Latin America

The brunt of yesterday's hearing in the House committee about lifting the U.S. travel ban on Cuba came down the following: will allowing American visitors spread word of democracy, or will tourist dollars will just prop up the Castro regime? That is the wrong question according to a a Human Rights Watch report out this week, which documents how the Cuban government uses Orwellian laws to silence dissent and has become more abusive in recent years.

Other governments must also revise their stance towards Cuba with the aim of fomenting human rights, said the report.

Not only have all of these policies -- US, European, Canadian, and Latin American -- failed individually to improve human rights in Cuba, but their divided and even contradictory nature has allowed the Cuban government to evade effective pressure and deflect criticism of its practices."

The report lambasts the United States for allowing Cuba to play David to its Goliath, but it also critiques the ineffective Candian and European policies, and the pedestal/blind eye attitude of Latin American countries, whose silence:

[C]ondones Cuba's abusive behavior, and perpetuates a climate of impunity that allows repression to continue. This is particularly troubling coming from a region in which many countries have learned firsthand the high cost of international indifference to state-sponsored repression."

The ambivalence and outright support for Castro coming from Latin America speaks to the curious distinction people in the region often make between undemocratic regimes of the right and those of the left: those who support the coup in Honduras are the same ones who scream about Castro, whereas those who tolerate Castro are apoplectic about Honduras. 

The idea then, as a European Union official said earlier this month, should not be regime change, but rather human rights. Jorge Castañeda, former Mexican foreign minister, urges a similar policy, calling on the U.S., Europe and Canada to work together. In short: the United States must back down and lift the embargo not only to help Cubans directly, but also to uncouple support of human rights from regime change, thus enabling the strong multilateral approach called for by Human Rights Watch.

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Peru is starting to remind me of a character in a Latin American soap opera. A wife who has grown to hate her husband, Chile, after a near divorce (the 19th century war) followed by decades of perceived slights. She sits at home, stewing and seeing infidelities everywhere (accusations that Chile and Bolivia are making a secret deal, that Chile is preparing for war, that Chile is taking parts of the coastline). She frequently confronts him hysterically, and then they fight. This, of course, doesn't mean he isn't cheating.

If it were really a soap, Chile would obviously have planted spies in the Peruvian military, as the latter's government is alleging. The spy was apparently sending information south about an ongoing border dispute case in the International Court of Justice. As of last count, Peruvian officials were talking about six supposed spies, some of whom are already on the lam; Peruvian president Alan Garcia called Chile a tinpot republic; Chilean President Michelle Bachelet responded to these "offensive" and "pompous" statements with cool denials; in the meantime her minister of foreign relations assured Chile that "derogatory accusations" do not affect them.

As if all this weren't enough, as in any soap opera, there are ambiguous minor characters in both countries: the legislators in Chile who accuse Peru of orchestrating a hostile communication strategy, and the original alleged spy, Víctor Ariza, whose mother cries and threatens to cut off her hands.

The madness doesn't go as far as war, the Peruvian authorities are attempting to avoid accusing Bachelet herself of involvement, and most analysts agree trade relations should continue uninterrupted. It's part of what diplomats there call a two strands approach: political relations on one side, trade on the other.

As interesting as it is, the analysis is thin on what is really going on. There are many serious stakes in all this, after all. Can it really be chalked up to the long-standing rivalry between the two countries dating back to the 1883 War of the Pacific?

One article in an Argentine paper questions the timing of the story -- which broke when Garcia and Bachelet were at a summit together -- and points out that it serves as a distracting and unifying issue for Garcia, at a time when he faces unrest and unpopularity at home. His approval ratings are at 26 percent, dropping to 14 percent in many areas of the country.

In the next nail-biting episode: If Peru presents Chile with proof, how will Chile respond?

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Some of the world's remaining communist countries (plus former Soviet Russia) are preparing to control the weather. Indeed, China, Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba are preparing ways to control precipitation -- hearkening back to something the X-Men guys thought up during the Cold War (see: Storm). 

Last a summer, Chinese government officials worried that it might rain on their parade, literally, during the Olympics. They fired rockets filled with dry ice and silver iodide into the clouds, to make them cough up any raindrops before Beijing. The process might have backfired, causing two fierce snowstorms. But Moscow's mayor seems undeterred by the weather -- he is using the same technology to deflect snowfall from his city, having military planes spray iodide clouds.

Venezuela isn't as concerned with deflecting precipitation. Chavez is trying to increase rainfall on parched areas of his country. And rather than simply ordering the cloud seeding to take place, he is going to do it himself, going airborne with a group of Cuban scientists.

"I'm going in a plane. Any cloud that crosses me, I'll zap it so that it rains," Chavez said.

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Thankfully, beyond a few muggings, last night's massive Brazilian blackout seems to have caused little lasting damage. But the international coverage of the event is probably a good preview for the Olympic host country's next six years:

Questions remained about what happened and what the fallout would be in Brazil, a nation seen as an ascending economic and political power.

"The image of Brazil, of Rio, is bad enough with all the violence," said 35-year-old graphic designer Paulo Viera, as he sat in a restaurant a block from the sandy arc of Copacabana.

Standing in an open-air restaurant where patrons were drinking quickly warming beer, Viera said he worried about how the outage might look for a city that last month was picked to host the Olympics and will be the showcase city for soccer's World Cup in 2014. "We don't need this to happen. I don't know how it could get worse."

The blackout comes on the heels of a wave of gang fighting in Rio's slums that led to violence fears ahead of the games.

"It's sad to see such a beautiful city with such a precarious infrastructure," 22-year-old law student Igor Fernandes said. "This shouldn't happen in a city that is going to host the Olympic Games."

This is a little unfair. Even Rio's mayor acknowledges that the city has a long way to go in terms of safety and infrastructure before the games, but they do have another six years, and the IOC knew what they were getting when they awarded Brazil the games. 

The problem with developing coutries hosting events like the Olympics is that while the intention is to highlight the enormous progress they've made, they're just as likely to highlight the shortcomings. . Every crime wave or infrastructure failure, or corruption scandal Rio suffers in the next six years will now be covered in the context of whether the city is ready for the games.

Just ask South Africa or Russia. 

This Wall Street Journal article is trying really hard to find something sinister in the story of a recently constructed mosque in Nicaragua. The piece leads by reporting that the "ever-present Managua rumor mill" is suggesting that the Iranian government may have paid for it, since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a close ally of President Daniel Ortega. 

On the other hand, no one is able to corroborate these rumors, no evidence is presented to suggest that they are true, and the reporter finds a Pakistani businessman in Honduras who says he paid for it. About the only shady dealing the article reports is a dispute with the contractor over pay, which proves that it is... a construction project. 

The Berlin Wall fell twenty years ago, and the Cold War itself ended soon after, but if you're feeling nostalgic, tune into the Cold War of the Andes: somewhat more farcical and definitely less likely to end in nuclear annihilation, but riveting nonetheless.

With Venezuelan troops lining up on the Colombian border, Peruvian officials' urging fellow South American countries to reduce military spending arms purchasing, in addition to creating a regional security force, is making a lot more sense. Peruvian officials indicated that Brazilian President Lula was receptive to the proposal in a recent meeting, and will be meeting with Colombian and Paraguayan presidents in the next week.

Although the campaign should be seen in light of Peruvian suspicion of neighboring Chile, military spending in many South American countries has increased in recent years. Some estimates place 2008 spending at $60 billion, which would be well over double the amounts spent in 2003. According to American calculations, Brazil, Venezuela, Chile and Colombia account for 80 percent of arms purchases. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also urged caution in purchases, warning against entering a race.

Of course, experts have pointed out in past years that the main concern is probably not war between countries, no matter what Venezuela says, but rather resource related violence. Even Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias of Costa Rica warned against buying more arms, while noting that the region has never been so peaceful.

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Honduran politicians apparently didn't get the memo that last week's U.S.-mediated deal had ended their country's political deadlock:

Zelaya's supporters say that failure to approve the deal in the next few days would kill the final opportunity to legitimize this month's presidential elections by keeping a government in power that no foreign leaders have recognized. They warn there could be more of the street protests and repressive government countermoves that have sunk the country's economy.

However, Honduras' congressional leadership has postponed the crucial vote by asking the country's Supreme Court, attorney general and human rights ombudsman to give nonbinding opinions on the legality of Zelaya's return.

One sign that this is far from over is that Zelaya still won't leave the Brazilian embassy -- where he has been hold up since sneaking back into Honduras in September -- for fear of arrest. Something tells me that Zelaya has spent all this time sleeping on an aerobed having music blasted at him at 2 a.m. just to finish off the last few weeks of his term. That's why Micheletti's supporters aren't likely to let him anywhere near the presidency before the elction -- which most countries have promised not to recognize.

So essentially, we're back where we started.  

When you think about communist propaganda, you might think of Stalin glaring down at you from a wall, happy workers singing in strangely clean factories and well-thumbed copies of Mao's little red book.

But it's the twenty-first century, and even commies must keep up with the times. A dissident faction of Peru's Shining Path -- VRAE -- is now making its case online, with a website and You Tube uploads of revolutionarily inspiring songs. 

The songs performed by a VRAE leader in the Andean musical style of Huayño assure the listener that:

Imperialism will be defeated/socialism will flower the world/ imperialism, mainly genocidal Yankees, sucks the blood of the millions of poor around the world/to combat them, to defeat them, is our task/to annihilate them with our forces is our obligation."

 
But, the political analysis on their website is even better. They tear apart the jailed Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman, labeling him a "revisionist" and a terrorist, and criticize governments such as Nepal, Hamas and Bolivia for practicing pseudo-socialism.

The tract reads like a blast from the past, as if the Amazon fosters active denial of lost battles (many Japanese immigrants in Brazil famously denied their emperor's defeat for nearly a decade). In a shout out to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, they call him the natural leader of socialism, upon whom it is incumbent to lead the armed fight against Yankee imperialism. They urge unity in this:

We must put to one side the narrow nationalism which is very noxious and damaging ... [and which is] parasitically fomented by Yankee imperialism and its lackeys."

Extra points for their genious use of the word lackey together with Yankee imperialism-- when's the last time you heard that one?

While it's all song and talk -- and assurances of democratic intentions -- on the internet, Peruvian authorities are somewhat concerned about the possibility of the narco-terrorist group recruiting more followers. Leaders from the main Shining Path group, which put down arms a decade ago, are contemplating running for office in upcoming Peruvian elections.