Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for May 2015

May 4, 2015 By Fausta

The royal baby Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince William and Kate Middleton, had a baby daughter born on Saturday, and that’s all you’ll hear about it on this blog.

On with the news in our hemisphere:

ARGENTINA
Now even the dogs get kidnapped: Gangs Target Purebred Dogs in Argentina

BAHAMAS
Bahamas court agrees to review new immigration rules

BRAZIL
Lula Investigated for Being Odebrecht’s “Trafficker-in-Chief”

Brazil’s Power Dynamics Shifting Amid Political Scandals

Brazilian executed in Indonesia ‘unaware what was happening until end’Priests states Brazilian man executed in Indonesia did not understand what was happening to him because of his schizophrenia and bipolar disorder

CHILE
Chile’s Calbuco volcano erupts for third time

COLOMBIA
Colombia’s High Court Seeks Wider Probe of Espionage CaseInvestigation of ex-President Álvaro Uribe, five other aides sought

Where Are Colombia’s Youth in FARC Negotiations?Josías Fiesco: The Most Impacted Have Not a Single Seat at the Table

Colombia’s judiciaryTrouble at the topEven the highest courts are not immune from scandal

COSTA RICA
Costa Rica is happy — but not too much

CUBA
From China: Clandestine Arms Shipment Arrives in Cuba

Venezuela’s Maduro Joins Raul Castro for Cuba’s May Day Parade, where no one would dare throw mangoes at them.

ECUADOR
What Happened When I Joked About the President of Ecuador

A few months before, I registered the Crudo Ecuador brand with the Ecuadorean Institute of Intellectual Property. The I.E.P.I. published the Gaceta, a booklet that shows all the brands that are being registered, including mine.

That’s when things took a dark turn. Some Twitter users began posting I.E.P.I. documents. These documents are supposed to be confidential; they showed my telephone number, my address, my ID number. Then they started posting information from the civil registry. And then, a photo of me in a mall. When I showed my wife the picture, she said, “Hey, this was taken three days ago.” So they’d been following us.

GUATEMALA
Guatemala Needs More than OutrageScale Back the State to Starve Corruption

HAITI
SCHWEIZER: CLINTON DONORS, RELATIVES GOT RICH OFF HAITI CONTRACTS, US TAXPAYERS

JAMAICA
A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia reviewRichard S Dunn’s comparative study of slavery makes surprising arguments

LATIN AMERICA
Thanks To Vaccination, Rubella Has Been Eliminated From The Western Hemisphere

MEXICO
Mexican army helicopter shot at in drug cartel attackA Mexican army helicopter has been shot at in the western state of Jalisco, killing three soldiers and injuring 12 others.

NICARAGUA
For “peaceful purposes”? Nicaragua approves Russian satellite base for ‘alternative GPS’Opposition say legislation was rushed through without proper scrutinyNicaraguan military says it plans to buy Russian jets and patrol boats

PANAMA
Crossing the Darién Gap: US-bound migrants marooned in Panama jungleLong voyage winds from half a world away in search of economic opportunity in North America (emphasis added),

As dusk fell on a recent Saturday, a long dugout canoe floated into this remote town in Darién province of Panama, carrying an increasingly frequent cargo of improbable origins.

At a border police base by the Chucunaque River, the human haul — 13 Bangladeshis, seven Nepalese and two Somalis — disembarked to noisy greetings from other migrants on the bank.

PARAGUAY
Girl, 10, raped by stepfather, denied abortion in ParaguayAmnesty International is calling on Paraguay’s government to allow child to get an abortion for the sake of her health

PERU
Hidden early Christian crypt discovered with dozens of skeletons

PUERTO RICO
Puerto Rico on the Brink

Puerto Rico is in trouble, after years of bad policies, mismanagement, excessive debt and bad luck.

Its economy has been shrinking or stagnant for a decade and theunemployment rate sits at nearly 12 percent. The commonwealth and its utilities have a debt of $73 billion, its public pension funds are woefully underfunded and one state agency has warned that the government could be forced to shut down soon because it might run out of money.

URUGUAY
Ex-Gitmo Detainees In Uruguay Protest At U.S. Embassy

VENEZUELA
The U.N.’s Venezuela Crush Gets Orwellian

Report: Venezuela’s Medical Shortages Rival War ZonesHuman Rights Watch: Thousands at Risk while Maduro Looks for Scapegoats

«Yo fui el intérprete de Chávez»Mohamad Mohamadi fue el traductor del líder bolivariano en más de un centenar de encuentros con sus aliados iraníes

The week’s posts and podcast:
Argentina: On with slandering the Jews in the AMIA & #Nisman cases

Cuba: How’s that “easement” going?, part 2

What works

“The Americans” non-values UPDATED

Venezuela: Electricity rationing because of . . . global warming

Chile: Bachelet lifts a page from the Clintons

Don’t rebuild

Minnesota men heading to ISIS via . . . Mexico?

Puerto Rico: Calling Dr. Cardona Harper

Cuba: How’s that “easement” going?

Latin America: Why there’s no light at the end of the tunnel

Podcast:
Mexico and other US Latin America stories of the week



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Filed Under: Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, Carnival of Latin America, Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Latin America, Lula, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Russia, Uruguay, Venezuela Tagged With: Calbuco, Fausta's blog, Odebrecht

May 3, 2015 By Fausta

Pope Francis, meet Iñigo Montoya UPDATED

Pope Francis:
Pope Francis praises Junipero Serra as U.S. ‘founding father’

Iñigo Montoya:

Junípero was not a member of the American Constitutional Convention of 1787, did not fight in the War of Independence, sign the Declaration of Independence, or as far as I cold tell, even set foot on the thirteen colonies.

However, since Junípero was a Franciscan priest, maybe Pope Francis means that Junípero was a founding padre.

UPDATE:
I rarely agree with Latino Rebels, but I agree on this: The Pope’s Saint of Death

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Filed Under: Catholic Church, Pope Francis I, USA Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Junípero Serra

May 1, 2015 By Fausta

Argentina: On with slandering the Jews in the AMIA & #Nisman cases

Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman resigns from both the AMIA and the DAIA, while endorsing Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s slanderous accusation that the Jewish communal organizations aim to destabilize her government:
Argentine Foreign Minister Turns on Jewish Leaders as AMIA Controversy Deepens

The endorsement by a Jewish politician of Fernández de Kirchner’s slanderous accusation that Jewish communal organizations are trying to destabilize her government is a genuine gift for Argentina’s professional anti-Semites. They include individuals like , a Buenos Aires lawyer who has launched a private prosecution against AMIA and DAIA, alleging that both have engaged in treason. Labaké, an advocate of the conspiracy theory that Israel was behind the AMIA bombing, is basing his charges on Fernández de Kirchner’s remarks, which were in turn grounded on the original accusation by Jorge Elbaum, a former director of AMIA and a government loyalist, that AMIA, DAIA and Nisman’s supposed subversion was being financed by the American hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, who has been locked in a separate legal battle with the Argentine authorities.

Just as anti-Zionist Jews provide a protective layer against charges of anti-Semitism directed at the BDS movement, men like Elbaum and Timerman perform much the same service on behalf of Fernández de Kirchner. Indeed, Timerman’s decision to openly turn on AMIA and DAIA brought forth an angry denunciation from Dr. Shimon Samuels, the international director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. In an email to journalists, Samuels declared: “By this personal act, [Timerman] has rejected his Jewish education values and destiny – among them burial in a Jewish cemetery – and has, apparently, abandoned the Argentine victims of this Tehran-sponsored aggression,” a reference to the evidence uncovered by Nisman that Iran was behind the AMIA atrocity.

At the same time, Argentina to compensate victims of 1994 Jewish center bombingPayment is to be made to the 300 injured and to the families of the 85 people killed in the attack, which Israel accuses Iran of ordering and Hezbollah of carrying out. The decision came about after Ruth Tenembaum, the widow of one of the 85 people murdered in the 1994 attack, had pursued the case in court for nearly a decade.

Considering Argentina’s record of not default, I wonder how long – if ever – will it take to collect.

Whether the survivors collect or not, as Ben Cohen of The Tower points out,

neither that acknowledgment [of Argentina’s failure to protect the AMIA building from a terrorist attack] nor the compensation will lead to any convictions in either the AMIA bombing or the Alberto Nisman case.

Cohen refers us to read Eamonn McDonagh’s posts on the Nisman murder, pointing to Lagomarsino.

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Filed Under: Argentina Tagged With: Alberto Nisman, AMIA, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, DAIA, Fausta's blog, Héctor Timerman

May 1, 2015 By Fausta

Cuba: How’s that “easement” going?, part 2

Forget about improving the conditions in the island-prison, says the ambassador to Germany

Cuba‘s ambassador to Germany Rene Juan Mujica Cantelar Thursday lowered expectations for political change on the Caribbean island after the ongoing historic reconciliation between Washington and Havana.

“This is not an issue that is on the agenda of the Cuban people, of the Cuban society,” he said at an event in Berlin.

He was answering a question about whether new political parties and independent media would be allowed in the future on the socialist island.

Way to go, comrade Rene, way to go! Keep up the good work. Keep defending the blissful merits of communism on behalf of the Cuban people!

Prior post:
Cuba: How’s that “easement” going?

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Filed Under: Communism, Cuba Tagged With: Fausta' blog, How’s that “easement” going?

May 1, 2015 By Fausta

What works

Readers of this blog are familiar with my nagging asserting repeatedly that Communism doesn’t work. John Mauldin and Stephen Moore have come up with A Six-Point Plan To Restore Economic Growth And Prosperity. In brief, the 6 are:

  1. Streamline the federal bureaucracy.
  2. Simplify and flatten the income tax.
  3. Replace the payroll tax with a business transfer tax of 15%, which will give lower-income workers a big raise.
  4. Provide certainty by keeping tax rates low through a tax-limitation constitutional amendment that would require future tax increases to be passed by 60% of the Congress, in combination with a balanced-budget amendment.
  5. Roll back the regulatory state.
  6. Drill for America’s domestic energy and use the royalties on federal lands to retire the debt and/or fund needed infrastructure repair instead of raising taxes.

While these are specific to America, countries in our hemisphere would benefit from similar incentive structure measures, if their institutions would also ensure a framework of rule of law and true commitment to ending corruption.

Mauldin and Moore address the real source of economic progress: the incentive structure. Read their full article here.

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Filed Under: business, economics Tagged With: Fausta's blog

May 1, 2015 By Fausta

“The Americans” non-values

Please read my latest article, “The Americans” non-values.

UPDATED:
Alison Gopnik asks, Can loyalty to a country or an idea ever justify deception and murder? It can, if you have no moral compass.

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Filed Under: Christianity, Communism, entertainment, TV Tagged With: Fausta's blog, The Americans

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