The deceased ELN leader was a member of the guerrilla group for 17 years and was purportedly heavily involved in the group’s extortion racket and cocaine production.
“Imagine a country where not only are the borders secured by armed guards, but once you entered the country, if you even spoke about politics — at all — if you even mentioned anything politically, you would be deported. Imagine a country where everyone is required to be tracked all the time. Where all of these immigrants are constantly monitored. Imagine where the idea of immigrants even having a word on the internal politics of a country would be enough to get them deported.”
“I can imagine a country like that. That country is Mexico.”
More than 99% of voters said yes, according to Darren Christie, public relations manager for the Falklands Islands government. Just three people voted no. Turnout was 92%.
The Argentinian government won’t have it, because, as the guy in the video said, “Of course [they'll] vote that way, they’re British citizens,” but “the Falkands will always belong to Argentina” no matter what.
As one of my UGA classmates in economics used to say, “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull s**t.”
Welcome to the Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean. The top story in our hemisphere this week: the announcement of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s death. While the government has announced a presidential election for April 14th, don’t expect chavismo to give up power anytime soon.
The cult of adoration is now under way, which fills a need peculiar to Latin America, as Enrique Krauze explains,
In Latin America the need to turn politicians into secular saints is due to the distrust many feel for the region’s weak institutions and a worship for so-called men on horseback—heroes who come to the nation’s rescue, said Mr. Krauze. The region’s deep Catholic tradition of anointing and then venerating saints is also an important factor, he said.
When Congress finally decided in 2012 to allow people to obtain the salary information of its employees, it also required them to find the name of each employee and submit it online. In other words, if someone wanted the information on the legislature’s 25,000-strong work force, then that person had to independently identify them and submit 25,000 separate online requests.
If only it were that easy here in São Paulo. One clerk at the state’s high court, Ivete Sartório, was reportedly paid about $115,000 after convincing her superiors that she should be compensated for not taking leaves of absence. But when asked recently about her wages, a spokesman for the court, Rômulo Pordeus, said that Ms. Sartório’s “matriculation number” was needed to request the information.
When asked how any curious taxpayer could get that number, he replied that it was in Ms. Sartório’s possession, and that he did not want to bother her about it.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s lionization of his Venezuelan friend Hugo Chávez caused a political firestorm in the Islamic Republic, as doubts arose over whether the two countries could carry on their tight alliance now that Mr. Chávez is dead.
Plans to build a large, permanent exposition center for Chinese-made goods near Cancún have triggered an outcry from Mexican industrialists who struggle to compete with Chinese manufacturing.
Cristina Fernandez took out an ad in the UK’s Guardian and the Independent basically telling UK Prime Minister David Cameron to have the UK “return” the Falklands to Argentina.
Argentina’s been out of the Falklands for 181 years and got their butts kicked when they tried to invade 31 years ago, but Cristina needs a distraction from her ruinous domestic policies, and oil was found off the Falklands, hence, the ad.
a spokesman for Mr Cameron said the people of the Falklands had shown “a clear desire to remain British” and their interests would be protected.
…
Downing Street said the prime minister would “do everything to protect the interests of the Falklands islanders.”
Mr Cameron’s spokesman said the people of the Falklands had shown “a clear desire to remain British” and the Argentine government should respect their right to self determination.
Argentina now argues that the British planted people on the island over the last 180 years of sovereignty, and that the people currently living on the islands — which are more than 250 miles away from Argentina, by the way — should be ineligible for self-determination. It’s a cute argument, as it does away with the question of self-determination at all — but by the same measure, most Argentinians would be ineligible for self-determination, as their population came mainly from colonial expansion from a couple of centuries before. What’s the cutoff? 181 years? 241 years? 369 years?
No one can be expected to take this seriously, but Cameron is clearly taking no chances.
Cristina ought to be worrying her little Botoxed head over her domestic policies… and maybe, just maybe, over her political future if the time comes when Hugo Chavez’s demise stops those suitcases full of money that finance her campaigns.
Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo vowed on Thursday to stand and fight rather than resign after his opponents launched an impeachment drive over a land eviction in which 17 people died last week.
The shows highlight Argentine veterans’ difficult postwar adjustment process. A repressive military government mobilized the veterans, often conscripts from working-class backgrounds, for Argentina’s 1982 invasion of the islands in a last-ditch bid to rally popular support. Argentina’s leadership hadn’t expected the British to dispatch its own invasion force to retake the islands. Argentine troops were left underequipped and with only an improvised plan to confront the professional U.K. army.
The NYTimes magazine has a must-read report, Cocaine Incorporated (h/t AD), with a yowza,
In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto — he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. “How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?” Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli’s case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.)
The New York Times revealed today in a major news article that the well-known Stuxnet malware attack on the Iranian nuclear program was, in fact, an American operation. Most experts had felt that was the most logical conclusion, but it had never been confirmed. The Times report is based on interviews with anonymous sources “because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day,” reporter David Sanger wrote. While this is an acknowledgement of U.S. prowess in cyberwarfare, the revelation is an inexcusable breach of security that seems to be a part of a disturbing trend.
One has to ask: Why is the Obama Administration choosing to continue revealing operational information that is normally not released? This includes the specific units that conducted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden,information from the bin Laden compound, classified information on the bin Laden raid, details of drone operations, and now secrets about cyberwarfare. There is NO good operational reason for doing this. The only “logical” reason is a tight race for presidency. Does this mean that the closer that we get to the election, the more operational secrets will be given away?
The larger reality is that these leaks, designed to highlight the President’s credentials as a tough leader, are trying to mask the fact that Obama has virtually nothing to show on key national security issues. Progress in the big and important issues, such as relations with China and Russia, broadly fending off Iranian nuclear development, and keeping the rogue regime in North Korea inside its box, have all proven elusive for this Administration.
When progress is absent, a desperate Administration may use leaks, even if it harms national security.
This is a clear-cut case of self-determination, and the Obama administration’s continuing support or a negotiated settlement (made abundantly clear by a senior State Department spokeman last week) is a slap in the face for both the Falkland Islanders as well as the British people.
ARGENTINA
