Welcome to the first Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean of 2010. I hope you had a joyful holiday season and wish you a prosperous and happy year.
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.
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.
Considering how the US is moving towards formally cutting off aid to Honduras, the following is not surprising at all: Mary O’Grady of the WSJ reports on the Obama administration’s behind-the-scenes shenanigans:
Mr. Obama’s methods are decidedly uncool. Prominent Hondurans, including leading members of the business community, complain that a State Department official has been pressuring them to push the interim government to accept the return of Mr. Zelaya to power.
When I asked the State Department whether it was employing such dirty tricks a spokeswoman would only say the U.S. has been “encouraging all members of civil society to support the San Jose ‘accord’”—which calls for Mr. Zelaya to be restored to power. Perhaps something was lost in the translation but threats to use U.S. power against a small, poor nation hardly qualify as encouragement.
Elsewhere in the region there are reports that U.S. officials have been calling Latin governments to demand that they support the U.S. position. When I asked State whether that was true, a spokeswoman would not answer the question. She would only say that the U.S. is “cooperating with the [Organization of American States] and [Costa Rican President] Oscar Arias to support the San José accord.”
In other words, though it won’t admit to coercion, it is fully engaged in arm-twisting at the OAS in order to advance its agenda.
If Zelaya doesn’t accept these [Micheletti's] terms, it’s difficult to see how Zelaya can keep claiming that he never intended on building a presidency-for-life. A refusal would make it much more difficult for the Obama administration to keep defending and championing Zelaya, although so far, no one seems embarrassed enough at the prospect to think it will change.
Not so. The Obama administration is committed to one course of action, and one course alone. Their behind-the-scenes behavior shows it.
Last week Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador to Caracas. Yesterday he was threatening to expel the American Charge d’Affaires in Caracas, John Caulfield, for going to a wedding in Puerto Rico. Chavez claims Caulfield was plotting against him…at the wedding.
Argentina’s economic outlook is bleak, and not likely to improve over the short term. While the country has been invited to the G20 summit and may be distancing itself from Caracas’s influence, government spending is out of control,
Argentina’s Ministry of Economics estimated in midsummer that the country was carrying about $150 billion in debt. The government has been borrowing from anyone who will lend — namely, the captive domestic bond market and regional ally Venezuela — at high interest rates to fund its populist programs, which include steep energy subsidies and the outright nationalization of six (now seven, counting Aerolineas) companies. Payments on Argentina’s debt will total more than $10 billion in the first six months of 2009 alone. At the same time, the government is assuming more and more responsibilities across the board and shows no sign of halting.
Because the 2009 government budget did not take the nationalized pension funds into account, it appeared at first blush that the government might have secured for itself some means of taking the bite out of debt payments with that appropriation. Given that the original budget was based on highly optimistic economic performance forecasts — the global downturn and the decline of Argentina’s agriculture industry notwithstanding –- it was possible to argue that the move was relatively prudent, despite the jitters felt by investors.
But the reality is that Fernandez is increasing spending at such a rate that the administration will quickly burn through the extra cash. This is not typical debt manipulation, but rather, as investors had feared, the outright commandeering of Argentines’ retirement savings to prop up the government’s populist policies.
Setting aside the emotional and financial impact to Argentine workers as they contemplate their futures, the government has ensnared itself in an accounting dilemma. If spending continues in the face of falling revenue and limited credit, Buenos Aires eventually will hit a wall. And so far, its only recourse has been to liquidate what few financial assets remain in-country. Although there could yet be a grand scheme that will compensate for this problem, the government has shown no evidence thus far that one exists. The odds of an outright debt default and a return to the economic crisis of 2002 are growing.
The Antigua Sun reported that the Antigua and Barbuda Medical Registration Board (MRB) refused to register the documents because, according to the Chairman of the MRB, David Dorset, the requirements were not satisfied that they could practice medicine by themselves.
Additionally Dorset said the applicants had not proven their entitlement to practice medicine in another country. Therefore, they would not be registered in Antigua and Barbuda under the Medical Act.
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. If you would like your posts included in the carnival, please email me: faustaw2 “at” gmail “dot” com.
In attendance Saturday were the presidents of Chile, Colombia, Equatorial Guinea and Haiti, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic.
Taiwan’s new president, Ma Ying-jeou, came to meet with Fernandez and strengthen relations with a shrinking list of 23 countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan instead of rival China.
Leftist presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Evo Morales of Bolivia, who have increased state control of the economy in their countries, saluted Lugo as a revolutionary brother when they arrived on Thursday.
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CONSERVATIVES STAY AWAY
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Argentine President Cristina Fernandez came to Asuncion for the swearing in and were met by a front-page editorial in ABC Color newspaper, calling on them to pay higher prices for electricity produced in Paraguay from dams their countries financed.
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The region’s more conservative and pro-Washington leaders, from Colombia, Mexico and Peru, sent emissaries to the inauguration.
the facts of the case could not be denied, a suitcase full of US$ 800,000 in cash, caught in a country friendly to Chavez, arriving in an airplane chartered by PDVSA and filled with PDVSA employees and Argentinean Government officials.
Wecome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. If you would like your posts included in next week’s Carnival please email me: faustaw2 “at” gmail “dot” com.
I have started a daily 15-minute podcast on Latin America:
On Tuesdays and Fridays, you can listen to my live podcasts at 11AM Eastern Blog Talk Radio.
On Monday, Wednesdays and Thursdays I do video podcasts at 2PM Eastern at NowLive. iTunes subscription here, XML Feed here.
While bank runs plague Venezuela next door as panicky depositors seek to withdraw their savings before Chavez can get his hands on them, Colombia is an investment magnet, drawing in a record $3.1 billion in the first quarter. If things stay steady, the country should draw at least $12 billion by the end of the year. It would be a 25% rise from 2007’s record-setting $9 billion. See what happens when a country cleans up and follows free markets? The inflowing investment is proof of it, a belief in Colombia’s future. Viva Colombia!
HAITI Aristide’s American profiteers, especially at Fusion, whose board at the time (during the Clinton administration) “read like the who’s who of Democratic politics”
The chairman of Fusion’s board was and still is Marvin Rosen, who was the finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 1996 Clinton fund-raising scandals. During the late 1990s, Joseph P. Kennedy II and Thomas “Mack” McLarty, both prominent Democrats, were on the board. Fusion has previously denied any wrongdoing.
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. If you would like your posts included in the Carnivals, please email me: faustaw2 “at” gmail “dot” com.
The article (in Spanish) states that the FARC, through its Coordinadora Continental Bolivariana (CCB) [Continental Bolivarian Coordination] network created in 2003, the FARC has developed a strategy that involves legal groups, clandestine cells and guerrilla training. These groups are closely associated with leftist organizations in seventeen countries, including Germany and Switzerland.
They opened four organizations in Mexico, managed by two cells that answer directly to the Secretariado, the FARC’s leadership.
In the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela the FARC sponsor guerrillas through so-called “Biodiversity Forums”, in addition to “official political-diplomatic relations” with Communist parties and the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador.
Their aim, is
“Crear un gran Ejército revolucionario con el apoyo de masas para derrocar el sistema capitalista e instalar el socialismo”. “To create a great revolutionary Army with the support of the masses in order to destry the capitalist system and install socialism.”
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia has established undercover cells abroad in 17 countries, a Spanish newspaper says, quoting from documents found on the computer of Raul Reyes, a slain commander of the anti-government group.
All this information comes from the computers seized from Raul Reyes.
Among the details in today’s article in addition to their narcotraffic involvement, the FARC is the world’s largest planter of land mines, their ties with internations criminal organizations, and their revenues from kidnappings, among them half a million dollars revenue from kidnapping two Swiss executives from pharmaceutical company Novartis.
You can read the articles at El Pais in Spanish. The above is my translation and summary. Please credit me if you use it. Thank you.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday almost told German Chancellor Angela Merkel to go to hell, but stopped short of insulting the woman leader on Mother’s Day. Instead he called her a political descendant of Adolf Hitler and German fascism. “Ms. Chancellor, you can go to …,” he said, pausing for effect and eliciting giggles from the audience, a group of military officers, cabinet ministers and government officials. “Because she’s a woman I won’t say anything else.”
Being insulted by Chavez is indeed a mark of honor.
Welcome to the first Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean of 2010. I hope you had a joyful holiday season and wish you a prosperous and happy year.
PARAGUAY
BRAZIL
