Does Obama have a Latin America policy?

Although a few changes may offer hope that he is mainly ignoring Latin America right now, and that changes could come in the future, in significant and discouraging ways, his administration’s Latin American policies seem like an uncritical continuation of the past.

First, there’s Colombia, with a failed drug war and a continuing insurgency, human rights abuses by the military and paramilitaries, and jailing of military officers for killing civilians and then claiming they were insurgents. As South American presidents express alarm, the United States is boosting its military presence in Colombia, and moving its drug war HQ to Colombia. The increased U.S. military presence will probably include a 10-year agreement allowing US troops, aircraft and naval vessels access to at least four Colombian bases.

Then there’s Honduras. Despite UN and OAS condemnation of the coup, the Obama adminsitration has resisted using the word and continues to train Honduran soldiers at the School of the Americas. The failure to speak out strongly and consistently against the coup leaves the field open for misinformation from the right. As Laura Carlsen observers the Americas Program weekly report:

What’s remarkable … is the persistence of myths—particularly that the non-binding referendum proposed included an indefinite term for President Zelaya—and the idea among so many people that it’s okay for the military to oust an elected president if they have a difference of opinion. We would have hoped that after the Organization of American States and the United Nations resolved to condemn the coup, and after Central American countries fought so hard to rebuild democracy, at least the terms of debate would be clear.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a letter sent by the White House to Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which the White House appeared to blame Zelaya for his own ouster:

We energetically condemn the actions of June 28. We also recognize that President Zelaya’s insistence on undertaking provocative actions contributed to the polarization of Honduran society and led to a confrontation that unleashed the events that led to his removal…

While Zelaya was elected as a center-right candidate, after his election he had moved to support programs for alleviation of poverty, such as an increase in the minimum wage. Since his ouster, the coup government has cracked down on peasant and worker movements that support Zelaya, and on protesters. NYU Latin American history prof Greg Grandin described the situation August 7 on Democracy Now:

Well, it turns out that progressive priests, Jesuits, environmentalists, like Jose Andres Tamayo, is being hounded by soldiers. Just the other day, the police attacked the university, director of the university; Julieta Castellanos was beaten with riot clubs.

Members of death squads from the 1980s, most famously Billy Joya, has returned to support the Micheletti government. The government is closing down radio stations. Radio Globo, one of the few radio stations that is calling it a coup, has been shut down. Due process is suspended. Large parts of the southern part of the country have twenty-four-hour curfews. This is the face of the regime.

The soft-on-coup position of the Obama administration is interpreted by many in this country and across Latin America as opposition to popular and populist governments aligned with the poor majorities in the region.

The most recent move in the Honduran negotiation came as the de facto government first refused to allow a high-ranking OAS delegation to enter the country, and then said the delegation could enter, but that OAS Secretary-General Jose Insulza could not be involved in negotiations.

In contrast to the Obama administration’s continuation of business-as-before in Latin America, Senator Patrick Leahy blocked approval of anti-drug aid to Mexico, citing extensive evidence of human rights abuses in the Meixcan drug war, including torture and disappearances.

Honduran crisis continues

Despite international backing from the U.N., the OAS, and governments around the world, including the United States, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya has been unable to return to his country after a June 28 military coup. Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, himself a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has been negotiating for Zelaya’s return, and now says he should return on Friday. BBC reports that Arias has put forward a plan with limits on presidential power, and that the country’s interim authorities have rejected the plan but also said they would allow the Honduran Congress to vote on it.

Inside Honduras, supporters and opponents of Zelaya continue to stage demonstrations. The Center for International Policy reports:

There is currently a curfew in place across the country, military roadblocks in various regions, and arrest warrants filed against leaders of unions and campesino, indigenous, and human rights movements. Security forces have killed at least three people. Social movements continue to rally in the streets and their numbers and degree of organization have increased daily as they fight for the return of President Zelaya and his right to consult the public on a constitutional assembly. It was this issue that sparked the coup, implemented by the armed forces, and conservative politicians and businessmen.

Both the European Union and the United States have suspended aid to Honduras, according to Democracy Now, but the United States continues to train Honduran military at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, known as WHINSEC, formerly known as the School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia. Six of the officers involved in the coup, including its leader, General Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez, were trained at the School of the Americas.

For on-going coverage of the coup, bookmark the Americas blog of the Center for International Policy..

Honduras update – July 1, 2009

President Manuel Zelaya, ousted in a military coup over the weekend, said he will return to Honduras tomorrow, with the support of the United Nations and the OAS. In the meantime, the Weekly News Update on the Americas provides ongoing reporting of events on the ground, with international press and individuals reporting protests against the coup around the country, with protest marches toward the capital being stopped by military roadblocks. Reporting and communication remained difficult as the military shut down media outlets.

Honduras coup

FROM NICANET AND NACLA:

As of 11:15am, Caracas time, President Zelaya is speaking live on Telesur from San Jose, Costa Rica. He has verified the soldiers entered his residence in the early morning hours, firing guns and threatening to kill him and his family if he resisted the coup. He was forced to go with the soldiers who took him to the air base and flew him to Costa Rica. He has requested the U.S. Government make a public statement condemning the coup, otherwise, it will indicate their compliance. He said that he has not resigned and that until his term ends in 2010 he remains president of Honduras.The Honduran Foreign Minister and the ambassadors to Honduras from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua were detained by the military. The ambassadors, after suffering physical mistreatment by the military, were set free but the Foreign Minister, Patricia Rodas, remained in military custody.

In the aftermath of the coup, electricity and cell phone service were cut, and those radio and television stations that managed to remain on the air did not report the coup. Some television stations were reportedly taken off the air by the military.

A little background:

President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya was elected in November 2005, on the Liberal Party ticket. The Liberal Party may be characterized as center-right. According to BBC, Mr Zelaya won 46.17% of the vote in 2005 to 49.90% for Porfirio Lobo of the ruling National Party, which controls the legislature and the supreme court. His presidential term runs for four years — 2006-2010.

Zelaya began moving away from the right after his election, as food prices rose and Honduras continued to suffer from extreme poverty and high crime rates. Almost a year ago, Honduras joined the Venezuelan-led Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), which also includes Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, St. Vincent, and Antigua & Barbados. ALBA opposes the U.S. Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) proposals.

This year, Zelaya proposed a vote on whether the country’s constitution should be amended to allow a second term. The vote would be advisory only, but could put his opponents in an awkward position if they refused to consider a constitutional amendment. The vote was scheduled for today, Sunday, June 28. Last week, the Supreme Court and the Congress both declared the vote unconstitutional. Zelaya said the vote would go forward and ordered the army to distribute the ballots and ballot boxes. When General Romeo Lucas, the head of the army, refused, Zelaya (who, as president, is commander-in-chief) fired him. The Supreme Court and Congress ordered Romeo Lucas reinstated.

Then, on the morning of June 28, soldiers invaded the national palace, seized and beat the president, and forced him onto a plane bound for Costa Rica. They also seized and beat ambassadors from Venezuela and Cuba and seized Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas, whose whereabouts and fate are unknown.

Bloomberg reports that U.S. officials say they regard Zelaya as the lawful president of Honduras, and that they expect an OAS meeting in Washington today will say the same. Costa Rican president (and Nobel Peace Prize winner) Oscar Arias appeared next to Zelaya at a press conference denouncing the coup, the first in Central America in 16 years.

The Honduran Congress named congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as president to serve until January 27.

Countries throughout Latin America condemned the coup. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez spoke strongly (as he usually does), and, according to AP, said Venezuela “is at battle” and put his military on alert.

Losing a good voice

In Toward Freedom, Ben Dangl writes a eulogy for a friend in Abraham’s Last Rap: Bolivian Hip-Hop Hero Dies in El Alto . Hip-hop has become a political statement and the voice of young people around the world. I confess that it’s a music I hear only occasionally, and that my social consciousness owes more to the music of the civil rights movement and Pete Seeger. But when I listen to Abraham’s “Medios Mentirosos,” I know this music has as much soul and as much message as anyone could ask and I, too, mourn the loss of a strong voice for justice.

U.S. Supreme Court: NO to identity theft charges

It’s too late for hundreds of workers in Postville, IA, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday that charges of aggravated identity theft cannot be based on giving a false social security numbers to an employer. The ruling should end the recent Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) strategy of using identity theft charges as a threat to get undocumented workers to agree to immediate deportation.

In the case before the Supreme Court, Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa had been arrested in East Moline, Illinois. Flores-Figueroa, an undocumented worker from Mexico, had first used a completely fictitious social security number that belonged to no one. Eventually, he bought phony identification that included a social security number that belonged to a real person. The case turned on whether he could be charged with the federal crime of aggravated identity theft. This charge carries an mandatory minimum two-year prison sentence.

Flores-Figueroa’s lawyers argued that Congress intended the identity theft law to apply to people who were trying to gain access to victims’ bank accounts or credit cards or otherwise financially harm the victims. Flores-Figueroa, however, used the number only to secure his own employment.

The aggravated identity theft law applies to a person who “knowingly transfers, possesses or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person.” The court’s 18-page opinion focused on grammar:

In ordinary English, where a transitive verb has anobject, listeners in most contexts assume that an adverb (such as knowingly) that modifies the transitive verb tells the listener how the subject performed the entire action,including the object as set forth in the sentence.

All nine justices agreed on this result, with six joining in the majority opinion, and three filing separate concurring opinions. The bottom line: Aggravated identity theft is committed only if an individual uses a false social security number and knows that it belongs to another person (as opposed to being simply a phony number).

Back to Postville: After the immigration raid on a meat-processing plant in Postville on May 12, 2008. Some 270 workers were charged with aggravated identity theft, as well as immigration violations. Slightly more than a hundred other workers were also charged with various immigration-related violations, but not with identity theft, because the social security numbers they used were phony, and did not belong to any real person.

With a two-year mandatory minimum jail sentence hanging over their heads, most of the 270 agreed to immediate deportation in exchange for dropping the identity theft charges.

The aggravated identity theft charge has been a key threat against immigrant workers arrested in ICE’s new strategy of workplace raids. Marcelo Ballvé, Mother Jones, reported:

The agency reported 5,184 workplace arrests in fiscal 2008, more than seven times the 2004 figure. Its raids have included others on the scale of Postville—sweeps resulting in the dislocation of entire immigrant communities. Last October, ICE arrested 330 workers at the Columbia Farms poultry plant in Greenville, South Carolina. That came on the heels of a massive sweep of Howard Industries, an electronics maker in Laurel, Mississippi, where agents netted some 600 workers. The year before, 300 employees were picked up at a Massachusetts leather manufacturer, and raids in late 2006 on Swift meatpacking plants in Nebraska and five other states led to 1,300 arrests.

When a worker agrees to deportation, the government does not have the burden of proving a case, saving substantial time and expense. For the worker, deportation creates significant legal obstacles to ever legally re-entering the United States.

For the deported Postville workers — and for the thousands of others around the country who agreed to deportation rather than risk two-year jail sentences — the ruling comes too late. For the future, however, the ruling may become one more factor in deterring workplace raids.

War, peace and victory at last for FMLN in El Salvador

After a bitter and bloody civil war, followed by 17 years of political struggle, El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) won the largest number of seats in parliament last week, and is poised to win the presidential election March 15. BBC reports a final parliamentary count of 35 for the leftist FMLN and 32 for the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party, with the remaining 17 seats going to smaller parties. According to the NACLA/CISPES/UpsideDownWorld reportthe centrist PDC won seven seats, the right-wing PNC “around” five seats, and the center-left CD one or two seats.

FMLN presidential candidate Mauricio Funes, a former television journalist who did not fight in the civil war, is favored to win the presidency over ARENA’s Rodrigo Avila.

In the capital city of San Salvador, Arena candidate Norman Quijano unseated Salvadoran Mayor Violeta Manjivar of the FMLN, in an upset victory after 12 years of FMLN mayors.

For in-depth analysis and reporting, see The 2009 El Salvador Elections: Between Crisis and Change, a joint production of NACLA, CISPES, and UpsideDown World. From the executive summary and introduction of the 27-page report:

After 17 years since the end of El Salvador’s civil war, the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) is poised to accomplish what its guerrilla predecessors never did: Take over the national government with the presidential elections on March 15. The FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes holds a double-digit lead over his rival Rodrigo Avila of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party. An FMLN victory in March would break 20 years of one-party rule by ARENA. …

Funes will join a new coalition of left-leaning leaders throughout Latin America. The turning of the political waters constitutes a dramatic shift for El Salvador—and the region. Over the decades, ARENA administrations have made El Salvador one of Washington’s closest allies in the region and a poster-child of the free-market, neoliberal policies that have plunged millions into poverty throughout Latin America. The FMLN’s rise to power would also mark an essential breaking point with the legacy of the country’s civil war in which the US-backed government and its paramilitary death squads murdered some 75,000 citizens. …

Indeed, this year marks a rarity in Salvadoran electoral politics. First, came the January 18 legislative and municipal elections, which will be soon followed by the presidential election on March 15. Normally, presidential elections, held every five years, do not coincide with local elections, which are held every three years, making the beginning of 2009 a pivotal moment for El Salvador’s future.

Though El Salvador is a small country in Central America, the elections have international resonance. A victory for another leftist president continues the trend that began with Brazil’s Inacio Lula da Silva, and strengthened with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales. While each country has its own distinct internal dynamic, and many would question whether Brazil’s Lula even qualifies as “leftist” these days, internationally funded and organized right-wing opposition continues to lump them together (and together with Cuba and Fidel Castro). In El Salvador, that means international funding for anti-FMLN campaigning. The NACLA/CISPES/UpsideDown World Report notes that

A key element of the current electoral climate is the campaign against the FMLN orchestrated by right-wing organizations notoriously led by the El Salvador branch of Fuerza Solidaria (United Force). Founded in Venezuela, the organization’s primary goal is stopping the leftward political tide in Latin America. In El Salvador, its activities include using print and television ads to defame the FMLN presidential formula.

Some of the past violence continues, with half a dozen FMLN members and supporters murdered in 2008, and others attacked and sent to hospitals. Norman Quijano, ARENA’s San Salvador mayoral candidate publicly admitted that his campaigners are armed and should be “considered dangerous.” ARENA was the only political party to refuse to sign a non-violence pact. In addition to violence, substantial accusations of electoral fraud continue, with the ARENA-dominated electoral commission ignoring legal requirements for transparency and accountability.

For interesting, on-going coverage, check out the CISPES blog on the elections. While CISPES unabashedly favors the FMLN, the blog provides extensive English-language coverage, links to other coverage in both Spanish and English, and photos.

50 years of revolution

New Year’s Day also marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. Fifty years after the overthrow of the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro (82) has handed off power to his slightly younger brother Raul Castro (77).

The BBC reports that Cuba’s economy slowed down this year, growing at a rate of only 4.3% instead of the projected 8%. Cuba was hit by three major hurricanes this year, with damages estimated at $10 billion. An AP report in the Miami Herald called the economic growth figure inflated because it includes “state spending on free health care and education, as well as subsides for transportation and food rations.” (Of course, no matter how you slice it, the Cuban GDP looks better than this year’s U.S. GDP, which is likely to show less than 2% growth.)

As the New York Times noted, Cuba “has secured advances in education and health care,” and its life expectancy of 77.3 years is one of the highest in the hemisphere. Its infant mortality rate is lower than that of the United States, according to U.N. reports

U.S. policy toward Cuba continues to be punitive, with stringent limitations on travel and trade. Some change is expected with the new administration. NACLA reports that President-elect Obama has promised to give Cuban-Americans “unrestricted rights” to visit family members in Cuba and to send money to them. However, Obama said he will maintain the trade embargo first imposed by President Eisenhower in 1960, despite continuing international calls for lifting the embargo.

For 17 straight years, the 192-member U.N. General Assembly has overwhelmingly approved a non-binding resolution condemning the U.S. embargo. Only the United States, Israel and Palau voted against the measure in October. …

On December 8, the heads of 15 Caribbean nations called on Obama to rescind the embargo: “The Caribbean community hopes that the transformational change which is under way in the United States will finally relegate that measure to history,” their statement said.

Then on December 17 in Brazil, the leaders of 33 Latin American countries, including conservative allies of Washington like Colombia and Mexico, convened for another gathering and unanimously called on Obama to drop the “unacceptable” embargo. (“End the Embargo,” NACLA)

Cubans know better than to count on big changes from the new administration. The Weekly News Update on the Americas summarized an interview from Mexican daily La Jornada:

Cuban National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón said that Cuba isn’t counting on a major shift in US policy towards Cuba when Barack Obama becomes US president on Jan. 20. Alarcón, who lived in New York 1966-1978 as Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, noted that “many of my friends…people of what was the American New Left in other times” had wept at Obama’s victory celebration in Chicago on Nov. 4. “I understood their hope,” he told reporter Blanche Petrich, but “I know that we can’t expect a big turning point with respect to Cuba.”

Alarcón told La Jornada, that Obama promises change, but not radical change. For Cuba, that means lifting the restrictions placed by Bush, and a return to some form of dialogue, which had ended during the Bush years.

La verdad es que siempre hubo espacio para el diálogo discreto, la interlocución privada, la diplomacia no pública que se mantuvo, que probó ser útil y que existió hasta que llegó el increíble equipo de George Bush, el pequeño.

The truth is that there was always space for discreet dialogue, for private conversations, for diplomacy maintained out of the public view, which was useful and which existed until the incredible team of George Bush, the small one.

Now, said Alarcón, a changed relationship with Cuba could be an important part of a new U.S. relationship with Latin America.

About Latin American News and Views

This blog is a collection of news and views from/about Latin America — more political and social issues than cultural notes, but probably a smattering of each. In addition, I’ll include immigration news, predominantly but not exclusively about Latinos in the United States.