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American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for 2015

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Venezuela: Supreme Justice bars 4 elected assemblymen

Of the eight disputed seats, the Justices will prevent the four deputies from Amazonas state from taking office:

Venezuelan Supreme Court admits Maduro’s election challenges

  • Justices stop four assembly members from taking their seats while it examines cases
  • Opposition says all of its deputies will be on hand when it takes control of house next week

Government candidates who lost in the races filed election challenges in six election districts with the Supreme Court, alleging voting irregularities. The government alleged that votes were bought by the opposition in Amazonas, a poor state with a small population in the south of the country.

More at the WSJ:

The court has come under harsh criticism from analysts and rights groups since the lame duck parliament last week appointed 13 Socialist party loyalists as magistrates before lawmakers’ terms ended. Venezuelan legal experts said Socialist legislators violated constitutional norms by naming party allies as judges and by rushing through the appointment process in two days of marathon assembly sessions that opposition lawmakers largely boycotted and deemed illegitimate.

. . .

Posted on its website, the Supreme Court’s statement didn’t specify on what grounds it acted against the lawmakers from Amazonas. While the court had received requests for injunctions on nine legislative seats won by the opposition, the court only ordered a halt on three of them. The six others will be able to participate in the inauguration next week, though their cases will still be subject to a judicial review.

One.Oh.Nine

It affects all three deputies from Amazonas state, and the indigenous deputy from the Southern Region, which also includes Apure state.
. . .
Opposition-linked legal scholar José Ignacio Hernández suggests MUD is fully justified in simply ignoring the ruling

Hernández posits a matter of jurisdiction:

  • that once officially proclaimed, seats cannot not be withdrawn, and,
  • that only the National Assembly can qualify its members, not the Supreme Court acting retroactively.

Developing . . .

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Our Watcher’s Council Nominations – Don’t Worry, Be Happy Edition

At the Watchers’ Council,

http://www.westcovinalimoservices.com/uploads/3/2/2/1/32210687/952963_orig.jpg

Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.

Council News:


The results from this year’s 2015 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards are in and the Council scored big! Teresa Monroe-Hamilton’s The Noisy Room, Fausta’s Blog, VA Right, Sara Noble’s The Independent Sentinel and Bookworm Room all received individual awards and rave write ups, and the Council as a whole received a group award as best blogging group..

This week, The Pirate’s Cove, Right Reason, The People’s Cube and Seraphic Secret earned honorable mention status with some great articles.

You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning.

Simple, no?

It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let’s see what we have for you this week….

Council Submissions

Honorable Mentions

Non-Council Submissions

Enjoy! And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that!And don’t forget to tune in Friday for the results!

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Venezuela: Chavistas, kicking & screaming, appeal election results

Six days to go before the new National Assembly is sworn in, the PSUV contests the election results:

Venezuela contesting elections; opposition on verge of losing supermajority in assembly (emphasis added)

Venezuela’s ruling party filed motions to dispute the election of eight lawmakers from the opposition coalition, which on Dec. 6 obtained a majority with enough power to rein in President Nicolás Maduro, sack Cabinet ministers and even call an assembly to rewrite Hugo Chávez’s 1999 constitution.

The government’s party needs to succeed in unseating just one of the eight elected lawmakers to take away the so-called supermajority from the opposition.

The motions were filed Tuesday before the Supreme Court, just days after the government appointed 13 new justices — including two of the five justices from the Sala Electoral, the panel charged with all electoral issues.

As I said on December 7,

The immediate challenge:
The new members to the National Assembly do not take office until January 5th. Diosdado Cabello and his goons can cause a lot of harm and mayhem in one month.

The takeaway: What takes place in Venezuela in the next month, and in the first six months of 2016 will be crucially important for our entire hemisphere.

[Post re-entered to include omitted text]

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Cuba: More migration

As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours:

Accord Over Cubans Stranded in Costa Rica Sparks Fear of Illegal Migration Wave. Deal covers about 8,000 people and is meant to be one-off solution, but officials see a precedent being set,

The agreement between Central American nationsand Mexico to allow around 8,000 stranded Cubans to travel legally from Costa Rica to the U.S. was viewed as a positive short-term solution, but sparked fears the move could encourage a wave of illegal migration in coming months.

Fearing an end to special U.S. asylum treatment as Cuba-U. S. relations improve, thousands of Cubans have used legal visits to Costa Rica and Ecuador as a first step toward migrating to the U.S. But in this latest case, Cuban migrants became stuck in Costa Rica in recent weeks after neighboring Nicaragua closed its borders to them, blocking the land route north. Nicaragua wasn’t part of the accord signed on Monday.

Not refugees, but economic immigration,

Signatories nations included Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica and Mexico.

The South-North human traffic is controlled by smugglers (emphasis added),

Even some officials of the signatory nations said the deal comes with risks. “We are finishing the work of the smugglers, and of course it will incentivize the arrival of more illegals, but in solidarity we could not ignore the drama in Costa Rica,” Carlos Raúl Morales,Guatemala’s foreign minister, said in an interview.

Secret deal hatched to airlift 8,000 Cubans out of Costa Rica and put them back on track to U.S.

Meanwhile, Cubans arriving to South Florida in droves, while

I’ve been saying all along that the problem is assimilation; the current administration in Washington is totally uninterested in having hundreds of thousands new immigrants assimilate.

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Colombia: “Guilty as sin, free as a bird?”

Senator and former President Álvaro Uribe has been reading the draft for the FARC-Colombian government “peace deal”, and tweeted this today:

“In the FARC-Government accord, drug trafficking will not get extradition nor domestic penalty.”

So not only won’t the Colombian government continue to outsource justice instead of repairing its broken institutions – especially the justice system, which The Economist calls “worryingly inefficient and corruptible” – the drug trade (the FARC’s main source of revenue) won’t be punished.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Argentina: Macri aims to restore the government data’s credibility

Over the past several years I have posted on Argentina’s dubious economic data and the Kirchneristas’ persecution of economists who didn’t toe the official line.

Hence, this is a good start:
Argentina’s Macri Tackles Flawed Government Data as Part of Overhaul. New president is moving quickly to overhaul 12 years of populist policies; fixing government-data collection is key.It wasn’t only economists who were punished,

Businessmen also came under pressure. Miguel Schiariti, the president of Argentina’s meat industry chamber, recalled getting into heated arguments with Mr. Moreno, who wanted meat prices to stay low.

Mr. Moreno didn’t respond to requests for comment. He told a local television program recently that Indec’s data was accurate, and he accused economists of self-interest in reporting higher inflation figures.

Indec workers who refused to doctor data were demoted to dingy offices without equipment, according to the public employee union, an account backed by Mr. Garrido’s findings. Others say they received threatening phone calls and were hassled in the building’s hallways, union leaders said.

Indec’s reputation was ruined, leading private-sector economists to publish their own data that showed rampant inflation two or three times higher than official figures. This year, private economists say inflation will be about 25%.

We’re talking huge discrepancies here (click on image to enlarge),

Years of this left the government with – 0 – credibility. Macri has his work cut out ahead for him.

Meanwhile, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner fails time and again to make herself relevant.

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Venezuela: Countdown to the new Assembly UPDATED

The new National Assembly takes office on January 4th. Here are a few headlines:

Chavista Politicos Rush 21 Supreme Court Appointments in Final Hour. Insiders Cling to Hold on to Judicial Branch in Expiring Mandate (emphasis added),

National Assembly members were summoned to four extraordinary sessions on December 22 and 23 for this purpose; usually, Congress ends its last session of the year on December 15, but the current ruling party majority decided to delay its recess after the opposition’s recent victory in the parliamentary elections.

On December 22, the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber issued a ruling stating that all extraordinary sessions in the National Assembly have legal validity. This means that any decision that outgoing congressmen approve will be legitimate.

By appointing 21 new Supreme Court magistrates, Chavista congressmen would be able to avoid investigations against members of congress and government officials being prosecuted in foreign courts. The measure also hinders the discharge or impeachment of the president, ministers, members of the armed forces and other high-ranking functionaries.

Jackson Diehl predicts a very likely outcome: Strongmen strike back in Burma and Venezuela

In Caracas, opposition leaders also appeared ready to negotiate. But Maduro and his most powerful deputy, National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello, embraced a radical, and highly risky, strategy of confrontation.

Since the Dec. 6 vote, Cabello has convoked a new, unelected “communal Congress” and installed it in the parliament building. Maduro has hinted that the outgoing N ational A ssembly, which remains in office until Jan. 5, may transfer its powers to the new “Congress.” Meanwhile, the ruling party rushed last week to appoint 13 new members to the supreme court, which was already under government control.

All these steps were flagrantly unconstitutional. But the most ominous measure floated by the Chavistas goes still further: a court action to overturn the election of 22 opposition deputies. Last Tuesday, opposition leaders called a news conference to announce the government was going through with what would amount to a nuclear option. Hours later, the supreme courtmysteriously responded that it had received no such petition.

Venezuelan analysts believe the episode may have been a sign of a divide in the regime. The intransigence of Maduro and Cabello is likely encouraged by the regime’s hard-line Cuban advise rs, but it is also rooted in corruption. Cabello is reportedly a prime target of a U.S. federal drug trafficking investigation, while two of Maduro’s nephews are already being held in New York on trafficking charges. With U.S. prosecutors involved, the Chavistas, unlike Burma’s generals, cannot negotiate a pass.

On the other hand, the Venezuelan military, including Defense Minister Vladi­mir Padrino López, has no interest in tactics that may drive Venezuelans into the streets and leave the a rmy with the job of putting down a “people power” rebellion. That would be the likely result of reversing the election results. So it could be that Venezuela’s victorious opposition, like Burma’s, will end up negotiating with the generals.

TheWaPo editorial board looks at The anti-democratic maneuvers of Venezuela’s leaders

Peter Wilson: In Denial Over Opposition Win, Maduro Ignores Venezuela’s New Reality

At the blogs:
The priorities ahead

In other news, Venezuela: Murder Rate for Year May Be World’s Worst, Report Says

In a report Monday, the group, the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, estimated that 27,875 killings occurred this year, pushing the homicide rate up to 90 per 100,000 residents; last year, its count was 82 per 100,000.

UPDATE

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