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Puerto Rico: Debt and Budget Crisis

By Fulton Armstrong

Photo Credit: Erica Feliciano / Flickr / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Erica Feliciano / Flickr / Creative Commons

Puerto Rico’s debt and budget crises – worsened by the legislature’s rejection last week of the governor’s proposed fiscal reforms – threatens to plunge the island into a deeper, longer-term depression and is already causing tensions with Washington.  The government and state-run corporations are $73 billion in debt, with little prospect of paying it off.  The Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority (PREPA) alone owes investors, mostly based on Wall Street, about $9 billion.  Last year, the government restructured about $19 billion of PREPA, the water company, and the highway administration’s debt – giving itself barely a year’s breathing room.  The inability to make good has caused internal political tensions and thrust the government into the danger of defaulting, which would shut off access to much-needed credit for potentially years to come.  Hedge funds and others have been buying Puerto Rican paper at deeply discounted rates.

No solution seems possible to make good on such monstrous debt.  Governor García Padilla last year took steps to rein in spending and dramatically reduce the deficit – from $2.2 billion to $200 million a year.  Government personnel have declined by 16,000 positions without disruptive layoffs.  But such measures have barely made a dent in the $73 billion in outstanding liability.  García Padilla has been reluctant to fight PREPA over its inefficient management structure, force it to shift away from expensive hydrocarbons (which account for 98 of electricity production), and adopt renewable energy sources.  The legislature last week killed the centerpiece of his budget reform – a 16 percent value-added tax – and further complicated efforts to persuade lenders that the debt will be paid.  A broader economic slowdown over the past decade, with even tourism registering declines, has been a key factor.  The Governor’s biggest hope at this time seems to be legislation in Washington, introduced by Puerto Rico’s non-voting member in the U.S. House of Representatives, that would allow the corporations to declare Chapter 9 bankruptcy – which Puerto Rico (unlike the 50 states) is forbidden to do under current federal law.

The economic crisis is triggering a political crisis on the island and potentially in relations with Washington.  As Argentina’s failure to make good on its debts has demonstrated, U.S. hedge funds have extraordinary clout and will use it to block anything that lets Puerto Rico off the hook, reducing the chances that Representative Pedro Pierluisi’s bill will pass to practically nil.  The United States may press the island harder to reform its inefficient corporations, but it will ultimately have no option but to watch the crisis deepen.  The situation will give greater urgency to another referendum on Puerto Rico’s status, which the Governor said will take place in 2016, with two contradictory trends at play.  While many Puerto Ricans undoubtedly resent aspects of Washington’s attitudes toward the island, polls show no change in single-digit support for independence.  Most Boricuas, if nothing else, value their U.S. citizenship and the ability to move stateside if conditions on the island get much worse.  Even if the debt crisis frays relations with Washington, inertia argues for no redefinition of the relationship.  There is little indication that Washington will clarify the island’s status unless Puerto Ricans become a factor in Florida during the 2016 presidential campaign.

May 7, 2015

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by clalsstaff on May 7, 2015  •  Permalink
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CICIG: Model for Northern Triangle

By Fulton Armstrong and Héctor Silva

Photo Credit: Mike Gifford and Nicolas Raymond / Flickr / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: Mike Gifford and Nicolas Raymond / Flickr / Creative Commons

Guatemalan President Pérez Molina’s announcement two weeks ago that he would seek another two-year renewal of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) has been well received everywhere except in neighboring countries, which would benefit greatly from similar outside assistance.  A broad array of leading Guatemalans have welcomed the move, as have the UN and the United States.  U.S. Secretary of State Kerry said it “is a major step forward in the fight against organized crime … and will advance the goals of Guatemala and the United States as articulated in the Plan of the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle.”  First created in 2007 to support prosecutions of cases involving corruption and impunity and to strengthen the country’s judicial sector through legal reforms and training, CICIG has been renewed every two years since.  Its commissioner, Colombian jurist Iván Velásquez, said CICIG “commits to the government and society to make every effort in support of Guatemala’s aspirations to consolidate institutions, to offer more analyses, to formulate proposals to strengthen institutions, to continue criminal investigations that we carry out shoulder to shoulder with the Public Ministry, and to continue building the capacity of judicial institutions.”

CICIG’s record shows that, on balance, it has made unique, positive progress to meeting Guatemala’s need for prosecution of impunity and for reform.  The Washington Office on Latin America and other key observers have given CICIG high grades because, as WOLA said in a recent report, it has provided “important investigative tools for the prosecution of organized crime … [and] helped to resolve emblematic cases of corruption and it has dismantled powerful criminal networks deeply embedded in the state.”  Daniel Wilkinson, managing director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, told the Guatemalan El Periódico that CICIG has “almost been a miracle.”  While it’s made some mistakes, he said, “The surprising thing is everything that CICIG has achieved in these years” in high-profile cases.  InSight Crime notes that the recent case against extortionist Byron Lima, who had suborned the head of the prison system, was impressive.  InSight Crime and others also say, however, that CICIG “has proved unable to sufficiently reform the country’s judicial system.”  InSight Crime reported that, despite its $12 million a year budget, the body is still struggling to train and foster an independent judiciary – that is, encouraging Guatemalan justice to work on its own.

Velásquez and his team will face tough challenges in the new mandate.  There are rumors that President Pérez Molina – who previously said he wouldn’t extend CICIG under the “threat of blackmail” – intends to rein the body in, and the retrial of former dictator Ríos Montt, currently projected to be in 2017, looms on the horizon as a further test of Guatemalan resolve to deal with impunity.  Nonetheless, CICIG is nearly universally seen as providing assistance that all three countries of the “Northern Triangle” of Central America need – to foment rule of law, build confidence in justice, and clean up state institutions – and it has achieved reforms when the political will was sustained.  CICIG’s status as an advisory body in support of the government has enabled it to finesse the legal and political need to fully respect sovereignty.  Honduran and Salvadoran leaders have made statements suggesting openness to the idea but, apparently for different reasons, don’t want independent investigators upsetting the applecart.  Salvadoran President Sánchez Cerén has less to fear from examination of his administration and his predecessor’s record on impunity and organized crime, but he may be concerned that a CICIG-style unit would dangerously aggravate his opponents, who retain intimidating power through many sectors.  The failure to push for CICIG to realize its full potential in Guatemala and for similar mechanisms in El Salvador and Honduras will only slow the sort of reforms the Northern Triangle needs to overcome its political, social, and economic challenges crises.

May 4, 2015

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by clalsstaff on May 4, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on May 4, 2015

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Honduras: Dare Anyone Criticize?

By Fulton Armstrong

Hernandez Honduras

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez. Photo Credit: Presidencia de la Republica del Ecuador / Flickr / Creative Commons

The decision last week by the Constitutional Chamber of the Honduran Supreme Court to legalize presidential reelection appears to have benefited a man – current President Juan Orlando Hernández – whose political fortunes got a shot in the arm from the 2009 coup that removed President Mel Zelaya for proposing a constitutional assembly to consider just such an action.  A Liberal Party magistrate said he wanted to recant his vote the next day, but the ruling party published the decision in the Gaceta Oficial before he could.  The Supreme Court, ruling in favor of petitions by former Nationalist President Rafael Callejas and several members of Hernández’s National Party, repealed two key articles of the Honduran Constitution, including one that says “the citizen who has served as the head of the executive power cannot be president or presidential candidate.”  Callejas immediately announced that he was resurrecting his Callejista movement, called MONARCA, which won him the presidency in 1990, and his campaign literature appeared in the streets of Tegucigalpa soon after.

The Court did not explicitly overturn Article 4 of the Constitution, which states that an “alternation in the exercise of the presidency of the republic is obligatory.”  That action reportedly will fall to the National Party-led Congress, but President Hernández is almost universally seen as the big winner from the Court decision, culminating his effort to continue as President.  After the coup that removed Zelaya from power, Hernández had a hand in congressional strategies to give a constitutional and legal framework – widely debunked – to Zelaya’s military ouster and later, while serving as president of the Honduran Congress and while campaigning for president, Hernández engineered the removal of four of the five justices of the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court and replaced them with more sympathetic judges.  He subsequently had a role in selecting a replacement for the fifth, who became Attorney General – making for a court unanimously indebted to him.  (He was sworn in as national President in January 2014.)  Reacting to the court decision last week, Hernández noted that “reelection is something that is a general rule around the world … Prohibition of it is the exception … [and] Honduras has to make progress.”  His opponents have vowed to fight the repeal.  Leaders of the Partido de Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE) have accused the justices of “betrayal of the fatherland.”  One said the court “guaranteed the impunity” of the Hernández government, but the opposition’s legislative strategies have failed before.

Representing Central America’s most violent and most corrupt nation, President Hernández is seen in Washington as essential to success of U.S. policy in Central America and initiatives such as the “Alliance for Prosperity of the Northern Triangle.”  With a request for a billion dollars on its way to the U.S. Congress, the Obama administration can ill afford to point out Hernández’s hypocrisy for doing what he condemned former President Zelaya for trying to do in 2009.  Political inconveniences aside, the political cynicism and tensions that his and former President Callejas’s maneuvering will incite in violence-ravaged Honduras can hardly be seen as helpful to the goals of good governance and democratic consolidation that all profess.  When Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega engineered a similar judgment by his Supreme Court in 2009, allowing him to run for an additional term, the State Department did not mince words about its “concern” for its implications.  Hernández, in contrast, was in Washington securing support for funding when his court announced its decision.  The U.S. Southern Command’s new task force of some 250 Marines is expected to arrive in Honduras and begin training of security forces involved in “fighting the drug traffickers.”

May 1, 2015

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While Mexican Government Resists Scrutiny on Rights, Citizens Welcome It

By David Crow*

"Do you how many migrants have died this year in Mexico? The government doesn't either." Photo Credit: Grupo Cinco Amnistía Internacional México / Flickr / Creative Commons

“Do you how many migrants have died this year in Mexico? The government doesn’t either.” Photo Credit: Grupo Cinco Amnistía Internacional México / Flickr / Creative Commons

The Mexican government is rejecting recent criticism of its human rights record, but its citizens welcome it as necessary to hold the government to account on its international rights commitments.  Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (and Professor of Human Rights Law at American University) released a scathing report on Mexico last month, revealing that torture continues to be “widespread” and occurs at every level of government and in every security agency.  Mexico’s Foreign Ministry vociferously challenged the report and indulged in ad hominem attacks against Méndez, branding him “unprofessional and unethical.”  According to Méndez, the Mexican government had pressured him to tone down the report’s findings, but he refused because it proffered no evidence that the report was wrong.  Mexico’s strategy of denying the obvious – the ubiquity of torture is well documented – has been a public relations disaster, according to human rights and international relations experts.  It is rooted in a deep-seated historical aversion to outside prying.  The cornerstone of Mexican foreign policy, the 1930 “Estrada Doctrine,” has meant abstaining from passing judgment on other governments – and Mexico expects the same in return.  Though Mexico is signatory to a number of international rights protocols (including the Convention on Torture), the Méndez kerfuffle seems to betray an atavistic revulsion to external scrutiny.

Ordinary Mexicans, however, do not toe the government line on sovereignty.  They reject the notion that rights are conduits for foreign interests, view international organizations favorably, and welcome international oversight – particularly if it’s not from the United States.   The Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico (in The Americas and the World and the University of Minnesota  (Human Rights Perceptions Polls) teamed up last year to probe Mexicans’ views on human rights.

  • Asked “[h]ow much does promoting U.S. interests have to do with what you understand human rights to be?” Mexicans averaged just 3.0 on a 1-7 scale (anything under 4 indicates disagreement and anything over, agreement).
  • Mexicans also reject the notion that human rights “spread foreign values” (3.2).
  • In contrast, they strongly support the idea that rights “protect against torture and murder” (5.5).
  • Mexicans view international organizations favorably, awarding the United Nations and Amnesty International scores of 65 and 60 (out of 100), respectively – the two highest ratings of all organizations evaluated.
  • And 50% of the public said UN supervision would “help the human rights situation” (36% felt it wouldn’t), while 48% viewed monitoring by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights favorably (35%, unfavorably). Mexicans split over U.S. supervision: just 43% said it would help, compared to 46% who said it wouldn’t.  Nonetheless, that 43% are willing to accept U.S. oversight is perhaps a measure of just how bad things have gotten.

While a “multilateral turn” is occurring among its citizens, the Mexican government can’t seem to break free from the old isolationism, with serious implications for the country.  The horrifying rights situation dominates international perceptions of Mexico and, along with persistent high-level corruption, threatens to derail President Peña Nieto’s reform agenda, scaring off risk-averse potential foreign investors and weakening his hand domestically with Congress and the public at large.  To reverse these trends, Mexico must make strides, quickly, to improve observance of rights.  International pressure – “naming and shaming” of rights violators – is a key ingredient.  As its citizens have done, the Mexican government must embrace, not shun, international involvement.

April 27, 2015

*David Crow is an Assistant Professor in the International Studies Division of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE, Mexico City).

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by clalsstaff on April 27, 2015  •  Permalink
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Violence and Risky Responses in El Salvador

By Héctor Silva

PresidenciaRD and US Embassy San Salvador / Flickr / Creative Commons

PresidenciaRD and US Embassy San Salvador / Flickr / Creative Commons

Salvadoran President Sánchez Cerén, facing a surge in gang-related violence, is grasping at risky solutions.  The 481 murders last month – about 16 per day – broke a 10-year record and represented a 52 percent increase over the same month in 2014.  The soaring murder rate has deep roots going back to well before Sánchez Cerén and his FMLN predecessor, President Funes, came to power in 2009, but its immediate cause is the end last year of the three-way truce between the country’s two biggest gangs – the MS13 and Barrio 18 – and the government.  Negotiated by the Funes administration in 2012, the truce provided a respite that, according to many observers, was doomed to fail because it split gang leaders, with those outside prison expanding their power, and allowed both gangs to expand their territorial control largely unfettered.  Another factor is weak leadership and low morale among public security forces, especially the National Police, which has gutted confidence among the rank and file and prompted some frustrated commanders to take matters into their own hands.  Extrajudicial executions of gang members in retaliation for the loss of police comrades have further driven up the death toll.  Observers increasingly refer to El Salvador’s current situation as a “low-intensity conflict.”

Sánchez Cerén has tried an array of sometimes contradictory tactics in response to the gang problem and the violence, creating an appearance of incoherence and ineffectiveness.  Without disputing estimates of the spiraling death toll, he has blamed the right wing and the media for creating a crisis atmosphere.  Over the past 10 months, he has attempted – and failed – to implement “community policing” strategies, which languish due to inadequate funding and planning, and he recently led several hundred thousand people in a march for “life, peace, and justice.”  With mounting pressure on the President to adopt hardline approaches, he has pledged greater resources to arm and deploy special anti-gang units, and last week he announced intent to supplement the 7,000 military troops already dedicated to law-enforcement duty with the creation of three new “Gang Cleanup Battalions.”  The government says that these 1,200 elite Army troops, strikingly reminiscent of the “Immediate Reaction Infantry Battalions” (BIRIs) that committed grave human rights abuses when deployed during the civil war, will be under civilian police control.

The President’s moves are fraught with danger.  His zigzags signal weakness to his ambitious political opponents and the gangs alike, and his political liabilities will only mount if, as almost all observers expect, the new battalions escalate the war in a manner that fuels extrajudicial killings and other human rights violations.  Criticism from advocates of dialogue with the gangs, including negotiators involved in the previous truce, further weaken him.  The fact is that the gangs, taking advantage of decades of state neglect of key sectors of society, have established strong bases of support in areas where the state’s presence and credibility are already nil or worse.  The shift toward a militarized strategy, moreover, runs counter to the tragic lessons learned in Honduras and Guatemala.  Going after the maras will entail battle in marginalized urban and rural areas that should be Sánchez Cerén’s and his FMLN party’s natural constituencies.  In a lose-lose situation, Sánchez Cerén may be opting for the surer loss.

April 23, 2015

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by clalsstaff on April 23, 2015  •  Permalink
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Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Political Step Forward

By Fulton Armstrong

In more than 10 cities across the U.S. activists will use guerrilla light projection to illuminate monuments and building facades with slogans like “Don't Let Comcast Choke Your Freedom,” “No Slow Lanes, Open & Equal Internet For All,” and “TPP Dismantles Democracy.

In more than 10 cities across the U.S. activists used guerrilla light projection to illuminate monuments and building facades with slogans like “Don’t Let Comcast Choke Your Freedom,” “No Slow Lanes, Open & Equal Internet For All,” and “TPP Dismantles Democracy.” Photo Credit: Backbone Campaign / Flickr / Creative Commons

The chairmen of key U.S. Congressional committees agreed on legislation allowing President Obama to negotiate a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade accord, but major political and substantive obstacles to an agreement remain. The leaders of the Senate and House tax-writing committees announced the move, with the key Democratic senator involved claiming that the Obama Administration had addressed his deep concerns about the secrecy of the talks. If passed, their bill would give the President “fast-track” trade authority – power to negotiate an accord that the Senate would eventually vote on but without the power to amend it, which would significantly increase chances of passage. Obama’s advisors have called TPP the “cornerstone” of his Asia policy, and the President said last week that it would help “make sure that we, and not countries like China, are writing the rules for the global economy.” Supporters estimate that TPP would stimulate growth by eliminating tariffs and non-tariff barriers affecting $2 trillion of goods and services (about one-third of global trade) each year among its 12 members.*

Opposition in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere remains intense, however. The Senate Democratic whip, charged with tallying support and opposition, stated that only one-quarter of Senate Democrats support the measure – and those opponents have made clear their concerns about the implications for U.S. workers and consumers. Although tariffs are on the table, most observers say the focus of the negotiations is on “harmonizing” regulations, which big multinational corporations – which have access to the talks that citizens’ groups lack – systematically seek to eliminate. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, are pushing hard for extending patents and trademarks so that cheaper generic medications cannot be sold. Critics say revisions to copyright and trademark provisions would also have implications for public information and the internet. Industry is seeking to roll back environmental protections in place since the early 1970s. The negotiations have been secret, but a leaked chapter of the draft agreement revealed that companies were gaining the right to sue governments if any regulatory action ever caused their profits to fall short of target – a massive burden on budgets.

The lack of transparency, which the leading Senate Democrat claims has been addressed, may have stoked opponents’ concerns. But the differences between U.S. backers and opponents appear significant and unlikely to fade without some serious political horse-trading, which the Obama Administration has been unwilling to do. In his statement last week, Obama admitted that “it’s no secret that past trade deals haven’t always lived up to their promise” – particularly regarding job creation – but neither he nor the Congressional chairmen have provided hard data showing that dismantling a host of regulations to accommodate corporate agendas will help consumers and un- or under-employed U.S. workers. If history is any guide, the Latin American signatories – Mexico, Chile and Peru – may see a favorable impact regarding employment in certain sectors, and others may see it as the only game in trade right now and thus worth trying to join, but Washington’s vision of TPP as primarily an Asia policy – to counter Chinese influence – suggests that they too see the advantages of participation accruing across the Pacific rather than to the north.

* Currently envisioned as members are the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam: Korea last week expressed interest in joining the talks, but the United States told it to wait. Colombia is interested, and Panama and Costa Rica seek membership in the “Pacific Alliance,” which is related to TPP.

April 20, 2015

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Corruption in Chile and Brazil

By Luciano Melo

Brazilian Pres. Rousseff (l) and Chilean Pres. Bachelet. Photo Credit: UN Women / Flickr / Creative Commons

Brazilian Pres. Rousseff (l) and Chilean Pres. Bachelet. Photo Credit: UN Women / Flickr / Creative Commons

A growing perception of corruption in Latin America, most recently in Brazil and Chile, is eroding confidence in two of the region’s most dynamic presidents – Dilma Rousseff and Michelle Bachelet.  The Chilean and Brazilian corruption cases are both serious, but differing perceptions and expectations in the two countries suggest the scandals will have different impacts.

  • Chile has long been the darling of economists and political scientists (and U.S. policymakers) in terms of democratic maturity, economic development, and transparency. The use of political influence to secure millions of dollars in sweetheart loans there has pulled the country down from its high perch, and since the issue directly touched President Michelle Bachelet’s own family members, it has become a huge deal in and outside Chile.
  • Although among the six main economies in the world and alone among the BRIC countries in boasting a stable democratic system, Brazil, by contrast, has repeatedly been tainted by corruption scandals that would lead to the fall of most Scandinavian governments in a matter of days. Former President Lula’s son became a millionaire while his father was in power, yet this fact hardly stained the ex-President’s popularity.  The scandals weighing down President Dilma Rousseff are different.  Brazilian citizens customarily have thought of Petrobras, one of the few remaining state enterprises after the wave of privatizations under President Cardoso during the 1990s, as a great source of national pride, and this sentiment was encouraged by the PT government, never a fan of the neoliberal predilections of its predecessor.  So when the scandal touched almost all of the party’s leaders, in addition to the prized national oil company, even Brazilians inured to corruption felt pain. Moreover, Lula and Dilma’s party, the PT, had promised to do politics in a different way.  As a union leader and a woman who fought against the dictatorship, respectively, they represented the rise to power of leaders based entirely outside the traditional parties and their murky ways of doing business.  Now, some of Dilma’s disillusioned supporters are demanding her impeachment, and many famous artists who once endorsed the PT are feeling betrayed.

Latin American voters have long manifested contrasting expectations of their presidents – cynicism about their venal nature coincided, as Latin America specialist Guillermo O’Donnell once said, with hope that they be “acclaimed saviors.”  Within the codependent relationship between citizens and politicians, trust is impaired once betrayal surfaces, but the marriage normally continues.  In some cases of rupture, as happened with impeached President Fernando Collor in 1992, it hasn’t meant the end of the political affair.  In the October 2014 elections Collor was reelected as Senator for the state of Alagoas.  Dilma and Bachelet have already said they will not resign, and that they intend to implement a comprehensive cleanup.  The road will be easier for Bachelet.  The Chilean scandal is still small and remains manageable, and although the decline in commodity prices has already  affected the country’s economy, further taxing Bachelet’s popularity, Chile has a sovereign reserve fund to cushion any blows.  For Dilma the conjuncture is considerably bleaker.  She was on the board of Petrobras while its executives were engaged in costly shenanigans, and it is now known that the fraudulent scheming also involved the Health Ministry and the state-owned bank Caixa Economica Federal.  And in Brazil, in contrast to Chile, the fiscal situation is sufficiently tight as to constrain the president’s room to maneuver as the commodity-driven economy stagnates.  At this point both women appear likely to survive their challenges, but the road ahead looks a lot tougher for Dilma than for Bachelet.

April 16, 2015

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by clalsstaff on April 16, 2015  •  Permalink
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The Summit of the Americas: Important Progress

By Aaron Bell and Eric Hershberg

VII Summit of the Americas Photo Credit: OEA-OAS / Flickr / Creative Commons

VII Summit of the Americas Photo Credit: OEA-OAS / Flickr / Creative Commons

The U.S.-Cuba rapprochement has returned the Summit of the Americas (SOA) to the way it was before George W. Bush turned it into a forum in which the U.S. was increasingly isolated – a community of vibrant but respectful debate reflecting the varied perspectives of the hemisphere.  The event in Panama this past weekend was dominated by Cuba’s attendance at its first SOA and Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama’s cordial public encounter and hour-long meeting, the first of its kind between the two nations’ leaders in over half a century.  The next step in improving relations will be for Obama to formally announce Cuba’s removal from Washington’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism,” which the State Department reportedly recommended last week.  Regrettably, the leaders did not take advantage of the Summit as an occasion to announce a target date for the formal restoration of diplomatic relations and the appointment of Ambassadors.  But that, presumably, will come soon, and regardless, in the plenary session Obama set a new tone for U.S. policy when he acknowledged that “the days in which our agenda in this hemisphere so often presumed that the United States could meddle with impunity — those days are past.”  Obama clearly articulated a desire to move beyond not only the legacy of U.S. intervention in the region but also the stale ideological debates that, he observed pointedly, pre-dated his birth.

Statements and activities surrounding the SOA also reaffirmed the broad range of perspectives in the hemisphere,  including in attitudes toward the United States.  The “People’s Summit,” held parallel with the SOA, provided a forum for left-wing critiques aimed primarily at U.S. meddling in the region, in particular its foreign military bases and its recent allegation – which it subsequently backed away from – that Venezuela poses an “extraordinary threat to U.S. national security.”  The sanctions it imposed on senior officials drew critiques from around the region, including from Argentina, Colombia, and from Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, who summarized regional sentiment in characterizing them as “counterproductive and inefficient.”  The criticism was overshadowed, however, by widespread applause for changes in U.S.-Cuba relations.  Obama also won points from observers for meeting with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who used the Summit to denounce the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama and present to Obama a list of 11,000 signatures opposing Washington’s sanctions.  Maduro praised the meeting as the “Summit of Truth” and even “cordial,” noting that it opened the door to further discussions on the bilateral relationship.  Obama also seemed to subscribe to a different role for civil society representatives – as opponents of sitting governments – at the summit, choosing to meet privately, for example, with Cuban dissidents opposed to the Raúl Castro and his government.

Obama’s steps to remove the festering U.S.-Cuba issue from the hemispheric agenda have been game-changing, even if some presidents criticized Washington’s continued enforcement of the economic embargo and the Administration’s bewildering inability to move faster to remove Cuba from its highly politicized terrorist list.  This summit may signal a return to the values and respectful debate that Obama, and before him Bill Clinton, espoused at past Summits, and may pave the way for cooperation over contemporary issues rather than Cold War-era ideological hang-ups.  In the final days before the Summit, senior White House advisors had intervened to ease tensions over the State Department’s national security rhetoric vis-à-vis Venezuela, emphasizing with regret that assertions regarding Venezuela’s posing a security threat were an unfortunate procedural necessity rather than a genuine assessment of the situation.  This recognition that “words matter” turned on their head the words used earlier in the week by Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson in lamenting that Latin American governments were not using language similar to Washington’s to characterize the deteriorating political situation in Venezuela.  While the correctives from the White House and the focus on the transformation of U.S.-Cuba relations were both conducive to a successful SOA, these developments did overshadow both the official theme of this year’s summit – Prosperity with Equity – and related discussions on energy, the environment, and education.  These crucial issues, all ripe for regional cooperation, are the core of what should become the focus of U.S.-Latin American relations for the remainder of this administration and beyond.

April 13, 2015

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Bolivia’s Elections and Evo’s Surprising Political Malaise

By Robert Albro

Previous elections in La Paz. Photo credit: Pablo Andres Rivero / Flicker / CC BY-NC-ND

Previous elections in La Paz. Photo credit: Pablo Andres Rivero / Flicker / CC BY-NC-ND

Departmental and municipal elections in Bolivia last week dealt a significant setback to President Evo Morales’s party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).  Benefiting from strong economic growth, broad-based support from among the country’s many social movements, and the absence of major controversy, last October Morales was elected to a third term as Bolivia’s president with an impressive 61 percent of the vote.  He is on track to be in office until 2020, making him the longest-serving leader in Bolivian history.  Last week, however, the party won just four of nine races for departmental governor and two of the races for mayor in Bolivia’s ten largest cities, reversing a trend of sustained MAS dominance since Evo’s election in 2006.  Most alarming for the MAS is that it lost across the board in the previous strongholds of La Paz and El Alto.  This unexpected outcome has touched off speculation that the MAS is running out of steam.

The MAS emerged as a national political force during the sustained social ferment of the early 2000s.  It reaped the benefits of widespread popular disenchantment with government as a movement for change and indigenous enfranchisement, and it built a successful coalition across ethnic, class, rural-urban, and to some extent, regional differences.  The MAS’s rise coincided with the collapse of the country’s established political parties.  As the only remaining national political movement, the MAS has since often identified its approach to governance as a bottom up, participatory, or popular plebiscite – a multiethnic and plurinational vision of local autonomy that it has successfully enshrined in the country’s constitution.  Addressing last week’s upset, Vice President Alvaro García Linera noted the MAS had done a poor job of cultivating new local leaders.  Evo suggested it was a “punishment vote” in response to recent corruption scandals involving MAS candidates.  Nor did Morales do his candidates any favors when he threatened not to work with opposition politicians in El Alto or La Paz if they were elected.

Despite this setback for the MAS, local opposition at the polls does not necessarily lead to national opposition.  The political opposition remains fragmented, and the MAS remains the country’s only truly national political party.  Even where it lost races for governor or mayor, in most cases the MAS enjoys a majority in the state legislatures or city councils.  However, several factors – corruption scandals, continued dependence on the extractive industries, and the party’s habit of co-opting right-wing non-masistas as candidates where it thinks they will win – point to the stubborn persistence of different national and local political realities.  When the MAS has run into problems in recent years, as with recent controversy over a plan to build a highway through the TIPNIS indigenous territory and national park, it is because it misread local political terrain, chose poor candidates, and ran afoul of regional or local autonomies.  The horizontal and plural coalition-building that has been the MAS’s hallmark can be a clunky local political instrument.  Last week highlighted that local electorates are less driven by social movement ferment, ideology, or historical change; are notably distrustful of MAS impositions from above; and are more interested in prosaic matters of good governance and candidates they know and trust. It was certainly not the beginning of the end of the MAS.  But if the national party continues to struggle in the face of diverse local political realities, it could signal for the MAS a gradual death by a thousand cuts.

April 9, 2015

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by clalsstaff on April 9, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 9, 2015

https://aulablog.net/2015/04/09/bolivias-elections-and-evos-surprising-political-malaise/

Brazilian Truth Commission Looks at Police Violence

By Paula Orlando

March in commemoration of the 22nd anniversary of the Carandiru massacre in 2014. Photo credit: veredaestreita / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA

March in commemoration of the 22nd anniversary of the Carandiru massacre in 2014. Photo credit: veredaestreita / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA

A new truth commission is about to investigate Brazil’s legendary police brutality and, for the first time, attempt to bring some public accountability for the crimes committed by the state. Police kill an estimated six people per day. Civil society organizations persuaded the Sao Paulo Legislative Assembly (ALESP) to establish the commission, the first to focus on human rights violations in the post-dictatorship period. It will hear testimony from witnesses and survivors of police brutality, and examine documents and other evidence related to major cases of police violence in the city and state in the last decades. The initiative follows the recent release of reports by the National and Sao Paulo State Truth Commissions on human rights violations during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). In fact, the reports suggested that present-day violence should be understood as a legacy of the lack of accountability for past violations.

The “Truth Commission of Democracy Maes de Maio” – named after a prominent movement of family members of victims of police violence that fights for justice and changes in security policies – held its first hearing on March 21. Parents of some of those killed in May 2006, when at least 493 civilians were killed in a period of 10 days, testified. (The National Truth Commission had accounted for 434 people killed during the 21 years of military rule.) The violence in May 2006 took place in the context of a conflict between the police forces and the “First Command of the Capital” (PCC) – a criminal organization formed within the detention system, and was justified as part of a “war on crime.” A study conducted by the International Human Rights Clinic of the Harvard Law School and the Brazilian Human Rights Organization Justiça Global contends that at least 122 deaths were directly linked to the police, and many of these bodies showed signs of execution. Four other civilians remain missing after nine years, and nearly all the cases have been archived without a resolution. With the participation of representatives designated by the National Secretariat of Human Rights, legislators, and members of social movements, the new commission will also examine other massacres, such as one at the Carandiru penitentiary in 1992 and the nighttime slaughter – also linked to police officers – of several people who were sleeping near the Sé Cathedral, in downtown Sao Paulo, in August of 2004.

The truth commission is more than a symbolic step towards recognizing and bringing some degree of state accountability in human rights violations; it shows the growing pressure of the movement against anti-police violence and in favor of justice and reparations for victims. Deputy Adriano Diogo, a major proponent of the panel, has warned that the way ahead “will be difficult; this is a discussion that the Brazilian government does not accept to have.” Insofar as the truth commission succeeds, it will not only create an institutional space linked to the state to clarify cases of police violence; it will stimulate an important discussion of the legitimization of police brutality in the context of “fighting crime.” In addition, it could contribute to the understanding that unlawful police violence is a form of political violence that no democratic society should endure.

April 6, 2015

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by clalsstaff on April 6, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 6, 2015

https://aulablog.net/2015/04/06/brazilian-truth-commission-looks-at-police-violence/

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