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.
-
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.
-
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.
Decapitated six-year-olds and overexposure to ‘cop dramas’
20/08/2010
Even if—like me, you live in North America and only have basic cable, the chances are pretty good you’ll find what can broadly be described as a ‘cop drama’ any night of the week. Off the top of my head: Bones, Law & Order (three of them?), Cold Case, Dexter, Criminal Minds, CSI (three of them?), Flashpoint, the Mentalist, NCIS, Southland, then of course there’s the non-fiction of COPS and America’s Most Wanted—and popular shows that went off the air fairly recently—the Shield, the Wire.
What is the North American obsession?
I’m sure there are psychological and sociological studies offering a plethora of explanations, but a comment my sister made the other night was enough to get me thinking.
I don’t remember what we were watching, but when it started to get fairly gruesome, she said: “Now that I have kids, I can’t watch these shows anymore.”
And I thought—really? This is pretty tame—even by primetime standards.
I started to wonder if I’d become so desensitized to the violence (I hate even having to write that) that I no longer appreciated how gruesome it all was.
Stab—yawn, blood—yawn, boring. But just when I was worried I was turning into Patrick Bateman, I read about Marleny Alejandra Galdámez and wanted to vomit.
Last week in Ciudad Arce, El Salvador, six-year-old Marleny was on her way to school when she was kidnapped by a group of men, tortured, decapitated, and dumped 500 metres from her house.
(http://www.elsalvador.com/mediacenter/show_gallery.aspx?idr=4332)
According to her mother, the motive was extortion: $US50—El Salvador having dollarized in 2001, the gangs or maras now extort exclusively in greenback.
In San Salvador, where in many neighborhoods extortion is commonplace for those doing something as innocuous as trying to take the bus, the nauseating details of the crime might not have provoked the same collective nausea—but this didn’t happen in the gratuitously violent capital—it happened in the Salvadorian version of the small town.
There’s a reason these cop dramas take place in Los Angeles and New York as opposed to Irvine or Binghamton.
“We haven’t marked this off as a gang area, but it appears gangs foreign to the area have appeared in the past few days,” said Jaime Granados Umaña, police chief in the zone known as La Libertad, the zone in which Ciudad Arce is located.
Even in a country as violent as El Salvador, which often has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America, many still find solace in the belief there are pockets of relative safety. Marleny’s death has done a great deal to undermine that fragile optimism.
The Archbishop of San Salvador’s recent lament will surely draw some attention, and the Catholic Church—for all its faults—has experienced its own significant losses in its attempt to better the country: the murders in the 80s of the Maryknoll missionary nuns and Óscar Romero are the first who come to mind, though there are obviously more recent examples.
In this case, however, the Archbishop’s statement will only pressure the government into more ineffectual policy.
El Salvador, like President Calderón’s government in Mexico, is at its wit’s end. And as Salvadorians have learned, and as Mexicans surely will should they choose to return the PRI to power, new government won’t change tired solutions. When Antonio Saca and his right-wing ARENA party threw money and bodies at the problem, nothing improved; now current President Maurico Funes of the leftwing FMLN is using 1/3 of the army to support police efforts; the greatest achievement they can boast so far is a decrease in the July murder daily murder rate from 11 to 9.
The country only has 6 million people.
I have no policy suggestion of my own, and I don’t intend to proselytize, but I do know we’ve seen enough examples of violence begetting more violence through ‘crackdowns’ to know that bloody retribution won’t prevent another Marleny from a form of savagery that, tragically, is now deeply engrained.
I’ll come home from work, tired, watch any one of the shows I mentioned and continue to dismiss primetime’s murders as unrealistic. Having found his beautiful little girl in pieces, Marleny’s father might argue the only implausible part is the location.
Even if—like me, you live in North America and only have basic cable, the chances are pretty good you’ll find what can broadly be described as a ‘cop drama’ any night of the week. Off the top of my head: Bones, Law & Order (three of them?), Cold Case, Dexter, Criminal Minds, CSI (three of them?), Flashpoint, the Mentalist, NCIS, Southland, then of course there’s the non-fiction of COPS and America’s Most Wanted—and popular shows that went off the air fairly recently—the Shield, the Wire.
What is the North American obsession?
I’m sure there are psychological and sociological studies offering a plethora of explanations, but a comment my sister made the other night was enough to get me thinking.
I don’t remember what we were watching, but when it started to get fairly gruesome, she said: “Now that I have kids, I can’t watch these shows anymore.”
And I thought—really? This is pretty tame—even by primetime standards.
I started to wonder if I’d become so desensitized to the violence (I hate even having to write that) that I no longer appreciated how gruesome it all was.
Stab—yawn, blood—yawn, boring. But just when I was worried I was turning into Patrick Bateman, I read about Marleny Alejandra Galdámez and wanted to vomit.
Last week in Ciudad Arce, El Salvador, six-year-old Marleny was on her way to school when she was kidnapped by a group of men, tortured, decapitated, and dumped 500 metres from her house.
(http://www.elsalvador.com/mediacenter/show_gallery.aspx?idr=4332)
According to her mother, the motive was extortion: $US50—El Salvador having dollarized in 2001, the gangs or maras now extort exclusively in greenback.
In San Salvador, where in many neighborhoods extortion is commonplace for those doing something as innocuous as trying to take the bus, the nauseating details of the crime might not have provoked the same collective nausea—but this didn’t happen in the gratuitously violent capital—it happened in the Salvadorian version of the small town.
There’s a reason these cop dramas take place in Los Angeles and New York as opposed to Irvine or Binghamton.
“We haven’t marked this off as a gang area, but it appears gangs foreign to the area have appeared in the past few days,” said Jaime Granados Umaña, police chief in the zone known as La Libertad, the zone in which Ciudad Arce is located.
Even in a country as violent as El Salvador, which often has one of the highest homicide rates in Latin America, many still find solace in the belief there are pockets of relative safety. Marleny’s death has done a great deal to undermine that fragile optimism.
The Archbishop of San Salvador’s recent lament will surely draw some attention, and the Catholic Church—for all its faults—has experienced its own significant losses in its attempt to better the country: the murders in the 80s of the Maryknoll missionary nuns and Óscar Romero are the first who come to mind, though there are obviously more recent examples.
In this case, however, the Archbishop’s statement will only pressure the government into more ineffectual policy.
El Salvador, like President Calderón’s government in Mexico, is at its wit’s end. And as Salvadorians have learned, and as Mexicans surely will should they choose to return the PRI to power, new government won’t change tired solutions. When Antonio Saca and his right-wing ARENA party threw money and bodies at the problem, nothing improved; now current President Maurico Funes of the leftwing FMLN is using 1/3 of the army to support police efforts; the greatest achievement they can boast so far is a decrease in the July murder daily murder rate from 11 to 9.
The country only has 6 million people.
I have no policy suggestion of my own, and I don’t intend to proselytize, but I do know we’ve seen enough examples of violence begetting more violence through ‘crackdowns’ to know that bloody retribution won’t prevent another Marleny from a form of savagery that, tragically, is now deeply engrained.
I’ll come home from work, tired, watch any one of the shows I mentioned and continue to dismiss primetime’s murders as unrealistic. Having found his beautiful little girl in pieces, Marleny’s father might argue the only implausible part is the location.
What’s a potosí worth?
13/08/2010
There is fairly ubiquitous Spanish expression used when there’s a need to describe something of great value; it’s said that something is worth a “potosí”. Unlike many other sayings of which the origins remain unknown or debated, in this particular case the etymology is straightforward: tons of silver were once extracted for the Spanish monarchy from its mines, and today foreign companies fill the void.
That the expression isn’t in any way ironic or tongue-in-cheek reveals how little the human cost of this extraction was and is acknowledged, because today to say something is worth a “potosí” would more appropriately be used when describing the complete opposite.
The southwestern department is Bolivia’s poorest. Four out of ten children suffer from malnutrition, infant mortality is at a rate of 101 per thousand births, and the streets of the capital of the same name are filled with Potosians in line for basic provisions. But whereas history has had them begrudgingly accept their subjugation and exploitation, their patience has finally worn out—making the Aymara man in whom they found a sense of hope for indigenous solidarity, now just another disappointment.
Evo Morales’ election in 2005 was argued by some to be the first time an indigenous person was fairly elected as the leader of a Latin American country. Though the veracity of this claim was also disputed by many as a form of populist manipulation, its accuracy is less relevant when you compare Morales to his fellow leaders in the region: a coca growers union leader, a man who didn’t graduate from high school, a bachelor who eschews traditional presidential attire, his features that remind the world Bolivia was and still is a predominantly indigenous country, and most significantly— his promises to create a more equitable situation for that majority.
He kept these promises with his 2009 referendum victory, which among many other changes allowed 36 indigenous groups the right to claim territory, language rights, a form of community justice, and limit the size of landholdings.
It was predictably rejected by the eastern departments (Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon) in which the high concentration of white and mestizo populations have virulently opposed any encroachment on their autonomy—essentially a combination of sharing their massive reserves of natural gas and an inherited superiority complex. If you want to see an example of the latter, I suggest watching a documentary called “Bolivian Voices”. Though it’s been a while since I last saw it, I still vividly remember a white Bolivian hurling racist epithets at Evo in Santa Cruz. This was prior to his election—making subsequent unrest there an obvious development.
That this current crisis would unfold in one of the western departments, and one as historically symbolic as Potosí, has to be disheartening for Morales and his MAS (Movimiento Al Socialismo) party. Access to the city of Potosí has been blocked and many—including Governor Felix Gonzalez, himself a member of MAS— are carrying out public hunger strikes, all in order to force the government to respond to their six demands.
These demands include resolving a border dispute with the neighboring Oruro department over land rich in limestone, connected to which is a demand for a cement factory, the preservation of the Cerro Rico—which mining activity has destroyed, the construction of a multiple metals mining complex in Karachipampa, and an international airport.
In other words, they want investment in the region.
Just yesterday, mining companies Glencore International AG and Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp. suspended operations, which in addition to Sumitomo Corp. closing the world’s third largest silver mine at San Cristobal, has put Morales in unfamiliar territory. At the moment President Morales is aloof and his Minister of Autonomy, Carlos Romero, is trying to explain the government’s predicament: “if someone summons you and awaits your arrival with a club, there aren’t conditions for dialogue.”
As a department that’s been exploited for centuries awaits resolution to a conflict with one of their own, they do so with the sadness typical of internecine disputes. Poor, indigenous Bolivians elected a man who stood with them in opposition to the privatization and resulting privation of their water supply, who marched with them in the 2005 gas conflict, who won them revolutionary, constitutionally enshrined rights, but who when given the opportunity to lead them, has shown that populism is no panacea; because when it’s used to inspire, the corresponding expectations can all too easily turn into burdens, with locals constantly reminded that a “potosí” doesn’t seem to be worth all that much these days.
There is fairly ubiquitous Spanish expression used when there’s a need to describe something of great value; it’s said that something is worth a “potosí”. Unlike many other sayings of which the origins remain unknown or debated, in this particular case the etymology is straightforward: tons of silver were once extracted for the Spanish monarchy from its mines, and today foreign companies fill the void.
That the expression isn’t in any way ironic or tongue-in-cheek reveals how little the human cost of this extraction was and is acknowledged, because today to say something is worth a “potosí” would more appropriately be used when describing the complete opposite.
The southwestern department is Bolivia’s poorest. Four out of ten children suffer from malnutrition, infant mortality is at a rate of 101 per thousand births, and the streets of the capital of the same name are filled with Potosians in line for basic provisions. But whereas history has had them begrudgingly accept their subjugation and exploitation, their patience has finally worn out—making the Aymara man in whom they found a sense of hope for indigenous solidarity, now just another disappointment.
Evo Morales’ election in 2005 was argued by some to be the first time an indigenous person was fairly elected as the leader of a Latin American country. Though the veracity of this claim was also disputed by many as a form of populist manipulation, its accuracy is less relevant when you compare Morales to his fellow leaders in the region: a coca growers union leader, a man who didn’t graduate from high school, a bachelor who eschews traditional presidential attire, his features that remind the world Bolivia was and still is a predominantly indigenous country, and most significantly— his promises to create a more equitable situation for that majority.
He kept these promises with his 2009 referendum victory, which among many other changes allowed 36 indigenous groups the right to claim territory, language rights, a form of community justice, and limit the size of landholdings.
It was predictably rejected by the eastern departments (Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz, Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon) in which the high concentration of white and mestizo populations have virulently opposed any encroachment on their autonomy—essentially a combination of sharing their massive reserves of natural gas and an inherited superiority complex. If you want to see an example of the latter, I suggest watching a documentary called “Bolivian Voices”. Though it’s been a while since I last saw it, I still vividly remember a white Bolivian hurling racist epithets at Evo in Santa Cruz. This was prior to his election—making subsequent unrest there an obvious development.
That this current crisis would unfold in one of the western departments, and one as historically symbolic as Potosí, has to be disheartening for Morales and his MAS (Movimiento Al Socialismo) party. Access to the city of Potosí has been blocked and many—including Governor Felix Gonzalez, himself a member of MAS— are carrying out public hunger strikes, all in order to force the government to respond to their six demands.
These demands include resolving a border dispute with the neighboring Oruro department over land rich in limestone, connected to which is a demand for a cement factory, the preservation of the Cerro Rico—which mining activity has destroyed, the construction of a multiple metals mining complex in Karachipampa, and an international airport.
In other words, they want investment in the region.
Just yesterday, mining companies Glencore International AG and Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp. suspended operations, which in addition to Sumitomo Corp. closing the world’s third largest silver mine at San Cristobal, has put Morales in unfamiliar territory. At the moment President Morales is aloof and his Minister of Autonomy, Carlos Romero, is trying to explain the government’s predicament: “if someone summons you and awaits your arrival with a club, there aren’t conditions for dialogue.”
As a department that’s been exploited for centuries awaits resolution to a conflict with one of their own, they do so with the sadness typical of internecine disputes. Poor, indigenous Bolivians elected a man who stood with them in opposition to the privatization and resulting privation of their water supply, who marched with them in the 2005 gas conflict, who won them revolutionary, constitutionally enshrined rights, but who when given the opportunity to lead them, has shown that populism is no panacea; because when it’s used to inspire, the corresponding expectations can all too easily turn into burdens, with locals constantly reminded that a “potosí” doesn’t seem to be worth all that much these days.
Cuba’s Bobby Sands
09/08/2010
Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
Nobody goes to Belfast for the weather.
When I had the good fortune to get there a few years back with my sister and her husband, we all acknowledged the morbid curiosity that brought us to Northern Ireland’s volatile capital. That conspicuous hatred and division, which we were led to believe disappeared after American envoy George Mitchell helped broker the Good Friday Agreement, was manifest everywhere.
That we equate a lack of media coverage with improvement is nothing new; and nowhere is this currently greater evidenced than in Haiti. Even apolitical Haitians are apparently singing Wyclef songs on the streets of Port-Au-Prince in anticipation, not of the prodigal son rescuing them from the ineffective government of René Préval, but of refocusing our ephemeral attention span on their plight in a way sometimes only celebrity can; they’ve learned the hard way that our well-intentioned promises are often forgotten when the cameras shut off.
Returning for a moment to Belfast—of the many memories still fresh in my mind, the mural of Bobby Sands remains one of the most poignant—not as a piece of art, but because his now widely cited words seemed to mean more there in the environment in which they were inspired. Michael Fassbender’s portrayal in Steve McQueen’s Hunger has since not only made seeing the mural less essential, but added the gory details and removed any romantic notion of what it’s actually like to starve yourself to death.
But while Bobby Sands has been immortalized through art, Orlando Zapata has yet to become a household name like his Irish predecessor. In my opinion, Zapata’s death in February got very little attention. Aside from brief mentions in the mainstream media, there was hardly any polemic aside from the always vocal Cuban Diaspora and—obviously—Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Of course it was universally denounced, but politicians everywhere will only go as far their constituents demand, and outside of Florida those demands appeared to be few and far between.
There are some who argue the international pressure Zapata’s death inspired directly resulted in the release of other political prisoners—notably those from the Group of 75 unjustly imprisoned in 2003; that argument, though, as Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out in his July 25 column in El País—is quite the spin.
Should we really be celebrating as progress the release of men whose crimes were signing petitions and owning typewriters?
I do think Llosa went a bit far in describing President Zapatero’s abandonment of the E.U. Common Position on Cuba as a political ruse to remind their Spanish supporters the PSOE is more than just nominally socialist, but at the same time, playing good cop with the Castro brothers right now is analogous to pardoning a bank robber who gives back some of the stolen money.
It’s a moot point that Zapata sacrificed his life for his fellow prisoners, but I can’t imagine he’d see increased releases as anything more than an extremely minor victory, or as the leader of Havana’s Damas de Blanco (White Ladies) (Cuba’s version of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) Laura Pollán put it, ‘a little light’.
We all know how eagerly Fidel’s death is anticipated, and of the 638 Ways to Kill Castro, many are still incredulous it could be natural causes that finally do him in. Some see the day that happens as the day Cuba will finally stop seeing Batista era cacharros on its roads; though if his return to the National Assembly this week is any indication, that day might not be as soon as previously thought.
Nonetheless, whenever that inevitable event does occur, would it not be wiser to be in the position to definitively put Cuban communism out of its misery and release the long-repressed Cuban ingenuity ready to explode for their and the world’s benefit? Or do we appease a dying regime, reward their half-hearted benevolence and allow Zapata to become the next Pedro Luis Boitel?—a man perhaps more deserving of the title of Cuba’s Bobby Sands. Remembered by some, but forgotten by most.
Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
Nobody goes to Belfast for the weather.
When I had the good fortune to get there a few years back with my sister and her husband, we all acknowledged the morbid curiosity that brought us to Northern Ireland’s volatile capital. That conspicuous hatred and division, which we were led to believe disappeared after American envoy George Mitchell helped broker the Good Friday Agreement, was manifest everywhere.
That we equate a lack of media coverage with improvement is nothing new; and nowhere is this currently greater evidenced than in Haiti. Even apolitical Haitians are apparently singing Wyclef songs on the streets of Port-Au-Prince in anticipation, not of the prodigal son rescuing them from the ineffective government of René Préval, but of refocusing our ephemeral attention span on their plight in a way sometimes only celebrity can; they’ve learned the hard way that our well-intentioned promises are often forgotten when the cameras shut off.
Returning for a moment to Belfast—of the many memories still fresh in my mind, the mural of Bobby Sands remains one of the most poignant—not as a piece of art, but because his now widely cited words seemed to mean more there in the environment in which they were inspired. Michael Fassbender’s portrayal in Steve McQueen’s Hunger has since not only made seeing the mural less essential, but added the gory details and removed any romantic notion of what it’s actually like to starve yourself to death.
But while Bobby Sands has been immortalized through art, Orlando Zapata has yet to become a household name like his Irish predecessor. In my opinion, Zapata’s death in February got very little attention. Aside from brief mentions in the mainstream media, there was hardly any polemic aside from the always vocal Cuban Diaspora and—obviously—Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Of course it was universally denounced, but politicians everywhere will only go as far their constituents demand, and outside of Florida those demands appeared to be few and far between.
There are some who argue the international pressure Zapata’s death inspired directly resulted in the release of other political prisoners—notably those from the Group of 75 unjustly imprisoned in 2003; that argument, though, as Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out in his July 25 column in El País—is quite the spin.
Should we really be celebrating as progress the release of men whose crimes were signing petitions and owning typewriters?
I do think Llosa went a bit far in describing President Zapatero’s abandonment of the E.U. Common Position on Cuba as a political ruse to remind their Spanish supporters the PSOE is more than just nominally socialist, but at the same time, playing good cop with the Castro brothers right now is analogous to pardoning a bank robber who gives back some of the stolen money.
It’s a moot point that Zapata sacrificed his life for his fellow prisoners, but I can’t imagine he’d see increased releases as anything more than an extremely minor victory, or as the leader of Havana’s Damas de Blanco (White Ladies) (Cuba’s version of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo) Laura Pollán put it, ‘a little light’.
We all know how eagerly Fidel’s death is anticipated, and of the 638 Ways to Kill Castro, many are still incredulous it could be natural causes that finally do him in. Some see the day that happens as the day Cuba will finally stop seeing Batista era cacharros on its roads; though if his return to the National Assembly this week is any indication, that day might not be as soon as previously thought.
Nonetheless, whenever that inevitable event does occur, would it not be wiser to be in the position to definitively put Cuban communism out of its misery and release the long-repressed Cuban ingenuity ready to explode for their and the world’s benefit? Or do we appease a dying regime, reward their half-hearted benevolence and allow Zapata to become the next Pedro Luis Boitel?—a man perhaps more deserving of the title of Cuba’s Bobby Sands. Remembered by some, but forgotten by most.
The United States as a champion of labor rights in Guatemala?
03/08/2010
This past July 22 I was given the opportunity to see United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk speak before a small but influential audience at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. I, like many others in the audience, expected innocuous statements about increased regulatory cooperation and a ‘fair and ambitious conclusion of the Doha Round.’ To be sure there were the obvious diplomatic exigencies, but his selective criticism of China was nonetheless surprising.
It wasn’t that currency manipulation harangue currently fashionable in Washington, but concern that the American humanitarian approach to trade in Africa (African Growth and Opportunity Act) is being overshadowed by an amoral, conscious-less Chinese resource grab. Though Kirk’s observation was accurate, there was a slight hint of sanctimony—if only because the history of American foreign policy obliges a massive grain of salt when it comes to altruism.
But while it might be easier to let sanctimony slide when it comes to Africa, Kirk’s announcement on Friday that the Administration “is filing a case against Guatemala under the US-Central America Free Trade Agreement for its failure to enforce its labor laws” is a little too much swallow.
I actually spit out my coffee.
I tried to rationalize it, especially since the event I had in mind took place before the current leaders were even born, but I couldn’t shake my frustration. Someone must be compelled to have at least a little sense of history.
Eduardo Galeano once called Guatemala “the key to Latin America,” and from the standpoint of 20th century Latin American history, the CIA coup of 1954 was the watershed moment for overt American involvement in the region. The expropriation of unused land belonging to the United Fruit Company, for whom Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, had been lawyers, led directly to the end of the freely and fairly elected Presidency of Jacobo Arbenz and the subsequent deaths of up to 200,000 people. This, like the Bay of Pigs, isn’t disputed, so to go into further detail would be redundant.
Suffice it to say it’s pretty laughable to think that a country upon which the United States singlehandedly bestowed decade after decade of civil war is now being chosen as the first to reap the rewards of a new enlightened American trade policy—this being the first time the United States has pursued a free-trade partner for labor violations.
As Ambassador Kirk said, “With this case, we are sending a strong message that our trading partners must protect their own workers...”
A noble cause, no doubt. But let’s call a spade a spade.
Though the well-being of Guatemalan workers is the ostensible reason for the financial penalties that may be imposed, the truth is the Obama administration is kowtowing to the anti-free trade unions to which they’re beholden—it being an election year and all; in this case, it’s the AFL.-CIO.
There are labor violations in Guatemala? They’re discovering this now? What about the other sixteen countries with which the U.S. has FTAs? Will they now be subject to the new stringent American trading regime? Or will that only happen if they can make cheaper t-shirts?
If strengthening respect for the rule of law and the treatment of workers is really the goal, the United States should do everything it can to contribute to the success of the fragile International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Punishing Guatemalan exporters won’t help workers who, once they lose their jobs, will be forced to return to the informal economy and a daily struggle against criminals they know will never be punished.
The recent resignation of Carlos Castresana as the director of the CICIG due to links between Attorney General Conrado Reyes and organized crime, and the subsequent removal of Reyes, has left a gaping hole in the Guatemalan judicial system. If the Americans truly want to help, they’ll do it by helping repair the legacy of their intervention, not by pretending their protectionism is genuine concern.
This past July 22 I was given the opportunity to see United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk speak before a small but influential audience at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. I, like many others in the audience, expected innocuous statements about increased regulatory cooperation and a ‘fair and ambitious conclusion of the Doha Round.’ To be sure there were the obvious diplomatic exigencies, but his selective criticism of China was nonetheless surprising.
It wasn’t that currency manipulation harangue currently fashionable in Washington, but concern that the American humanitarian approach to trade in Africa (African Growth and Opportunity Act) is being overshadowed by an amoral, conscious-less Chinese resource grab. Though Kirk’s observation was accurate, there was a slight hint of sanctimony—if only because the history of American foreign policy obliges a massive grain of salt when it comes to altruism.
But while it might be easier to let sanctimony slide when it comes to Africa, Kirk’s announcement on Friday that the Administration “is filing a case against Guatemala under the US-Central America Free Trade Agreement for its failure to enforce its labor laws” is a little too much swallow.
I actually spit out my coffee.
I tried to rationalize it, especially since the event I had in mind took place before the current leaders were even born, but I couldn’t shake my frustration. Someone must be compelled to have at least a little sense of history.
Eduardo Galeano once called Guatemala “the key to Latin America,” and from the standpoint of 20th century Latin American history, the CIA coup of 1954 was the watershed moment for overt American involvement in the region. The expropriation of unused land belonging to the United Fruit Company, for whom Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, had been lawyers, led directly to the end of the freely and fairly elected Presidency of Jacobo Arbenz and the subsequent deaths of up to 200,000 people. This, like the Bay of Pigs, isn’t disputed, so to go into further detail would be redundant.
Suffice it to say it’s pretty laughable to think that a country upon which the United States singlehandedly bestowed decade after decade of civil war is now being chosen as the first to reap the rewards of a new enlightened American trade policy—this being the first time the United States has pursued a free-trade partner for labor violations.
As Ambassador Kirk said, “With this case, we are sending a strong message that our trading partners must protect their own workers...”
A noble cause, no doubt. But let’s call a spade a spade.
Though the well-being of Guatemalan workers is the ostensible reason for the financial penalties that may be imposed, the truth is the Obama administration is kowtowing to the anti-free trade unions to which they’re beholden—it being an election year and all; in this case, it’s the AFL.-CIO.
There are labor violations in Guatemala? They’re discovering this now? What about the other sixteen countries with which the U.S. has FTAs? Will they now be subject to the new stringent American trading regime? Or will that only happen if they can make cheaper t-shirts?
If strengthening respect for the rule of law and the treatment of workers is really the goal, the United States should do everything it can to contribute to the success of the fragile International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Punishing Guatemalan exporters won’t help workers who, once they lose their jobs, will be forced to return to the informal economy and a daily struggle against criminals they know will never be punished.
The recent resignation of Carlos Castresana as the director of the CICIG due to links between Attorney General Conrado Reyes and organized crime, and the subsequent removal of Reyes, has left a gaping hole in the Guatemalan judicial system. If the Americans truly want to help, they’ll do it by helping repair the legacy of their intervention, not by pretending their protectionism is genuine concern.
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