After a month of wrangling, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner succeeded in sacking central bank President Martin Redrado last week. In his place she named Mercedes Marcó del Pont, a Yale-trained economist who has expressed the view that central bank autonomy ought to be limited.
The opposition howled at the news. Felipe Sola, former governor of Provincia de Buenos Aires, warned that the new bank president “is going to do what the executive decides and they are going to modify the bank charter to justify her doing what the executive tells her.”
Of course that would seem to be the point. Mr. Redrado was fired because he refused to turn over $6.6 billion in bank reserves to Mrs. Kirchner, who wants to pay foreign creditors but doesn’t want to use treasury revenues.Ms. Marcó del Pont, if she wants to keep her job, will follow the orders of the president.
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. The two top stories of the week are the Venezuelan currency devaluation, and Argentina’s Central Bank dispute.
Never mind that Peru is in the Southern Hemisphere and is not winter there now, the world is freezing and the Guardian is spinning:
In a world growing ever hotter, Huancavelica is an anomaly. These communities, living at the edge of what is possible, face extinction because of increasingly cold conditions in their own microclimate, which may have been altered by the rapid melting of the glaciers.
Say again?
The glaciers melted because of global warming and that made it too cold in Peru?
Earlier and colder winters are now defined as global warming.
The Guardian would do better to realize that what is endangering the lives of the poor people in the Andes is not global warming, but factors that the Guardian mentions in its own article:
a lack of basic health services, animal diseases, rising food prices and a declining availability of water.
All of these factors are man-made. “Global warming” is not.
Two weeks ago I posted a link to a gruesome report that allegedly a Peruvian gang was killing people for human fat. Now the BBC has an update on that story:
Peru’s police chief has suspended a top investigator for saying he had caught a gang who were murdering people to sell their fat.
Last month, top organised crime investigator Felix Murga said police had arrested four suspects who confessed to murdering up to 60 people.
He said they were selling their fat for thousands of dollars a litre.
But the macabre tale now appears to be nothing more than a tall story – or a big fat lie.
‘Sold-on’
In an extraordinary press conference, police showed two bottles of what they said was human fat and a photo of a decapitated head.
Mr Murga told journalists how four suspects had confessed to gruesome murders reviving an Andean legend about the Pishtacos – mythical killers who murdered people on lonely roads to collect their fat.
But two weeks later a complete lack of evidence showed the police account to be more fiction that fact.
As a result Peru’s chief of police, Miguel Hidalgo, announced Mr Murga would be put on indefinite leave from his job for sullying the reputation of his unit.
Initial doubts were compounded when police from the region where the crimes were alleged to have taken place said they knew nothing about a gang of murderers killing people for their fat.
They were only able to corroborate one of the dozens of alleged disappearances in a region where drug-trafficking and violence is rife.
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad started his tour of South America by accepting Lula’s invitation to Brazil, which was first scheduled for last May but was postponed after public outcry. Protestors were at the airport
Around 200 Iranian businessmen accompanied Ahmadinejad’s delegation, in a sign of their eagerness to tap opportunities in a continent that does not consider Tehran a pariah.
Lucia Newman, formerly of CNN, reports on the visit,
More links on the visit in the Brazil section below.
The sea lanes of the South Atlantic have become a favored route for drug traffickers carrying narcotics from Latin America to West and North Africa, where al Qaeda-related groups are increasingly involved in transporting the drugs to Europe, intelligence officials and counternarcotics specialists say.
A Middle Eastern intelligence official said his agency has picked up “very worrisome reports” of rapidly growing cooperation between Islamic militants operating in North and West Africa and drug lords in Latin America. With U.S. attention focused on the Caribbean and Africans lacking the means to police their shores, the vast sea lanes of the South Atlantic are wide open to illegal navigation, the official said.
“The South Atlantic has become a no-man’s sea,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity owing to the nature of his work.
A spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) confirmed the new route.
“The Colombians have shifted their focus from sending cocaine through the Caribbean, and they saw an opportunity to sell cocaine in Europe, transshipping it through the South Atlantic from Venezuela and then to Africa, through Spain and into Europe,” DEA spokesman Michael Sanders told The Washington Times. “That’s what we’re seeing. It’s just a new location. That’s the route they’re taking, for the most part.”
Islamists, the FARC and Venezuela are involved:
Concerns center on groups such as al Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), which operates primarily in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. North African officials say they worry that AQIM is amassing large sums of money from the drug trade to use in financing attacks, with the object of frightening away tourists, undercutting local economies and, ultimately, secular regimes.
Much of the drug trafficking passes through Venezuela, said Jaime Daremblum, the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the Hudson Institute and a former Costa Rican ambassador to the United States.
“Caracas has become the cathedral of narco-traffickers,” he said.
Colombian and Peruvian drugs pass through Venezuela en route to Africa and then are transshipped to European markets, anti-drug specialists say. The FARC guerrilla movement, which seeks to destabilize the government of Colombia, is involved and has links to the Islamists in North Africa, they say.
Tonight’s screening of The Sugar Babies at the University of Miami will proceed as scheduled despite enormous pressure from a member of the university’s Board of Trustees. One of the board’s senior trustees is Alfonso Fanjul, who is also the Chairman and CEO of Flo-Sun, Inc., a sugar company featured in the film for its inhumane labor practices, which include employing children to work sugar cane fields in conditions that can best be described as modern-day slavery.
The award-winning, feature-length documentary The Sugar Babies is scheduled to be screened tonight at 7 p.m. as part of the Latin American Film Series organized by the University of Miami Center for Latin American Studies. It will be followed by a question and answer session with filmmaker Amy Serrano. Tomorrow, November 13, Serrano will also lead a round table discussion about the film and the current situation of Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic.
Dominican diplomats also pressured the university to remove the film from the festival. Edgar Aponte, Dominican Minister Counselor, will be attending the event. Aponte works under Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican Minister of Foreign Affairs, who happens to be the former president and CEO and current shareholder at the Fanjul-owned Central Romana Corporation in the Dominican Republic.
Fuentes castrenses que pidieron el anonimato por razones obvias confirmaron a ABC que el último año ha sido frecuente la llegada sin registro de militares venezolanos, aparentemente para “colaborar” con las Fuerzas Armadas en tareas de inteligencia. La coordinación estaría a cargo del agregado militar de ese país, Oscar Carrizales Pinto, que llamativamente es general, cuando este tipo de puestos habitualmente lo ocupan oficiales de menor rango. Los tripulantes del Hércules que se habrían quedado en el país el jueves no hicieron trámites migratorios.
Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez says he will join a team of Cuban scientists on flights to “bomb clouds” to create rain amid a severe drought that has aroused public anger due to water and electricity rationing.
Chavez, who has asked Venezuelans to take three-minute showers to save water, said the Cubans had arrived in Venezuela and were preparing to fly specially equipped aircraft above the Orinoco river.
“I’m going in a plane; any cloud that crosses me, I’ll zap it so that it rains,” Chavez said at a ceremony late on Saturday with family members of five Cubans convicted of spying in the United States.
In case you think this came from The Onion, here he is saying it in Spanish, announcing that the Cuban technicians arrived and are ready to bomb the clouds:
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Today’s top story: Yoani Sánchez and Orlando Luís Pardo Lazo last Friday, November 6, were kidnapped off a street in Havana just as they were about to participate on a peace demonstration. They were severely beaten by three men, threatened, and released. More details on the story in the Cuba section below. I’ll be talking about this in today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern.
Val Prieto posted an item Claudia Cadelo, another Cuban blogging from the island-prison, is posting now at Babalu.
Another top story making the news in the media is that Chavez is threatening war with Colombia… again. You’d think he would come up with something new by now.
Zelaya in June 25 video: For those of you who must insist that Zelaya didn’t violate the law prior to being deposed, here is a video of Zelaya leading a mob to steal the Venezuela-printed ballots and electoral material that the Honduran authorities had declared illegal.
“Generals of the armed forces, the best way to avoid a war is to prepare for one,” Chavez said in comments on state television during his weekly “Alo Presidente” program. “Colombia handed over their country and is now another state of the union. Don’t make the mistake of attacking: Venezuela is willing to do anything.”
Chávez asks the military to prepare for war with Colombia: Chávez pide a militares “prepararse para guerra” con Colombia. Here he is stating it in his Alo presidente TV show (in Spanish). He also tells Obama “don’t make a mistake, Mr President Obama, and order open aggression against Venezuela by using Colombia. Don’t make that mistake, because we’re ready for everything.”
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean.
This week’s big news: the new Honduras agreement. Please see this morning’s roundup on the international reaction, and last Friday’s post. More posts on Honduras below.
Politics is full of surprises. Roberto Micheletti, designated president of Honduras by that country’s parliament, wanted former President Manuel Zelaya to remain in jail in Tegucigalpa while judges and prosecutors formalized the judicial process against him for violation of the Constitution, corruption and misappropriation of public funds. Curiously, Hugo Chávez, Lula da Silva and Daniel Ortega have made that detention possible.
True, Zelaya is not in a Honduran jail but in the Brazilian Embassy in the capital, but that’s a lot more convenient for the government of Micheletti. It is unlikely that pro-Zelaya commandos will break into the Brazilian haven to try to rescue him, because he entered it of his own will and, in any case, the responsibility for Zelaya’s physical integrity is now in the hands of Brazil. The Honduran police need only guard the building’s exterior and control the comings and goings. At some point, Zelaya will decide to submit to his country’s justice, or maybe he’ll choose to spend a long time under asylum.
Meanwhile, President Micheletti, with remarkable firmness, says that he’s going ahead with the elections planned for Nov. 29. Shortly before Zelaya’s return, Panama declared that, if the upcoming Honduran elections are fair and transparent, it will recognize the new government. That’s the sensible thing to do. Fortunately, President Ricardo Martinelli is a brave statesman who doesn’t mind swimming against the current if it is morally justifiable to him.
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. 
