NDN Blog

• Much has been written about the President’s five day trip to Brazil, El Salvador and Chile. Interestingly, during his time in Santiago, President Obama advocated regions look to Latin American for lessons on democratic transitions in Latin America have proved as valid for democratic transitions. The New York Times reports on how Obama cited the Latin American experience as an example for the rest of the world:s. The New York Times reports on how Obama cited the Latin American experience as an example for the rest of the world:

With his first trip to South America eclipsed by war and upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa, President Obama sought to connect the two in a speech here on Monday, calling Latin America a model for those trying to throw off dictatorships in favor of democracy and broadly shared economic growth.

Moreover, when asked whether the he would ‘ask for forgiveness’ on behalf of the United States for its part in the 1973 coup that brought Chile’s former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. 

Mr. Obama said that his administration would consider any requests for information as Chile seeks a truthful record of that period, but that neither country should be “trapped by our history.”Since that time, he added, “We’ve seen extraordinary progress here in Chile, and that has not been impeded by the United States but, in fact, has been fully supported by the United States.“So I can’t speak to all of the policies of the past,” he said. “I can speak certainly to the policies of the present and the future.”

• The White House released the awaited President’s Task Force on Puerto Rico last Wednesday. For the first time, the document takes a serious look at a range of Puerto Rico’s economic challenges and presents important policy recommendations in addition to addressing the issue of the Island’s political status. Access the full report here.

• As has predicted for a year, the Guatemalan first lady announced last week that she would seek to run in the upcoming presidential election next September. What it was not as obvious was her decision to divorce her husband—President Alvaro Colóm to overcome the legal hurdle that bans relatives of the president from standing for office. The Economist examines her active role as a first lady.

Ms Torres has played a prominent role during the presidency of her husband, Álvaro Colom, heading the government’s anti-poverty programmes. Many say that behind the scenes she wields even greater influence over her mild-mannered spouse. Guatemala is one of Latin America’s most rural societies, which makes it a nightmare for pollsters. Ms Torres is unpopular in the capital, the country’s only major city, but does better in the impoverished countryside, where her social programmes, such as Mi Familia Progresa (My Family Progresses), a  conditional-cash-transfer scheme, have had the most impact.

However, it remains unclear whether the Constitutional Court will be swayed by this unusual announcement.

• Andres Oppenheimer wrote an opinion piece in the Miami Herald on why Central America will be Obama’s biggest challenge. Read full op-ed here

• The UN is urging Haitians to show patience and restraint as they await the results of Sunday's presidential runoff election, in which former first lady Mirlande Manigat faced off against popular singer Michel Martelly. Let’s not forget that Haiti is the Western Hemisphere's poorest country and has been struggling to rebuild following a devastating earthquake in January of last year. The Caribbean island has also been dealing with a cholera epidemic that broke out in October, leaving thousands dead.  

Don't forget to join us in the upcoming joint event with Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on Public Diplomacy and Social Media in Latin America on March 29th from 12-2 pm. The two part forum will first host Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Judith McHale, followed by a discussion panel that will explore the impact of social media and other network technologies on governance and civil society in Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Brazil. Click here to secure your seat ASAP. 

Moreover, the Latin America Policy Initiative along with the 21st Century Border Initiative will be hosting a policy day on Monday, April 11th at the Newseum: Forward Together/Avanzando Juntos/Avançando Juntos – A Conference Looking at the Changing Politics of the Americas. Please make sure to RSVP!

• There was good news for the inclusion of Latin American women in positions of political decision-making as International Women’s Day hit the century mark last week:

Dilma Rousseff was inaugurated on January 1 President of Brazil after winning the secondround elections with 56 percent of the vote. With her inauguration there is for the first time ever three women presidents serving simultaneously. In addition to Roussef, Cristina Fernández is governing Argentina and Laura Chinchilla is president of Costa Rica.

 The regional average of female ministers increased from 23% to 26% over the last year; and four countries (Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Nicaragua) have gender parity in the cabinets. In addition, in recent years Bolivia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador have introduced a series of comprehensive changes in their constitutional and/or statutory provisions shooting for, among other measures, parity composition (from 40% to 60% men and women) in their lists of candidates for popular election. These figures and measures reflect the impetus that gender equality is coming to have on the public agenda in some countries.

       To access the full report as prepared by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral                    Assistance, click here.

• Nobel Literature Prize Winner Mario Vargas Llosa fired back at the Argentine group that, due to his “liberal” and reactionary position,”recently asked that the Buenos Aires Book Fair retract their invitation for Vargas Llosa to inaugurate the event. In his letter to Spanish newspaper El País, Vargas Llosa asks if they want a New Cuba.

•  Foreign Policy Magazine published two pieces that touch on Brazil's drive for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council:  Jorge Castañeda thinks it's too soon, while Celso Amorim calls for Obama to support this drive.

• Christopher Sabatini wrote a very interesting blog post for Americas Quarterly where he expresses his hope that President Obama address the Administration’s understanding of -as well as its commitment to- social and racial inclusion on his trip to the region. Some excerpts below:

Inclusion. The concept will likely figure large during President Barack Obama’s planned trip to Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador from March 19 to 23. This is so, not only for symbolic reasons (the U.S. President is a powerful symbol of inclusion and U.S. meritocracy), but also the significant advances and challenges of the countries he’ll be visiting on his first trip south of Trinidad and Tobago. Will he address it realistically or gloss over the ongoing challenges?

 In recent years, the growth of the Latin American middle class, especially in Brazil, has been significant. But those gains are delicate and limited by race. More than a decade of stable economic policy coupled with social policy innovations has lifted over 40 million people in the region out of poverty in what was, and remains, the most unequal region in the world. These numbers are nothing to sniff at, but they belie the fragility of this new middle class. Most academic or technocratic measures of “middle class-ness” rely on measuring income, while most journalistic reporting on the middle class tends to cite these arrivistes’ access to credit.

NDN will have the priviledge to host Christopher Sabatini in the upcoming joint event with Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on Public Diplomacy and Social Media in Latin America. The two part forum will first host Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Judith McHale, followed by a discussion panel that will explore the impact of social media and other network technologies on governance and civil society in the region.  If interested, click here to secure your seat ASAP.

Moreover, the Latin America Policy Initiative along with the 21st Century Border Initiative will be hosting a policy day on Monday, April 11th at the Newseum: Forward Together/Avanzando Juntos/Avançando Juntos– A Conference Looking at the Changing Politics of the Americas 

Here are four very interesting stories and events that took place last week across the Americas.  Please feel free to send us stories that we might have overlooked that touch on a wide-ranging policy issues affecting constituencies, civil society organizations and businesses with operations and ties to both regions. 

• The Mexican government continues to express its anger against the US, this time to The Washington Post:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said Thursday that the release of State Department cables criticizing Mexico's anti-drug fight had caused ‘severe damage’ to its relationship with the United States and suggested that tensions had risen so dramatically that he could no longer work with the American ambassador in his country.

• Spanish newspaper El País published a great article about Dilma Rouseff’s plan to increase up to 45%of the government’s largest social program, ‘Bolsa de Familia’. With this increase, the program will benefit 50 million more Brazilians, working to fulfill her campaign slogan: “A rich country is a country without poverty”. For the full article click here.

• Jorge Castañeda wrote a provocative piece for Time magazine about Libyan President Gaddafi's friends in Latin America. An excerpt below:

As one might expect, the radical wing of the Latin American left is much more concerned about Gaddafi's survival and U.S. interference than the welfare of the Libyan people. While Gaddafi massacres the latter, Latin American leaders defend him.

• Damien Cave reported for The New York Times on Haitian efforts to restore beautiful murals destroyed by last year’s earthquake in Port-au-Prince. According to the author, this initiative is a visible extension of a little-known cross-border bond. Haiti’s Scars, and Its Soul, Find Healing on Walls is a must-read. 

On Monday, March 14th, at 12:30pm ET, NDN and the New Policy Institute will host a speech by the Colombian Ambassador to the United States, Gabriel Silva.  Mr. Silva, who first served as Ambassador to the United States from 1993-94, will discuss U.S.-Colombia relations and how Colombia is changing under President Santos.

Under the administration of President Santos, Colombia is forging a new path to prosperity, with policies promoting economic growth, national unity and social development. President Santos has also enacted reforms to protect human rights and provide relief to victims of violence.  Ambassador Silva will address topics such as the importance the importance of the extension of The Andean Trade Preferences, the U.S.-Colombia free trade agreement, Colombia’s role in sharing lessons in security, and new areas of cooperation such as energy and the environment.

The Latin America Policy Initiative (LAPI) is excited about this event and we hope that you will be able to join us.  Please be sure to RSVP now.  

• Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has called for a referendum—described as a vote of confidence on his rule—for May 7th of this year, at a cost of $30 million. The Economist interestingly poses the question of whether the plebiscite breaks with the government’s balance of power:

The method the president has chosen to strengthen himself, however, may wind up harming Ecuador’s democracy even more than the police officers’ rebellion did. Although some of its ten questions involve relatively trifling matters, like banning gambling and bullfights, others involve constitutional reforms that political scientists and legal scholars say could give the president a blank cheque to concentrate power in his own office.

• After 73 years, the BBC has sadly ended its radio broadcasts in Spanish for Latin America as a result of cuts to the World Service Budget. More here.

• On an interview last week with El Universal, one of Mexico's leading newspapers, President Calderón expressed his anger towards the United States. After Wikileaks published various cables, Calderón accused diplomats from the US of distorting and exaggerating their analyses. Calderón even said that the lack of coordination and rivalry was not on the Mexican but on our side, between ICE,  DEA, and CIA .  He said that at the personal level, he's had a 'cooperative' relationship with both Bush and Obama on the security agenda but "evidently, the institutional cooperation on this topic ends up being notoriously insufficient". For the full interview in Spanish, click here.

•  Cuban state-run television revealed last week that announced plans to lay off half a million state workers by March are behind schedule and that the process will be delayed to help alleviate the impact.  Even though layoffs are meant to be a centerpiece of the reforms to modernize Cuba’s Soviet-style economy, Castro told the government’s Council of Minsters that:

A project of this magnitude, which affects in one way or another so many citizens, cannot be framed in inflexible periods.

• Yahoo! News published an amazing story about indigenous grandmother who helped bring a landmark judgment against US oil giant Chevron for polluting the rain forest she calls home without any formal legal training or formidable command of the Spanish language.

"Mary Aguinda et al" are the opening words of the suit launched in 1993 on behalf of 30,000 residents of Orellana and Sucumbios provinces, in which they charge Texaco dumped billions of gallons of toxic crude during its operations, fouling rivers, lakes and soil and causing cancer deaths in indigenous communities.  Aguinda said she believes her husband and two of his 10 children died from effects of the pollution, which rights group Amazon Watch says has affected an area the size of the US state of Rhode Island.

Please feel free to share any news or opinion pieces that  you find are not only interesting but demonstrate the diversity of Latin American politics and societal views. Remember to check back every Tuesday for the LAPI round-up!

LAPI shares five interesting stories you might have overlooked this past week while following the unbelievable events taking place in North Africa.  

• In light of the upheaval that led to the resignations of the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents, this year’s South American-Arab summit had to be postponed. Even so, Peruvian President Alan García suggested the eventual meeting will be an opportunity to “shake up new alliances”. Jim Wyss from the Miami Herald reports that Latin America is calling to boost ties with the Middle East, seeking trade routes and allies different from the United States, China and Europe. Interestingly, Wyss points out that the demographics might have something to do with this call since:

Chile is home to more than 200,000 Palestinians—making it the largest such community outside the Middle East—Brazil has an estimated 10 million people of Arab descent, including seven million Lebanese. 

Wyss also brings light to the fact that since December, nine Latin American countries have recognized a sovereign Palestinian state. Definitely worth a read, please click here to access  the full story.

• El País published an interview with Cemex CEO and Tecnológico de Monterrey Chairman, Lorenzo H. Zambrano, where he stressed his commitment to not losing the city to the narcos  It is refreshing to see a prominent business leader recognize that active and independent civil society organizations can work with medium and larger private enterprises to protect the Mexico’s most important industrial and innovation center from violence, corruption and chaos. 

• News about months of unrest at the University of Puerto Rico finally made it to US media. The       New York Times reports that in the last week, a number of students have been arrested, students have been injured by riot police officers, faculty and staff members held a two-day walkout, the president of the university resigned and the police finally withdrew from campus. Students are protesting about a budget cut that requires them to pay a new $800 fee, increasing their costs by more than 50 percent.  In Puerto Rico, Protests End Short Peace at University is a great read because it shows that similar to the experiences and feelings being faced by students at public universities elsewhere in the US students in Puerto Rico worry that the new fiscal realities will restrict access to higher education.

• The Washington Post writes about another student protest taking place, this time a hunger strike in Venezuela. More than 80 protesters are pushing the government to let the OAS Secretary-General visit and investigate allegations that Chavez’s government utilizes the judicial branch to persecute opponents. This story will continue to draw strong reactions from both sides, as shown by the excerpt below:

That drew a strong reaction from Caracas' friends in the left-leaning ALBA bloc of nations, which told Insulza to not meddle in Venezuela's domestic affairs. In a joint statement issued last week, ALBA allies including Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador said Insulza's actions threatened "a dangerous return to the times when the OAS was an instrument of interventionism and colonialism" of the United States.

• Nicaragua-based ‘Bloggins by Boz’  analyzes how Cuba is running out of ‘censorship’ excuses. The blogger even posts a big ‘thank you’ to Hugo Chavez for connecting Cuba to the Internet with a major fiberoptic cable. 

The cable has a 640GB capacity, vastly increasing Cuba's potential connection to the internet, which was previously provided mostly by satellite. For years, Cuba has used the US embargo as an excuse for its censorship of the internet […] It won't create a democracy overnight, but I'd certainly appreciate the irony if it eventually turns out the Venezuelan government gave the Cuban government enough fiber-optic cable to hang themselves with.

Check back every Tuesday for the LAPI round-up and feel free to send us suggestions and cool stories worth sharing and reading. 

Every Tuesday, the Latin America Policy Initiative (LAPI) will share a couple of news events or opinion pieces that we find are not only interesting but demonstrate the diversity of Latin American politics and societal views. Check out the following stories that you may have missed in the past week:

• The BBC reports that Colombia has announced it’s working on negotiations with China to build an alternative to the Panamá Canal.  This story is yet another example of how Latin American countries are deepening both their diplomatic and economic ties with other partners. More here.

• Andres Oppenheimer wrote a revealing Op-Ed in the Miami Herald that calls US cuts in foreign aid ‘diplomatic suicide’, especially on the US-Latin America relations front: 

 If you are alarmed by these figures, and you think that all prophesies about the nexorable decline of U.S. influence around the world are bound to come true if Washington can’t be the biggest donor in its own neighborhood, get ready: it will get much worse.…the drastic foreign aid cuts proposed by Republicans could lead to a slow motion U.S. diplomatic suicide. The fact that Venezuela is already outspending Washington in donations to Haiti should speak for itself.

• Mexico is mad at the US government for referring to their drug war as an ‘insurgency’…again. The Calderón Government condemned the characterization by a top U.S. Defense Department official as uniformed and innacurate. The Washington Post quotes the Mexican Foreign Minister calling for an equal partnership  

Espinosa said the two countries "need to find cooperation mechanisms that lead  to a greater ability to confront organized crime. It's totally unacceptable and  inappropriate to see the problem unilaterally”

• Spanish newspaper El País published a fascinating interview with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. The interviewer and newspaper director, Javier Moreno, questions Santos about his similarity to FDR in being called a ‘traitor to his class’. The President refutes the question as nonesense but accepts that Colombia has to do a lot more on the social justice front. For full interview in Spanish, click here.

163 years ago today, the US and Mexico signed a treaty that ended a two-year war between the two countries and added an extensive tract of land to the US.  We have now come to know this land as the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona, in addition to parts of Kansas, Wyoming and Colorado. 

Politico wrote a brief article about the agreement that forever changed the history of each country as well as the nature of the relationship between them.

If Texas is also taken into account — Mexico had recognized neither the Texans’ declaration of independence in 1836 nor the republic’s annexation by the U.S. in 1845 — Mexico lost about 55 percent of its prewar territory as a result of the conflict. The treaty extended U.S. citizenship to Mexicans living in the newly acquired territories, unless they specifically declared their intention to remain Mexicans.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran an opinion piece that examines the initial interactions after the US-Mexican War during the early years of the Lincoln administration. Lincoln’s Mexican Visitor is a great read; it puts the historical facts in a social and human context. Below a short excerpt:  

Despite four decades of rancorous relations with her northern neighbor, no other nation welcomed the Lincoln presidency with more hope and sincerity than Mexico. The Mexican leadership remembered the Congressman from Illinois who questioned President James Polk’s belligerency in the Mexican-American War by challenging whether the conflict’s first bloodshed took place on American soil. They noted the similarities between the Kentucky-born president-elect and their own Benito Juarez, two wise men of North America who had risen up from poverty on the force of profound intellects.

While the US-Mexico War feels like distant history for those of us north of the Border, it still colors the relationship for many Mexicans, and is very present in the nation’s collective national memory. At a time when a positive, productive relationship with our Mexican neighbor is so crucial, we ought not forget history, either.

On November 17 at 12:30pm, NDN and the New Policy Institute will host the Chilean Ambassador to the United States, Arturo Fermandois.  Ambassador Fermandois was appointed on June 21st by Chile’s new president, Sebastián Piñera, who is the country’s first center-right leader since the return to democracy.

The Latin America Policy Initiative (LAPI) is very excited about this event and we hope that you will be able to join us.  Please be sure to RSVP now.

The global spotlight has been focused on Chile these past few months, as people around the world were captivated by the heroic efforts of the Chilean government to rescue 33 miners who were trapped underground for 69 days.  The Washington Post recently highlighted Ambassador Fermandois’s exciting first few months in the Capital:

"The new ambassador, who arrived in Washington just four months ago, erected a jumbo screen outside the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue so everyone could watch the live broadcast of Chilean miners being rescued. Fermandois set up a guest book for people to write messages for the men. Quite a debut for the rookie diplomat, who left his life as a lawyer and professor of constitutional law (after stints as a Fulbright scholar and at Harvard Law School) to become ambassador. His first few weeks were packed with his country's earthquake recovery efforts, its bicentennial and a visit from new President Sebastián Piñera. Just when he expected things to slow down, news broke of the trapped miners."

But the rescue isn't the only noteworthy news coming out of Chile. In recognition of the sound fiscal leadership that has elevated Chile to be a regional economic power, the country has recently become the first South American member of the OECD group of advanced economic nations. The Ambassador will explore all of this and more at NDN.

Arturo Fermandois at NDN
Wed, Nov 17, 2010
12:30 PM, Lunch to be served
NDN Event Space
729 15th Street, NW
First Floor
Washington, DC
RSVP
Live webcast will be available, but you must still RSVP