Latin America News Round-up
May 14 2009
Argentina
Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner says media is greatest opposition. AP
Argentina could have to import beef and wheat in 2010. Mercopress
A rise in dengue fever. GlobalPost
Bolivia
New report says Dwyer opened fire on police in shootout. The Irish Independent
Morales Recovers Lost Ground in Bolivia. Angus Reid Global Monitor
Peru gives refuge to 2 officials sought by Bolivia. AP
Bolivia Cuts Deals with 13 Oil Companies to Boost Output. EFE
Ecuador
UPDATE: Ecuador Finance Minister: Bond Prices Could Differ. Dow Jones Newswires
Venezuela
Poll: 59% of Venezuelans back Chavez. AP
Venezuela Economy Likely Didn’t Contract In 1Q – Analysts. Dow Jones Newswires
Venezuela Hikes Teachers Pay, Pushes Socialist Education. Latin American Herald Tribune
Venezuela’s PDVSA ‘Unlikely to Default,’ Barclays Says. Bloomberg
Venezuela moves forward with oil nationalizations. AP
Report: Tidewater boats seized by Venezuela. AP
Chavez, Citgo sued for five billion in damages. AFP
Venezuela Rejects Inter-American Human Rights Commission Report. Venezuelanalysis
Andean Region
DJ Colombia Forces Abbott To Cut Price Of AIDS Drug Kaletra. Dow Jones Newswires
Two More Awa Indians Murdered in Southern Colombia. EFE
Colombia Apr Crude Output Rises To Average 651,000 Barrels/Day. Dow Jones Newswires
Close Presidential Race Continues in Chile. Angus Reid Global Monitor
UPDATE 1-Chile’s Lomas Bayas miners agree to fresh talks. Reuters
Miners Block Highway in Southern Peru. EFE
10 Indians Injured in Clashes with Peru’s Police. EFE
Southern Cone
Petrobras Open to China Stake in Oil Fields. Wall Street Journal
Brazil flood victims return home. BBC
Brazil Official: Govt To Hold Use Of Sovereign Fund Until 2010. Dow Jones Newswires
Bernardo Says Brazil May Revise 2% GDP Growth Target (Update1). Bloomberg
México, Central America and the Caribbean
Mexico denies swine flu cover-up. BBC
Mexican Rebels Invite Press to Mountain Hideout. EFE
Guatemala rejects allegations of role in lawyer’s death. CNN
After Postville raid, Guatemalan town is hurting. Chicago Tribune
S&P Cuts El Salvador’s Ratings Deeper Into Junk Amid Recession. Dow Jones Newswires
El Salvador grapples with rising bloodshed. The Los Angeles Times
RIGHTS-COSTA RICA: Persons for Sale. Inter-Press Service
Obama Just Keeping Campaign Promise, Cuba Says. EFE
Travel – A Catalyst for Transforming the Relationship Between Cuba and America. Huffington Post
US implored to stop deporting Haitians. The Boston Globe
Region: Trade, Security, Economy and Integration
Private equity boost for Latin America. Financial Times
Another Clinton hand joins Obama’s team as head of hemispheric affairs. Mercopress
Argentina
Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner says media is greatest opposition
AP. May 13, 2009
BUENOS AIRES — Congressional candidate and former President Nestor Kirchner says the greatest obstacle facing Argentina’s ruling party in the midterm elections is the media.
Kirchner minimized the possibility that the opposition would wrest control of congress from his wife and successor, President Cristina Fernandez, in comments to a Buenos Aires radio station on Tuesday. He said “our greatest opposition is the media.”
Both have recently stepped up criticism of local press for what they consider biased reporting.
Watchdog groups have called for a cooling of the heated rhetoric.
Kirchner is chairman of the ruling Peronist party and widely considered to be co-governing Argentina with Fernandez.
Kirchner launched his congressional campaign for the June 28 elections this week.
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Argentina could have to import beef and wheat in 2010
Mercopress. May 13, 2009
Argentina, once the breadbasket of the world and land of some of the best cattle beef could be forced next year to import wheat and beef to meet domestic demand, according to government and private sector reports.
An internal paper from the Agriculture Ministry Agro-food markets division points out that beef production in Argentina next year will fall from 3.11 million tons in 2009 to 2.67 million tons in 2010, which means, if forecasts are confirmed, that the country will have to import at least 1.000 tons to meet domestic demand.
This means that Argentina which only five decades ago was the world’s leading exporter of beef will have to appeal to foreign beef.
Argentina’s livestock has been traditionally in the range of 55 to 60 million head, however next year it is forecasted to drop to 47.9 million, which in practical terms means 438.000 tons less of beef.
As to wheat the current crop now beginning the sowing process, will have the smallest area in a hundred years and could turn Argentina into the world market as a net purchaser of the cereal, according to one of the country’s main grains and oilseed operators.
“The extreme climatic situation with a no-end-in-sight drought plus erred taxing policies have brought us to this situation”, said Cesar Gagliardo from Artegran.
In 2007/08, Argentina had a record crop of 16.3 million tons of wheat but for the coming season, 2009/10 will be below the 7 million tons threshold taking into account the area which is to be planted.
“From the 4.5 million hectares of 2007/08 we’re down to 3.7 million”, said Gustavo Lopez from Agritrend, making it the less planted season in the last century.
The powerful Argentine Rural Society is even more pessimistic, 3.5 million hectares which at an average yield of 2.000 kilos adds up to 7 million tons, just above the 6.5 million tons Argentina normally consumes.
However Gagliardo points out that “we shouldn’t discard a volume of 5 million tons, given the current climate and political situations”, and then Argentina will have to buy wheat in the open market.
A similar forecast was anticipated by Gustavo Grobocopatel, considered the Argentine “soy king”, who said it’s possible next year “we will have to import wheat from the US, Ukraine or Canada”.
Wheat has become the most sensitive of all cereals “because the government needs to ensure cheap, accessible prices, to keep inflation under control” but at the same time it’s of serious concern for surplus export because Argentina could loose its virtually “captive” next door neighbour client, Brazil.
In recent history, only in 1952 was Argentina forced to import wheat to meet domestic demand because of the wrong farm policies.
“Time is ticking: each day it does not rain the number of hectares to be planted comes down. We had no rainfall in March, April and only a million hectares are considered to have the needed soil humidity”, said Gagliardo.
Furthermore wheat is no longer an attractive crop and farmers are looking for other more lucrative options.
“Last year was a poor season for summer crops so there are not many funds for fertilizers, agro-chemicals and genetics” cautions Gagliardo.
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A rise in dengue fever
Dengue fever has plagued Argentina this year.
Anil Mundra. GlobalPost. May 13, 2009
BUENOS AIRES – The world over, swine flu is the illness du jour. But in Argentina, the illness of the year – one that some say is worse than the swine flu – has been dengue fever.
As the southern hemisphere’s winter sets in and kills off the mosquitos that transmit the virus, Argentina is just beginning to come off its worst dengue epidemic ever.
The government has recorded more than 23,000 confirmed cases of the illness, with mercifully fewer than 10 deaths so far. But non-govermental experts say that the actual numbers may be many times higher.
“Argentina is en route to becoming a dengue-endemic country – that much is clear,” said Hector Coto, executive director of the Healthy World Foundation. Although the outbreak began and has remained strongest in the semi-tropical north of the country, every province in the nation has now seen suspected infections.
Some of the reported illnesses, especially those in the frigid Patagonian states, are believed to have been contracted when people traveled to dengue-endemic regions. But health officials believe the vast majority of cases, including some of those in temperate Buenos Aires, came from mosquitos right in peoples’ backyards.
This is a rude awakening for a country that had eradicated the dengue-carrying mosquito from its territory decades ago. But after 81 years without dengue, a few cases were imported from neighboring countries in 1997. A major domestic outbreak occurred the following year, and in the past decade there have been five more outbreaks infecting almost 3,000 people.
Argentina seems not to have fully adjusted to this new health reality. Groups like the Argentine chapter of the international NGO Doctors of the World have accused the national and provincial governments of negligence in treating the disease, and of denying the extent of the problem. Indeed, the congressional debate over whether to declare a health emergency in the worst-affected areas was suddenly silenced last month when Senate Majority Leader Miguel Pichetto declared, “We shall not place Argentina in the red zone of the world,” citing concerns about hurting tourism in the country.
The debate here is likely about more than medicine.
“I think it has deep cultural roots,” said medical sociologist Ignacio Llovet of the Center of Studies of State and Society in Buenos Aires. “I think there’s a deep resistance to admit certain things” that might associate Argentina with tropical neighbors that have historically had more trouble with health and development challenges, Llovet said.
It’s true that the recent resurgence of dengue in Argentina leaked from bordering states, which have had much larger epidemics – Brazil saw hundreds of thousands of cases in its worst outbreak ever last year. And it’s also true that Argentina’s tens of thousands of dengue cases are a drop in the Americas’ bucket of more than 1 million a year, and the 50 million annual cases worldwide.
But Argentina’s share in this and other diseases has been growing in recent years, and now some of the country’s health indicators are worse than those of its neighbors, Llovet said. He cited chagas, a parasite that has been all but eradicated in Brazil, where it was first discovered, but still persists in Argentina and infects about 10 million people in the hemisphere.
Like chagas and many other infectious diseases, dengue is strongly associated with conditions of poverty – a stigma that might be another impediment to its acceptance as a fact of Argentine life. Because dengue-carrying mosquitos breed in standing water, the disease disproportionately affects poor communities without plumbing on the outskirts of cities.
There have been a few cases of more illustrious dengue victims – an ex-governor, for example, was the first person known to have contracted the disease in his province during this outbreak. But these are the exception rather than the rule.
In Chaco, the province that accounts for half of Argentina’s dengue cases, then-Health Minister Sandra Mendoza recently pronounced that dengue “doesn’t distinguish between social class, religion or political parties,” and she indignantly dismissed as a political attack the allegation that she herself was infected. In an epic 13-hour legislative hearing on that allegation and questions about whether she had taken enough action on the outbreak, Mendoza declared that “the responsibility for dengue lies with the mosquito.” She has since resigned under fire.
Dengue panic and polemics were muffled by fears over swine flu at the end of April. But a few weeks into that outbreak, Mexican president Felipe Calderon revived dengue-related politics when he criticized Argentina’s efforts at disease prevention. He made the jab as he was bristling at an Argentine ban on flights from Mexico, a measure that a handful of Latin American countries adopted against the advice of the World Health Organization and the United Nations.
Meanwhile, politicians and commentators – from Argentina’s Mexico ambassador to Foreign Policy Magazine – maintained that Argentina is sicker from dengue than Mexico is from the flu. That might still be true (by 40 to one) in terms of the number of reported infections, but Mexico seems to have had a much higher mortality rate during its outbreak.
And while the future of swine flu is unclear, dengue fever in Argentina is winding down – for this year, anyway. Experts say that without rigorous intervention by the Argentine government, dengue outbreaks will become more widespread and more deadly in the future.
Bolivia
New report says Dwyer opened fire on police in shootout
Jeff Farrell in Santa Cruz and Eimear Ni Bhraonain. The Irish Independent. May 13, 2009
Conflicting reports emerged yesterday from Bolivia over whether an Irishman fired shots at police before he was killed.
Bolivian authorities investigating the death of Michael Dwyer released a ballistics report on Monday which claims the Tipperary man opened fire on police officers.
Security forces killed Mr Dwyer and two other men in the Hotel Las Americas in Santa Cruz on April 16. Police alleged the group was involved in a plot to assassinate Bolivian president Evo Morales.
Traces of gunpowder found on Mr Dwyer’s hands prove the 24-year-old was killed in a shootout, a Bolivian prosecutor has said. But this contradicts earlier reports and eyewitness statements that there was no crossfire.
Another police probe of the raid on the hotel signalled that Mr Dwyer was not involved in a shootout but was executed by special forces.
Yesterday, a spokesperson for the Dwyer family said they had been informed that it could take up to six months for an official report into the killing. He added that the family would not be making any comment before the release of this report.
Critics have called for an independent inquiry to show if the alleged gunpowder detected on the Tipperary man’s hands was present before or only after his death.
Images of the aftermath of the dawn raid in Hotel Las Americas showed Mr Dwyer in his underwear, suggesting he had been asleep before the raid.
The 24-year-old had two guns and several rounds of ammunition in his room, according to a police report seen by this newspaper. Early reports said it was unclear if he had fired the weapons.
A special police investigation into the raid has indicated in preliminary findings that there was no shootout between the security forces and Mr Dwyer.
Traces of gunpowder were also found on the hands of two other men killed in the hotel swoop, according to the report.
The lawyers of two other men arrested at the scene have called for an independent probe to show if gunpowder residue came to be on the men’s hands before or after the fatal raid.
Aftermath
Government figures in the opposition stronghold of Santa Cruz claim there was no terrorist plot to kill Bolivia’s leftist leader and the police operation was a show to link high-profile Morales’ critics to the alleged terrorist group.
Photographs taken in the aftermath of the shootings, seen by this newspaper, show a pistol on the floor next to the slain body of Eduardo Rozsa Flores (49). No weapon is seen in the adjacent room, where Mr Dwyer was killed.
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Morales Recovers Lost Ground in Bolivia
Angus Reid Global Monitor. May 13, 2009
(Angus Reid Global Monitor) – Most people in Bolivia support Evo Morales, according to a poll by Ipsos, Apoyo, Opinión y Mercado published in La Razón. 53 per cent of respondents approve of their president’s performance, up four points since March.
Morales-an indigenous leader and former coca-leaf farmer-won the December 2005 presidential election as the candidate for the Movement to Socialism (MAS), with 53.7 per cent of the vote. He officially took over as Bolivia’s head of state in January 2006.
Morales’s tenure has been focused on “re-founding” Bolivia through a new constitution. In November 2007, a draft constitution was approved with the support of all pro-government National Constituent Assembly members. Opposition parties boycotted the vote. The proposed draft included articles that allow for consecutive presidential re-election, the creation of 36 autonomous indigenous communities, and tighter government controls over private media outlets.
Last year, the departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija-all led by politicians opposed to Morales-held votes in an effort to increase their autonomy within Bolivia, directly defying articles in the new constitution. In response to the non-binding referendums, Morales enacted a law that scheduled a recall vote on himself, Bolivian vice-president Álvaro García Linera, and the country’s nine governors or “departmental prefects” in August. The president and vice-president were ratified with more than 60 per cent of the vote.
On Oct. 21, the discussions between the president and the departmental prefects finally ended with a revamped version of the constitution and a decision to hold a referendum to ratify the new body of law on Jan. 25, 2009. The new draft included a bill of rights and an entire chapter dedicated to Bolivia’s 36 indigenous nations. It also put the economy in the hands of the state, limited landholdings, redistributed revenues from gas fields in the eastern lowlands to the country’s poorer areas, and included a compromise that will allow the current president to seek only one additional five-year term.
In January, the new constitution was ratified with 61 per cent of the vote. Morales celebrated, saying, “Here begins the new Bolivia. Here we begin to reach true equality.”
Polling Data
Do you approve or disapprove of Evo Morales’s performance as president?
Apr. 2009 Mar. 2009 Feb. 2009
Approve 53% 49% 55%
Disapprove 43% 48% 41%
Source: Ipsos, Apoyo, Opinión y Mercado / La Razón
Methodology: Interviews with 1,033 Bolivian adults in La Paz, El Alto, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, conducted from Apr. 15 to Apr. 27, 2009. Margin of error is 3.1 per cent.
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Peru gives refuge to 2 officials sought by Bolivia
Andrew Whalen. AP. May 13, 2009
LIMA, Peru — Peru gave refuge to two more former Bolivian government ministers who fled genocide charges for the 2003 army killings of dozens of protesters, Peru’s foreign minister said Tuesday.
Bolivia had been demanding that Peru hand over the two ex-officials as well as a third granted political asylum in April, in a case that has further strained relations between the two South American neighbors.
There was no immediate reaction from Bolivia to Tuesday’s announcement that the two fugitives had been granted status as refugees, but earlier Bolivian President Evo Morales called the former ministers “criminals” and said giving them haven would be “an open provocation of the Bolivian people.”
Peruvian Foreign Minister Jose Antonio Garcia Belaunde said former Bolivian ministers Mirtha Quevedo and Javier Torres Goitia requested and have received refugee status, a legal measure that – unlike asylum – does not denote political persecution.
Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez Lozada and 17 of his former ministers are charged with genocide for sending soldiers who killed 63 people in 2003 while quelling anti-government protests in the city of El Alto, a bastion of support for Morales. The charges were filed after Morales took office in 2006.
Sanchez resigned the presidency after the bloodshed and fled to the United States, where President George W. Bush granted him and two of his ministers asylum.
A trial in Bolivia is scheduled for May 18 on the genocide charge, which carries a penalty of 30 years in prison.
Former officials have been fleeing Bolivia, saying they cannot get a fair trial in what they call a politically motivated case.
Supporting that argument, Garcia Belaunde said Tuesday: “Mr. Morales’ accusation has all of the marks and characteristics of being political in nature and we have thus granted asylum and refuge” to former Bolivian minister Jorge Torres Obleas in April.
Even before the squabble over the fugitives, relations were poor between Peru and Bolivia. Morales, a leftist, opposes Peruvian President Alan Garcia’s push for a free trade pact with the European Union and is a strong critic of Peru’s free trade pact with the U.S.
Peru lodged a protest Tuesday with Bolivia’s ambassador in Lima over comments made by Morales over the weekend in which he addressed his counterpart as “my vulgar companion Alan Garcia.”
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Bolivia Cuts Deals with 13 Oil Companies to Boost Output
EFE. May 13, 2009
LA PAZ – State-owned Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos, or YPFB, has reached agreements with 13 oil companies to increase natural gas production to 44.68 million cubic meters per day until the end of the year, the press reported.
The deals will make it possible to expand natural gas and liquids production for the domestic and foreign markets by 3.68 million cubic meters per day this year.
Petrobras Bolivia, Spain’s Repsol YPF, YPFB-Andina, YPFB-Chaco, BG Bolivia, France’s Total E&P, Petrobras Energia, Mapetrol, Orca, Canadian, Plus Petrol, Vintage and Don Wong agreed to boost their production.
YPFB chief Carlos Villegas said the agreements covered three areas: delivery, payment processing and the revision of development plans.
“The three agreements are aimed at ensuring an increase in production so we can continue to carry out what we have been doing in the domestic market and in that for exports,” Villegas told the daily La Razon.
The contracts include penalties for companies that do not meet their production goals, Villegas said.
YPFB, for its part, agreed to ensure the timely disbursement of payments to cover the companies’ production costs and profits.
Oil output is expected to rise by 42,000 barrels per day (bpd) this year, Villegas said.
The natural gas industry is the main source of foreign exchange for Bolivia, which is one of the largest exporters of the fuel in South America.
Brazil recently increased its consumption of Bolivian gas to some 30 million cubic meters per day, while Argentina is expected to consume a minimum of 4 million cubic meters per day of the fuel until the end of the year.
The central bank said last month that Bolivia’s revenues from natural gas exports to Argentina and Brazil could fall by as much as $1.2 billion this year.
In 2008, gas exports reached $3.43 billion, accounting for half of Bolivia’s total exports.
The decline in export revenues stems from the drop in the price of gas, which fell to $4.60 per million British thermal units (BTUs) in sales to Argentina and Brazil.
The Andean nation has an estimated 48 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, giving it the second-largest reserves in South America after Venezuela. EFE
Ecuador
UPDATE: Ecuador Finance Minister: Bond Prices Could Differ
Mercedes Alvaro. Dow Jones Newswires. May 12, 2009
QUITO (Dow Jones)–Finance Minister Maria Elsa Viteri told bondholders Tuesday that a modified Dutch auction could result in two different final clearing prices: one of each for the Global 2012 and 2030 defaulted bonds.
In December, Ecuador defaulted on some $3.21 billion in bonds due in 2012 and 2030, contending they are “illegal” and “illegitimate.”
The government has since offered to repurchase outstanding bonds at 30 cents on the U.S. dollar.
In a letter sent to bondholders Tuesday, Viteri said that the decisions on the final clearing prices will be made on or about May 26.
“We don’t rule any price from the outset,” Viteri said. “Our objective is to gather a substantial participation provided, of course, that this is consistent with our financial resources.”
Viteri added that the final clearing price for the 2012 and the 2030 bonds could indeed be different.
The letter said that the 2012 minimum clearing price will be applied to the original nominal amount of the 2012 bonds of $1,000 and then the pool factor applied to calculate the minimum price payable for the 2012 bonds.
The minimum clearing price will be applied in the same way, but as there has been no partial redemption of the 2030 bonds, no adjustment for a reduced pool factor is necessary, the letter added.
Viteri said Ecuador has the right to purchase or acquire bonds in any manner, “obviously, in accordance with applicable laws.”
Viteri also said that any required announcement about how much debt the government bought back in the secondary market after announcing the default will be revealed at the “appropriate time.”
“This can be construed as implicit acknowledgement that the government has indeed bought back some of the defaulted debt, which raises serious questions about the integrity of the process,” said Alberto Ramos, of Goldman Sachs in a report.
“Given that the government has already bought some of the defaulted debt and given that the credit is liquid and solvent it should theoretically be able to accept all market bids and retire most of the debt,” he said.
Ramos added that for “political reasons, the government will not be very keen on validating a high clearing price.”
Venezuela
Poll: 59% of Venezuelans back Chavez
AP. May 13, 2009
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) – President Hugo Chavez remains popular among nearly two-thirds of Venezuelans after winning a February referendum removing limits on re-election and he’s feeling emboldened, a private pollster said Tuesday.
The socialist leader’s popularity stood at 59% in March, just slightly down from the 61% recorded in February, according to a March 20-30 survey of 2,000 people by the Caracas-based pollster Datanalisis.
Results of the survey, which had a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points, weren’t unveiled until this week because a group of businesses that paid for the poll had not authorized its release to the public.
Datanalisis said the latest figure is up from 51% in January, 2008.
Datanalisis Director Luis Vicente Leon said he believes the president’s popularity ratings appears to have prompted him to enact more radical policies, including the government’s recent moves to seize control of some privately-owned food processing plants.
“The radicalization process is the child of the increase in popularity,” Leon said.
Chavez ordered the expropriation of a rice-processing plant owned by Minneapolis-based Cargill Inc. in March and National Guard troops occupied another rice processing plant owned by a Polar, one of Venezuela’s largest companies, that same month.
The takeovers are part of a broader initiative aimed at stemming double-digit inflation by ensuring that companies do not flout regulations that require price-controlled items to comprise at least 70% of their output.
Nationwide inflation reached 31% last year – the highest in Latin America. Venezuela’s budget predicts inflation will be 15% for 2009.
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Venezuela Economy Likely Didn’t Contract In 1Q – Analysts
Darcy Crowe. Dow Jones Newswires. May 12, 2009
CARACAS (Dow Jones)–Venezuela’s gross domestic product probably didn’t contract in the first quarter of the year despite the backlash from the collapse in the price of oil, the bloodline of the country’s economy.
President Hugo Chavez sidestepped an economic decline in the first three months of the year by tapping government funds to prop up spending and “soften the impact of the crisis,” said Maikel Bello, an analyst with research group Ecoanalitica.
The Caracas-based firm forecasts a 1.07% GDP expansion for the first three months of the year.
Other analysts predict GDP expansions that range from 1% to 7%. Most of them, however, predict that Venezuela will close 2009 with an economic contraction. “The pace of growth is dropping and eventually we’ll be seeing red numbers,” said Bello.
Economic growth in Venezuela slowed to a 4.9% expansion in 2008, the lowest figure in five years, despite record oil revenue.
Chavez ordered at the beginning of the year a $12 billion transfer from the central banks international reserves to the Fonden development fund, a spending vehicle favored by the president for scores of social and infrastructure projects.
Additionally, the government has been using a range of bilateral development funds that Venezuela has set up with different countries to curb the decline in oil revenue.
Economic growth was spurred in recent years by rising oil revenue, which the government funneled through numerous social programs, and sharp increases in government spending, economists say.
On March 21 Chavez announced an economic package that included a 6.7% reduction in the budget and an increase in the consumer tax to 12% to deal with the drop in oil revenue.
“Those measures are only postponing the economic decline,” said Bello.
The International Monetary Fund expects Venezuela’s GDP to decline 2.2% in 2009.
The IMF’s forecast for Venezuela, released in its World Economic Outlook report, is more optimistic than some analysts’ estimates. Barclays Capital predicts a 4.1% contraction.
In Latin America, the economic contraction in 2009 will only be steeper in Mexico, according to the IMF. In 2010, Venezuela will suffer a 0.5% GDP decline, while the other Latin American economies surveyed by the IMF will post positive numbers.
Venezuela relies on oil for 90% of its exports and half of state revenue.
The central bank doesn’t have a set date for the release of first quarter economic data, but usually publishes the report six weeks after the end of the quarter.
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Venezuela Hikes Teachers Pay, Pushes Socialist Education
Latin American Herald Tribune. May 12, 2009
CARACAS – Elementary and high-school teachers will get a 30-percent pay hike and Venezuela’s government will move ahead to implement “socialist education,” Education Minister Héctor Navarro said on Tuesday.
“More than 500,000 educators will benefit from the new collective teachers’ contract, about which discussion ended last Friday,” the minister said, adding that among other clauses, it calls for “a wage increase of 30 percent, plus bonuses for professional qualifications and seniority.”
Navarro told the official VTV network that the document will be signed next week and that from May 1 wages will increase by 15 percent and an additional increase of the same percentage will be added on Sept 1.
Besides “decent” wages, the building of “a new country” requires “a constant effort by educators” since “the starting point for creating socialism is education,” Navarro said.
The president of the Sinafum teachers union, Orlando Pérez, confirmed Navarro’s words and said that the accord will also set “bonuses for transportation, health, professional expenses plus paying an amount of 460 bolivars ($214) for all teachers.”
The health minister will guarantee “free medicine for retired teachers who suffer chronic illness,” Pérez said, adding that with all the bonuses, the wage hike from September will add up to 42 percent.
The collective bargaining agreement was negotiated by Sinafum, the Venezuelan Teachers Federation (FVM) and the Educators Federation of Venezuela (FEV), and left out another seven unions that called a strike on March 25 rejecting it.
Those unions “are not legitimate, because they haven’t held elections to designate” their leaders, as the law requires for negotiating collective bargaining agreements, Navarro said.
Nelson González, president of Fetramagisterio, one of the unions that called the strike, called it a “national protest campaign” that also complained that “the employer-government” kept wages low until then, with a maximum of 1,900 bolivars (some $884) for teachers with postgraduate degrees.
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Venezuela’s PDVSA ‘Unlikely to Default,’ Barclays Says
Lester Pimentel. Bloomberg. May 13, 2009
May 13 (Bloomberg) — Petroleos de Venezuela SA is “unlikely to default” as its debt to suppliers represents less than 0.2 percent of its annual income, Barclays Plc said.
“We believe the nonpayment of suppliers by PDVSA is likely to be short term in nature, and it is extremely unlikely that this would trigger a default event,” Barclays analysts Alejandro Grisanti and Juan Cruz wrote in a report yesterday.
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Venezuela moves forward with oil nationalizations
Rachel Jones. AP. May 13, 2009
Venezuela’s state oil company said Tuesday that it has taken control of 90 percent of oil contractors on western Lake Maracaibo as it aims to reduce costs due to falling crude prices.
President Hugo Chavez announced last week that Venezuela is nationalizing 60 oil contractors as his government moves to assert control over the industry under a new law approved by the pro-Chavez National Assembly.
Many of the contractors run boats, docks and other facilities on Lake Maracaibo in oil-rich Zulia state, while others process natural gas or inject water into oil fields to help extract crude.
State-run Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, has recently clashed with domestic and foreign service providers, falling behind on billions of dollars in payments as it aims to cut costs by 40 percent. Venezuela’s Energy Ministry says PDVSA’s unpaid invoices jumped 145 percent last year over 2007, to reach $13.9 billion in December.
The U.S. government is “monitoring the situation” and has been in close contact with companies that could be affected through its embassy in Caracas, U.S. State Department spokesman Noel Clay said Tuesday.
“In the event of expropriation, we expect the Venezuelan government to provide U.S. companies with prompt, adequate and effective compensation in accordance with international law,” Clay said in Washington.
Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said some contracts negotiated at last year’s soaring crude prices are now overvalued. “We’re not going to pay abusive rates to anybody,” he said Tuesday.
Venezuela relies on oil for 93 percent of exports, but has seen world oil prices fall 60 percent since their July peak. A barrel of light, sweet crude was trading at $58.73 on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Tuesday.
Under a resolution published in Venezuela’s Official Gazette on Monday, 39 companies currently providing services to PDVSA will be brought under government control — including New Orleans-based Tidewater Inc. and Gulmar Offshore Middle East LLC, based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Some companies not mentioned in the resolution will also be affected by the law, including SIMCO consortium and natural gas processor and distributor Williams Companies Inc. SIMCO’s largest partner, Wood Group, is based in Houston. The Wood Group’s parent company, John Wood Group PLC, is based in Aberdeen, Scotland.
PDVSA has taken control of two gas compression facilities in eastern Venezuela belonging to Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Cos.
Accumulated debts with PDVSA have prompted some foreign oil drillers to halt their Venezuela operations, including Ensco International Inc., which stopped drilling its offshore rig in January, saying Venezuela owed it $35 million.
The Dallas-based company said in a statement Monday that it has notified PDVSA that it intends to terminate its contract due to nonpayment.
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Report: Tidewater boats seized by Venezuela
AP. May 12, 2009
Venezuela’s state oil company has seized an undisclosed number of boats belonging to Tidewater Inc., which provides water transportation for the petroleum industry, according to a published report.
The New Orleans-based company’s executive vice president, Joe Bennett, said that “some boats” had been seized and more details would be released during Tidewater’s quarterly investors conference call on Thursday, New Orleans CityBusiness reported Tuesday.
Bennett said the Venezuelan government was now operating the vessels.
Bennett would tell The Associated Press only that “we have some challenges in Venezuela.”
On Monday, Venezuela’s government said the state-owned oil company would take over 39 oil contractors under a new law.
The companies provide transport boats and other oil-related services on Lake Maracaibo in western Venezuela, the official Bolivarian News Agency reported.
Chavez said Friday that his government was nationalizing some 60 companies as he oversaw the takeovers of boats, docks and other facilities on Lake Maracaibo. He said the aim was to cut oil production costs.
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Chavez, Citgo sued for five billion in damages
AFP. May 12, 2009
MIAMI (AFP) – A US advocacy group and a Venezuelan exile said Tuesday they have filed suit seeking five billion dollars in damages from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and state oil companies for alleged human rights abuses.
The suit, which was first filed in April by Washington-based Freedom Watch and exiled Venezuelan journalist Ricardo Guaripa, accuses Chavez of alleged acts in support of terrorism, torture and human rights violations.
Freedom Watch president Larry Klayman said he increased the amount sought to five billion dollars on Monday and added Venezuelan-owned Citgo to the suit on grounds that it provides the funds that support the alleged terrorism.
“We are going to wait and see whether Venezuela turns up for the proceedings. If it does not it will be easier to gain a verdict against it,” said Guaripa.
Guaripa worked for US-funded Radio Marti in Caracas until the end of 2004 when he went into exile, alleging he had been the target of death threats and intimidation by the Chavez government.
“The people of Venezuela and the world have been terrorized by Chavez and his communist/terrorist henchmen for too long,” Klayman said in a statement, adding that the president has taken several measures to “cement” his grip on power.
“All the while he continues, through oil revenues and other means, to support terrorist countries and groups bent on destroying capitalism and the West in general.”
Freedom Watch accuses Chavez of supporting the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), as well as Middle East groups Hamas and Hezbollah. The US government has labeled all three groups terrorist organizations.
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Venezuela Rejects Inter-American Human Rights Commission Report
James Suggett. Venezuelanalysis. May 12, 2009
Mérida, May 12th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis) – On Saturday, the Venezuelan government rejected the annual report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which categorized Venezuela as one of four countries in the hemisphere where human rights are particularly threatened. President Hugo Chávez said Venezuela will consider withdrawing from the Organization of American States (OAS) and forming a separate regional organization with its allies.
The IACHR, which is an institution of the OAS, labeled Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Colombia countries which “for diverse reasons confront situations that seriously and gravely affect the enjoyment of fundamental rights.”
According to the report, Venezuela is “a hostile environment for political dissent.” Human rights activists have received threats from unknown individuals, and the government has openly expressed its suspicion of human rights organizations that receive funding from international sources that may be hostile to the “21st Century Socialism” that Venezuela is constructing, the report says.
The report also alleges that the government violated freedom of religion by forcibly searching a Jewish community center in Caracas for weapon stashes. It highlights the increased rates of homicide and violent deaths in jails as signs that citizen security is weakly enforced.
Although the IACHR report focuses mainly on political and civil rights, it briefly “recognizes the importance” of the government’s extensive social programs that have drastically improved Venezuelans’ social and economic human rights, by cutting poverty in half, abolishing illiteracy, and making primary health care freely accessible to all Venezuelans.
In response to the report, the Foreign Relations Ministry released a statement in which it “categorically rejects” the “inexact, malicious, and false character of [the report's] affirmations,” which lack “transparency and objectivity.”
“The IACHR has abandoned its role as an international organism for the protection of human rights… and converted itself into a political instrument of the national and international sectors which, for ideological reasons, attack the progressive governments of the region,” stated the Ministry.
The Ministry recounted how the IACHR recognized the interim government that was installed during a two-day coup d’etat in April 2002, during which sectors of the military and the elite business class kidnapped President Chávez and dissolved the constitution.
Also, from the time Venezuela ratified the American Convention on Human Rights in 1977 until the beginning of Chávez’s presidency, which was a time period marked by many human rights crimes including the murder, disappearance, and torture of leftist political dissidents, the IACHR brought only six cases against Venezuela. During Chávez’s presidency, in contrast, the IACHR has brought approximately 150 cases against Venezuela, according to the Ministry.
The Ministry demanded that the IACHR “apply the principles of universality, impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectivity in its examination of human rights issues, eliminate the application of a double standard and politicization,” and “admit that it recognized the coup d’etat and rectify its biased position against our country.”
Venezuela will continue to improve its human rights situation, “independently of the manipulations and lies of the IACHR,” the Ministry’s statement concluded.
During the televised inauguration of nearly two dozen new public health care centers on Saturday, President Chávez called the IACHR’s report “immoral” and a sign of the “cynicism” of the OAS.
“Venezuela could leave the OAS and bring together the peoples of this continent to liberate ourselves from these old instruments, and to form an organization of free peoples of Latin America,” said Chávez, who has already initiated several regional integration organizations based on cooperation and mutual benefit, as an alternative to U.S.-dominated free trade agreements.
“Why didn’t [the report] condemn Bush?” Chávez asked, referring to U.S. President Barack Obama’s predecessor. Chávez also said the report should have condemned the Obama administration’s recent military assault on Afghanistan, which killed more than a hundred Afghan civilians.
The U.S. has never ratified the American Convention on Human Rights.
In response to the Venezuelan government’s objections on Saturday, IACHR President Luz Patricia Mejía admitted that the private media, which are open adversaries of the Chávez government, provided the “majority of the information that the report possesses at present.”
“We have openly questioned the use of the media as a principal source from which to formulate a general diagnosis of human rights in Venezuela, the use of media which have participated in an open and direct manner in political junctures that the country has lived and is living, and most of all, those which participated in an open and direct manner in the coup d’etat in 2002,” said Mejía during an interview with the Caracas-based regional news station Telesur.
Mejía, a Venezuelan lawyer who previously worked with the Venezuelan human rights organization PROVEA, a frequent critic of the Chávez government, recommended that an “internal debate” be held during next month’s summit of the OAS in Honduras.
Meanwhile, former Cuban President Fidel Castro expressed solidarity with Venezuela in the face of the OAS. “Today, Chávez is a formidable adversary of the capitalist system of production and of imperialism… No wonder the OAS is hypocritically trying to present him as an enemy of freedom of expression and democracy,” Castro wrote in an editorial published in Cuban and South American news outlets. “Venezuela is not alone,” wrote Castro.
Andean Region [contents]
DJ Colombia Forces Abbott To Cut Price Of AIDS Drug Kaletra
Inti Landauro. Dow Jones Newswires. May 13, 2009
The Colombian government forced Abbott Laboratories (ABT) to cut the prices of its Kaletra drug, which treats HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The Colombian National Medicine Prices Commission decided to cut the price of Kaletra after comparing prices of the same drug in neighboring Brazil, Ecuador and Peru, according to a document released by the country’s Health and Labor Ministry.
The commission will cut the price of a one-year Kaletra treatment by 69% to $1,067.35 down from $3,443 for the “institutional” sector, which includes state hospitals among others, and by 52% to $1,591.24 for the “commercial” sector, the document said.
Kaletra tablets are a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir in 200/50 milligram doses that are used in combination with other medications to control HIV infection.
Abbott officials declined to comment immediately.
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Two More Awa Indians Murdered in Southern Colombia
EFE. May 12, 2009
BOGOTA – An unidentified armed group killed two Awa Indians in southern Colombia, bringing to 20 the number of members of that community killed by bullets or landmines so far this year.
“The chain of extermination, regrettably, shows that there is a clear intention to do away with the indigenous Awa people,” said the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, or Onic.
Ademelio Servio Bisbicus and Marco Antonio Taicuz were shot to death on May 10 in their homes on the Piedra Verde reservation, located in the southern province of Nariño, Onic said.
Bertha Taicuz, the wife of Bisbicus and mother of four children, was wounded by the gunfire and is hanging “between life and death” in a hospital in the region, according to Onic.
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebels killed 13 Awas in the same town in February.
Onic said that Awa leaders are being followed, subjected to persecutions and constant threats both on the reservations and in Pasto, the capital of Nariño.
The Awas have survived pressure from settlers, civil wars, illegal loggers and the increase in gold mining in the region, as well as the spread of the cultivation of coca, the source of cocaine.
The estimated 27,500 Awas live in more than 120 communities within a territory 322,000 hectares (805,000 acres) in size in the provinces of Nariño and Putumayo, both on the border with Ecuador.
The ancestral lands of the Awas are located on the western edge of the Macizo Andino, a mountainous, jungle region cut through by many rivers and streams that the Indians share with Afro-Colombian communities.
Originally, the Awas were hunters, but because of all the armed internal conflict in the region, they had to devote themselves to raising domestic animals and farming. EFE
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Colombia Apr Crude Output Rises To Average 651,000 Barrels/Day
Diana Delgado. Dow Jones Newswires. May 13, 2009
BOGOTA (Dow Jones)–Colombia’s April crude oil output rose to an average 651,000 barrels a day from 568,000 a year earlier, the government oil-licensing agency reported on its Web site.
Oil production in April was higher than in March, when output reached an average 650,000 barrels a day, the National Hydrocarbons Agency report said.
Average crude output in the first four months of the year was 639,000 barrels a day.
Foreign and domestic companies extracted an average 965 million cubic feet a day of natural gas in April, up from 897 million a year earlier and higher than March’s 907 million, said the agency, known as ANH.
In 2008, average crude oil output totaled 588,000 barrels a day, the highest since 2001 when output for the year hit an average of 604,000 barrels a day. In 2000, the country’s output reached an average of 688,000 barrels a day.
If local consumption and production trends continue and no significant oil discoveries are made, Colombia will become a net oil importer by 2016, according to public remarks by President Alvaro Uribe.
The Colombian government has been actively trying to attract companies to explore for oil.
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Close Presidential Race Continues in Chile
Angus Reid Global Monitor. May 13, 2009
(Angus Reid Global Monitor) – Sebastián Piñera holds a slight advantage in Chile, according to a poll by TNS-Time. 46 per cent of respondents would support the Alliance for Chile (APC) candidate in a presidential run-off, up four points since March.
Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle of the governing centre-left Agreement of Parties for Democracy (CPD) is second with 41 per cent.
In a first round scenario, Piñera is ahead with 36 per cent, followed by Frei with 29 per cent, current Socialist Party (PS) congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami with 14 per cent, current senator Alejandro Navarro of the Broad Social Movement (MAS) with four per cent, and independent senator Adolfo Zaldívar with three per cent.
The CPD’s Michelle Bachelet-a former defence minister-was elected in a January 2006 run-off with 53.49 per cent of all cast ballots. Piñera was second with 46.51 per cent.
The centre-left CPD-which includes the PS, the Christian-Democratic Party of Chile (PCD), the Party for Democracy (PD) and the Radical Social-Democratic Party (PRSD)-has not lost a single presidential election in Chile since the return of democracy after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in March 1990. The centre-right APC encompasses Piñera’s National Renewal (RN) and the Independent Democratic Union (UDI).
In October 2008, Piñera’s RN achieved significant victories in local elections across the country. For the first time, centre-right parties have more elected mayors than centre-left organizations. Frei served as Chile’s president from March 1994 to March 2000.
Earlier this month, Enríquez-Ominami revealed that he will become a presidential candidate, saying, “The law is clear: you cannot run to be both a deputy and the president, and you cannot be an independent presidential candidate if you are member of a party.”
Bachelet is ineligible for a consecutive term in office. The first round of Chile’s presidential election is scheduled for Dec. 11.
Polling Data
If the presidential election took place this Sunday, which of these candidates would you support?
Sebastián Piñera 36%
Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle 29%
Marco Enríquez-Ominami 14%
Alejandro Navarro 4%
Adolfo Zaldívar 3%
Thinking about a run-off, which of these candidates would you vote for?
Apr. 2009 Mar. 2009 Feb. 2009
Sebastián Piñera 43% 39% 43%
Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle 41% 41% 38%
Neither / Not sure / Blank 16% 20% 19%
Source: TNS-Time
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 1,320 Chilean adults, conducted from Apr. 1 to Apr. 30, 2009. Margin of error is 2.6 per cent.
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UPDATE 1-Chile’s Lomas Bayas miners agree to fresh talks
Reuters. May 11, 2009
SANTIAGO, May 11 (Reuters) – Mine workers at Xstrata’s (XTA.L) Lomas Bayas copper deposit in northern Chile continued to strike for a sixth day on Monday, but they agreed to resume wage talks with the company later this week.
The Lomas Bayas deposit, in Chile’s Atacama desert, has an annual output capacity of around 75,000 tonnes of copper. Chile is the world’s biggest producer of the metal.
Xstrata and representatives of the 385-member union at Lomas Bayas had their first meeting on Friday, mediated by government labor authorities, but no agreement was reached.
The two sides met again on Monday and agreed to restart salary negotiations, scheduled for Wednesday.
“We’ll continue with our strike, but we’re seeing a more positive approach now,” the president of the union, Elias Andronico, told Reuters.
He said the union’s rank and file would meet on Tuesday, ahead of the negotiations with the company.
Lomas Bayas said it has implemented a contingency plan and is using stocks to continue normal levels of cathode output, but production of ore from the mine has fallen 50 percent.
The company organized airlift transportation for food and medical supplies between the city of Antofagasta and the mine as workers have blocked access to the deposit.
Xstrata offered a raise of 4 percent over inflation, plus improvements in health and education benefits, instead of the 6 percent over inflation raise that mine workers are demanding.
The company said it was the final offer and is the best they can do due to the global financial crisis. (Reporting by Rodrigo Martinez; Writing by Alexia Vlahos and Hilary Burke)
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Miners Block Highway in Southern Peru
EFE. May 12, 2009
LIMA – Thousands of independent miners on Tuesday blocked several stretches of highway in southern Peru at the start of a 72-hour national protest to pressure the government to grant them formal recognition.
The miners, some of them carrying signs and sticks, gathered rocks at several points along the main highway connecting Lima with the southern part of the country, a move that caused unease among thousands of passengers on board buses that had been stranded along with trucks and private automobiles since before dawn.
In Lima, hundreds of members of the Fenamarpe miners association, which says that some 300,000 Peruvian families subsist from small-scale mining, marched through the streets to demand better treatment by the government as well as the nullification of legislation they consider harmful to their rights and interests.
The general director of mining at the Energy and Mines Ministry, Victor Vargas, told RPP radio that if the workers continue with their current mining practices they will wind up polluting the environment.
He added that the new legal rules aimed at fostering small-scale mining are oriented toward allowing the official recognition as a group of a large number of independent miners, as well as establishing environmental standards.
Also on Tuesday, Peru’s environment minister said the independent miners who produce 16 tons of gold annually dump twice that amount of poisonous mercury into the rivers and soil of the southeastern jungle region of Madre de Dios.
“The pollution has already reached Porto Alegre, capital of (the state of) Rondonia in Brazil,” Antonio Brack told reporters in Lima.
Madre de Dios receives 60,000 foreign tourists each year for ecotourism in its national parks and protected areas.
In that region, 150,000 hectares (375,000 acres) of forest have been destroyed by open-pit strip miners prospecting for gold. EFE
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10 Indians Injured in Clashes with Peru’s Police
EFE. May 12, 2009
LIMA – Their takeover of a bridge and their later eviction by police in Peru’s Amazonas region resulted in 10 Indians being injured, one of them by gunfire, according to the Aidesep group representing indigenous communities in the area.
The incidents occurred on Sunday, when a group of Awajun and Wampis Indians seized the Corral Quemado bridge along the main access road to Peru’s northern jungle area as part of protests initiated on April 9 that last weekend led the government to declare a state of emergency in the zone.
Of the 10 people who were injured, Aidesep said, three are badly hurt, two of them severely affected by tear gas and a third who was hit in the stomach by a bullet.
The Amazon tribes are protesting against several new laws that they say harm their rights to property and control over their own natural resources.
In addition, they are demanding that they be consulted on matters concerning their territories and that a constitutional reform be implemented to reestablish their inalienable rights to their lands.
As part of the protests, the Indians shut down three pumping stations belonging to the state-run petroleum outfit Petroperu, took over an airfield and blocked a highway and several rivers along which petroleum vessels travel.
Although on April 20, Cabinet chief Yehude Simon announced the creation of a dialogue table with the Indian groups to reach an accord, Aidesp leader Alberto Pizango said that so far that had not been accomplished.
“And this is a sign that the farthest thing from the government’s mind is dialogue. And we peoples are not the only ones demanding to talk. The regional presidents, the mayors of Peru, different sectors are also requesting it,” Pizango told RPP radio.
Hours later, Simon invited Pizango to meet on Tuesday. EFE
Southern Cone [contents]
Petrobras Open to China Stake in Oil Fields
Patricia Kowsman. Wall Street Journal. May 13, 2009
SINGAPORE — Petroleo Brasileiro SA is prepared to have Chinese state-owned oil companies invest in its oil exploration and production projects in Brazil, a person familiar with the situation said.
The state-run Brazilian oil company is open to such a move as part of a package deal involving $10 billion in Chinese financing for Petrobras announced in February.
Separately, Petrobras is in talks with four Chinese companies on how much crude oil the company would supply as part of a credit-for-oil deal. The person said this deal is expected to be announced by next week, when Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva visits China.
In February, Brazil and China agreed on a framework for the loan and oil supplies. The details are now being worked out.
If a final agreement is hammered out, it would be just one of a string of similar deals Beijing has struck with energy producers in recent months.
As part of the Brazil-China talks in February, Petrobras agreed to sell China Petrochemical Corp., known as Sinopec, 60,000 to 100,000 barrels a day of heavy crude oil — equivalent to around 5% of Petrobras’ daily output.
The discussions have now been expanded to include possible sales of up to 200,000 barrels a day, with other Chinese companies brought into the equation.
Financial terms of the loan and oil sales are still being worked out, but both have a 10-year term, the person said.
The four Chinese companies in talks to buy between 100,000 and 200,000 barrels a day of heavy crude are PetroChina Co.’s unit Chinaoil, Sinopec’s unit Unipec, Sinochem Corp. and Zhuhai Zhenrong. The companies weren’t available to comment.
Petrobras needs the money for the exploitation of big oil and gas discoveries off Brazil’s coast, which could turn Brazil into a major oil exporter.
The company has said it will spend $28 billion through 2013 to explore and drill in the deep-water fields.
Following the recent oil and gas discoveries off Brazil’s coast, the government suspended auctions of exploration rights in those areas, essentially blocking investment by foreign companies. Petrobras was then left to find ways to finance the exploration costs.
Brazil’s President Lula, who will have Petrobras Chief Executive Jose Sergio Gabrielli with him during a three-day visit starting Monday, is expected to sign a range of agreements with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao.
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Brazil flood victims return home
BBC. May 13, 2009
Tens of thousands of people in north-eastern Brazil have begun returning home, after devastating floods there.
Civil defence helicopters, boats and lorries have been ferrying food and other supplies to the affected area.
Officials say the death toll declined from 42 to 39, as some deaths were not flood-related. Some 274,000 people have fled their homes.
Floodwaters are subsiding in some areas but some rivers are reported to be still rising rapidly in Amazonas state.
The fear now is that diseases could start to spread, says the BBC’s Gary Duffy in the town of Bacabal, Maranhao state.
The flooding has washed bodies out of the local cemetery and many animals have been killed, our correspondent says.
Despite this, some local people have been drinking the water are refusing to leave their homes, partly because of the fear of looting.
Concern is also growing over the possibility that the flooding could spread further inland to cities like Manaus, as the waters of Rio Negro, which feeds the Amazon, have been rising rapidly in recent days.
The unusually heavy rains have hit many regions used to downpours but also the arid north-east of Brazil.
‘Climate change’
Among the worst-hit areas is Maranhao, where 65,000 people have had to leave their homes.
The town of Trizidela do Vale is said to be almost completely flooded.
Across the north and north-east, some one million people are said to have been affected by the floods.
The Rio Negro is just 74cm (29in) below a record high set in 1953, the state-run Agencia Brasil news agency reported.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said the floods and drought in two southern states signalled climate change.
“Brazil is feeling climate changes that are happening in the world, when there is severe drought in areas that don’t have drought, when it rains too much in places where it doesn’t rain,” President Lula said in his weekly radio address earlier this week.
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Brazil Official: Govt To Hold Use Of Sovereign Fund Until 2010
Gerald Jeffris. Dow Jones Newswires. May 13, 2009
BRASILIA (Dow Jones)–Brazil’s government will refrain from using resources from its recently created sovereign wealth fund in 2009, Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo said Tuesday.
Speaking at a hearing of the lower house budget committee, Bernardo said the government projected the fund’s resources would grow to 18 billion Brazilian reals ($8.74 billion) in 2010 from BRL15 billion currently.
“We aren’t going to use the fund’s resources in 2009,” he said. “We think growth and the fiscal situation will be better in 2010 and if necessary we can use them then to meet our obligations.”
Brazil’s government recently reduced the target for its year-end public-sector primary budget surplus to 2.5% of gross domestic product from 3.8% previously. The primary surplus is used to pay down the country’s public-sector debt, which as of March stood at BRL1.1 trillion, or the equivalent of 37.6% of gross domestic product.
The government created its sovereign wealth fund in December 2008. According to government officials, the fund is alternatively reserved for use in reinforcing fiscal stability and financing activities of strategic Brazilian companies operating internationally.
Government economic advisers have pledged to maintain so-called countercyclical fiscal policy, saving more in times of strong growth and boosting government outlays as a stimulus during economic slowdowns. Over recent months, the government has cut several taxes, including the IOF financial transactions tax, the IPI industrial products tax and the IRPJ personal income tax, as a way of encouraging consumption.
Despite a slower economy in recent months, Bernardo said Tuesday that the government had no plans to increase taxes in the near term to compensate for falling tax revenue.
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Bernardo Says Brazil May Revise 2% GDP Growth Target (Update1)
Iuri Dantas. Bloomberg. May 12, 2009
May 12 (Bloomberg) — Brazilian Budget Minister Paulo Bernardo said the government may revise its target for economic growth of 2 percent this year.
Bernardo, speaking in Brasilia, said “uncertainty” makes it difficult to predict growth and that a decision about the target will be made in coming months.
“There’s still a lot of volatility and uncertainty for a precise forecast,” Bernardo told lawmakers today. “I wouldn’t doubt the possibility of a jump from 2 percent to 4 percent.”
Economists covering Brazil expect Latin America’s biggest economy to contract 0.44 percent in 2009, down from a previous forecast of a 0.30 percent drop, according to a weekly survey of analysts by Brazil’s central bank published yesterday. Fitch Ratings said today that Brazil’s gross domestic product will probably shrink more than 1 percent this year.
Bernardo said tax collection may drop by 50 billion reais ($24 billion) this year because of the crisis.
To contact the reporter on this story: Iuri Dantas in Brasilia at idantas@bloomberg.net
México, Central America and the Caribbean [contents]
Mexico denies swine flu cover-up
BBC. May 13, 2009
Mexico’s health minister has denied allegations by Fidel Castro that the country intentionally failed to reveal the existence of swine flu last month.
The former Cuban leader accused Mexico of covering up the outbreak in order to avoid missing out on a visit by US President Barack Obama.
The minister, Jose Angel Cordova, said Mexico had been extremely forthcoming and proactive over the outbreak.
It has been doing all it can to combat the H1N1 virus ever since, he added.
Mr Castro’s comments came after Cuba reported its first confirmed case of swine flu on Monday. Correspondents say his remarks may contribute to a further worsening of relations between the two countries.
Cuba cancelled all flights to Mexico when news of the outbreak first emerged.
Mexico has confirmed the deaths of 58 people from swine flu and the spread of the virus caused a national crisis, with restrictions on public gatherings only relaxed last week.
‘Not the CIA’
Mexican President Felipe Calderon said last week he might cancel a planned trip to Cuba “as one of the unforeseen consequences of decisions that have no technical basis” – a clear reference to Cuba’s ban on flights.
Mr Castro responded late on Monday in an internet column in which he referred to President Obama’s visit to Mexico in mid-April, which came days before a spreading flu outbreak in the country was officially diagnosed as swine flu.
“The Mexican authorities did not inform the world of [the outbreak], awaiting the visit of Obama,” the former Cuban leader wrote.
“Now they threaten us with suspending Calderon’s trip.”
A Mexican was diagnosed with swine flu in Mexico on Monday. He had become ill after returning from a trip home in late April.
“The only thing that can be confirmed now is that [the flu] wasn’t brought here by the CIA,” Mr Castro added in his column.
“It came from Mexico.”
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Mexican Rebels Invite Press to Mountain Hideout
EFE. May 12, 2009
THE MOUNTAINS OF GUERRERO, MEXICO – Reporters spent hours last weekend traveling by car and motorcycle to a remote spot in the southern state of Guerrero for a meeting with some 30 members of the small Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People, or ERPI.
The camouflage-clad and masked rebels brandished AK-47 assault rifles during the encounter high in the mountains.
“Comandante Ramiro,” whose real name is Omar Guerrero Solis, told the journalists that the ERPI has for several years fought drug traffickers, illegal loggers and government-backed paramilitaries in Guerrero, a poor state with a large Indian population.
He also said ERPI units have clashed with federal and state security forces in encounters that authorities falsely characterize as battles between police and criminals or among rival groups of outlaws.
Solis, who escaped from prison in 2001, said his ERPI column had a major engagement two years ago with a paramilitary group operating under the protection of state police director Erit Montufar.
“It was 14 hours of combat, in the village of Las Mesas del Guayabo,” he said, accusing the Mexican army – currently deployed in a dozen states to combat the drug trade – of training militias in Guerrero.
He said the ERPI has conducted a “cleansing of military and paramilitary informers” over the past seven years, but did not specify how many people had died in those operations.
Solis blamed fugitive drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman for the wave of gangland-style violence that has claimed more than 10,000 lives in Mexico since 2006.
Guzman, whose nickname means “Shorty,” is protected by federal and state officials, the ERPI commander said, voicing a suspicion that is widespread in Mexico.
“The problem is that the drug cartels are doing the dirty work of the Mexican government,” Solis said.
The ERPI originated in 1998 as an offshoot of the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, which operates in Guerrero and several neighboring states.
Two years ago, the EPR bombed several fuel pipelines operated by state oil company Pemex to press authorities to hand over two guerrilla leaders who disappeared after they were taken into custody.
A 2006 draft report on the “dirty war” Mexican governments waged against leftists from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s included a section on a “genocide plan” implemented in Guerrero, where security forces resorted to scorched-earth tactics that included summary execution, torture and rape. EFE
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Guatemala rejects allegations of role in lawyer’s death
Arthur Brice and Saeed Ahmed. CNN. May 12, 2009
(CNN) — Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom has dismissed an allegation that he was behind the death of a lawyer who left a video blaming the president if anything happened to him.
A video with Rodrigo Rosenberg appears on YouTube in which he accuses Guatemala’s leader in his death.
The lawyer, Rodrigo Rosenberg, was shot and killed Sunday while riding a bicycle in Guatemala City.
On Monday, a video surfaced in which Rosenberg — seated behind a desk and calmly speaking into a microphone — linked Colom and an aide to his death.
“If you are watching this message,” Rosenberg said on the video, “it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom, with help from Gustavo Alejos,” the president’s private secretary. Rosenberg mentions a third person who he believes would have been involved in his death and also mentions those three people as well as the president’s wife in connection with two killings last month.
In a broadcast to the nation Monday night, Colom denied any connection.
“We categorically reject the accusations that pretend to tie the president, first lady and private secretary as those responsible for this assassination,” Colom said.
A dated and signed transcript of the video’s content indicates Rosenberg made the recording last week. It surfaced Monday after his funeral, and was posted on YouTube and distributed to other media outlets by the newspaper El Periodico de Guatemala.
Rosenberg’s video said he was targeted for talking about the death of prominent businessman Khalil Musa and his daughter in April.
They were killed, Rosenberg said, because they had refused to participate in acts of corruption as the president wanted.
Rosenberg said he had been speaking out about his belief that Colom and others were behind the slaying.
Radio journalist Mario David Garcia told CNN en Español on Tuesday that Rosenberg was supposed to detail his allegations Monday afternoon on Garcia’s program, “Hablando Claro” (Speaking Clearly). Garcia, also an attorney, said Rosenberg came by his office last week to talk about the allegations against the president. Garcia said he asked for proof.
In the video, Rosenberg wears a blue-gray suit, white shirt and solid sky-blue tie. A blue cloth backdrop drapes the wall behind him and a large red broadcast-type microphone sits on the table in front of him.
He speaks in a calm, deliberate voice and mentions that he is the 47-year-old father of “four divine children, with the best brother that you could ask of life, with incredible friends and very much wanting to live in his country.” But he adds that he could not have lived with himself if he had not come forth with the accusations.
Mario Gonzalez, manager of the business Musa owned, told CNN en Español that Rosenberg relayed to him Friday afternoon his plan to release the information to the media. Rosenberg knew he was targeted, Gonzalez said.
“He felt threatened,” Gonzalez said. “[But] he was not afraid. He had been threatened but he knew that sooner or later he would be killed. ‘They are going to kill me,’ he said.”
The lawyer’s niece, Mariela Rosenberg, said her uncle learned to accept his fate.
“He had many threats,” she told CNN en Español, “and when he saw it was inevitable, he taped a video.”
In addition to Colom’s broadcast address, the government posted a seven-point statement on its Web site rejecting the assertions and saying the claims were meant to create “political chaos.”
In the posting, Colom’s administration blamed Rosenberg’s death on organized crime and welcomed international assistance in the investigation.
“The government of Guatemala categorically condemns the hostile, malicious way some sections of the population are using these events in order to create political instability in the country,” it said.
“The murder of lawyer Rosenberg as well as the recording and written declaration distributed have to be analyzed very carefully,” the government said, “because the murder as well as the accusations are very serious offenses that are severely punishable by the law and are attempts against the state of law and democracy.”
Some analysts say they have no knowledge of Colom or others in his inner circle being involved in the killings, but point to Guatemala’s history of corruption and large-scale involvement in the drug trade.
“Guatemala has been particularly known for the complicity of the government with the dark forces of the nation,” said Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington policy institute.
In his video, Rosenberg bemoans the “narcos, assassins and thieves” who have taken over the country.
“Those thieves are sinking all of Guatemala,” he said. “They kill people like dogs.”
About 200,000 people have been killed in Guatemala since 1970, mostly as a result of organized crime and drug-trade violence, Birns said.
The violence has gotten worse, he said, since Mexican President Felipe Calderon started waging war on that nation’s drug cartels a couple of years ago. Mexico shares a 541-mile (871-kilometer) border with Guatemala and many Mexican narcotraffickers moved their operations to the neighboring country.
Guatemala is also known for money-laundering.
“There isn’t a single serious banker in this country,” Rosenberg said in the video. “There isn’t a single correct banker in this country.”
Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, said Guatemala has a reputation for corruption and the drug trade.
“It is a country where one of two presidents ends up being seriously charged with corruption,” he said.
The government also offers scant public services.
“Guatemala has the lowest tax collection, the lowest government expenditures of any country in Latin America,” Hakim said.
Colom was elected in November 2007 on a promise to lessen Guatemala’s horrendous poverty. It hasn’t worked out that way.
“He proved to be a disappointment,” Birns said.
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After Postville raid, Guatemalan town is hurting
Oscar Avila. Chicago Tribune. May 12, 2009
SAN JOSE CALDERAS, Guatemala — Here was Angela Noemi Pastor’s blueprint for prosperity: She borrowed $12,000 to cross the U.S. border illegally with three of her children, a crossing that posed many risks. Her payoff was a job making less than $7 an hour in rural Iowa.
On paper, it sounds like a questionable business plan. Except it was a formula that meant prosperity to many in this village, the main source of labor for the Agriprocessors Inc. meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa.
The pipeline — workers going north, money flowing south — ended when U.S. Immigration agents raided the plant a year ago and deported hundreds of illegal workers, including Pastor.
“Thank God we were able to work a little bit,” Pastor said. “But with a little bit more time, we could have done even more.”
As with Pastor, the raid has brought the bitterness of dashed dreams to this cloistered community of 3,800, which lies up a winding gravel road dotted with peach orchards.
Men — including several who were deported — loiter outside straw shacks as they wait for odd jobs as farmhands. A handful of general stores, which once buzzed with daily commerce, are quiet. Several of the newer, concrete homes display “For Sale” signs for neighboring plots of land.
Here and elsewhere across Latin America, workers are out of jobs because of tougher U.S. Immigration enforcement and a downturn in the American economy, according to experts. That means a dwindling of remittances sent back home, a development that holds deep implications for a region dependent on money from illegal workers.
According to 2008 data, remittances to Latin America declined in real terms for the first time since accurate data has been kept. The Inter-American Development Bank forecasts even greater declines for 2009.
The trend likely will place even greater pressure on Guatemala and other countries battling epidemics of crime. With employment opportunities bleak, out-of-work young men are prime candidates to fall into illicit activities in a country that is a key crossroads for illegal drugs into the U.S., according to local residents and experts.
While supporters of tougher Immigration enforcement warn of the harm that illegal Immigration may cause in the U.S., American officials and international development experts worry that America’s security also could suffer if pockets of poverty and instability grow in Latin America.
The drop in remittances has been especially harsh in Guatemala, which relies on the cash for an estimated 12 percent of its gross domestic product. Guatemala took in about $4.3 billion in remittances last year.
The seeds of hardship already are beginning to sprout in San Jose.
The town is a bumpy 45-minute ride from the cobblestone streets of tourist hot spot Antigua, but the espresso bars and Internet cafes there seem a world away.
Even in their isolation, San Jose residents used to eke out livings by growing vegetables that were exported throughout Central America, lifelong resident Mario Junech said. But soon, mostly because of overfarming, the fields lost their fertility and the markets closed. About a decade ago, the first residents found their way to Postville, followed by a typical chain of others.
Junech worked at the Postville plant, where he came to love the small-town friendliness that reminded him of home as well as new treats, such as Chinese buffets and Mexican taquerias.
Junech came back to San Jose about four years ago after working long enough to pay off his “coyote,” who smuggled him north. Once home, he built a small house and an attached general store.
Junech could make a living in San Jose by selling milk, detergent and other staples to townspeople flush with cash from the north. Since the Iowa raid, his business is down about 50 percent.
His teenage son was among those deported from Postville, having tried to follow in father’s footsteps. The son was away for a few days working in the countryside, where he makes $7 a day, about the same as an hour’s wage in Postville.
The country’s unrest is already hitting San Jose as residents complain of a crime wave that makes it unsafe to go out at night. Even worse, kidnappers are targeting returning immigrants, assuming they have more money than the typical resident, villagers say.
“How are you going to compare life in the United States to what a family finds here?” Junech said. “If God allows it, maybe one day we will return.”
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S&P Cuts El Salvador’s Ratings Deeper Into Junk Amid Recession
Lauren Pollock. Dow Jones Newswires. May 13, 2009
Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services lowered its credit ratings on El Salvador deeper into junk territory, reflecting the spillover of the global economic crisis on the country’s economic and fiscal performance.
Before the credit crisis intensified last year, El Salvador was once thought to be a candidate to see its ratings boosted to investment-grade territory following the upgrades of several other Latin American countries’ ratings, which highlighted the steps they had taken to boost their fiscal discipline. But the global recession has all but eliminated any ratings upgrades as countries merely look to keep their economies afloat.
The ratings firm, which lowered its long-term sovereign credit ratings on the country by one notch to BB, said its economic and fiscal ratios had lagged those of its similarly rated peers at the old rating. BB is two levels below investment-grade status.
S&P said it expects El Salvador’s real gross domestic product to fall 1.5% this year, though economic activity will recover gradually. Real GDP is projected to be nearly flat in 2010 and then slowly increase to 3% in 2011.
The credit rater added the weak performance this year reflects falling consumption, investments and exports tied to the global recession, further noting remittances fell by 8% in the first two months of the year while exports are shrinking at a double-digit pace.
Credit analyst Roberto Sifon-Arevalo said that although El Salvador’s commitment to fiscal discipline remains, keeping the general government deficit within the budget of less than 3% of GDP doesn’t seem realistic.
Still, S&P said its stable outlook on the ratings reflects the maneuvering room that El Salvador has to withstand external pressures in the coming year, pointing to its financial support from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, among other groups, that should alleviate potential liquidity concerns.
S&P had revised its ratings outlook on El Salvador to negative in September, warning it expected the economy to weaken amid rising inflation.
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El Salvador grapples with rising bloodshed
Tracy Wilkinson. The Los Angeles Times. May 12, 2009
Reporting from San Salvador — Father Antonio Rodriguez keeps the image on his cellphone. A 12-year-old boy. Headless. His killers probably boys not a whole lot older than him.
When Josue went missing, his frantic grandmother sought the priest’s help. Rodriguez went looking for him and found the body. The crime chilled and disgusted him.
Somehow, he needed to document the loss of another young life in a dizzying spin of daily, casual death. And so the blurry photo, the thin, lifeless body in bluejeans and red shirt askew in a ravine, the head off to the side, remains on the priest’s cellphone.
“It’s the story of thousands,” Rodriguez said.
Though Mexico grabs headlines for its horrific drug war body count, El Salvador suffers a far worse homicide rate, one of the highest in the world.
Two decades ago, it was a civil war, with soldiers, death squads and guerrillas spilling the blood. Now it’s gangs (thousands of members originally from Los Angeles), drug-fueled crime, abusive police officers — all the makings of a bloodletting that has terrified the population and contributed in recent elections to the unseating of the party that ruled for 20 years.
In the first three months of 2009, by official government count, an average of nearly 12 people a day were slain. This in a tiny, densely populated nation of nearly 7 million. (The homicide rate is roughly five times that of Mexico and 10 times that of the United States.)
Life is cheap in El Salvador. Throw in drugs and impunity, and a flawed judicial system whereby few if any killings are ever solved, and the death toll will continue to climb. With the lawless atmosphere, ordinary business disputes and personal vendettas are readily solved by physical attack.
Gun shops, which barely existed a decade ago, are common neighborhood features. You can hire someone to kill a rival for $50; for $100 if you want to see the body.
“It is an epidemic,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez’s parish is in the Mejicanos neighborhood of San Salvador, a jumbled working-class area where old women walk with live chickens tucked under their arms and pupusas stacked on their heads, and where guards with shotguns stand at pharmacies and bakeries.
The priest runs a violence-prevention program at his church. He’s helped about 1,800 youths, most of them active or former gang members, giving them job-skills training, psychological counseling and perhaps most important, the chance to have their tattoos removed.
Rodriguez says the gangs used to protect their neighborhoods, their turf, and attacked only outsiders. But with more and more members in prison, the result of an “iron fist” government crackdown, they now strike anywhere — attacking, robbing, extorting, killing — because they need money to support their incarcerated associates and families.
Not long ago, Rodriguez presided over the funerals of five homicide victims in a single day: two youths who were found half-buried in shallow graves, and two brothers, 26 and 28, who were visiting their mother when men wearing hoods shot them; the elder brother had recently gotten out of jail.
And Josue Pintin, the 12-year-old.
Like so many Salvadoran youths, with parents who are working, have emigrated or have died, Josue was raised by his grandmother. They lost their home in an earthquake, and the boy never really went to school.
“He was a bit of a rebel, always wandering the streets, looking for trouble,” said his grandmother, Hetelvina Clara, 75. A widow, she lives with some of her 20 grandchildren in a collection of cinder-block rooms that tumble down the side of a rock-and-dirt road. On a dank wall hangs a picture of Josue, near one of Monsignor Oscar Romero, the onetime archbishop of San Salvador, beloved by the poor and slain by a death squad.
With Josue’s photo hangs a medal he won in a kids’ running competition, the only evidence of normality in his short life.
Josue was keen to join a gang, his family says. He was courting danger, Clara says. She warned him to steer clear of an older youth who would cruise by from time to time, just whistling, as if giving a secret signal.
“He didn’t have any prospects,” said Rodriguez. Finally, Josue wandered off and didn’t come back. Neighborhood scuttlebutt was that he was trying to use information about one gang to ingratiate himself with another, and it got him killed. Dangerous ploys for a 12-year-old.
But Rodriguez and others say it’s easy to scapegoat gangs for all of the violence, and, in fact, a large percentage of the country’s homicides are committed by others.
One of El Salvador’s leading human rights organizations, affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, has analyzed homicides every year since 2004 and concluded that hundreds were committed by rogue police officers, private security guards and people hired to carry out “social cleansing” — the elimination of undesirables through extrajudicial executions.
Whoever is doing the killing, youths are disproportionately affected. Half of homicides last year were committed by people 18 to 30, according to the National Civil Police, and 70% of victims were between the ages of 15 and 39.
Nearly two decades after El Salvador’s civil war, a new generation is experiencing what Rodriguez calls a naturalization of death. He says he’s seen the change in his own spiritual evolution since arriving here from Spain in 2000.
“Death has become natural to me. Ten years ago, this kind of thing was an inconceivable scandal to me. Now I live with death in a very natural way. If it happens to me, imagine those born into this culture.
“Death made natural.”
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RIGHTS-COSTA RICA: Persons for Sale
Daniel Zueras. Inter-Press Service. May 11, 2009
SAN JOSÉ, May 11 (IPS) – Global trafficking of persons continues apace and Costa Rica is not exempt from sexual exploitation and forced labour. Data compiled by the United Nations indicate that women and girls are most affected by human trafficking, making up 80 percent of victims worldwide.
A large proportion of these girls and women are trapped into sexual exploitation, although there are no real statistics. “There is a lot of mythology around this subject,” Ana Hidalgo, head of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) unit combating slavery and human trafficking in Central America and Mexico, told IPS.
She explained that sexual exploitation cannot always be prosecuted as illegal trafficking in women, because it is not necessarily combined with coercion or deprivation of freedom, a basic requirement for the U.N. definition of trafficking.
The phenomenon is still popularly referred to as the “white slave trade”, a phrase that originated in its impact on white people. “It seems as though problems only exist when they affect white people in the West,” Hidalgo said.
The Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, also known as one of the Palermo Protocols after the Italian city where it was signed in 2000, supplements the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organised Crime.
Among the shortcomings of the convention is that it addresses and penalises traffic between countries, “but in Costa Rica, the domestic trade is more of a problem” than cross-border trafficking, although “they are closely interlinked,” said Hidalgo.
Other forms of exploitation endured by victims of trafficking include recruitment as child soldiers or beggars, illegal adoptions, forced marriages, surrogate motherhood, organ extraction, forced labour, servitude, classical slavery or forced participation in crime, the expert said.
In the last few years, the justice system in this country has acted in cases involving the sex trade and forced labour. Costa Rica is a source, transit and destination country for human trafficking.
The main victims of forced prostitution, apart from Costa Ricans themselves, are women immigrants from the Dominican Republic, followed by those from Nicaragua. Costa Rica is documented as the country of origin for human trafficking bound for Canada, Mexico and Japan.
According to the Regional Study on Legislation regarding Trafficking of Persons in Central America and the Dominican Republic, 54 prosecutions for human trafficking were opened in Costa Rica between 2002 and 2006, which led to the conviction of 16 people.
Between 1998 and 2007, 151 victims of such crimes were identified, including a contingent of 56 persons from China and another group of 44 Peruvians and 13 Ecuadoreans.
The other cases investigated by the justice system during that period focused on the traffic of women for sexual exploitation and the sale of children for illegal adoption.
According to Hidalgo, there are many cases of young women travelling back and forth under the auspices of modelling schools and agencies, where they are offered attractive contracts. However, when they reach their destination they find the reality to be very different to what they were promised.
The most susceptible victims are “poor, unemployed women looking for opportunities,” she said.
Slave labour is another serious problem in Costa Rica, and Chinese mafias engaged in human trafficking, apparently to meet that demand, have appeared on the scene. In the latest case, in early April, a shipment of 300 under-age children from China to Costa Rica was foiled.
The Costa Rican embassy in Beijing had been warning the Chinese authorities since 2008 about forged “hukou” (family registration booklets), which are required to obtain visas to enter Costa Rica.
The mafias look for Chinese people living in Costa Rica whose surnames match those of future under-age Chinese forced workers. “They would ask for people with a certain surname, and a given number of people would come forward. They would set a maximum price and hold a reverse auction,” the head of the Costa Rican Migration Service, Mario Zamora, told IPS.
The person with that surname willing to take the least money would be paid, and would come forward to pick up the trafficked child, posing as the child’s father. The trafficked under-age worker would then work a given number of years free for the organised crime group running the scam.
The ringleaders of the trafficking network were arrested in China, while in Costa Rica a former Foreign Ministry official is facing prosecution.
Thanks to this operation and another one carried out in 2007, for which the trial verdict is still awaited, “we have been able to find out how these networks operate,” said Zamora. Based on available evidence, the Chinese immigrants were probably going to be used as forced labour, he said.
But Zamora said it was difficult to prove crimes related to trafficking in court, because both the accused and the victims remained silent. The victims’ families back in China were the “guarantee” that they would not talk.
According to Zamora, trafficking is organised by international organisations that carry out “criminal activities behind a legitimate front. They transform themselves into corporations.”
The attempted trafficking that was interrupted in 2007, when the alleged criminals tried to pay Zamora 5,000 dollars for each of 500 visas they applied for, is being tried only on the charge of bribery, “because bringing in human trafficking would complicate the case,” said the head of the Migration Service.
He complained that although penalties for such crimes have recently been stiffened, to bring them closer into line with the Palermo Protocol, this is still not enough to successfully combat the traffickers.
In his view, “the crime of human trafficking has been typified as a socio-political concept, but from the judicial point of view it is an extremely complex matter to prove unequivocally in court.”
According to Zamora, the Palermo Protocol is inadequate, because it is necessary to demonstrate international linkages, and the judges are faced with witnesses who refuse to talk.
Trafficking exists in the context of the economic dynamics of supply and demand, and the networks establish the connections between one and the other.
“As long as there are asymmetric labour dynamics, conditions will be ripe for (human) trafficking and slavery,” Hidalgo concluded. To put an end to these practices, the OIM regional official called for migration policies that recognise different economic realities, and regulate the entry of foreigners under conditions that are “legal, decent and safe.”
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Obama Just Keeping Campaign Promise, Cuba Says
EFE. May 12, 2009
HAVANA – The speaker of the Cuban parliament said that President Barack Obama’s decision to end restrictions on Cuban-Americans’ travel and remittances to the island was rooted in U.S. domestic politics.
“What he did has nothing to do with Cuba,” Ricardo Alarcon told reporters, “it was an electoral promise he made during the campaign.”
“He made it (the promise) in Miami, it helped him win Miami for sure, and Florida,” he said.
Obama “has been characterized up to now by his attempts to fulfill the promises he made and that was one of them, it was a promise to the voters of South Florida,” Alarcon said.
He added that Cuba is not expecting “any real gesture” from the U.S. government.
About the possible elimination of a ban on Cuba accessing a U.S. undersea fiber-optic cable that runs near the island, the parliament speaker said that Obama “did not mention that, as he didn’t speak of (raising) the (economic) embargo.”
He recalled that Obama spoke of the possibility of authorizing U.S. telecom companies “to access” the Cuban market, but “on what terms” still has to be specified and regulated, the Cuban official said.
Almost with one voice, Latin American leaders – including U.S. allies such as Mexico’s Felipe Calderon – are calling on Washington to end its 47-year-old economic embargo on Cuba.
But Obama appears unwilling to even consider scrapping the embargo unless Cuba releases the estimated 205 political detainees now sitting in the island’s prisons and makes other moves toward democratization.
President Raul Castro has publicly offered to free political prisoners in exchange for the five Cuban intelligence agents serving time in the United States for espionage, and Alarcon said Monday that Obama has “a magnificent opportunity” to put an end to the case against the five.
Gerardo Hernandez, Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero, Ramon Labañino and Fernando Gonzalez were arrested in Florida in September 1998. A federal court in Miami judged them guilty of undermining U.S. national security and sentenced them from 15 years in jail to life imprisonment.
Cuba has acknowledged that the five “heroes” are intelligence agents, but says they were sent to South Florida to spy on the Cuban exile community in the wake of terrorist bombings on the communist island that were allegedly masterminded by Miami-based anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles. EFE
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Travel – A Catalyst for Transforming the Relationship Between Cuba and America
Barry Harford. Huffington Post. May 13, 2009
The U.S. today has an historic opportunity to put aside half a century of division and build a new future with one of its closest neighbors by ending the ban on travel to Cuba.
President Barack Obama took a bold first step by calling for a ‘new beginning’ and by making it easier for Cuban Americans to visit family in Cuba. Soon afterwards Raul Castro, the new Cuban leader, announced he is ready to talk. This represents a remarkable shift in a relationship previously marked by mutual antagonism.
I applaud these developments, but am convinced that American foreign policy would benefit by advancing more boldly and giving all U.S. citizens the freedom to travel to Cuba.
Two new leaders reaching out to each other to bridge historic differences represents an unprecedented opportunity. We should seize it.
The interaction between people from countries with differing perspectives can be a powerful force for positive change and understanding. In 1971 the U.S. State Department lifted the ban on travel to China. Later that year the U.S. ping-pong team made the first visit to China by a U.S. sports team since 1949. A year later President Nixon took a few momentous steps off an airplane in Beijing and talked about “the week that changed the world.”
These early moves laid the groundwork for turning a closed, hostile relationship into the most important economic and diplomatic relationship in the world today. Does this mean China and the U.S. always see eye to eye? Of course not. However the increased levels of travel between China and America have fostered a level of understanding unimaginable 35 years ago.
Our experience with China leads me to believe that America should follow a similar path of engagement with Cuba.
Americans support such a policy. With Fidel Castro no longer officially in power, the Zogby/Inter-American Dialogue Survey last year showed that over two-thirds of Americans believe that all U.S. citizens should be allowed to travel to Cuba. U.S. citizens are already voting with their feet, visiting Cuba via a third country such as Canada, Mexico or a neighboring Caribbean island. This is despite the challenges in getting to Cuba that stem from the ban prohibiting U.S. travel companies such as Orbitz from facilitating their journey.
Beyond the politics, we all stand to gain significantly through renewed cultural exchange.
Havana was once a premier international destination; elegant hotels such as the Hotel Nacional hosted distinguished guests including Frank Sinatra and Winston Churchill. Havana’s splendid architecture is some of the most eclectic and diverse in the world, its music is world-renowned, and it has a vibrant artistic community. Americans should once again have the opportunity to take in Cuba’s sights, to explore its history, to be entranced by the rhythms of its salsa and son.
I was able to experience Cuba during a visit 1997 before I moved to the U.S., and was struck by the warmth and friendliness of the Cuban people. Visiting Cuba would provide Americans with a vibrant cultural and historical experience and provide a fascinating contrast to life in the United States. Cubans would benefit from having the opportunity to meet with American travelers and learn about the U.S.
President Obama has said “we must learn from history, but we can’t be trapped by it.” We at Orbitz agree. This is why we are launching a new campaign, at www.OpenCuba.org, which offers ordinary Americans an opportunity to make their voice heard and call on policy leaders to open travel to Cuba for all Americans.
Why can’t all of us visit this alluring neighbor and play a part in transforming the relationship between two countries?
Americans have the freedom to travel to every other country in the world, even those with whose leadership the U.S. has significant differences. That freedom provides an opportunity for U.S. citizens to experience the world and share the message of what America has to offer the world. Isn’t it time to bring that message to Cuba?
Barry Harford is President and CEO of Orbitz Worldwide
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US implored to stop deporting Haitians
Maria Sacchetti. Boston Globe. May 13, 2009
Gracieuse Marius, a nurse, had huddled inside until the floodwaters subsided in the city of Gonaives, then she raced into the streets to find someone to save. Instead, she was confronted with silence: Cars, trees, and dead animals floated in the water. She still cannot bring herself to talk about the children.
Overwhelmed, she left Haiti for the United States. Now she is adding her voice to a growing nationwide chorus urging the United States to stop deporting Haitian immigrants, at least until their nation can recover from four devastating hurricanes last year and years of political and economic turmoil.
Haiti is one of the least-developed countries in the hemisphere, and one of the poorest in the world, according to the US State Department. Six of Marius’s relatives are here illegally and facing deportation, among more than 32,000 illegal Haitian immigrants nationwide and 2,000 to 3,000 in Massachusetts.
“If they are sent back, some of them will die,” the 46-year-old mother of two said in French Creole through a translator, after English class at the Association of Haitian Women in Boston. “When someone goes back and they don’t have any family and don’t have any money, what are they going to do?”
From Boston to Miami, Haitians and several prominent advocates are intensifying pressure on the US government.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representatives Barney Frank and Stephen Lynch are urging the Department of Homeland Security to grant Haitians temporary protected status, and Lynch cosponsored a bill that would force Secretary Janet Napolitano to take the step if she does not act on her own. The status would allow Haitian immigrants, legal and illegal, to remain here and work for a fixed amount of time.
State Representative Marie St. Fleur, who was born in Haiti, visited that country this spring and then met with White House aides on the issue last month. In January, Haitian Ambassador Raymond Joseph took it even further, by stalling deportations to Haiti. He refused to provide deportees’ travel documents until the Obama administration reviews its policy on Haiti.
“Anyone who requests a paper from us is not getting it,” he said Friday.
Last month Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Haiti and said the US government was reviewing its policy on granting Haitian immigrants temporary protected status.
But Napolitano, who has the granting authority, has stayed silent. Deportations halted last year after the hurricanes, but have resumed, including a plane filled with 48 convicted criminals who were deported to Haiti last month, said her spokesman Sean Smith.
Frank said Friday that the US policy is discriminatory. The government now provides temporary protection to five countries – El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Sudan – but it has never offered it to Haiti.
“I think it’s outrageous that they don’t have it,” Frank said.
Others are more cautious, saying Haiti is one of many struggling countries. They worry that the temporary protection would become permanent. Salvadorans and Hondurans have had the status for years.
“Haiti is a country that’s in bad shape, but it’s perpetually in bad shape,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors reduced immigration. “There are hurricanes, but there will always be hurricanes.”
But Haitians say their nation should qualify for temporary protection. It is beset by widespread unemployment and crime, and is still recovering from last year’s hurricanes, which left 800 dead, thousands homeless, and led to riots over food. Haitian officials are also worried that deportations will slash the $1.87 billion that Haitians in the United States sent home last year, more than a quarter of that nation’s income, according to the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington.
And hurricane season starts June 1.
In Massachusetts, Haitian immigrants are one of the largest groups in the state, with more than 43,000 people clustered in Boston and other large cities. They include taxi drivers, parking garage attendants, and cooks, and also college professors, politicians, and high school valedictorians. Each year, immigrants here send more than $12 million home to Haiti.
“It makes sense for us to keep those people here,” said Carline Desire, executive director of the Association of Haitian Women in Boston. “It’s never given to Haitians when we meet all the conditions.”
A 51-year-old Hyde Park housewife named Marie, who spoke on the condition that her last name not be used, is a legal immigrant whose visa expires in July. She intends to overstay it because she refuses to bring her 13-year-old American-born son to Haiti.
“I have to stay to take care of him,” she said. “There is big trouble in Haiti.”
Charles Pean, a 55-year-old Boston radio show host and Haiti native who has been pressing for temporary protected status on the air, said Haitians are worried about deportations.
“I don’t want to sound apocalyptic, but I know Haiti will be 10 times, 100 times worse than the way it is now because we do not have any structure to absorb those people,” he said. “All the institutions are weak. They are not prepared for a catastrophe.”
Region: Trade, Security, Economy and Integration [contents]
Private equity boost for Latin America
Martin Arnold. Financial Times. May 12, 2009
Latin America’s nascent private equity industry is receiving a helping hand to survive the financial crisis as pension funds in Brazil, Peru and Colombia start investing in local buy-out, venture capital and infrastructure groups.
Private equity in Latin America makes up only a tiny fraction of the $2,500bn global industry.
But it has been growing rapidly and many investors expect it to come out of the financial crisis in better shape than bigger counterparts in the US and Europe. “You don’t have a mortgage crisis in these countries, consumer debt is much lower and banks are in a more stable condition,” said Ernest Bachrach, co-head of Advent International ‘s Latin American business.
“Latin America will recover faster and not hit as low a bottom as Europe or the US.”
Almost $6.4bn was raised from local and international investors by private equity groups operating in the region last year, according to the Latin American Venture Capital Association which today publishes its first annual report.
While the pace of fundraising slowed in the second half of the year, as the crisis started to bite, the emergence of local pension funds as private equity investors helped offset some of the decline.
Peru is the latest country to pass laws authorising national pension funds to invest in the higher risk, higher return strategies of private equity, which uses a mix of private investors’ money and bank debt to invest in companies.
In one of the biggest examples, Darby Overseas, the private equity arm of Franklin Templeton Investments, and Stratus Group, a São Paulo-based investment group, raised $240m from Brazilian pension funds for a new infrastructure vehicle.
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Another Clinton hand joins Obama’s team as head of hemispheric affairs
Mercopress. May 13, 2009
US President Barack Obama named Tuesday Arturo Valenzuela, a US-Chilean citizen and former member of President Bill Clinton’s administration as the new head of hemispheric affairs in the State Department reported the White House press office.
Valenzuela will replace Thomas Shannon once his nomination has been confirmed by the US Senate. Shannon has been on the job since 2005, when he was named by former president George Bush.
The next Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Department of State is a prestigious academic currently Professor of Government and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies in the Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
He was previously Professor of Political Science and Director of the Council on Latin American Studies at Duke University. He holds a Doctorate and a Master’s degree in Political Science from Columbia University and a BA summa cum laude Political Science and Religion from Drew University.
Valenzuela was born in Chile and moved to the United States at the age of 16 in order to attend college. His studies focused on politics in Latinamerica. He was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs in the US Department of State by President Bill Clinton during his first term.
His primary responsibility under Clinton was United States foreign policy towards Mexico, a country of which he is considered an expert.
In President Clinton’s second term in office, Valenzuela was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Inter-American Affairs at the national Security Council at the White House.
Valenzuela has been a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, the University of Sussex, the University of Florence (Italy), and the Catholic University of Chile. He has served on the board of directors of Drew University, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the National Council of La Raza and the advisory boards of the America’s Watch and the Institut des Amériques in Paris.
Valenzuela is a man of “great contacts and much knowledge of the region”, said Michael Shifter, Vice-president for Inter American Dialogue.
Shifter also mentioned that besides Mexico, “one of Obama’s priorities”, Valenzuela has long argued in favor of “dialogue and an opening towards Cuba”.
In a recent interview with Chile’s El Mercurio Valenzuela said that “what the US has to do is listen more. But if it does so, then the region must also have proposals. The US has other foreign relations priorities in the world, so what is most important is to an interlocutor”.
In respect of former president George Bush’s policy, Valenzuela said it had been a time of “big distancing with Latinamerica” and the challenge for the incoming administration “will be to try and rebuild that relation”.
President Obama also nominated another Latinamerican, María Otero, of Bolivian origin, for the post of Under Secretary of Global Affairs, Department of State, which addresses issues as democracy, human rights and migration among other issues.
