News of interest from Latin America by David Morris
Vol. 1, No. 8. Monday, October 22, 2007
Bolivia: illusive victory
Opponents of the Bolivian government have claimed a heroic victory in the name of national sovereignty and regional autonomy after incidents the government describes as legal action against corrupt airport authorities.Activists opposed to the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) declared marches they had organized forced the departure of several hundred soldiers and police officers from the Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz on October 19, where they had landed early the previous morning to take control of the teminal building and airport operations. The government said the troops and policemen left because they had accomplished their mission of arresting and replacing corrupt officials and restoring airport operations.
Two soldiers were injured, one by gunshot, during the arrests.
According to government officials, the local branch of the national airport authority had been collecting cash payments from international airlines for use of the facilities when by law the airlines should have made payments once a month to the national airport authority in La Paz, the capital. They claimed there was no accounting for the money local officials had collected and that in addition the Santa Cruz airport owed the national government 187 million bolivianos in taxes, about US$25 million.
The eastern city of Santa Cruz, the wealthiest in the country, is a center of rightist opposition, which, with support from the United States, has become more militant over the past few months. Viru Viru is the busiest international airport in the country.
“We’re not going to allow elements associated with corruption to destroy the Santa Cruz airport’s international ranking,” Minister of the Presidency Juan Ramón Quintana said. “There is a risk that we could be disqualified for poor management.”
But the opposition said sending the military to Santa Cruz violated regional autonomy, a subject at the center of its criticism of the MAS project of transforming Bolivian society. The wealthier, more European, eastern parts of the country seek as much independence as they can attain from the government and from the poorer, more indigenous western parts, where support for President Evo Morales and MAS is strongest.
Opposition leader Branko Marinkovic said in a speech that the day at the airport was only the beginning of the battle against the government. Government Minister Alfredo Rada in turn said the administration was open to dialogue with the opposition concerning the airport but that covering up the corruption was not acceptable and that the government was not going to give in to violence. “If anyone wants a confrontation,” he said, “the government is not going to play that game, they will have to do it alone.”
Rubén Costas, governor of the department of Santa Cruz, of which the city of Santa Cruz is the capital, said the airport incidents were “a day of dignity.” He said he is the only departmental commander of Santa Cruz and that he, unlike others, would never obey orders coming from Venezuela or Cuba. He condemned what he characterized as verbal threats from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, whom he called “a rat, a petty dictator and a great macaco.” Chávez had said in his weekly radio broadcast on Sunday, October 14, that Venezuelans would not “stand by with our arms crossed” if the Bolivian oligarchy drives Morales from office or assassinates him. He said another Vietnam is possible in Bolivia.
“We have a vigorous, strengthened democracy,” Rada commented, “which is growing deeper and is capable of solving our problems within a national framework, with respect for our sovereignty and our democratic methods.”
(Sources: Agencia Boliviana de Información, Bolivia; El Deber, Bolivia; La Razón, Bolivia; El Diario, Bolivia; La Jornada, Mexico; El Deber, Bolivia; El Diario, Bolivia; La Patria, Bolivia)
Haiti: unwelcome guests
The United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on October 15 to extend the mandate of MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, by one more year. The decision came a week after Project Censored, a media research group at Sonoma State University, included an incursion by UN soldiers and police into the large poor Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Cité Soleil on December 22, 2006, among the 25 most censored news stories of the past year.The December 22 incident, in which more than 30 residents were killed and many were injured, was generally interpreted as retaliation for a demonstration in Cité Soleil a few days earlier in which the 10,000 participants demanded an end to the UN military occupation and the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from South Africa, where he has lived in exile since he was forced out of office in a US-engineered coup d’état in 2004. MINUSTAH replaced US soldiers in Haiti shortly after the coup.
The Security Council vote followed a September 28 address to the General Assembly by President René Préval in which he urged renewal of the mandate. The resolution accompanying the mandate reflected recommendations made by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that MINUSTAH be reconfigured to reflect what he called the changing reality in Haiti. The number of military personnel in MINUSTAH will be reduced slightly to 7,060 and the number of police will be increased to 2,091.
Préval in the meantime has appointed a commission to consider the creation of a new Haitian security force that would eventually replace MINUSTAH. The new force presumably will be separate from the Haitian National Police (HNP), the creation of which was mandated by the 1987 constitution. Until 1987 Haiti had had no police force apart from the military and the tontons macoutes, the brutally repressive personal army created by dictator François Duvalier.
The HNP had remained small and underfunded before the 2004 coup, in part because material support promised by the United States was never provided, but grew during the rule of interim president Gérard Latortue when former members of the military, which Aristide had dissolved in 1995 to lessen the danger of another coup, joined the police. The political nature of the HNP thus came to reflect the repressive, reactionary views of the former military. The new UN resolution directs MINUSTAH to aid in reforming and restructuring the HNP by monitoring and training its members and by helping recruit new officers.
Préval said during his visit to the UN that he is against restoring the military. “All I’ve seen professional armies do,” he commented, “is either repress their own people or conquer other people’s territory.” He said one purpose of the new security force might be to protect the environment but it is unclear how it will differ otherwise from the HNP or MINUSTAH.
Despite opposition from many of its own citizens, the Brazilian government said it is prepared to continue leading the military portion of MINUSTAH for another year. Brazil supplies about 1,200 soldiers and police officers to the operation.
Among Haitians, there is continuing strong popular opposition to MINUSTAH, which is seen as a repetition of the US occupation of the country from 1915 to 1934, one lasting result of which was the formation by the US marines of the Gendarmerie d’Haïti, a military force that evolved over the years into the army Aristide disbanded in 1995. At a demonstration on July 28 to mark the 92nd anniversary of the US invasion, well known human rights activist Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine declared, “Yes, in 1915 we were subjected to an imperialist, criminal and ruthless occupation. In the year 2004 we again were subjected to another imperialist, criminal and ruthless occupation, even if the dark forces tried to hide their faces behind the army of a few countries that are poor like us.”
Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine disappeared two weeks after the July 28 demonstration and has not been seen since. The HNP has confirmed that he was kidnapped.
(Sources: Haïti Progrès, Haiti; Agence Haïtienne de Presse, Haiti; AlterPresse, Haiti; Radioagência Noticias do Planalto, Brazil; Haiti Press Network, Haiti; Indybay, US; Znet, US; Dissident Voice, US.)
Brazil: exporting wealth
(Translation of an October 16 article from Radioagência Noticias do Planalto)Profits sent out of the country by multinationals triple during Lula’s presidency by Vinicius Mansur
According to figures from the Central Bank, during President Lula’s first term, from 2003 to 2006, for every ten reais invested in Brazil by foreign businesses, six were taken out of the country by the parent companies. During former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s second term, from 1999 to 2002, the proportion was two reais taken out of the country for every ten invested.
In 2006, banks sent more resources out of the country than any other industry, more than 2.5 billion reais [about US$1.4 billion], which represents about ten percent of the total.
According to sociologist Léo Lince, these figures reflect the continuation of an economic policy begun by Fernando Collor de Melo (between 1990 and 1992), carrried forward with the privatizations of the Cardoso government, and continued by Lula. In the past, international capital invested resources in Brazil to initiate operations here, but now high-profit corporations have risen above the national level.
“As there was a very considerable process of surrendering the Brazilian economy during the privatizations, naturally there was an increase in the export of profits. Lula was elected with promises of changing the economic model, but he carried on policies begun way back by Fernando Collor de Melo. A natural consequence is denationalization of the Brazilian economy, the loss of autonomy, in a process that could almost be characterized as re-colonization.”
Lince stated that this economic policy, in which wealth does not belong to the country that produces it, results in a nation with no capacity for long-term projects for solving its social problems.
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