Two words sum up Argentina's national stance towards the atrocities committed under the 1976-1984 military dictatorship: "Nunca más" -- never again. But while the junta remains firmly in the past, the effects of its clandestine crimes remain potent in the present. The national outcry, the investigations conducted by the Argentine National Commission on the Disappeared, and even the tireless marching and protesting by mothers of "desaparecidos" on Mayo Square have failed to yield information on what happened to the estimated 30,000 victims of state-sponsored abuse.

But last month, after being hidden beneath floorboards for 34 years, a secret list emerged to give some Argentinians what they thought they might never get: answers.

Throughout its rule, the military junta enforced a meticulous policy of destroying all their documents. But apparently it wasn't meticulous enough: one accused subversive named Juan Clemente escaped from his detention center with 259 pages of the military government's records. Clemente feared divulging the papers would cost him his life, and so kept them hidden underneath his house for over three decades; but a new safeguard from the witness protection program and a sense of urgency elicited from the imminent verdict of the Tucuman trial has motivated him to bring them forward.

Certainly with the lack of available evidence, the incriminating notes -- easily attributed to junta operatives by the flagrant signatures on each page -- will bolster the case against the four Dirty War perpetrators on trial. The new evidence could even be to thank for a more just verdict come July 8.

But perhaps the list has delivered an even greater form of justice: some reprieve for those left oblivious as to the fates of their abducted loved ones. Families of the Dirty War's "desaparecidos" have flooded into the courts to examine the papers -- even the sadistic notes on intelligence operations, torture sessions, and the victims' decrepit physical states.

The families were also able to access the pages in which the junta took stock of their victims, recording their names in the left columns and the outcome of their detentions in the right. For some of those reading, two letters beside their loved one's name -- DF, or "disposition final" -- may bring both heartbreaking finality and bittersweet relief.

In lieu of his famous and long-winded diatribes (his longest speech clocked in at 7 hours and 10 minutes), Castro -- or, more likely, a loyal ghostwriter -- now communes with the populace via the blogosphere. Several times a week, a new "Reflection of Fidel" appears on the website of Granma Internacional, Cuba's leading newspaper. His latest contribution stirred up trouble last week when passages of a post were quoted in a speech by Cuban delegates before the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. In the article, Castro alleges:

The state of Israel's hatred of the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send one and a half million men, women and children from that country to the gas chambers in which millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis... The Führer's swastika would seem to be Israel's banner today."

Not surprisingly, his added caveat -- that "this opinion is not born of hatred"-- did little to appease outraged Israelis, and today the government formally denounced Cuba's remarks. The comments come on the heels of a similarly incendiary speech by the Syrian envoy before the council last week, raising fresh concerns about anti-Semitism in the global community.

The British border agency discovered 728 pounds of cocaine off the southern coast of the country on Sunday, floating in bags attached to lobster pots. The three men charged with the conspiracy to import the drugs are due in court today, where they will likely confess to the crime, but remain ignorant of their invoking the drug's notorious double entendre: "the white lobster."

In the Caribbean, where the ban on coca leaves and the burgeoning cocaine trade are hot topics, many call cocaine "the white lobster." Faced with a law enforcement crackdown, Colombian traffickers often are forced to release their drug supplies into the ocean. From there, currents bring the bulging packages to the shores of some of the most impoverished surrounding regions, where fishing communities collect and sell them to make a living.

The contrast here elucidates just how vastly different the role of drug trafficking is in different areas of the world. The cocaine trade requires a crackdown; but certainly that crackdown should be executed very differently in countries like Nicaragua, where the presence of "white lobster" belies enormous financial hardship, than in Britain, where lobster -- in this case -- is merely the fancy floatie for 9 million dollars of narcotic loot.

As promised, the Bolivarian revolution has entered the Twittersphere. President Hugo Chavez's first tweet went up at around midnight last night and already has over 44,000 followers: 

Epa que tal? Aparecí como lo dije: a la medianoche. Pa Brasil me voy. Y muy contento a trabajar por Venezuela. Venceremos!! 

"Hey how's it going? I appeared like I said I would: at midnight. I'm off to Brazil. And very happy to work for Venezuela. We will be victorious!!"

Chavez has chosen @chavezcandanga as his handle -- candanga is an obscure word for "devil" -- and the feed will be part of what Chavez's allies have called an  "assault" on social networking sites, which are currently dominated by the opposition. 

But what are his thoughts about Justin Bieber?

I don't think even PETA would make this argument: 

Bolivia's opposition and homosexual groups criticized comments made by Morales at the first "people's conference" on climate change the previous day, in which he said that chicken producers inject birds with female hormones and "when men eat those chickens, they experience deviances in being men."

The Bolivian president also suggested that the European diet made men go bald.

The State Department was quick to portray Wednesday's meeting between Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton's powerful chief of staff, and Cuban Foreign Minister Bruni Rodriguez, as a big old nothingburger -- even though it was the highest-level contact between the countries in ... well, I don't know how long.

"They talked about Haiti," said departmental spokesman P.J. Crowley during this afternoon's press conference. "In particular, she did meet with Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez to ensure that our assistance is consistent with the priorities established by the Haitian Government. Cuba has volunteered, I think, in the significant assistance in the health sector, and they want to see -- make sure that this assistance is implemented in a coordinated fashion. So it was a specific meeting about Cuba’s -- the support that they wish to provide to Haiti."

"[W]e don’t agree with Cuba and Venezuela on very much, but we all agree on the importance of assistance to Haiti," Crowley said.

Asked whether Mills brought up human rights, Crowley responded: "[W]e do have regular meetings with Cuba in the context of migration talks and specific issues, like postal services."

"When we do have discussions with Cuba, we always bring up the issue of human rights, we always bring up our concerns about prisoners who are held there," he continued. "And in this particular case, we did. I’m aware of that the specific issue of Alan Gross came up. I just don’t know if the broader issues were touched on as well." (Gross is the USAID contractor who was arrested in Havana late last year and accused of espionage.)

Some people will see this development as a sign that Obama is stepping up his engagment with the Cuban regime, but I strongly doubt it. Just last week, the president ripped the Cuban government for using a "clenched fist" -- a reference to his inaugural address -- against "those who dare to give voice to the desires of their fellow Cubans.'' A Cuban journalist who is calling for the release of the country's political prisoners is said to be near death after a hunger strike that has stretched longer than a month, and the regime has just brutally cracked down on a dissident group calling itself Las Damas de Blanco, the Ladies in White. The timing is awful for any sort of attempt to cozy up to the Castro brothers, and I'm sure the Obama folks know it.

More broadly, there's not much political upside in trying to engage the Cuban regime, given the entrenched opposition to any kind of rethink of the decades-long failure of U.S. Cuba policy on Capitol Hill. Nobody in Congress is laying down any political cover for Obama on this issue, so the odds are long that the administration would make the first move. If anything, U.S.-Cuba relations are heading south.

The only bright spot here would be if the Cubans seriously engaged on Gross -- which U.S. officials say they haven't done thus far. But Crowley gave no details on that front, so we'll just have to wait and see.

Evidently, a congratulations from Hillary Clinton wasn't enough, and Alvaro Uribe is now getting presidential kudos for not trying to illegally seize power: 

President Barack Obama is applauding Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for accepting a court decision that prevents him from running for a third term.

Obama says Uribe's respectful heeding of the Feb. 26 ruling by the Colombian Constitutional Court "will resonate in the Americas" as an "invaluable example."[...]

The Obama letter was delivered to Uribe on Thursday by U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones in Chile, where both men are attending the inauguration of that country's new president.

I understand why Obama would be relieved that the United States's most loyal ally in Latin America didn't pull a Zelaya, but this seems very condescending to me.

There's an ongoing debate over initiatives like the Ibrahim Prize, which gives former African leaders a monetary reward for good governance and upholding democratic norms, but that at least is a lifetime achievement prize which rewards behavior over the course of a career. Nothing screams paternalism and low expectations quite like congratulating a president in the developing world for doing something that most democratic leaders are simply expected to do.  

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is counting on divine intervention to pull Venezuela out of its power crisis:

Rationing and blackouts have afflicted the South American oil exporter since late 2009, due mainly to a drought that has cut water levels at hydroelectric installations normally supplying more than two-thirds of power needs.[...]

"The squalid ones are hoping it won't rain," Chavez said late on Tuesday, using his usual term for the opposition. "But it's going to rain, you'll see, because God is a 'Bolivarian.' God cannot be squalid. Nature is with us," the socialist leader added during an event with athletes

It seems that Americans are in no particular hurry for a change in Cuba policy: 

Forty percent of Americans say the Cuba embargo should remain in place while 36 percent want it ended, and nearly half say they wouldn't visit the island even if allowed, according to a BBC/Harris Poll released Tuesday.

Nearly three in 10 Americans believe President Barack Obama's gestures toward Cuba have not been enough, 35 percent believe they went far enough and 10 percent say they went too far, the poll showed.

The good news for embargo opponents is that younger Americans are less supportive of the policy than older voters. Most Americans -- 63 percent -- see Cuba as "unfriendly" but not an enemy. I have to imagine that most of these voters wouldn't be in favor of slapping new sanctions on other merely "unfriendly" nations, but the poll is a reminder that once policies have been in place. 

Some British bloggers seem to be infuriated by remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at her meeting with Argentine President Cristina Kirchner today. Here's what Clinton had to say about the ongoing dispute over the Falkland Islands:

And we agree. We would like to see Argentina and the United Kingdom sit down and resolve the issues between them across the table in a peaceful, productive way. [...]

As to the first point, we want very much to encourage both countries to sit down. Now, we cannot make either one do so, but we think it is the right way to proceed. So we will be saying this publicly, as I have been, and we will continue to encourage exactly the kind of discussion across the table that needs to take place.

Guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan, Alex Massie writes:

So one hopes that Clinton was merely being polite, but her words carry weight and will increase a sense of expectation in Argentina (and more broadly across Latin America) that cannot possibly be met and that is guaranteed to infuriate the British. At best this is clumsy; at worst it's rather worse than that.

If me email is anything to go by...  the average Briton is likely to react to this sort of American intervention by suggesting that it's time to bring our boys home from Afghanistan and leave the Americans on their own.

The Economist's Bagehot was even angrier, and seemed to speculate that the move by Clinton was some sort of retaliation for " the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the fuss over Binyam Mohamed":

I have hesitated to read drastic slights into the sometimes awkward diplomacy between Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. But this stance on the Falklands cannot be seen any other way. It really is no way for the Americans to treat their most important military ally—as some in America doubtless appreciate.

I recognize this is a very contentious issue, but I think these writers may be reading a bit too much into Clinton's statement. It seems to me that when U.S. diplomats say they "encourage both countries to sit down," what they're really saying is, "we don't want to deal with this so please, just don't start another war." I don't really see the stab in the back here. 

Chile was rocked by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake early this morning, and reports are still dribbling out about its effects, including the tragic deaths so far of at least 85 people. There's still much we don't know -- particularly about what's going on in Concepcion, the country's second-largest city, which was the closest major town to the quake's epicenter. Some Flickr users, such as condeorloff, have already started uploading photos of damaged buildings some 200 miles away in Santiago, the capital. So Concepcion must be pretty bad. There have also been numerous aftershocks, and warnings about tsunamis threatening the coastline.

But  one thing is already clear: Chile was well prepared for this disaster, having been struck by 13 large earthquakes since 1973. The biggest seismic event in recorded history was in Chile, a 9.5-magnitude quake in 1960.  While the death toll will inevitably go up, and hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage are likely, the country seems very resilient.

Comparisons to Haiti, whose earthquake was much smaller but several orders of magnitude more deadly, are inevitable. But not only was Chile far better prepared, it is also a vastly more developed country, one that just joined the OECD and has a highly competent government, so it's no surprise that it would be able to weather this disaster relatively calmly. Would the United States?

UPDATE: Reuters  is now reporting that the death toll has climbed past 300. There are also reports of extensive damage in Concepcion and Talcahuano, a port town that was hit by the tsunami. I've seen no reports of looting -- nor would I expect to -- but folks did try to take advantage advantage of the chaos:

At least 269 prisoners took advantage of the quake to escape from a prison about 250 miles (450 km) south of Santiago, police said. Twenty-eight of the inmates were captured and three shot.

Bloomberg reports that some 1.5 million home were destroyed, and some 2 million Chileans affected, by the quake. I'm not sure how they arrive at those estimates so quickly, but suffice it to say that this was a major tragedy and that it will take months, if not years, for Chile to recover.

UPDATE2: The death toll is now past 700.  More here.

Russian Deputy Prime Minsiter Igor Sechin apparently blew his top after Kommersant published an article suggesting that Russian financial support for Cuba was being linked to recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia: The Miami Herald reports:

In an article Feb. 12 in the daily Kommersant, reporter Andrei Odinets said that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's tour of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Mexico was intended to restart – in the aftermath of the Caucasus war – Moscow's "diplomatic offensive in Latin America, which last year began to choke."

"It is possible that Moscow will encourage Russian investment in Cuba's mineral riches if Havana announces its recognition of [South Ossetia and Abkhazia]," Odinets wrote. "Russia already has worked such a scheme in Venezuela," trading oil-exploration money for diplomatic support, he said..

In an angry letter to Kommersant on Monday, Sechin derided Odinets as a self-appointed expert in foreign policy and an inept journalist. Some of Odinets' information was "biased and untrue," Sechin said. The reporter's allegation that Cuba's diplomatic support could be purchased was "detrimental to the principles of [Russo-Cuban] cooperation and long-term friendship, historically based on the shared values and trust acquired during the long and difficult years of working together."

In the friendship between Moscow and Havana "there is no place for cold financial calculation or ambition," Sechin wrote.

 Strangely, in the letter, Sechin doesn't seem to deny that there was quid-pro-quo in the other countries that have recognized the breakaway regions, just that such cynical maneuvering would be unthinkable given the long history of Cuban-Russian cooperation. Is he suggesting that there is room for cold financial calculation in the frienship between Moscow and Caracas or Moscow and Managua? I'm not even going to ask about Nauru.

The frequent stories of grusome beheadings and seemingly rand mass-murders coming out of Mexico's drug war can make the country sound like its on the brink of anarchy. But as Alexandra Olson points out, by regional and historical standards, the country's violence is not unusually high:

Mexico's homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies.

By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil's was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.

Mexico City's rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.

Of course, all of that is cold comfort to residents of Ciudad Juarez, which had a mind-boggling homicide rate of "173 per 100,000 in the city of 1.3 million, or more than 2,500 murders last year."

Mexico's relative national stability combined with what can only be described as out of control carnage in the drug war zone, supports Jorge Castaneda's argument that Mexico should be looked at not as a state under seige, but as a country increasingly embroiled in a military quagmire inside its own borders.

Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira, referring to an incident where CNN medical expert Sanjay Gupta actually began treating patients in Haiti, asks, "Are reporters with backgrounds in medicine being show-offs when they simultaneously report on a disaster and administer care?"

A somewhat convoluted CNN.com writeup of the incident reveals that Gupta -- after a team of Beligan doctors and nurses left a field hospital due to security fears -- "monitored patients' vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition."

"I confess that when I saw the CNN reporter Sanjay Gupta caring for a baby in Haiti, dealing with the child's head wound, I cringed," Shapira writes. "I thought he had an ulterior motive, that he was trying to boost CNN's flagging ratings by sending a message to audiences back home: CNN tells great stories, but CNN also saves lives!" Reporters aren't supposed to get involved in the narratives they cover, but Shapira concludes, that in this case Gupta did the right thing by intervening.

Gupta's story reminded me of Kevin Carter, the South African photographer who committed suicide in 1994, only a year after taking this Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a Sudanese girl suffering from malnutrition as a vulture patiently awaits her demise:

Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter."

The haunting image made Carter a global celebrity, but it also raised uncomfortable questions about whether he should have helped the girl rather than simply watching her die.  To be sure, Carter had plenty of emotional and financial problems, and he drank and used drugs excessively.  But's it's not hard to imagine that his world-famous photo left him wracked with guilt, contributing to his suicidal state of mind. In his rambling final note, he wrote, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners."

That's why I can't blame Gupta for helping out when he did. On the one hand, he crossed a journalistic line and became part of the story. On the other hand, he probably saved a few Haitians' lives. Imagine how he'd feel if he had to report on CNN that he'd stay there to watch them die that night?