Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for October 2016

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#ColombiaDecide: Plinio smacks down Mario

Mario Vargas Llosa, prior to Sunday’s referendum, wrote an article supporting the “yes” vote for the FARC agreement, for the sake of “peace”. His long-time friend, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, author of the classic Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, firmly and politely smacked him down.

Don Plinio describes the agreement as “a stepping stone for the FARC’s path to power”, while additionally

FARC members would be exempt from serving prison terms regardless of the atrocities they carried out for over 50 years; they’ll effectively be awarded 26 seats in Congress, 31 radio stations, a TV channel, a bountiful budget to propagate their ideology and will occupy vast regions of the country absent of Public [law enforcement] Forces, areas which effectively will become small independent states where they can spread their socialist project.

Read the whole thing in Spanish here.

I don’t know what has come over Vargas Llosa now that he’s on the tabloid covers.

UPDATE
Colombians Vote for a Better Peace. They lost confidence in a president who didn’t keep his promises.

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Brazil: Local elections say No to Dilma’s party

The Workers’ Party of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was impeached in August, posted its worst showing in municipal elections since 2000 on Sunday.

Brazilian voters punished the leftist Workers’ Party that ran the country for the past 13 years in nationwide local elections on Sunday, giving a boost to non-establishment candidates and small parties in a sign of widespread disgust with their established leaders.

The Workers’ Party, or PT, which until recently was a leading force for Latin America’s left, won 263 mayorships in Brazil, less than half the city halls it won in 2012, according to newspaper Folha de S. Paulo.

Punished, you say?

Nationwide, the PT received just 6.8 million of the 118.8 million ballots cast on Sunday, according to local paper Folha de S. Paulo, a fifth-place showing that signals a tough road for the party to regain the presidency in 2018.

Punished indeed.

Who came out on top? Doria in Sao Paulo,

The winner in São Paulo was João Doria, from the center-right Brazilian Social-Democracy Party, or PSDB, a historic rival to the PT. Mr. Doria got 53.29% of the vote, an unprecedented result that eliminates the need of a second round.

Brazil’s newly elected mayors will face a more difficult set of fiscal challenges than their predecessors, Fitch Ratings says.

Many Brazilian local governments were put under fiscal stress when state and federal cash transfers to cities began to decline during the previous term (2012-2016). The new mayors will additionally face funding a greater share of hospitals and police forces.

Plus 55 has more.

 

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Colombia says No the FARC

Yesterday the people of Colombia rejected the so-called peace accord that would have placed 10 unelected members of the Marxist narco-terrorist organization in Congress, after granting amnesty for their war crimes.

Here’s a roundup:
WSJ Colombian Voters Reject Peace Deal With FARC Rebels. Narrow dismissal of accord with FARC is a blow to President Santos, thrusting nation into uncertainty. Like in Brexit,

The results mark another instance of voters rejecting counsel from their government and the establishment, after the U.K. vote to leave the European Union in June.
. . .
With 99.9% of votes counted in Sunday’s plebiscite, “No” votes—totaling more than 6.4 million—outnumbered “Yes” votes by fewer than 54,000.

Instapundit’s Austin Bay:

COLOMBIANS REJECT PEACE DEAL: Polls projected a narrow victory for the peace agreement. The result was a narrow defeat. Former president Alvaro Uribe was against it. He argued rebel leaders would be treated too leniently.

Business Insider:

The geographical breakdown of the voting posted online by Colombian electoral authorities indicated that much of the country’s western, southeastern, eastern, and northern regions — areas where the FARC has been more active — voted in support of the peace plan. That contrasted with the country’s center, which leaned toward “No.”

The BBC has a map of the vote.

Capitol Hill Cubans: Lesson of the Day: For Colombians (and Cubans), Justice Prevails Over Impunity

NYT: Colombia Peace Deal Is Defeated, Leaving a Nation in Shock

Jazz Shaw: Failure of FARC peace deal vote leaves Colombia in flux

Javier Lafuente for El País (Spain): Shock as voters in Colombia reject FARC peace dealDeep distrust of the guerrilla group and a high abstention rate were key in the surprise result

Polls had predicted solid backing for the ‘yes’ camp in a country exhausted by decades of war, but an abstention rate of more than 60% in the plebiscite made a mockery of those predictions. Massive levels of distrust in the guerrilla group also played a major factor in the outcome.

While talking about distrust on one hand on the other hand, Lafuente opines (emphasis added),

The failure of the ‘yes’ camp to carry the day also shines a light on the lack of leadership in the Colombian political landscape where there is a desperate need to tackle chronic cronyism. Uribe’s Democratic Center was the big winner of Sunday while President Santos was the big loser after calling a plebiscite that he never needed to hold.

Lafuente ignores the fact that one of the reasons for distrust was Santos’s backtracking on the referendum.

The polls may have predicted it, but, like in Brexit, there appears to have been some of the Bradley effect,

The Bradley effect (less commonly the Wilder effect)[1][2] is a theory concerning observed discrepancies between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in some United States government elections where a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other.[3][4][5] The theory proposes that some voters who intend to vote for the white candidate would nonetheless tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for the non-white candidate. It was named after Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor’s race despite being ahead in voter polls going into the elections.[6]

El Nuevo Herald: Colombia no olvida: Se impone el rechazo al acuerdo de paz con las FARC

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo:

“It’s a very simple formula: Vote against anything that the Castros support, vote against anything the Castros believe in.”

Carlos Alberto Montaner:

“Defeated by the Colombian NO: FARC, Santos, Raúl Castro, Maduro, Bachelet, John Kerry, pope Francis, Ban Ki-moon, King Juan Carlos.”

Last, but not least, Uribe’s speech following the results,



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In loving memory

Update on my Mom, Lydia: the Lord called her this morning.

My most heartfelt thanks to all for your kindness.

Here’s her last photo, last Tuesday with my sister Ivonne,

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