Beautiful Horizons

Views on Spain's New Government's Relations with Latin America

Andrés Oppenheimer reviews what the future may hold for Spain's policy towards Latin America:

Judging from what I'm hearing from several Madrid insiders, we may see less aggressive personal attacks on Cuba's dictator Fidel Castro -- especially if Rodríguez Zapatero forges a de facto coalition in Congress with the hard-line United Left Party -- but without lessening Spain's demands for human rights and democracy on the island.

Former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González, the Socialist Party's elder statesman, told me in an interview last year that Castro ''is pathetic.'' It's unlikely that Rodríguez Zapatero feels any different.

On Venezuela, there will be ''observation, distance and support for democracy,'' one well-placed Spanish source tells me.

With Brazil and Argentina, Spain actually may be more supportive of their demands on foreign debt and agricultural subsidies. But Rodríguez Zapatero is unlikely to have the clout to change the 15-country European Union's policies on these issues, at least for now.

On Colombia, Rodríguez Zapatero may distance himself more from President Alvaro Uribe, whom many Socialist Party legislators see as too tolerant of right-wing paramilitary human rights abuses. But few expect a serious diplomatic rift with Colombia.

Sounds good to me as they largely echo my own positions in these areas. Vamos a ver.

Oscar Arias on Disarming Haiti

Oscar Arias, one of the most deserving Nobel Peace Prize winners and former president of Costa Rica had an op-ed piece in yesterday's Washington Post that spoke to some of the issues I raised previously concerning President Aristide's demobilization of Haiti's army in 1995. His article demonstrates an all too common problem in poor countries that have large militaries:

Like so many countries in the Third World, Haiti has suffered not only from a lack of national security in the sense of borders and territorial integrity but also from an ongoing crisis of human security, the right of each person to live in peace and with the guarantee of basic rights such as food, health care, education and citizenship. The army, long an instrument of suppressive authoritarian regimes, has historically deprived Haitians of these fundamental rights.

Isolated and destitute, Haitians have been terrorized by military violence and its accompanying legacy of poverty. In the late 1980s, the army consumed about 40 percent of the national budget, even as hunger and AIDS wracked the population. Haiti had one soldier for every 1,000 citizens, and 1.5 doctors for every 10,000. [my emphasis]

So, as I stated before, in addition to being weapons of repression against their own citizens, the military in Latin America in many countries with less than democratic traditions have also been a source of wasteful spending. Arias has the good fortune of being a citizen of a country that abolished its military nearly sixty years ago and whose citizens probably enjoy the best quality of life in Central America.

Arturo Valenzuela on Haiti and Democracy

Arturo Valenzuela, the co-author of A Nation of Enemies, what may be the most judicious book on Pinochet-era Chile, has an article on Salon (subscription required or you have to watch an ad) addresses and shares some of the concerns I've had about the Bush administration's flaccid response to events in Haiti:

Why Reform Efforts Are Still Failing

I selected several categories for this post in large part, because this address by Alan Stoga, the President of Zemi Communications, given at the recent Americas Conference is very much on point and on target. It's too long and there are too many key points to mention that I won't excerpt any of it. I really urge you to read it.

While you're reading it, I'll go off in a corner somewhere and deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting from the fact that Stoga was managing director of Kissinger Associates from 1984 to 1996 and is still a Director and consultant to the firm . . .

More on Latin American Populism

What really struck me about the piece I quoted from Ariel Dorfman was how unusual that sort of sentiment is in Latin American politics: the idea that in order to effect change, you have to respect the concerns of those who may be opposed to this change and not seek to marginalize those with whom you have disagreements.

For decades in Latin America, when movements of the right have sought to implement their ideas, all too often they have marginalized the poor. When movements of the left have sought to implement their ideas, all too often they have alienated the upper middle class and rich. What all too often has resulted is an even more polarized society, especially when you factor in institutionalized racism and misguided attempts to change centuries old practices that impact the most desperately poor members of society.

A good case in point is what is taking place now in Venezuela. Last January I saw Hugo Chávez on Brazilian television and he made one excellent point: Venezuela is a nation rich in natural resources, with hectare upon hectare of fertile farmland. Why then is there such poverty in Venezuela? Why, as Julio Borges, stated in this documentary on PBS in April,

[Show reporter Juan] Forero meets with Julio Borges, a critic of Chavez. He says there has been an astonishing social shift in the last 20 years, pointing out that in 1983, the country was 75 percent middle class and 25 percent in poverty. Now these numbers are reversed.

This change, Borges says, made Chavez's rise to power predictable, if not inevitable. "Chavez is a symptom of the sickness that Venezuela has ... not the illness itself," Borges explains. The illness he's referring to is Venezuela's over-reliance on cheap and abundant oil.

There is no question that change needs to come. The change has to be such that it considers the needs of as many as possible and doesn't make for a more divided society. When the opposition sought to oust Chávez in April 2002 through the abortive coup and earlier this year through the strike, they were wrong from a moral and legal standpoint and they played into his hands. Chávez knew that he had a golden opportunity to mobilize his hard core supporters and portray himself as the victim while characterizing the opposition as coupmongers. When cooler heads prevailed and the opposition decided to use constitutional methods to replace Chávez, Chávez then started resorting to hysteria: he has accused the Dominican Republic of harboring coup plotters against his rule, apparently based on the fact that former Venezuelan president, Carlos Andres Perez (a vile and corrupt figure to be sure, but 81 years old and infirm), he has accused the CIA of plotting against him (something that wouldn't necessarily surprise me, but given the Bush administration's tacit acceptance of last year's coup, highly unlikely especially given the embarrassment potential after the Department of State spoke out in favor of the Inter-American Democratic Charter as well this action earlier this year), has subtly threatened those who sign recall petitions and in his latest Captain Queeg-like pronouncement - again with out any evidence to back up his claim - has accused Costa Rica, a nation whose hallmark is minding its own business, of supporting a coup plot against him.

So, stripping away the bombast and the posturing, is Venezuela becoming a better country because of the reckless populism of Chávez? Would it not have been better for Chávez to have considered the concerns of all levels of Venezuelan society and at least made an attempt to appeal to the enlightened self-interest of the elite? Would it not have been more likely to have accomplished something in this fashion, possibly making some unexpected alliances as opposed to running roughshod over those who feared you from the start confirming their worst suspicions? In case you have any doubts, you need look no further than Lula.

Populism in Latin America

In this post, Jeanne D'Arc makes reference to an editorial in the New York Times about the recent revolts in Bolivia. While she found it a little smug, I do think that it raises some good points about populism in Latin America and the failure of populist movements there.

The issue of keeping the natural gas in Bolivia to be used by Bolivians, is frankly, mystifying to me as a gringo [gringo, by the way, is not considered an insult in Latin America], but certainly is understandable given Bolivia's history. If you want a good primer as to the history of Bolivia's exploitation, you can do no better than We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines by June Nash. The fears of the Bolivians, especially the indigenous Bolivians are legitimate: the disastrous attempt to privatize water in Cochabamba and the horrific price increases that resulted is just one example of how globalization has impacted Bolivia's poorest. The coca eradication effort, sponsored by the USA because some Americans just can't resist putting white powder up their nose, and thus a crop that indigenous Bolivians raise (and have raised for years) in a difficult climate with ease is to be replaced by hearts of palm and pineapples, also serves to fuel resentment and contempt against the USA.

But as Mark Twain once said, "We should be careful to get out of an experience all the wisdom that is in it -- not like the cat that sits on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." Simply because a privatization effort has been put together sloppily or greedily, doesn't mean that all efforts to privatize or to develop resources are inherently bad. What it takes is skilled leadership, that considers and involves all affected parties and recruits input from as many points of view. That being said, this is exceedingly rare, and while I sympathize with the poor in Bolivia and feel rage, anger and frustration at their continued poverty and hopelessness, I cannot accept the notion that continued unrest and delivering ultimatums to the new president, demanding change in ninety days or gauranteeing more unrest will help them accomplish their goals.

Ariel Dorfman, in his excellent memoir, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey towards the end of the book does some courageous soul-searching:

Let me make this as concrete as possible, this need that inevitably awaite me to scrutinize the past for mistakes.

For the very people who should have been our allies then and were indispensable as allies agains Pinochet in the years to come, for the people we had to convince to join us against Pinochet, the past that I remembered as glorious and enthralling was perceived as painful and traumatic.

No better way to illustrate this dichotomy than to focus on someone who had been unjustly hurt by the Unidad Popular [Allende's movement], someone I recalled with regret many times in exile: Don Patricio, a friend and neighbor of our in Santiago and the father of Rodrigo's [Dorfman's son] favorite playmate. A calm, decent, quiet man, a progressive Christian-Democrat who had worked as an accountant in the government center for the distribution of flour, he had been more than willing, he told me several times over afternoon tea, to contribute to the change in Chile that Allende had inaugurated, even if he did feel himself to be in the opposition. But Don Patricio had been shunted aside, humilated, left at his desk with no work to do for months, discriminated against merely because he was not an Allendista. I remember the day he told me, fighting back tears, that he had resigned, that he couldn't stand so much hatred.

Dorfman had also stated on the previous page,

We could blame the CIA, the United States, the oligarchy, the military, all we wanted, but they would never have prevailed if we had been able to get the majority of Chileans behind our reforms.

Those are very courageous words. Certainly acknowledging your mistakes need not involve renouncing your ideals.

More on this tomorrow.

Chaos in Bolivia

The crisis in Bolivia regarding the attempts to develop a pipeline to send natural gas through Chile to tankers for sale to the United States has reached a dangerous point as some twenty protesters were killed and President Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada agreed to suspend the project while martial law is declared in the La Paz suburb of El Alto where the protesters were killed.

This crisis is a combination of anti-neoliberalism and nationalism. The anti-neoliberal component lies at the heart of several disastrous privatization efforts, including an attempt privatize the water supply in Cochabamba that led people to accuse Bechtel Corp. of trying to "buy the rain." As with so many countries in Latin America like Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, Bolivia's most desperately poor are the indigenous people and they are the ones most vigorously against the privatization.

The nationalism component has to do with resentment that still festers after the War of the Pacific in 1879 in which Bolivia lost its seacoast to Chile. While I understand the anger and resentment toward the privatizations, this is the issue that I have the greatest problem with. I have a general antipathy towards nationalism. I find all too often that it easily becomes the greatest weapon of violent and vicious demagogues. Certainly the Balkan Wars of the 1990's were fueled by vicious, demagogic nationalists and the invasion of the Falklands by Argentina in 1982 was clearly an attempt to use nationalist fervor by the Argentine Junta generals to distract an angry public from their brutal rule.

Bolivia needs the jobs and revenue from the sale of the natural gas, estimates of which place it at having the second largest reserves in South America. I don't see a simple amicable solution to this problem given an extremely unpopular president and a very angry, frustrated and bitter populace. This could be a very explosive issue for South America.

Mr. da Silva Goes to Havana

Lula has visited Cuba and signed business deals worth some US$200 million. He announced before the trip that he would not be meeting with the dissidents claiming ""I don't give opinions about the internal political conditions of other countries." Boy are those weasel words. Are we to believe that if Pinochet was holding these individuals in prison for the non-violent expression of their beliefs that Lula would not comment? I don't, nor do I believe he should in either case.

The Brazilian Ambassador to Havana made the following comments:

Brazil's ambassador to Havana, Tilden Santiago, said earlier this week his country hopes to help Cuba find "its rightful place" in world affairs.

Here's a good way to start:

1.) Have it allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit its prisons. Currently, Cuba is in the only country in the Western Hemisphere that doesn't allow ithe ICRC to make visits.

2.) Sign on to all of the major UN Human Rights Resolutions such as the Convention Against Torture. Also allow the major human rights NGO's to visit Cuba, as you have denied them entry since 1989.

3.) Allow for opposition political parties and with that, allow for free and open elections monitored by impartial international observers.

4.) Allow your citizens to own and operate their own businesses free of government interference.

Just four small requests. Would that be so hard?

Venezuela Recall Petitions Rejected

The attempt by Hugo Chávez's opposition to arrange a recall has hit a snag:

Electoral authorities in Venezuela today rejected an opposition petition, signed by 3.2 million people, demanding a recall referendum on the rule of its leftist president, Hugo Chávez.

The decision by the five-member National Electoral Council, considered neutral in Venezuela's simmering political stalemate, was a serious blow to a broad antigovernment movement that had hoped to end Mr. Chávez's term with a recall later this year.

I'm not schooled in Venezuelan law, but their reasoning seems to be a bit peculiar:

The council voted 3-0 to reject the petition because the signatures were collected months before the Aug. 19 midpoint of Mr. Chávez's six-year term, a violation of electoral guidelines, said Francisco Carrasquero, the president of the council. Two of the council's members abstained from the vote.

Realistically what difference should that make? If the referendum was not able to be conducted before August 19, why can't the opposition start collecting the signatures anyway? On the other hand, as I have said time and again, if the opposition had focused more of their energy on the referendum instead of the divisive strikes earlier in the year, the rules and terms could have been codified earlier and the organization of the referendum could have been effected less hapahazardly.

This is one of those rare occasions when I have to agree with Chávez:

Washington's efforts to push for a referendum, though, have irked the Venezuelan government. After Charles Shapiro, the American ambassador, held talks with the electoral council on Sept. 3 and offered technical assistance, Mr. Chávez warned the United States to back off.

"This is a sovereign nation, ambassador, and you must respect this country," Mr. Chávez said on his radio show last Sunday.

Whether one supports Chávez or the opposition (I find Chávez appalingly demagogic and the opposition until recently arrogant and elitist), the last thing that needs to happen here is for this issue to be painted as a struggle between Chávez and Bush. No one wins in such a scenario.

Is Democracy Endangered in Latin America?

Is Alejandro Toledo the Rodney Dangerfield of Peru? Marcela Sanchez seems to think so, albeit not in so many words: