Brazilian Leadership and the Global Internet

By Sybil D. Rhodes and Leslie Elliott Armijo*

Photo credit: Blog do Planalto / Flickr / CC

Photo credit: Blog do Planalto / Flickr / CC

Brazil’s efforts as defender of internet privacy and rights may be effective even if it sparks criticism from all sides of the issue.  Along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Dilma Rousseff has been among the most vocal protestors against spying by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).  She used her opening remarks at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September to criticize the spying.  Three months later, the UNGA passed a resolution initiated by Brazil and Germany in favor of the right to privacy in the digital age.  The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and Senate have passed legislation, known as the Marco Civil da Internet, which web leaders and scholars consider a pioneering framework for internet governance.  Last week, Brazil hosted the international meeting NETMundial, focused on standards for name registration, domains, and IP addresses.  Rousseff and her Science, Technology, and Innovation minister, Cleio Campolina, emphasized that, as the first such event since U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about abuses, privacy concerns should be paramount at the meeting.

Brazil has considered itself an emerging leader in internet governance for at least the last fifteen years, although until 2013 “digital sovereignty” and the allocation of commercial benefits appeared to be more important goals than protecting civil liberties.  Brazil also has counted itself as an important member of a coalition — including India, China, Russia, Arab countries, and the United Nations Working Group on Internet Governance – that has called for less U.S. dominance of internet governance.  The group has proposed that the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) assume responsibility for the Internet Cooperation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the non-profit organization in charge of distributing domain names since 1998.  An American creation, with headquarters in Los Angeles and a Board of Directors supervised by the US Department of Commerce, ICANN is seen by many as embodying U.S.-centric internet regulation.  Critics in Brazil and elsewhere claim that the private-sector and civil-society input into ICANN decisions is disproportionately pro-American.  The U.S. and its supporters, including Google, Microsoft, and civil associations like the Mozilla Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argue that the existing regime promotes a “free and decentralized internet” – and that any changes must preserve these principles.

Since Snowden, President Dilma has also renewed emphasis on “digital sovereignty” measures.  For example, provisions in legislation passed in the lower house (but removed from the Senate version) required that Google, Facebook and other companies doing business with Brazilians store their data about Brazilians on local servers.  The government has also promoted building fiber optic cables connections that do not go directly through the United States as a way of preventing NSA espionage.  The economic and technical feasibility of some of these projects is not clear, and some of them have encountered important political opposition within Brazil – because, according to an informal survey of experts, many Brazilians are suspicious of their own government’s regulation of the internet as well.  Language in the new bill simply obligates business to obey national legislation regarding privacy.

Snowden’s revelations have given a boost to efforts to reduce U.S. dominance of internet governance, which previously was viewed as a technical issue for which the existing regulatory regime worked well.  Announcing that the U.S. Department of Commerce will not renew its contract with ICANN when it expires in September 2014, the Obama administration appears to recognize that U.S. credibility as the guarantor of a free and open internet has been undermined.  The exact technical and legal procedures through which privacy and national sovereignty might be better protected on the internet remain open questions in national and global debates.  But Brazil appears poised to play a leading role in setting a moderate middle-range course, one that allows for multipolar or global governance of the internet while protecting the liberal principles the U.S. has long claimed are core values.  Dilma could come in for criticism from both sides – U.S. conservatives who believe that only the United States can guarantee a free internet as well as “anti-imperialist” advocates who will accuse her of selling out to corporate interests.  Moderate heroes are sometimes the most unsung but also the most necessary.

*Sybil D. Rhodes is Director of the MA in International Studies at the Universidad del Cema in Buenos Aires.  Leslie Elliott Armijo is a Visiting Scholar at Portland State University and a Research Fellow at CLALS.  They are currently writing a book about international cooperation in the Western Hemisphere.

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by clalsstaff on April 28, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 28, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/28/brazilian-leadership-and-the-global-internet/

Guatemala: The War of Paz y Paz

By Steven Dudley*

CLALS Paz y Paz

Law professor and human rights attorney Claudia Paz y Paz’s selection as Guatemala’s first woman attorney general was a surprise, but strident opposition to her reappointment from the dark interstices of the political spectrum is not.  More hippy professor than government bureaucrat, she’s a woman who defied the odds when she took office in 2010.  Paz y Paz speaks with a soft, gentle tone to the point where she almost needs a microphone to run a staff meeting.  Yet, from nearly the moment she walked into the attorney general’s office, she made a difference.  She and her team arrested previously untouchable figures such Juan López Ortiz, alias Chamale, and dozens of members of the feared Mexican criminal group, the Zetas.  The country’s murder and impunity rates fell.  Paz y Paz also prosecuted former military officers, including former military dictator Ríos Montt and others allegedly involved in atrocities in the 1980s, and helped set up special offices to deal with violence against women.

Paz y Paz also demonstrated how, employing best practices, Guatemalan judicial institutions can excel.  Her office’s reliance on forensic evidence, telephone intercepts and video analysis made for stronger cases.  This took the onus off of eyewitness testimony, a notoriously unreliable means of fighting powerful criminal groups, especially those who have deeply penetrated the state.  Paz y Paz also widened the investigative net, looking at entire criminal structures, rather than focusing on single criminal acts.  She won praise from a broad array of international partners and pro-democracy forces inside Guatemala.  She was a 2013 Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

In spite of – or because of – these accomplishments, Paz y Paz is struggling to keep her job for another four-year term.  She has to be approved by a “postulation commission” made up of 14 lawyers who select the final six candidates, from which the president picks one.  Special interest groups, using shady brokers (some with ties to organized crime), are maneuvering to make sure that her attempt to reform Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office ends sooner rather than later.  She has opened up many wounds and frightened Guatemala’s traditional elite, some of whose members worked with the Army during the civil war and believe they could be next on Paz y Paz’s list.  Efforts to block Paz y Paz’s second term underscore that Guatemala is a country that is still struggling to deal with its past civil war and its forever lopsided power structure.  Despite ending a nearly four-decade-old conflict in 1996, Guatemala is still at war –though the battles now take place in the courts – and the elites don’t want a formidable player like Paz y Paz to be in the game.

*Steven Dudley is co-Director of InSightCrime, which is co-sponsored by CLALS.  Click here for the full investigation of “The War of Paz y Paz.”

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by clalsstaff on April 25, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 25, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/25/guatemala-the-war-of-paz-y-paz/

Obama’s Deportation Debacle: Time for Executive Action?

By Eric Hershberg and Dennis Stinchcomb

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Amid fierce debate over the Obama administration’s record on the deportation of undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S. without serious criminal records, insiders confirmed to the Associated Press on Monday that the White House is seriously considering unilateral action to reduce deportations.  Preliminary reports suggest that a review of the policy by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson may result in executive action curbing deportations.  Rumors of White House movement on the issue surfaced last week, when members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus presented Johnson with a memo outlining their demands.  Most notably, they recommended an expansion of the president’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and the elimination of “Secure Communities,” a program initiated during the Bush era that mandates that local law enforcement agencies enforce federal immigration laws and which has led to reported abuses.

The increased pressure on the president to further limit forced removals comes at a moment when deportations are on the decline and interior enforcement is at a five-year low.  New statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security (via FOIA requests from The New York Times) and the Department of Justice provide the most comprehensive view to date of an enforcement policy fraught with political miscalculations.  DOJ reports, for example, a 43 percent drop in the number of new deportation cases filed in federal immigration courts in the last five years.  In hopes of gaining credibility and leverage for Democrats in a potential immigration deal, the administration in 2011 reallocated massive enforcement resources to the U.S.-Mexico border.  The plan was to ease interior enforcement that disrupted established families and communities – and ran up deportation numbers in the past – while deporting higher numbers of recent border crossers, who under previous administrations would have been sent home without formal charges.  In the interior, workplace raids all but disappeared, but state and local police, under the Secure Communities program, continued to identify “high-priority offenders.”

The Obama administration’s five-year attempt to placate Republican lawmakers through record-setting deportations has backfired politically, and the collateral damage is high, with nearly 2 million deportations to date and an outraged electoral base.  Though current and former administration officials argue that concerns over public safety and border security have guided immigration enforcement since day one, the evidence suggests that political expedience has driven Obama’s deportation policy and – with midterm elections just around the corner and maneuvering toward the 2016 presidential elections already underway – is likely to continue to do so.  Obama’s eagerness to impress Republicans with his toughness, without any guarantee the maneuver would work, has alienated Hispanic and Asian communities who feel betrayed and whose turnout at the polls is crucial for a Democratic victory.  The leaks of executive action indicate a White House focused on damage control with those important constituencies, while essentially signaling the definitive end of any chance of bipartisan Congressional immigration reform.  Despite some handwringing among American conservatives that the Republicans’ position will lock out Hispanic voters for years to come, most of the party’s leaders appear to give priority to their nativist base.  Obama ultimately may be calculating that, with chances of passage of immigration reform nil anyway, his energy is best spent on rebuilding ties with constituents whose communities have been torn apart by policies pursued during his first five years in office.

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by clalsstaff on April 23, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 23, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/23/obamas-deportation-debacle-time-for-executive-action/

The “Informal City” and Latin America’s Urban Future

By Robert Albro

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Latin American cities are powerful engines for growth, but sustaining that progress will require moving workers from the informal into the formal sector.  Latin America is the most urbanized continent in the world, and its cities are now the region’s main economic engine.  Its ten largest cities account for about half of the region’s economic output, and their share of economic activity is projected to increase by 2025.  They are also increasingly aspiring to insertion in the global economy. And mayors often assume a CEO-like autonomy in attracting international capital, business, and talent to their cities, while pursuing policies designed to enhance their municipal standing as critical global nodes, hubs or platforms of innovation, manufacturing and services.  Strategies include international city-to-city cooperation, corporate and multinational partnerships to fund infrastructure, global policy forums for mayors to share best practices regarding sustainability or climate change, and new urban planning intended to increase connectedness to global information flows.  Citi and the Wall Street Journal in 2013 judged Medellín, Colombia, the “most innovative city” in the world.  San José, Costa Rica, has become a telemarketing outsourcing center, in large part because of its well-prepared workforce.  And cities like Monterrey, Mexico, and Curitiba, Brazil, are emerging tech hubs.

Over the last several decades, however, rapid urban growth in Latin America has also greatly expanded the urban informal sector.  With sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America has the largest informal sector in the world.  Of all workers in greater Bogotá, for example, 59 percent operate in the informal economy.  Low levels of technology, finance and job skills conspire to limit productivity and to distance Latin America from the frontiers of the global economy.  Along with low earnings and the lack of social benefits or income security, a large informal labor sector generates inadequate tax revenue for municipalities and chronic underinvestment and neglect of urban infrastructure.  Pervasive informality also contributes to social exclusion.  More than 80 percent of the top 50 most violent cities in the world are in Latin America, and this violence is concentrated along rapidly expanding urban margins.  In the absence of resources from municipal authorities, marginal urban dwellers turn to illicit actors and activities for unregulated or pirated services and protection.  Potentially competitive enterprises are hesitant to establish a presence in cities where property ownership is contested or where government voids leave land, money, governance and other resources, vulnerable to criminal capture.

Latin America’s cities aspire to effective insertion into the global economy while also struggling with very local and hard-to-change challenges of informality and unregulated urban growth.  Labor flexibilization and privatization, hallmarks of 1990s-era neoliberal policies, at once promote the growth of the informal economy and complicate urban planning intended to facilitate the development of assets necessary for global competitiveness.  Urban planners mistakenly continue to treat participants in the informal economy as a transient reserve army of labor composed of rural in-migrants not yet absorbed into the industrial sector.  Yet if cities want to develop their niche in the global economy, policy makers will also have to attend to the connections between urban informality and social exclusion. Large-scale and violent protests, such as last year’s flash mob protests in shopping malls by working-class Brazilian youth, are demanding their “right to the city.” The economic future and competitiveness of Latin America’s cities significantly depends upon their capacity to address the second-class citizenship of their informal workforce. Overcoming social exclusion is a first step to competing effectively in a global economy characterized by increasingly stiff competition among cities.

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by clalsstaff on April 17, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 17, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/17/the-informal-city-and-latin-americas-urban-future/

Central American Governments Face Tough Challenges

by Benedicte Bull*

CLALS last week convened a panel in San Salvador to discuss the findings of its multi-year project on “Elites, States and Reconfigurations of Power in Central America.”  Attended by over 120 people, the event analyzed how the evolving role of elites will affect the new administrations in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Honduras.  The following day featured a daylong event to launch the Instituto Centroamericano de Investigación sobre el Desarrollo e Inclusión Social (INCIDE), a new think tank that aims to foster fresh thinking about the difficult challenges facing the region.  Here are some key conclusions:

The leftist FMLN in El Salvador and the centrist Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC) in Costa Rica have won crucial elections, but their ideological labels don’t fully capture how they will relate to three decisive actors: legal capital (the private sector), illicit capital (organized crime) and the United States.  The elections of Salvador Sánchez Cerén and Luis Guillermo Solís do not signal a strong turn to the left in Central America, but rather show that the population in both countries increasingly questions the political elites and institutions.  Solís capitalized on the corrupt image of Costa Rica’s two traditional parties, and what tipped the elections in El Salvador were all those who feared the return of a corrupt and elitist right, whose dirty laundry was made public in feuding between ARENA and the breakaway party GANA.

The new governments’ ability to restore confidence will depend firstly on how they relate to business and private capital.  All the countries of Central America are included in the free trade agreement with the United States (CAFTA-DR) and have been generally pursuing market-oriented development strategies since the late 1980s, but economic elites are still dependent on the state for survival.  Many build their business primarily on contracts with the state; all depend on the state involvement in infrastructure and services; but few are willing to pay sufficient taxes to allow their governments to face important challenges.  Honduras, which has accommodated elites the most, may establish a free zone fully exempt not only from taxes but all government regulations.  Nicaragua’s approach, under Daniel Ortega, is to build an alliance between the presidency and business, facilitated by Venezuelan assistance and growing integration into ALBA trade networks.

Institutional weaknesses throughout the region make it difficult to bring organized criminal groups under control.  In Guatemala, where congressmen frequently jump between political parties, organized crime easily buys political control and influence.  Weak parties, weakened ideologies, and leaders’ unwillingness and inability to build a state capable of implementing policies for the common good also allow organized crime a strong grip over politics.  In both Honduras and Guatemala, criminalization of politics has blurred distinctions between legal and illegal elites.

Central America’s relations with the United States also tend to hold it back.  While South America has come a long way towards independence from the United States, many Central Americans believe the old hegemon does not intend to let go of their region.  U.S. policy has in many ways become more sophisticated, but former members of governments speak freely of various methods the U.S. uses – often with the support of Washington lobbyists representing Central American rightwing elites – to restrict Central America’s room for maneuver.  This overshadows debate in Central America over China’s influence and Brazil’s growing leadership.

Taken together, these factors contribute to the conclusion that, even with winds blowing slightly to the left in Central America, the new presidents will have little space to make new policies.  For former guerrilla Sánchez Cerén and former history professor Solís, their experience and wisdom may be their best assets to move forward their agendas.

*Dr. Bull is Associate Professor at the Center for Development and the Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo.

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by clalsstaff on April 15, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 15, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/15/central-american-governments-face-tough-challenges/

Will Costa Rica Seize the Opportunity?

By Fulton Armstrong

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Costa Rican voters have given President-elect Luis Guillermo Solís a mandate for change, but they have also given him a Legislature and culture of political inertia that will make revitalizing the country’s democracy very difficult.  The withdrawal of opponent Johnny Araya from the presidential runoff on Sunday threatened to trigger such low voter turnout that Solís feared his legitimacy would be questioned from the start, but he received 78 percent (1.3 million) of the total votes – more than any other recent presidential victor.  Although he was deeply involved in the National Liberation Party (PLN) until nine years ago, he established himself and the Citizen Action Party (PAC) as viable alternatives to the PLN and Costa Rica’s other discredited traditional party, the PUSC.  His public persona – as a university history professor, former diplomat, a non-corrupt political neophyte, and an unglamorous campaigner – has engendered sympathy even if, as the head of a party with no record, people don’t really know what they’re getting in terms of policy.  Various business groups have signaled they can work with him and presented their wish lists – all touching on energy availability and prices – but that agenda also remains vague.

The composition of the Legislature, elected in February, poses a formidable obstacle to any agenda that Solís develops.  (Click here to see AULABLOG’s first read on this.)  His PAC won two more seats in Parliament – up to 13 out of a total of 57 – but the PLN won 18, the Broad Front (FA) won nine, and the PUSC won eight.  Outgoing President Chinchilla, of the PLN, had a broader base – 24 seats – but obstructionism from across the political spectrum made Executive-Legislative relations rough throughout her term.  The country’s premier economic newspaper, El Financiero, last week gave a generally positive review of President Chinchilla’s performance in ten crucial economic policies – poverty, unemployment, exports, fiscal deficit, and more – and even if that assessment is too generous, the Costa Rican political machines have treated her like an unmitigated failure.  With both traditional parties out of the Executive, maneuvering in the parliament is likely to intensify and be more damaging.

Statements by Costa Rican academics and opinion makers since the lackluster, non-substantive campaigning in the recent elections, suggest a concern that the country is in a funk over the quality of its democracy and democratic institutions.  The political elites are held in low regard for putting their own (often pecuniary) interests before all others.  When Solís takes office on May 8, Costa Ricans will have an opportunity to shake themselves out of that mentality, taking advantage of the new president’s outsider image and his lack of a political machine eager to attach itself as a parasite on the government and economy.  Johnny Araya’s cowardice and his failure to even pretend to have a political program worth fighting for in the second-round campaign, however, bodes poorly for whether the traditional parties are interested in revitalizing Costa Rican politics.  Being the best democracy in Central America has been important to Costa Ricans for decades; being the best it can be is the new challenge.

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by clalsstaff on April 10, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 10, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/10/will-costa-rica-seize-the-opportunity/

The Politics of the Brazilian World Cup

By Luciano Melo

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The 2014 World Cup, scheduled to begin in just 66 days, at this point poses greater risks for President Dilma and her administration than it does benefits.  When the Brazilian government presented its preliminary budget for the event in 2007 – around US$14 billion, or an estimated billion dollars for each 70,000-seat stadium – President Lula was perhaps the most popular president Brazil had ever had.  Despite the mensalão vote-buying scandal several years earlier, Lula was a “man of the people” with a strong personal magnetism.  Brazilians were seeing themselves as an emerging power with a dynamic economy.  Dilma, Lula’s chief of staff, was anointed his successor; she easily won the 2010 election; the Workers Party’s continuity in office seemed assured for the foreseeable future; and the World Cup would be a crowning jewel.

The scenario today looks far grimmer for Dilma.  Her support in the polls dropped from 43 to 36 percent just last month, underscoring her lack of charisma, and the largest Brazilian companies – Petrobras and Eletrobras – have lost half of their market value under her administration.  Cost overruns on World Cup projects have tripled and now exceed the annual budgets for both health and education ($35.6 and $28.8 billion, respectively).  Massive protests last year raised doubts about Dilma’s governance.  The armed forces are being deployed to maintain order in urban slums.  Brazil is now ranked 72nd in the Corruption Perception Index 2013 (a decline from 2012), and press reports indicate that nobody believes that World Cup construction companies have been chosen through a transparent process.  Economic analysts deem budget cuts and taxes increases inevitable – and austerity is in the cards no matter who wins the October 2014 elections.

World Cups and Olympic games are important for governments seeking to boost their image before international and domestic audiences.  If the Olympics in London 2012 aimed to sell England as a beacon of innovation, and the winter games in Sochi marketed Putin’s Russia as a powerful and modern state, the World Cup was Brazil’s opportunity to project itself internationally as a global player with a vibrant economy.  It was to show that high levels of violence and corruption are part of the old days.  Mismanagement and other problems so far suggest those objectives are beyond reach.  Domestically, if Brazil fails to win the cup, we will again see thousands (if not millions) of people protesting in the streets, and Dilma’s prospects of securing a second term will be complicated.  Should Brazil win, however, a soccer-induced surge of national pride may assist her re-election despite public concerns about the cost of the tournament and other economic woes.  But the reprieve probably would be short-lived.  The military move into the favelas is an ad-hoc measure, since organized crime has spread to surrounding urban areas and is likely to reemerge as strong as ever once the events are over.  The middle class and the private sector will continue to pressure the government to fix woefully inadequate public services and improve the business climate – even more challenging with austerity budgets.  The national soccer team could help Dilma win a second term, but the celebration is destined to have a short life. 

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by clalsstaff on April 7, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 7, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/07/the-politics-of-the-brazilian-world-cup/

Will Bolivia’s Half Moon Rise Again?

By Robert Albro

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In early 2014 Bolivian President Evo Morales’s main nemesis, the Media Luna (or Half Moon), composing the eastern departments of Tarija, Pando, and Beni, and led by the economically powerful department of Santa Cruz, has all but vanished politically. Morales is a prohibitive favorite to win a third term, while the opposition Social Democratic Movement built on the vestiges of the Media Luna is not a serious electoral contender. In 2008 this seemed highly improbable. Evo Morales was in a battle for control of Bolivia’s future. The Media Luna was in open revolt. The conflict had begun with Morales’s election in 2005 and was exacerbated by the acrimonious constituent assembly of 2006-2007. It came to a head over the MAS government’s intention to nationalize the country’s natural gas industry and use royalties from Tarija’s vast reserves to fund a new national pension plan. The Media Luna wanted greater regional autonomy and control over revenues. Its August 2008 revolt, which raged for several months, included a region-wide strike, widespread road blocks, takeover of natural gas facilities, government offices, and airports, and violent skirmishes between youth brigades and the police and army, culminating in the killing or wounding of dozens of pro-MAS indigenous marchers in Pando.

Then what happened? The Media Luna, led by elites who had dominated Bolivia’s economic and political fortunes at least up through the second Banzer regime (1997-2001), discovered the limits of its diminishing influence. Throughout the conflict in 2008, Morales maintained control of the machinery of state, including the police and the military, while opposition leaders lacked a political party, critical presence in government, or the international leverage to oust the MAS government. Nor did they have a clear agenda beyond opposition to Morales. Their at times racist attacks fueled national outrage, mobilized defenders of the government, and elicited international condemnation. Accused of conspiring with the Media Luna, the U.S. ambassador was expelled. Media Luna overtures to the OAS were rejected. Most tellingly, UNASUR issued an unequivocal statement supporting Morales’s “constitutional government” and comparing Media Luna tactics to the ousting of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973.

Morales’s 67% victory total in the 2008 recall vote, convened as a concession to the opposition, hastened its fragmentation. Moreover, the MAS has made steady electoral inroads in the East, in part capitalizing upon a demographic shift. Santa Cruz is now far from “wealthy and white,” and the MAS enjoys sizable support among indigenous groups, highland in-migrants, urban and rural poor, and small business owners. Support for the MAS led to popular rejection of autonomy initiatives in these departments. The MAS has also successfully recruited candidates among former elite enemies, a strategy of cooptation that has enabled it to gain six of nine governorships (including in Pando). Even in the once reactionary bastion of Santa Cruz, the MAS won nine of fifteen provinces in the most recent elections. At the same time, the MAS has promoted its model of state capitalism with the private sector, promising to respect private property, and pledging economic development, even as it has begun to expropriate the agricultural holdings of many lowland opposition leaders.

What seemed an existential threat to Morales and the MAS in 2008 has been reduced to a disjointed cadre of right-wing ideologues in 2014. The fate of the Media Luna is a lesson about the sometimes rapidly changing political and economic circumstances around elites in Bolivia and Latin America. The MAS firmly controls the Bolivian state and enjoys broadly distributed electoral support. Despite occasional tensions, neighboring states have also backed the Morales administration. With major agribusiness and hydrocarbons investments in Bolivia, Brazil energetically pressured Media Luna leaders to negotiate with the MAS government. Internationally isolated, lacking a credible electoral instrument, with less economic clout than in the past, Media Luna elites also have lost their historical monopoly brokering access to the global economy. Perhaps hardest to recapture: they no longer appear able to offer a compelling national project or vision for the future.

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by clalsstaff on April 1, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on April 1, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/04/01/will-bolivias-half-moon-rise-again/

U.S. Southern Command: Diminished Resources Affect Mission

By CLALS Staff 

General John F. Kelly Photo credit: Secretary of Defense / Foter / CC BY

General John F. Kelly
Photo credit: Secretary of Defense / Foter / CC BY

In an annual posture statement to Congress and a press conference, SouthCom Commander John Kelly played up the successes of his command’s counternarcotics mission – particularly its “engagements” throughout Latin America – but emphasized that his effectiveness is threatened by budget cuts.  The General said that cooperation with Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and others was “very, very valuable,” and he boasted that the United States has trained over 5,000 Mexican soldiers over the past year.  But he warned that “severe budget constraints” are limiting the Command’s ability to build on the progress.  On Capitol Hill, he said, “Let me be frank: reduced engagement risks the deterioration of U.S. leadership and influence in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.”

Kelly had lots of praise for individual counternarcotics operations – specifically Colombia’s “unbelievable heroic efforts” with crop eradication and attacks on processing labs – and cited the effectiveness of his Command’s drug interdiction programs (capturing about 132 tons of cocaine in 2013) despite funding cutbacks.  But the General reported that his Command failed to intercept 80 percent of the drugs flowing out of Colombia and about 74 percent of all maritime flows.  Despite his praise for Colombia, his statements confirmed that it is still a major producer (reportedly third, after Peru and Bolivia) and the major exporter of cocaine to the United States.  SouthCom estimates that the cocaine industry is still worth $85 billion a year and has “franchises” in 1,200 U.S. cities.  Kelly also reported that heroin consumption in the United States is up 65 to 80 percent in the last several years – “and it all comes up through Latin America.”  He said that SouthCom has been directed to reduce the amount of drugs reaching the United States from Latin America by at least 40 percent – a goal he said he cannot achieve because of cutbacks.

Policymakers and program-managers always face a balancing act when speaking in Washington.  They understandably tout their successes; cite resource constraints as the reason for failure to attain mission objectives; and make a pitch for resources.  SouthCom, having a budget that dwarfs that of any other agency, traditionally has been primus inter pares in Latin America, but Kelly portrayed his Command as merely one of many in the U.S. interagency.  His praise of Colombia as a “regional security exporter” also hints at the unwillingness or inability of the Command to continue its investment in such operations.  When the best-funded U.S. agency operating in Latin America projects itself in this fashion, admitting that the vast majority of illegal narcotics still reach U.S. territory, it’s natural for U.S. taxpayers to wonder what they are getting for their many millions of dollars.  If the Obama administration cannot make a better case, U.S. counternarcotics policy would appear to lack direction and, absent a systematic review, will continue essentially on autopilot.

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by clalsstaff on March 26, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by clalsstaff on March 26, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/03/26/u-s-southern-command-diminished-resources-affect-mission/

ALBA Governments and Presidential Succession

By Eric Hershberg

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Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is proof that being anointed successor by one’s patron on their deathbed isn’t adequate preparation for governing effectively or consolidating a revolutionary legacy.  Although being Hugo Chávez’s man got him into office, it obviously hasn’t been enough for Maduro to stem growing economic, political, and crime problems.  One element behind these protests is a widespread perception – including among some supporters of chavismo – that Maduro is a pale reflection of his benefactor and not up to the task of leading Venezuela.  Chávez hand-picked him in a hasty and half-hearted manner, and he didn’t bequeath to him a coherent set of policies, practices, or institutions that could ensure the continued advance of the Bolivarian Revolution.  Maduro inherited a state that was so weak institutionally and so dependent on Chávez personally that the jury remains out as to whether he has the capacity to keep all the pieces of Chávez’s legacy intact.

The Venezuelan president’s rocky road reflects the difficulty of the renovation of political leadership across ALBA nations.  Rather than nurture successors capable of carrying forward the transformations begun by founding leaders, one president after another has followed Chávez’s lead in dealing with the future by focusing primarily on extending their terms of office.  This past January Nicaragua’s national assembly cleared the way for Daniel Ortega, president since 2007, to run for a third term in 2016.  Ecuador’s Rafael Correa likewise won a third consecutive term in 2013.  Last May Bolivia passed a law allowing Evo Morales to run for an unprecedented third term in 2014.  In none of these cases has the leadership sought to build the credentials of potential successors in the presidency, in stark contrast to what Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva did with Dilma Rousseff or what Ricardo Lagos did with Michelle Bachelet.  This phenomenon is not unique to left-leaning governments – Alvaro Uribe and Alberto Fujimori, for instance, suffered similar temptations –, but it seems endemic to the ALBA governments and is particularly troubling to the extent that these are instances where the leadership aims to effect wholesale, lasting societal transformations through its enduring control over the state apparatus.

There is a distinctive sort of hyper-presidentialism emerging throughout the ALBA nations.  Chávez, Correa, Morales, and Ortega’s concentration of power in their own personas makes it particularly hard for future leaders to emerge.  Their political projects embody aspirations for fundamental societal transformations.  In that sense, they can reasonably be categorized as what the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci would label as historic projects, and even revolutionary ones.  But if a transformative, historic project fails to develop leaders and launch them into positions of growing responsibility and power, it is unlikely that it will succeed over the long run.  Lula could transfer power to Dilma, Lagos could do so with Bachelet, Tabare to José Mujica, and so on.  This is what made possible the conversion of eight-year projects into 16‑year projects, and so on.  The PRI, in Mexico, managed successions for seven decades, and presumably is poised to continue along that road now that it has regained the presidency.  Yet for some reason the ALBA governments have not taken this step.  Their leaders have angled toward caudillismos that have a medium-term appeal, but that almost certainly cannot be the foundation of a decades-long project for changing societies in need of transformations that they themselves articulate.  While their frequent successes in displacing traditional elites and thwarting well-financed oppositions are impressive, it is striking that they fail to build political institutions and leaderships capable of carrying on their own visions and political projects after they pass.  The ALBA presidents may calculate that dismantling the ancien regime is legacy enough, but history may judge them harshly for delaying the emergence of more effective and enduring institutions, and of leaders who can push their projects forward for many administrations to come.

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by clalsstaff on March 21, 2014  •  Permalink
Posted in Venezuela
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Posted by clalsstaff on March 21, 2014

https://aulablog.net/2014/03/21/alba-governments-and-presidential-succession/

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