The bed was made in 2005, and it’s still uncomfortable to lie in it

28/09/2010

There are a lot of English expressions I’ve never really understood. I mean, like anyone else I’ll say them, but as the words come out of my mouth I realize how ridiculous and—well, stupid they are. Most of these observations have already been made by way cleverer people, but still…

“You just want to have your cake and eat it too.” –eating the cake you “have” seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, right? As opposed to?

“It always in the last place you look.” –I owe my brother-in-law for this one. Of course it is. Why would you keep looking if you’d already found what you were looking for?

Finally, though, and a little more germane to the topic: “you made your bed, now you have to lie in it.”

It’s the first expression that came to mind when I read this Sunday’s Venezuelan parliamentary election results. The opposition, in its recent incarnation as the MUD (la Mesa de la Unidad Democrática), suffered for having sat out the 2005 elections, and as result found themselves playing a rigged game; because the rules changed with The Suffrage and Political Participation Law Chávez forced through the opposition-less legislature last December, and the MUD has had to live with the consequences.

The reality on Sunday was, as a journalist reminded a furious President Chávez, that regardless of how the popular vote shook out, the seats were already predetermined to disproportionately benefit the PSUV.

And so, despite a difference of barely 100,000 votes, the PSUV won 98 of the 165 seats.

I guess the first expression that really came to mind was “cosechan lo que siembran” (you reap what you sow). But that’s kind of harsh.

The opposition sat out in 2005 to restore democracy, not to weaken it.

But if they had stuck around, and won at least the 64 seats they won this time, they never would have bequeathed the power to change the constitution to el comandante.

And what would that have meant?

No Suffrage and Political Participation Law, which, in the current context, means the PSUV and MUD would be tied at 80 seats each.

So is the glass half full or half empty? It’s kind of hard to say. Aristóbulo Istúriz, a key member of the National Directorate of the PSUV, promised they’ll legislate “till the final day,” and that the opposition should “prepare themselves.” (http://aristobulo.psuv.org.ve/)

A little ominous? Threatening?

The PSUV maintains its majority till January, which means they’ll be eager to make as much use of it as they can.

“I don’t know a country where 98 is less than 64. In no country in the world…We know this campaign that just finished is just the preamble to our commitment for 2012, which is the ratification of Commander Chavez,” he continued.

He has a point.

This is being celebrated as an opposition victory, but it’s a bit early. They’ve really only won back what they lost four years ago, and at the cost of angering a President all too willing to make the most of his slightly weakened grip on power.

So, until the Presidential election in 2012, we’ll call a spade a spade, or call bread, bread, and wine, wine (llamar al pan, pan, y al vino, vino): Señor Chávez and the PSUV will not go gently into the night; 2012 is a long way away—the MUD should be happy to make it to January.

The journalists of Juárez: “What do you want from us?”

22/09/2010

Every profession has its aphorisms which with time and repetition add to an ever-expanding list of clichés; the obscure become a type of shibboleth or test—like a secret handshake that proves membership in an exclusive club. The more common are expressed ad nauseum so that the masses can easily identify a raison d’être. Sometimes they even become decrees—or oaths.

Doctors have theirs.

They trace it back to ancient Greece.

When I think of journalists, I don’t have to go back that far.

Around the turn of the 20th century, as Finley Peter Dunne was publishing his Mr. Dooley articles in Chicago, he came up with a variation of this: ‘to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’

Over time it gave muckrakers everywhere a clever reply to everyone’s favorite question: What do you do?

It’s noble, inspirational—almost heroic—and for present-day journalists in Ciudad Juárez, completely unrealistic. I limit the scope to Juárez instead of the state of Chihuahua or even all of Mexico, because the recent actions taken by those at Juárez’s El Diario deserve special attention:

http://www.diario.com.mx/notas.php?f=2010/09/19&id=ce557112f34b187454d7b6d117a76cb5

When Dunne wrote his political satire, he did so knowing he might make some enemies—just not the type of enemies who would prevent him from doing his job. Writing about American politics wasn’t and isn’t something that keeps its practitioners up at night worrying about their safety. And even as many journalists, like soldiers, go into warzones knowing they could lose their lives, they often do so with a sense of perceived neutrality; the danger is in the environment, not in the reaction to what they report.

In Juárez the façade of safety that neutrality offered is long gone, leaving the staff at El Diario to ask in a recent editorial, “What do you want from us?”

The “you” here means the cartels—or “the de facto authorities” as they call them:

“You are, at the moment, the de facto authorities in this city, because the legally-instituted authorities haven’t been able to do anything to stop our colleagues from dying, despite our having reiterated our demands repeatedly.”

The colleagues to which they’re referring are Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco and Armando Rodríguez Carreón. Orozco, a 21 year-old photographer, was shot with one of his friends last Thursday—luckily this friend and colleague, also a photographer, survived. Carreón was murdered in the presence of his wife and nine-year-old child in 2008. Not surprisingly, the case remains open.

The Committee to Protect Journalists recently released a report entitled “Silence or Death in Mexico’s Press”. Their statistics support the title: “More than 30 journalists and media workers have been murdered or have vanished since December 2006. As vast self-censorship takes hold, Mexico's future as a free and democratic society is at risk.”

El Diario stated in their editorial that they aren’t giving up; they’re just no longer willing to see their staff added to La Nota Roja—the section in Mexican dailies that describes recent violent crimes.

A press itself afflicted can do nothing to comfort their fellow citizens in a period of violence that long ago surpassed excessive. I’d contend that the Committee to Protect Journalists has understated the significance of the threat. If the imposed silence is allowed to prevail, Mexico’s “future as a free and democratic society” won’t be at risk, it will have disappeared altogether.

The rallying call of an opposition: “You’re out, Chávez.”

20/09/2010

“Yes we can.” The simple three word slogan that united Barack Obama’s positively youthful and exuberant 2008 Presidential campaign has long since been forgotten in the mean-spirited, ever-partisan American political environment. Many pundits have dismissed the possibility of anything other than massive Democratic losses in the upcoming Midterm elections, and as a result are either rejoicing or resigning themselves to the likely reality of a lame duck President.

Though something similar is going on in Venezuela, a different type of three word slogan has galvanized the youthful opposition there. Unlike Obama’s, this rallying call is angry: “Chávez tás ponchao”, which in baseball-crazy Venezuelan Spanish translates to “you’re out, Chavez”.

Venezuelans also have a penchant for sports metaphors, and the strikeout for which the opposition is waiting could come in the Parliamentary elections later this week.

There is one obvious similarity: just as Obama will remain President after the American Midterm elections, the choices to be made by Venezuelans on the 26th cannot result in Hugh Chávez losing his job. What they can do is make the two years leading up to the next Presidential election a rockier road; they can make fulfilling the goals of his often convoluted Bolivarian revolution substantially more difficult, and most importantly, they can prove it’s possible for him to lose.

Like in the United States, the Representatives who lose their seats in Venezuela may not be losing them for their own political ineptitude; this vote will be a referendum on the Chávez Presidency. And just as merely being a Democrat may be enough for some American politicians to lose their jobs in November, Representatives in Chavez’s PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) could find themselves in the same boat on the 26th.

The main opposition is the Coalition for Democratic Unity (La Mesa de la Unidad Democrática) and they’ve brought together parties as ideologically polarized as Communists and Centre-Right champions of trade liberalization. They have candidates on 98% of the federal candidate lists, and really don’t seem to have given much thought to how they’ll cooperate if they do manage to take back control of the unicameral National Assembly.

The only priority right now is to stop Chávez.

The irony is that they owe this opportunity to wrestle power away from him and the PSUV to Chávez and the PSUV themselves: they sat out on the 2005 Parliamentary elections and the PSUV used their control to pass The Suffrage and Political Participation Law last December. This law made it so that whichever alliance of parties wins 51% of the votes automatically gets 70% of the seats—a consolidation of power tactic that could end up backfiring.

Ismael García, General Secretary of the Podemos Party—formerly an ally of PSUV, now in firm opposition—explained that opposition by saying, “I believe in a Democratic Socialism that attends to the poor and the productive sectors. But what Chávez has imposed on Venezuela is state capitalism where the Government controls everything.”

Control is the word—the theme; because of the myriad issues the Venezuelan elections should be addressing, none can compete with those ominous dictatorial qualities of the regime. This isn’t the stuff of Tea Party rallies—like debates over the efficacy of Keynesian economic policies and public health care. This is way more fundamental than that. These are questions of indefinite reelection and freedom of the press.

The Obama administration doesn’t censor Fox news. On the other hand, Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) was shut down this past January for refusing to air Chávez’s verbose speeches in their entirety, hour after hour.

The Director of RCTV, Marcel Granier, told Washington Post reporter Juan Forero: “Those in the government simply do not tolerate any medium that tells people how things really are.”

Similarly, Globovision has seen its autonomy disappear as a result of its unsavory views of the President-Commander. In July the State estimated it was in control of 48.5% of the network after one shareholder died and another—Nelson Mezerhane—saw his share expropriated because of his ‘fugitive status’ in the country.

Always the thorn in each others’ sides while he was in office, President Uribe at least respected the decision of Colombia’s Supreme Court to prevent him from running for a third term; it took a second referendum for Chávez to win the right to be reelected indefinitely. Whether that really means President-for-life can’t be determined on the26th. The results, however, should go a long way in demonstrating whether there is even a chance it could happen in 2012.

A country on fire

13/09/2010

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a little girl named Marleny Alejandra Galdámez who was decapitated in Ciudad Arce, El Salvador. Her death, while exemplifying the wanton gang violence that’s marginalized all of the country’s other manifold concerns, was nonetheless an aberration; it happened outside the urban chaos of San Salvador; the victim was unequivocally innocent, and Salvadorians who have grown far too accustomed to violence were still taken aback.

In North America we’re loath to admit our apathy towards violence that doesn’t affect us. The 2005 Boxing Day shooting of Jane Creba in Toronto only garnered the attention it did because it forced Torontonians to acknowledge their potential vulnerability. Like in El Salvador, though obviously to a lesser degree, the perception that there is no longer a safe zone gives rise to tremendous anxiety.

But the anxiety Torontonians faced was short lived. Not to say it disappeared—it was just replaced by other more pressing issues, like the Maple Leafs’ playoff hopes. Never, even at their most anxious moments, did people seriously worry about taking the bus.

Salvadorians don’t have that luxury.

As part of my post about Marleny, I included inevitable commentary on the extortion carried about by the maras, making specific reference to public transportation. In the weeks since, and like Marleny’s murder, this once isolated problem has become one of national significance.

In what’s become known as the ‘gang rebellion’, well-known gangs such as Mara 18 and Marasalvatrucha have stopped extorting and started burning buses and businesses.

It wasn’t without provocation: the catalyst was the approval of a piece of legislation that outlaws their existence and penalizes those with whom they collaborate.

It’s easy enough for the government to be tough on crime with their mano dura policies; their lives aren’t the ones being put on hold. And the solution, as it always seems to be, is to add manpower. Defence Minister David Munguía Payés has already announced additional forces—the kneejerk reaction everyone expected. But whether people are comforted by the presence of the military on buses is another question. For many small business owners, the risk isn’t worth the reward.

Because they don’t know when it it’ll end.

For the gangs, the answer to that question is straightforward.

Not unaware of the power of public relations, they’ve used the church as an intermediary to both apologize and state their demands.

Last week a parish priest named Antonio Rodríguez read a message on behalf of the gangs on a local television station. It clarified that “they’re apologizing to the general population for the bus stoppage and for the situation that has arisen” and that “it’s a pressure measure so that the government takes two positions: One that makes room for dialogue between the gangs and the government with some entity or intermediary to solve the violence problem. And two, that the President veto the Gang Outlawing Law, which is a law that falls within the mano dura ideology, and which has caused an increase in the levels of violence.”

The FLMN government has flatly rejected the possibility of negotiating, which means the situation is likely to get a lot worse quickly.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record—draconian responses to violence don’t have good success rates. Mexico has tried and President Calderón’s recent musings about the possibility of legalization attest to how ineffective strong-arm tactics have been there.

The maras already represent the majority of the prison population. Adding to their numbers won’t help.

The fires are burning. The time has come to start thinking logically about how to put them out.

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Faux psychologists in Copiapó?

09/09/2010

Any person who’s ever taken a first year psychology course is probably familiar with the names Kity Genovese and Phineus Gage; the former was supposed to show us how callous and insensitive we can be when we believe others will act, the later gave us insight into how quickly our personalities can change when we traumatize our prefrontal cortex. But more to the point, both were accidental discoveries—the type of events over which researchers reticently salivate— knowing full well their passion for knowledge can easily be misconstrued as schadenfreude.

Economists watch keenly as autocrats drunk on power, wrestle control of the central bank away from the central bankers, usually for their own benefit; epidemiologists gleefully identify cellular mutations in deadly diseases killing the world’s most vulnerable; and psychologists, well they gather on top of a mine in Copiapó, Chile and marvel at each subtle change in the 33 men trapped there.

The scene is brimming with material, figuratively...

There’s Víctor Zamora, who’s been identified as the jokester—sending cards to the surface saying he’s happy to be below so he doesn’t have to wash himself.

There’s President Piñera offering to close the mine and build a shrine, well aware his ratings are said to increase by 10 percent every time the miners show signs of life—and always hopeful, of course, that this future shrine won’t sit on top of a mausoleum.

There’s a religious battle between the Catholics and the Evangelicals—Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz has brought rosaries blessed by the Pope while the Evangelical Minister Carlos Parra has put up with Catholic iconography and Patron saint worship (San Lorenzo) to ensure the men get mini-bibles; the lone Jehovah’s witness seems to have been lost in the mix.

There’s Gustavo Zerbrino—of “Alive” fame—who came to inspire the miners as he did this summer with the Uruguayan team at the World Cup. (I do wonder about the wisdom of sending a man who had to resort to cannibalism to lift the spirits of hungry men inevitably in the company of others weakening by the day.)

But returning again to psychology

Alberto Iturra, the man responsible for coordinating the team of psychologists helping the miners, has been accused of censoring the letters the men are sending to and receiving from their loved ones—a ridiculous accusation he vehemently denies. Why would he censor letters when they’ve been having videoconference calls?

Jéssica Cortés, a wife of one of the miners, has a theory.

Mrs. Cortés has suggested some of these psychologists in Copiapó might not be who they say they are.

“There are a lot of girls up there calling themselves psychologists, but I haven’t seen any identification…”

I didn’t understand what she was implying at first either... Is there a shady psychologist racket in Chile I didn’t know about?

No.

These faux psychologists are supposedly the men’s lovers, meaning that in Copiapó, Chile, psychologist has become a euphemism for a woman who sleeps with a married man. To the best of my knowledge, none of these men are gay…or at least their psychologists aren’t.

But what am I even talking about?

Somewhere along the line I imagined this awful event into an experiment, a soap opera, or combination of the two. Why the miners are there in the first place has become less important than the melodrama their misfortune has spawned.

Unlike a company such as BP, whose mistake has been--though deservedly— universally vilified, in this case it takes a little bit of effort to even find a name: Compania Minera San Esteban Primera, if you’re wondering. It takes a little more effort if you’re curious about their past: they’ve reportedly lost 16 miners in recent years (Reuters), been fined some forty times for safety violations, and were allowed to reopen this particular mine when they shouldn’t have.

President Piñera—to no-one’s surprise, sacked Alejandro Vio, the top mining regulator in Chile, but will his successor be as closely monitored when the spotlight leaves Copiapo?

I doubt it.

When the circus ends, most people forget.

It was over a month ago that the President promised “profound restructuring” of Sernageomin—the National Mining and Geology Service, but that might just have meant replacing Vio.

Lately there’s been greater focus on whether or not Health Minister Jamie Mañlich did or didn’t promise to get the men wine for the Bicentenary on September 18th.

The men might need it. When they get back to the surface, their shady employer will still be safe, their secrets may not be.