramilitary candidates will likely prove victorious in elections held in regions where paramilitary activities continue. Colombian congressman Gustavo Petro, who has denounced paramilitary ties with politicians, fears that demobilized paramilitaries who become elected congressmen would make it even more difficult to address Colombia's grossly unequal distribution of land, because paramilitaries are among the country's largest landowners.
Uribe's re-election would likely result in a continuation of the government's dirty war against civil society groups that are working peacefully for political, social and economic reform in Colombia. In August 2005, the United Nations criticized the Uribe administration for its practice of using arbitrary detentions to target those critical of the government's policies. The director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia, Michael Frühling, announced that his office is "concerned that mass-scale detentions and individual seizures with no juridical basis frequently affect members of vulnerable groups such as human rights advocates, community leaders, trade union activists and people living in areas where illegal armed groups are active."
According to the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared (ASFADDES) reports that 3,593 people were "disappeared" by state security forces during 2002 and 2003, which is more than the total number of Colombians disappeared during the previous seven years. Meanwhile, the human rights group Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), 6,978 people were killed for socio-political reasons during Uribe's first year in office, which amounted to 19 people a day, the same rate as the previous two years. The CCJ determined that paramilitaries were responsible for at least 62 percent of the killings, more than double the amount committed by the guerrillas. Most of the reduction in killings achieved by Uribe's Democratic Security Strategy has resulted from diminished violent crime in the country's cities, not a reduction in political killings.
Uribe's likely re-election, the government's ongoing dirty war, right-wing control of Congress and the IMF's structural adjustment demands make the prospects for the implementation of a redistributive project through democratic means in the near future bleak indeed. But what are the prospects for success for the armed left in Colombia?
Despite repeated attempts by the U.S. and Colombian governments and the mainstream media to portray the rebels as little more than common criminals or terrorists, Colombia's guerrilla groups are still at least partially driven by ideology. This, of course, does not mean that the guerrillas are not responsible for committing human rights abuses against the very people they claim to be fighting for or that they do not profit from the illegal drug trade.
But in regions where the FARC has long maintained control, and where the national government has never had a presence, the rebels function as a de-facto government and have implemented redistributive projects. In recent years, for example, the FARC has broken up almost a dozen large ranches in southern Meta department and redistributed the smaller parcels of land to subsistence farmers. The guerrillas have carried out similar agrarian reform programs in Caquetá, Putumayo and other regions.
The FARC has also implemented a national tax system whereby the income from kidnapping, extortion and the taxation of wealthy landowners and businesses is used to fund military operations. The revenue from taxes imposed on local communities in FARC-controlled regions, however, is turned over to municipal leaders and used to fund local social and economic projects.
Both the FARC and the ELN are highly critical of neoliberalism and, if they were to achieve power, would likely implement more radical policies along the lines of Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. As ELN commander Antonio García has claimed: "Any project that changes society must include the idea that we need an economic model that serves the people and society, not the other way around." Of course, how democratic a rebel government would prove to be is up for debate.
In reality, however, there is little possibility of Colombia's guerrillas seizing power in the near future. At the same time, there is also little chance of the guerrilla insurgency being defeated, despite repeated claims by both the Bush and Uribe administrations that the Colombian military is beating the FARC on the battlefield. In fact, there is ample evidence that official claims of military successes against the FARC are grossly exaggerated. According to a recent report by the Colombian NGO, Fundación Seguridad y la Democracia, guerrilla attacks against military and police targets increased by 69 percent during the first three years of the Uribe government when compared to the same period during the previous administration.
Another sign that Colombia's conflict continues to rage is the ongoing forced displacement of rural communities. The Human Rights and Displacement Consultancy (CODHES), a Colombian human rights organization, reported that 287,581 people were forcibly displaced in 2004—an average of 780 people per day and a 38 percent increase over the previous year. In all, 2.9 million people, or seven per cent of Colombia's population, have been forcibly displaced since 1985, making it the country with the second-largest internally displaced population in the world after the Sudan.
Sadly, there is little hope of Colombia's conflict coming to an end in the near future. As a result, many on the political left will continue to be victims of the government's ongoing dirty war, with little possibility of a revolutionary government coming to power—either democratically or through armed insurrection. Consequently, and tragically for Colombia's poor majority, there is little reason to believe that a far-reaching, nationwide redistributive political project is viable at this time.
Colombia Journal Online
October 3, 2005
While many countries in South America have taken a turn to the left, Colombia's presidency remains in the hands of right-winger Alvaro Uribe. Furthermore, many representatives in Colombia's Congress are ideologically aligned with the country's president. Consequently, the national government has done little to address the gross economic inequalities prevalent in Colombia. If anything, the neoliberal policies implemented by the Uribe administration have exacerbated the situation for the 64 percent of Colombians living in poverty. Meanwhile, next door in Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez continues to implement his hugely popular "revolution for the poor." The stark contrast between the two governments' approach to poverty begs the question: Is a redistributive political project viable in Colombia?
On the national level, Colombia's politics remain dominated by the right. President Alvaro Uribe has willingly worked with the Bush administration to address security issues and with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to establish economic policy, which has resulted in Colombia becoming the latest poster child for neoliberalism. While Colombia's Congress contains a smattering of progressive political figures, it remains dominated by Uribistas and the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties. This scenario has placed Colombia at odds with those South American nations that have taken a turn to the left in recent years.
On the local level, however, Colombian politics more closely reflect those of its neighbors. The emergence of the Polo Democrático Independiente (PDI) in 2003 marked the first highly visible left-of-center political party in Colombia since the Unión Patriotica (UP) in the late 1980s. In the 2003 local elections, PDI candidates won several important races: Lucho Garzón became mayor of Bogotá, Sergio Fajardo became mayor of Medellín and Angelino Garzón won the governorship of the department of Valle de Cauca.
While several PDI members have been assassinated in the past couple of years by right-wing paramilitaries, the party has so far managed to avoid the slaughter endured by the UP in the second half of the 1980s when more than 2,000 party members were assassinated, including two presidential candidates and four elected congressmen. One significant difference between the UP and the PDI is the latter's desire to distance itself from Colombia's guerrilla groups and its rejection of armed struggle as a viable option.
The PDI's policy proposals are not very radical. In fact, they appear to be more in line with those of Lula in Brazil than Chávez in Venezuela. In other words, the PDI seeks to implement its social project within the neoliberal paradigm rather than outright challenging neoliberalism as Chávez has done in Venezuela with his Bolivarian Revolution.
Still, having said that, like Lula in Brazil, the PDI does seek to implement redistributive policies to the degree that it is possible under neoliberalism. For example, the PDI recently introduced a bill to reform the education system in order to provide universal and higher quality education. Sixty-four percent of Colombians live in poverty and the country's distribution of wealth is the second-most unequal in Latin America—after Brazil—and among the worst in the world. This inequality is reflected in Colombia's public education system.
According to UNESCO, children in the two countries with the most unequal distribution of wealth in South America—Brazil and Colombia—receive the fewest years of education in the region. Colombian children receive an average of 5.3 years of schooling, less than their counterparts in Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Guyana and Bolivia. Colombia also ranks second lowest among the South American nations with regard to percentage of children enrolled in pre-school (33 percent) and secondary school (57 percent).
In an attempt to address the problem of inadequate access to education for Colombia's poor, the PDI's education reform bill proposes:
● the creation of positions for 1,602,648 new students in the next five years.
● that the government provide support to mothers in the poorest strata to reduce substantially the cost of sending children to school. Mothers would receive a monthly sum that would depend on the place of dwelling, the age of the child and the courses to be studied.
● that the Department of Education provide free courses in math and physics at the National University to help teachers achieve academic excellence.
In addition to the PDI's education proposals, Antonio Navarro Wolf, the party's candidate for the May 2006 presidential elections, is also promising to improve the public healthcare system if elected. Navarro Wolf is calling for, among other things, a "50 percent increase in funding for the public health system as well as the construction of a hundred fixed doctor's offices and a hundred mobile doctor's offices to provide basic medical care throughout the country."
Even if the PDI were to prove victorious in both congressional and presidential elections next year it would still have to contend with IMF loan conditionalities. When the IMF approved a $2.1 billion loan to Colombia in January 2003, it stated that Colombian "authorities intend to take the measures needed to ensure public debt sustainability and maintain Colombia's record of servicing its debt. Accordingly, the program calls for … key structural reforms and administrative improvements in the public sector."
The IMF demanded that Colombia reduce its deficit to 2.5 percent of GDP in 2003 and 2.1 percent in 2004. And under a $613 million loan agreement signed in April 2005, the IMF established deficit targets of 2.0 percent for 2005 and 2006. Given the ongoing conflict in Colombia, any future government is unlikely to cut military spending in order to achieve the IMF-imposed deficit goals. Consequently, it is social programs—including education and healthcare—that would continue to bear the brunt of public spending cutbacks in order to make money available to service the country's foreign debt. The IMF is calling on Colombia to reduce its public debt from its current level—52 per cent of GDP—to between 40-45 percent of GDP by 2010.
Navarro Wolf, if elected, would likely follow the Lula route of trying to implement poverty alleviation projects while abiding by IMF demands. The Brazilian government, however, has had only limited success in combating poverty. At the same time, Lula's appeasement of the IMF has turned many of his staunchest supporters into his fiercest critics. During his term in office, President Uribe has worked closely with the IMF and, as a result, has implemented a series of economic reforms that have included the privatization of the country's telecommunications company, Telecom, and the restructuring of the state oil company, Ecopetrol. Clearly, there is little likelihood that the neoliberal paradigm would be seriously challenged regardless of whether Uribe or Navarro Wolf were to prove victorious in May 2006.
According to a September poll that assumed Uribe would run for re-election, almost 70 percent of respondents said they would vote for the current president. Only 1.4 percent supported Navarro Wolf. However, when asked who they would vote for if Uribe is not allowed to run for re-election, the race looked to be much closer with 16.3 percent of respondents choosing long-time Liberal Party member Horacio Serpa, while 14.2 percent supported Enrique Peñalosa, 10.6 percent backed Antanas Mockus and 6.8 percent selected Navarro Wolf.
Like most opinion polls in Colombia, this poll was conducted by telephone with 600 Colombians in the cities of Barranquilla, Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cali and Medellín. Consequently, it mostly reflects the opinions of the country's urban middle and upper classes. While Colombian polls fail to reflect the opinions of all Colombians—many of the urban poor do not have telephones and the opinions of the rural poor are also rarely solicited—this poll likely accurately reflects the attitudes of most Colombian voters. Why? Because Colombia's leftist parties have found it difficult to win national elections due to the strategy implemented by right-wing paramilitaries in the urban barrios and rural regions they control that force citizens to vote for right-wing candidates. Meanwhile, in rebel-controlled regions, the guerrillas often force citizens to abstain from voting, contributing to the country's habitual low voter turnout. In both scenarios, the left vote is thwarted.
Clearly, if Colombia's Constitutional Court allows Uribe to run for re-election, there will be little likelihood of any significant redistributive project being initiated before 2010. If the court prohibits the current president from running, then the PDI has a chance of gaining the presidency and the opportunity to implement its redistributive project. There is, however, still another obstacle to any PDI attempt to implement redistributive policies: congressional opposition.
Following the August approval of the Justice and Peace Law by the Colombian Congress, several demobilized right-wing paramilitary leaders made clear their desire to enter the country's political fray. The paramilitaries already maintain a substantial influence in Congress, as paramilitary leader Vicente Castaño recently told Colombia's Semana magazine:: "I think that we can affirm that we have more than 35 percent of Congress as friends, and for the next elections, we're going to increase that percentage of friends."
In November 2003, the 800-member urban paramilitary force known as the Cacique Nutibara Bloc (BCN) in Medellín officially demobilized. The group's political chief, Givanni Marin, and other former members of the BCN, have formed a political-social organization known as the Democratic Corporation, which operates in the same poor barrios that were controlled by the paramilitaries. Marin has announced his intention to run for Congress in the March 2006 elections.
According to a September 2005 Amnesty International report, however, the November 2003 "demobilization" of the Cacique Nutibara Bloc did not end that group's paramilitary activities in Colombia's second-largest city. The Amnesty International report reveals that two years after their demobilization:
"Paramilitaries continue to operate as a military force, to kill and threaten human rights defenders and local community activists, to recruit and to act jointly with the security forces. However, rather than operating in large, heavily-armed and uniformed groups as they did in the past, they are now increasingly cloaking their activities by posing as members of private security firms or by acting as informants for the security forces."
Another troubling aspect of the demobilization process is the government's recent announcement that some 2,000 ex-paramilitary fighters would be incorporated into the country's police force. Clearly, paramilitary candidates will likely prove victorious in elections held in regions where paramilitary activities continue. Colombian congressman Gustavo Petro, who has denounced paramilitary ties with politicians, fears that demobilized paramilitaries who become elected congressmen would make it even more difficult to address Colombia's grossly unequal distribution of land, because paramilitaries are among the country's largest landowners.
Uribe's re-election would likely result in a continuation of the government's dirty war against civil society groups that are working peacefully for political, social and economic reform in Colombia. In August 2005, the United Nations criticized the Uribe administration for its practice of using arbitrary detentions to target those critical of the government's policies. The director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia, Michael Frühling, announced that his office is "concerned that mass-scale detentions and individual seizures with no juridical basis frequently affect members of vulnerable groups such as human rights advocates, community leaders, trade union activists and people living in areas where illegal armed groups are active."
According to the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared (ASFADDES) reports that 3,593 people were "disappeared" by state security forces during 2002 and 2003, which is more than the total number of Colombians disappeared during the previous seven years. Meanwhile, the human rights group Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), 6,978 people were killed for socio-political reasons during Uribe's first year in office, which amounted to 19 people a day, the same rate as the previous two years. The CCJ determined that paramilitaries were responsible for at least 62 percent of the killings, more than double the amount committed by the guerrillas. Most of the reduction in killings achieved by Uribe's Democratic Security Strategy has resulted from diminished violent crime in the country's cities, not a reduction in political killings.
Uribe's likely re-election, the government's ongoing dirty war, right-wing control of Congress and the IMF's structural adjustment demands make the prospects for the implementation of a redistributive project through democratic means in the near future bleak indeed. But what are the prospects for success for the armed left in Colombia?
Despite repeated attempts by the U.S. and Colombian governments and the mainstream media to portray the rebels as little more than common criminals or terrorists, Colombia's guerrilla groups are still at least partially driven by ideology. This, of course, does not mean that the guerrillas are not responsible for committing human rights abuses against the very people they claim to be fighting for or that they do not profit from the illegal drug trade.
But in regions where the FARC has long maintained control, and where the national government has never had a presence, the rebels function as a de-facto government and have implemented redistributive projects. In recent years, for example, the FARC has broken up almost a dozen large ranches in southern Meta department and redistributed the smaller parcels of land to subsistence farmers. The guerrillas have carried out similar agrarian reform programs in Caquetá, Putumayo and other regions.
The FARC has also implemented a national tax system whereby the income from kidnapping, extortion and the taxation of wealthy landowners and businesses is used to fund military operations. The revenue from taxes imposed on local communities in FARC-controlled regions, however, is turned over to municipal leaders and used to fund local social and economic projects.
Both the FARC and the ELN are highly critical of neoliberalism and, if they were to achieve power, would likely implement more radical policies along the lines of Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. As ELN commander Antonio García has claimed: "Any project that changes society must include the idea that we need an economic model that serves the people and society, not the other way around." Of course, how democratic a rebel government would prove to be is up for debate.
In reality, however, there is little possibility of Colombia's guerrillas seizing power in the near future. At the same time, there is also little chance of the guerrilla insurgency being defeated, despite repeated claims by both the Bush and Uribe administrations that the Colombian military is beating the FARC on the battlefield. In fact, there is ample evidence that official claims of military successes against the FARC are grossly exaggerated. According to a recent report by the Colombian NGO, Fundación Seguridad y la Democracia, guerrilla attacks against military and police targets increased by 69 percent during the first three years of the Uribe government when compared to the same period during the previous administration.
Another sign that Colombia's conflict continues to rage is the ongoing forced displacement of rural communities. The Human Rights and Displacement Consultancy (CODHES), a Colombian human rights organization, reported that 287,581 people were forcibly displaced in 2004—an average of 780 people per day and a 38 percent increase over the previous year. In all, 2.9 million people, or seven per cent of Colombia's population, have been forcibly displaced since 1985, making it the country with the second-largest internally displaced population in the world after the Sudan.
Sadly, there is little hope of Colombia's conflict coming to an end in the near future. As a result, many on the political left will continue to be victims of the government's ongoing dirty war, with little possibility of a revolutionary government coming to power—either democratically or through armed insurrection. Consequently, and tragically for Colombia's poor majority, there is little reason to believe that a far-reaching, nationwide redistributive political project is viable at this time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)