Paradigm Shifts and Policy in Latin America: Not for the Fainthearted!

The last few weeks in the Latin American world has been anything but calm. Coming off meeting of the G20 and Summit of the Americas, the region has moved towards many intended transformations in policy and relations with the US and the EU. Some of these major changes are discussed below.

Mexico: With a severely damaged economy, an epic drug war, corruption and now H1N1 Flu, Mexican President Felipe Calderon likely feels more like the recipient of biblical plagues as opposed to Mexico’s overworked president. Shutting down the largest city in the world for 5 days is no easy task, but with Mexico’s already suffering argo-business and tourism industries on the edge, an outbreak was the last thing Mexican business and the Mexican people needed at this time. The economic impact of the flu will be severe, and many will likely offer additional financial support to Calderon’s Mexico well after the hysteria of Swine Flu subsides. While the blame for the outbreak is being tossed between the WHO and Mexican officials, impressions of the unknown nature of the Mexican healthcare system is routinely being critcised by those outside of Mexico despite the extreme and sensible measures taken by Mexican officials in the process. Anti-Mexico feeling is likely not raised by a significant degree past the normal levels of criticism, but caution from areas such as Hong Kong; where SARS originated, and China, where Mexicans visiting and living in China were quarantined despite showing no signs of illness are not helping relations between the two countries. President Calderon even sent a plane to collect his citizens, in between public announcements that have brought a great deal of order to an otherwise chaotic Mexico City. For a detailed account of the Swine Flu, please read R G Wallace’s blogpost called The NAFTA Flu on his blog Farming Pathogens here.

Cuba: Cuba’s opening and dialogue with Barak Obama comes on the heels of the election campaign and numerous surveys’ showing the lack of support by many Americans for a trade embargo on Cuba. Writer Alvaro Vargas Llosa of the Washington Post Writers Group wrote an interesting piece on Cuba and Free Trade in last week’s The New Republic. Llosa, who initially supported America’s embargo on Cuba, discusses his reasoning and rationale with many detailed examples for pushing his opinion towards the other end of the spectrum. While he still maintains his support for freedoms of individuals to travel and communicate with whomever they wish, he argues how trade and the absence of financial growth may have actually contributed more to the maintenance of the Castro regime as opposed to helping grow grassroots opposition towards it. Llosa’s numerous examples of regimes who have decayed from within in comparison to Cuba is definitely something worth pondering, but without the ability to re-write history, and re-write Cuba, the only option is to move towards sensible policy in the future, whether that involves Free Trade with Cuba, an embargo or simply a slow and progressive opening of Cuba while pressing for human rights in the process. The Llosa article named Free Trade can be seen here.

Venezuela: Two impressive articles have come out recently speaking about the future of Chavez in Venezuela and its new relations with the United States. In another Washington Post Writers Group article called Regift, Please!, Llosa discusses the book given to Obama by Chavez called: Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano. Llosa goes through the main thesis of the book and argues against the intellectual capacity of Chavez and seeks to disassemble the perspectives of the book published originally in the early 1970’s. The book argues that Latin America has always been an absolute victim of colonialisation and imperialism from Europe and the US respectively. In the context of the early 70’s, many of Galeano’s perspectives likely gained a lot of support throughout the decade and remains with many to this day. While growth in Latin America had come in some degree since that time, most of the region sought to ensure Import Substitute Industrialisation measures since the late 60’s well into the 1980’s and growth, while improving in times of economic boom, often ensured that the impoverished in the region were hit the hardest by economic collapses in the 1980s, 1990, post-2000, and even as we speak. Beyond growth and poverty, political issues between the US and various regimes in Latin America had great effects on the development of rights and freedoms in places like Chile, Central America and other specific cases where the CIA is claimed to be involved in the region. While Llosa is right to counteract the claims of Galeano in his book, the context of Latin America in the 1970s and its effect today did create many that might agree with Galeano to some degree, even if they are not supporters of Chavez. In recent works, Galeano perhaps tempered his arguments for a more modern Latin America, but ironically the funds coming in from sales of Open Veins likely made him wealthy in the process. Please place blog comments below. Llosa’s article can be read here.

Human Rights Watch and Chavez: I did write about these issues in the past, and Jose Miguel Vivanco of HRW, who was ejected from Venezuela for a report on Chavez could not state in better than in his article: Exposing a Chavez Charade. I wish that Vivanco’s words make a strong statement on rights in Venezuela, so I have posted a link to it here, and have pasted it below for all to read. Please leave your feedback on all articles and a response to your impressions Human Rights Watch has on Chavez’s Venezuela:

Exposing A Chávez Charade
by
José Miguel Vivanco
Published in the Washington Post
May 2, 2009

Published in the Washington Post José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division

(Mexico City) – President Obama came under fire last month for sharing a smile with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at the Summit of the Americas. Critics say that Obama was wrong to be friendly with a foreign leader renowned for his anti-U.S. antics and authoritarian tendencies. It might be expected, because I am a human rights advocate who has documented Chávez’s authoritarian policies and suffered the consequences at the hands of his security forces, that I would share this criticism. But I think time may show that Obama did the right thing.

Already, Obama’s overture has made it more difficult for Chávez to use his personal feud with the U.S. government to divert attention from his country’s problems. It will also be easier for the Obama administration to pursue a serious multilateral effort to pressure the Venezuelan government to reverse its authoritarian approach.

Venezuela is a complicated country. To its credit, it has competitive elections and independent political parties, media outlets, labor unions and civil society organizations. While Venezuela is plagued by chronic human rights problems such as police killings and deplorable prison conditions, there is no systematic denial of fundamental freedoms, as in Cuba. Nor is there an armed conflict with widespread violence by illegal armed groups, as in Colombia.

Yet the Chávez government has actively undermined democratic institutions that are essential for safeguarding the rule of law. It has strengthened the state’s power to curb media freedoms while abusing its regulatory power to threaten and punish critical media outlets. It has systematically violated workers’ basic right to freedom of association and sought to undermine the work of local human rights advocates.

Perhaps most troubling, the Chávez government has effectively neutralized the judiciary as an independent branch of government. This disregard for judicial independence has only fed fears that a recent wave of corruption charges against prominent Chávez opponents — including the opposition’s most recent presidential candidate, Manuel Rosales — could be a campaign of political persecution orchestrated by the government. While the Venezuelan justice system should be prosecuting corruption, it needs an independent judiciary for such prosecutions to be fair and credible.

To deflect criticism of his authoritarian policies, Chávez has relied heavily on a tactic favored by his friend and mentor Fidel Castro: routinely accusing human rights advocates of conspiring with the United States to topple his government. When, for example, the highly respected Venezuelan nongovernmental organization PROVEA issued its annual report on human rights in December, Chávez’s interior and justice minister declared on national television that the PROVEA workers were “liars” who were “paid in dollars.”

In my own case, after Human Rights Watch released a report in Caracas last fall, a colleague and I were forcibly detained in our hotel by Chávez’s security forces and summarily expelled from the country.

How did they justify this abuse of power? By claiming, falsely, that we had violated our visa requirements and were conspiring with the U.S. State Department to undermine the government.

No one familiar with our work, or that of PROVEA, takes these absurd allegations seriously. Yet such allegations resonate with some audiences in Venezuela and elsewhere in the region, ultimately serving to undermine discussion of the country’s human rights problems.

Indeed, the reason such allegations have any resonance is that the U.S. government does have a long and sordid history of conspiring to topple democratic governments in the region. And when Chávez’s opponents sought to oust him in a coup d’etat in 2002, the Bush administration initially welcomed their effort rather than joining in the near-universal chorus of condemnations from democratic governments in the region. This blunder badly damaged the Bush administration’s credibility in the region on issues of human rights and democracy. It also made it much easier for Chávez to cast debates over his policies as merely part of a political and personal contest between President Bush and himself.

Obama took an important step toward ending this dynamic when he extended his hand to Chávez in front of the cameras. He took an even more important step when he acknowledged the “historic suspicions” of U.S. intervention in the region.

That said, a smile and handshake from Barack Obama won’t solve Venezuela’s human rights issues or U.S. problems with Venezuela. And it would be a mistake to pursue a better relationship with Chávez for its own sake, or out of fear that otherwise he will fall under the sway of countries such as Iran, or because Venezuela has oil — as Hillary Clinton suggested in a recent congressional hearing.

Lowering the drama between the United States and Venezuela is worthwhile because it creates an opportunity to focus the region’s attention on developments in Venezuela. In the coming months, the administration must seize that opportunity by expressing concern about policies of the Chávez government that have undermined the independence of Venezuela’s democratic institutions. The United States should also work with regional allies to establish an appropriate multilateral forum — at the Organization of American States or elsewhere — to engage Venezuela on this issue.

Obama’s symbolic gestures were essential to setting the stage for such meaningful engagement. If his administration follows through as it should, the next time Chávez tries to label all human rights criticism as a U.S. conspiracy, few people in the region will take him seriously.