Yamascuma

Atlantic Forest

2010-04-13T23:59:00.002-05:00

James Wimberley, who lives in Brazil, thinks that replanting the Brazilian Atlantic Forest would help prevent the kind of deadly flooding recently experienced in Rio de Janeiro, as well as create a carbon sink. It goes without saying that a) saving lives and b) helping address global warming are the important moral concerns here. But, in a much less significant domain, this would be a wonderful tribute to Warren Dean, whose work (With Broad-ax and Firebrand) on the history of the Atlantic Forest was one of the first works of environmental history in Latin American studies. Dean died tragically in Chile, but has left historians with an enviable trove of works which we continue to consult.

8 years after April 11th

2010-04-13T23:44:00.003-05:00

Brian Nelson, who has literally written the book on the 2002 coup in Venezuela that briefly deposed Hugo Chávez, has a post on its eighth anniversary. (The book, The Silence and the Scorpion is told from multiple perspectives, deeply researched, and quite fair. I have used it in teaching with good results.) This bit seems worth quoting:

In many ways the government’s reaction to the violence is much more telling than the violence itself. The government had a choice: it could have jailed the gunmen and National Guard troops who were caught on film and in photographs shooting at the marchers. This would have provided some reconciliation for the victims and proven that the government applies the law equally to all citizens. It did not choose that route. Instead, it began building up lies on top of lies to protect itself.

I suspect that the government feels that it has to lie, simply because the stakes are so high. After all, former Venezuelan president Carlos Andréz Pérez was impeached simply for sending campaign funds to a candidate in Nicaragua. How would Chávez look if a proper investigation were held into the violence on April 11th? Another reason why keeping control of the National Assembly is so important. Rest assured that Chávez has thought of this. I’m sure he’s also thought of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, who is in jail for complicity in the killing of his opponents in Peru.

Obviously, many things are driving Hugo Chávez—his ardent belief in socialism, his distrust of the United States and the West, and his desire to become a legendary figure who can unite Latin America at least as well as his political muse, Simón Bolívar. But as someone who has studied Chávez’s record on human rights, I believe his fear of incarceration is also a factor. His repeated (and finally successful) attempts to change the constitution to allow for his indefinite re-election may be viewed through this lens. Yes, Hugo Chávez wanted to end term limits so that his revolution could continue, but I believe he also wanted to end term limits to protect himself from prosecution should he lose power.

April 11th was the 8th anniversary of the coup; April 14th will be the 79th of the Spanish Republic.

Dialog in Cuba

2010-04-11T09:16:00.004-05:00

I've been meaning to highlight this feisty exchange of letters between Castro critic-in-exile Carlos Alberto Montaner and Silvio Rodríguez for a couple of days now, but now Yoani Sánchez has done the same. Interestingly, we had almost exactly opposite reactions. She thought that it showed that dialog between the government and the opposition might soon be possible. I thought it showed that the situation of government supporters and the opposition (especially the opposition in exile) have become like that of Israelis and Palestinians: fixated on their own histories, interpreted as the accumulation of legitimate grievance. As with the Israeli and Palestinian issue, the problem is that it's true! Both sides really do have accumulated legitimate grievances. I don't know how you get past this. I suspect that the first step towards political reform in Cuba won't be through dialog between government and opposition, but from pressure by internal reformers (Silvio himself has recently come out in favor of this path, and is now doing penance by making sure no one thinks he's joined the opposition). To get a sense of what the limits and possibilities are for internal reform, read this interview with Rafael Hernández, director of an important Cuban magazine, Temas.

Selective enforcement

2010-04-11T09:03:00.003-05:00

Mark Kleiman, drugs and crime expert at UCLA, says the following:

I haven’t studied the Mexican drug wars carefully, and it’s always dangerous to opine about drug policy on the basis of newspaper accounts.

That said, if it’s true that the Sinaloa group headed by Joaquín Guzmán Loera has more or less won the war for control of Ciudad Juarez, and if it’s also true that President Calderón said that his government continues to fight all drug trafficking organizations – including the Sinaloa group’s rivals – on an equal-opportunity basis, then it seems to me that Calderón (and the U.S. government, to the extent we are advising and supporting him) is making a huge mistake. Not all drug dealing is created equal, and taking down the Sinaloa group’s competitors necessarily strengthens Guzmán’s grip on power. Right now, he has enough armed force and money at his command to challenge the Mexican state.

Fighting “drugs” or “drug trafficking” is as meaningless as fighting “terror.” Real enemies have proper names. Two of the Sinaloa group’s rivals – the Gulf group and Los Zetas, which is more a private army than a drug-trafficking organization – pose comparable threats. Perhaps there are one or two more names that belong on that list. Mexican and U.S. enforcement should focus on those groups, and on the groups on the U.S. side of the border who handle their drugs, to the exclusion of every other drug trafficker in Mexico. And if Sinaloa is winning the war just now, then it ought to be at the top of the priority list. Any organization that is just dealing drugs, and isn’t shooting at cops and journalists and citizens, needs a good leaving-alone.

I don't think that I disagree with anything here conceptually, although The Best Program in the History of Television argued that this approach would also have unexpected negative consequences:

On a more serious note, the issue is not that the Mexican government is taking on the Sinaloa cartel and its rivals, it's that (at least according to widespread rumors) the government is actively avoiding taking on the Sinaloa group. I really don't know enough to have an opinion on that.

I suppose it's also worth adding that just in the last several hours it's been announced that President Calderón is giving command of the "narco-war" to his Secretary of Public Security, and that 60,000 troops are expected to be back in their barracks by 2011, which would also seem favor locking in the status quo.

The drugs trade and Mexico's GDP

2010-04-10T10:55:00.005-05:00

Greg Weeks is attending the SECOLAS conference in Mexico City and reports (he had enough money to pay for the expensive dinner and keynote speech, I did not) on Lorenzo Meyer's talk:

The keynote speaker for the SECOLAS conference was the Mexican historian Lorenzo Meyer, who talked about US-Mexican relations. One of his points was that the Mexican economy has been stagnant since the import-substitution model was forcibly discarded in the 1980s, and now drug trafficking is filling the gap, which makes it even harder to combat. Both involve exports to the United States, but he argued that drug trafficking was even "better" than ISI because more of the inputs are Mexican, which means even more of the profit remains in the country.

I don't know. Maybe. On the one hand, there are definitely regions where the drugs trade is the most effective development policy available, and that must be taken into consideration as one tries to formulate a policy response. (This is why I think that dropping or changing the nature of agricultural subsidies in the United States would be a good-faith gesture to address part of the U.S.'s responsibility for the trade and its violent consequences.) On the other hand, a bit of googling suggests that the trade is about a $50 billion dollar a year enterprise in Mexico. Since Mexico's GDP is about $1.5 trillion, that makes drugs about 3% of GDP, maybe 4%. On the one hand, if that is the leading sector of the economy in a given year, that could be the difference between stagnation and reasonable growth. On the other hand, it makes nonsense the claims (on the Internet, ya know, which I would have thought would be more responsible!) that in the absence of the drugs trade the Mexican economy would shrink by 63%. That's absurd, and only someone who has never been to Mexico could say such a thing.

Human rights for me, but...

2010-04-10T10:36:00.002-05:00

From the National Security Archive today:

Washington, DC, April 10, 2010 - Only five days before a car-bomb planted by agents of the Pinochet regime rocked downtown Washington D.C. on September 21, 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger rescinded instructions sent to, but never implemented by, U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone to warn military leaders there against orchestrating "a series of international murders," declassified documents obtained and posted by the National Security Archive revealed today.

The Secretary "has instructed that no further action be taken on this matter," stated a September 16, 1976, cable sent from Lusaka (where Kissinger was traveling) to his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman. The instructions effectively ended efforts by senior State Department officials to deliver a diplomatic demarche, approved by Kissinger only three weeks earlier, to express "our deep concern" over "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians, and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad." Aimed at the heads of state of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, the demarche was never delivered.

That, and the recent allegations--that the U.S. media can't seem to source well enough to report on--that Bush et al. held people in Guantanamo that they knew were innocent, should serve as a reminder of the evil that sometimes occupies the corridors of power in the United States. Yes, evil. Kissinger likes to say that diplomats should not be held accountable for affairs of state, because they are tasked with defending the nation and sometimes that means doing things like killing people which are plainly against the law under normal circumstances. That's not an entirely specious argument in the abstract, but there can and should be limits to what one can do for politics, or, indeed, in the name of national defense. The Nixon presidency, the George W. Bush presidency (and probably, the Johnson and Reagan administrations, too) were well over the line.

But how do you hold them to account? Since the U.S. is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court, the answer has basically been Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón, who, over his years on the bench, has investigated everybody from Henry Kissinger to Osama bin Laden. To avoid arrest, Kissinger has to limit his travel outside of the United States, placing him in a kind of internal exile, which has always seemed to me like fair punishment. But after opening an investigation into Franco-era crimes, Garzón (no leftie he), has been attacked by a group of the Spanish far-right and is currently suspended. For the sake of human rights around the world, here's hoping that his case will be processed quickly, and he'll be able to return to the bench soon.

Generation Y

2010-03-31T22:17:00.002-05:00

Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez has been accused of getting Pentagon money for her blog. Although the best informed sources that I have tell me that that isn't the case (center-left Spanish paper El País may be helping), these sources could be wrong. If she is subsidized by the United States, I am increasingly of the mind that her blog is like London-based Encounter magazine was during the Cold War: yes, paid for covertly by the United States, but of sufficiently high quality that it is worth considering anyhow.

Cuban news

2010-03-27T19:36:00.002-05:00

What are we going to do when this guy is gone? Fidel Castro weighs in on the historical accomplishment of near-universal health care in the United States, which he views positively but notes Cuba achieved it years ago. Changing the subject, Castro suggests that there's something conspiratorial and fishy about the United States sending research probes to Mars. Put aside his weaknesses for now. Castro is right about health care, and not just about that. He calls Obama a "fanatical believer in the capitalist imperialist system," which is pretty fair (I'd say a "pragmatic believer in the capitalist imperialist system") and also notes that he's an especially good advocate for the "American dream" that justifies the system of American capitalism, in which extraordinary talent can be met with extraordinary success. In spite (because?) of this, the right hates him:

Por su condición de afroamericano, allí sufrió las afrentas de la discriminación, según narra en su libro Los sueños de mi padre; allí conoció la pobreza en que viven decenas de millones de norteamericanos; allí se educó, pero allí también disfrutó como profesional exitoso los privilegios de la clase media rica, y terminó idealizando el sistema social donde la crisis económica, las vidas de norteamericanos inútilmente sacrificadas y su indiscutible talento político le dieron la victoria electoral.

A pesar de eso, para la derecha más recalcitrante Obama es un extremista al que amenazan con seguir dando la batalla en el Senado para neutralizar los efectos de la reforma sanitaria y sabotearla abiertamente en varios Estados de la Unión, declarando inconstitucional la Ley aprobada.

That's really pretty good political analysis.

In other Cuba news, the voice of the Cuban Revolution, Silvio Rodrígruez, has just published a disc asking for "many things" to be re-evaluated. This is very much a critique that must be considered from "inside the revolutionary tradition"; Rodríguez is in no way breaking with the it. But, and this is what interests me most, there's now that much difference between what internal reformers and external critics think about the way forward for Cuba. Rodríguez is pretty clear that lack of pluralism is a problem in Cuba: in one of his new songs, he sings: "Demasiada sombra/demasiado sol/para encadenarnos/a una sola forma/y una sola voz". That's strong stuff, and it's being applauded enthusiastically at the Casa de las Américas. There are reasons for hope on both sides of the Florida Straits these days.

(See also here at La Jornada.)

Off to Costa Rica

2010-03-09T12:33:00.002-06:00

Ezra Klein, "The single best reason to pass health-care reform":

"I'll just tell you this," Rush Limbaugh says. "If this passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented -- I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica."

You hear that, guys? Health-care reform will not only cover 30 million Americans and reduce the deficit, but it'll also get rid of Rush Limbaugh! This is, like, the best bill ever!

Of course, Limbaugh picks Costa Rica, beloved of conservatives among the Central American nations because it never experienced a Marxist insurgency. The reason it has not done so, however, is that it was originally a darling of the anti-Communist Left (which came to power there through a dubious civil war in 1948) and expanded a robust welfare state that had been put together by a coalition of Communists and quasi-Christian Democratic presidents in the 1940s. Costa Rica, of course, has national health insurance, socialized medicine, and government involvement in the health care system, which Rush Limbaugh could take advantage of for a modest fee.

Building codes

2010-03-03T20:50:00.004-06:00

Just yesterday I was a-speculatin' that Milton Friedman was against building codes. And...

Friedman: Direct government spending in the United States amounts to about 42 percent of the national income. I'm putting it a little elliptically. Government spending equals a sum which equals 42 percent of the national income. In addition, there is much spending, which is classified as private spending, effectively mandated by the government. It would make no difference whatsoever in your life if the antipollution equipment you have on your car were provided to you without charge by the government but you had to pay a tax equal to the amount that you spent on those. You wouldn't know the difference. And yet if that were done, it would be counted as government spending.
Numerous other private expenditures are mandated by the government in a host of different ways. The cost of farm subsidies is included in the 42 percent, but the higher prices you pay for agricultural products because of the farm policy are not included in recorded government expenditures. Yet they are in effect mandated by the government and represent command over resources subject to government control and direction. Similarly, building codes impose costs that you might not privately want to engage in, wage and hour laws—and on and on. So I believe that easily more than 50 percent of the productive resources available in the nation are allocated by governments—federal, state and local. How those productive resources are used is determined not by the private interests of the individuals who dispose of them but by governmental mandates.
Of course, some of that is desirable. I'm not in favor of no government. You do need a government. But by doing so many things that the government has no business doing, it cannot do those things which it alone can do well. There's no other institution in my opinion that can provide us with protection of our life and liberty. However, the government performs that basic function poorly today, precisely because it is devoting too much of its efforts and spending too much of our income on things which are harmful. So I have no doubt that that's the major single problem we face.

Yep, I'm pretty sure that means building codes are a hidden tax, but I suppose you could read it a wee bit more charitably.

Via Paul Krugman, who has a nice graph of Chilean growth since 1970 that shows that its economic "success" is not the simple Chicago Boy story it's sometimes made out to be. See also pretty much any book about the history of Chile.

Update: Good, not-at-all silly column from Naomi Klein on the history of building codes in Chile. Chile's modern building code law? Updated in the 1990s, it was enacted in 1972, under Allende.

Great moments in attending inaugurations

2010-03-02T12:00:00.003-06:00

Hillary Clinton attended the inauguration of former guerrilla José Mújica, which one supposes is intended to communicate that the U.S. respects the outcomes of elections in Latin America, even when they produce leaders on the left.

Here's VP Lyndon Johnson at the inauguration of Rómulo Betancourt of Venezuela, a stalwart social democratic ally in the cold war in Latin America:

I can't track down an image, but LBJ also attended the inauguration of Dominican president Juan Bosch, giving him an "abrazo" that became a bit of a political irritant in the DR by allowing Bosch to be portrayed as too close to the United States. Then, when LBJ was president, he sent troops into the Dominican Republic to prevent Bosch from being restored to the presidency. My point: attending an inauguration doesn't mean much.

First image copyright Time Inc., details here.

News roundup

2010-03-01T23:27:00.004-06:00

The most important news is obviously the earthquake in Chile. It's a tremendous tragedy, and I don't want to use it to make crass political points. Coming so close to the earthquake in Haiti, media coverage in the United States of the Chilean quake has been less about U.S. generosity than Chilean building codes and the value of democracy. There's probably a more interesting story somewhere--I wonder if any Randian foreign economists tried to scrap building codes somewhere in Chile's past?--but I guess we'll let that go for now. (The notion that Chile has Latin America's strongest economy has also featured prominently in U.S. news coverage. Over a certain period of time, this may well be true. But there are two relevant responses. One is the "Brazilian response", which observes that the GDP of greater Sao Paulo is greater than that of Chile. The other is the "Bolivian response", which notes that it was Bolivia that enjoyed the highest rate of GDP growth in 2009, thank you very much.)

Not to pass unnoticed in the Colombian Supreme Court's decision not to allow Alvaro Uribe to run for another term. I'm oppose semi-indefinite presidential terms, so I like the results of this ruling (obviously I'm in no way qualified to assess the legal merits of the matter).

Lastly, Ricardo Cayuela of Letras Libres blogged, after the death of Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo:

Orlando Zapata Tamayo murió ayer tras ochenta y seis días en huelga de hambre. Su historia pone en evidencia la brutalidad de la dictadura de los hermanos Castro y la doble vara de medir de la comunidad internacional entre las dictaduras rojas y las dictaduras negras.

I appreciate Letras Libres much of the time, so I don't want to be too oppositional about this. But it does seem to me that this is boxing with phantoms. (What else is LL for, I guess?) This story has been widely reported in the left-wing press; not what remains of the Castroite universe, sure, but from the places that matter. I've lost the link, but even La Jornada has been ridiculing the Cuban position on his death. It seems to me that this double standard for judging "red" and "black" dictatorships doesn't really exist outside of dictatorships, and is pretty well understood in the left-wing press.

Re-democratization

2010-03-01T23:19:00.004-06:00

Philippe Schmitter, who wrote the book (I mean it) on democratization, is now reflecting that: "Democratization
has been easier than anticipated precisely because it has been less consequential
than anticipated." In my less temperate moments, I I basically see the Obama election of 2008 as the end of an eight-year judicial coup, a re-democratization of the United States. I wish Schmitter's conclusion seemed less true.

H/t Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez.

P.S. (while weeping silently): Electing this man would be a great way to reach the same conclusions with respect to Mexico.

Animals Eating

2010-02-25T12:51:00.002-06:00

This is a bit off topic, but I found this photo essay of animals eating a surprisingly poignant examination of the way we live today, across the world.

Health Care Reform

2010-02-25T12:44:00.003-06:00

Watching the health care reform summit, it becomes increasingly clear that it's a shame that Mr. Obama's legislative agenda has to be outsourced to Democrats in Congress.

News updates

2010-02-24T21:22:00.004-06:00

So much important political news in the last few days. All my links are going to go to the Spanish paper El País:

Latin American countries have agreed to form a regional bloc without the United States or Canada. Without knowing any details (the statutes will be written in future years, so it is not possible to know exactly what they will look like or what the responsibilities of the new group will be), this strikes me as a good idea. The U.S. has always had disproportionate influence in the OAS, and that has made it a somewhat useless organization for conducting business other than implementing the Cold War priorities of the United States. I suppose it's a bit ironic that this body is created now, when such pressures are less strong. We'll also have to see the effect that this has on the OAS, which will probably be left with even less legitimacy than it currently has. On the other hand, there are still some obstacles to union, as this exchange between Uribe and Chávez that turned "Sea varón" into a catchphrase indicates.
Albert Korda photos of Cuba are for sale at auction in London: images here.
The foreign relations minister for Nicaragua comments on the Carlos Fernando Chamorro situation:P. ¿Y las persecuciones a periodistas, como Carlos Fernando Chamorro (que abandonó la televisión donde emitía reportajes críticos con Ortega, después de que el presidente comprase el canal)?R. A Carlos Fernando Chamorro no se le ha perseguido. Él ha montado el show de separarse de un canal de televisión porque creía que se había vendido al Frente [Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, en el Gobierno]. Hoy, los dueños del canal están aclarando que es propiedad de ellos. No sé qué conflicto habrá tenido Carlos Fernando con los dueños del canal, pero sí que lo ha utilizado para hacer campaña contra el Gobierno y salir aparentando que el Gobierno lo estaba persiguiendo. Dice que no tiene libertad de expresión y ahí sigue escribiendo en contra del Gobierno. El Ejecutivo no les hace [a los medios opositores] absolutamente nada. Nosotros reclamamos que sean más equilibrados. Así como atacan al Gobierno, porque es el derecho que tienen, que también digan las cosas buenas. Los dos principales periódicos, La Prensa y El Nuevo Diario, sólo publican diatribas contra el Gobierno.

The Interamerican Commission on Human Rights criticizes Venezuela, recognizing progress on some social rights but arguing that that does not justify the lack of other fundamental rights.

On the other hand, the situation is far more acute in Cuba, where political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, dies after a hunger strike of more than eighty days. The case receives wide attention. Yoani Sánchez posts video of Zapata's mother (link here with English transcript).

The U.S. State Department demands that Cuba release all political prisoners; Cuba blames the U.S. for his death. Lula meets with the Castro brothers, expressing regret over the death.

Ideology

2010-02-12T13:39:00.003-06:00

Jonathan Chait says the following after revealing that Rep. Paul Ryan, he of the kill-Medicare to balance the budget by 2080 plan, is a Randian who admires the work of Jonah Goldberg:

What do those works have in common? They're written by people who don't understand liberalism and the left at all, and are thus unable to present liberal ideas in terms remotely recognizable to liberals themselves. The specific lack of understanding lies in an inability to grasp the enormous differences between American liberalism and socialism or communism, seeing them as variants on the same basic theme. The historical reality is that the architects of American liberalism saw it as a bulwark against communism, and communists and socialists in turn viewed the liberals as in implacable enemy. (Yes, you can cherry pick a few data points of commonality, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule.) The result is a tendency to see even modest efforts to sand off the roughest edges of capitalism in order to make free markets work for all Americans as the opening salvo of a vast and endless assault upon the market system.

I agree with the point about liberalism in the United States; I have long said that an inability to distinguish between various strands of left-of-center thought is an almost definitional characteristic of the Right. But I object to the way that socialism and communism are treated as similarly positioned vis-a-vis liberalism in this paragraph. Fortunately, The New Republic (Chait's magazine) is making available old articles published in its pages by Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr thinks about the etymology of liberalism here. And he gets to the differences of socialism and communism here, from 1953:

The most obvious distinction in the interest of fairness is to note the rigorous resistance to Communism by Democratic Socialists in all nations. The attitudes of Norman Thomas in this country, of the late Ernst Reuter in Berlin, and Henri Spaak in Belgium and many others is sufficient refutation of the outrageous charge that a common Marxist dogma creates an affinity between Communism and Socialism. Socialism and Communism may be brothers; if so, they are, as the late Socialist leader Kurt Schumacher observed, like Cain and Abel. The common Marxist dogma not only failed to guarantee affinity with Communism, but it has not prevented Socialism from being a creative force, when it expressed itself in loyalty to and in the context of a democratic community. A large part of the free world is indebted to the Socialist movement for the establishment of justice. The efforts of our vigilantes to brand the movement with the mark of Cain therefore alienates our friends and seems to substantiate prejudices of their own about our life.

Debating the audience

2010-02-06T18:15:00.002-06:00

Whenever I get into a nasty debate with someone whose politics I think I mostly share, it raises certain questions. For example: am I still, in any meaningful sense, on "The Left"? But the most important question, I think, is "What argument should engage my time?" And, here, I think that the answer depends a lot on one's audience: and I think that different conceptions of what constitutes one's audience shape certain disagreements.

Most people who grow up in the United States and end up writing, studying, or teaching about Latin America do so because they experience some political attraction to one or another radical movement at some point. But it is also true that Latin America provides some Lefties with their first experiences of movements that they would never like to see come to power - as Sendero Luminoso did to Eric Hobsbawm. Some people get mired in a long conversation about imperialism, and the generally malign role that the U.S. has played in Latin America in the 20th century. Saying bad things about Hugo Chávez, particularly if done frequently, is to these folks a sign of an unbalanced mind. The key thing is to consider the role of the U.S. in opposing Chávez, hypocrisy on the part of his critics (it abounds, 'tis true!), and propaganda buried (sometimes shallowly) in U.S. reporting on Venezuela and Latin America. I think that I understand this point of view quite well, because I once held these views. But, while I don't want to minimize those problems, I am preoccupied by a different set of problems these days. I see myself more engaged in a long conversation about the nature of the left, not just in Latin America but across the world. And when it comes to that debate: I have a clear preference, which obviously I believe I can defend, for democratic socialism over "21st century socialism."

Someone like Otto at IKN, the eccentric mining stock trader and part-time political analyst, has a very different audience. Here he has a post taking to task someone a Free-Market-Good type without my depth of knowledge about Latin America. Otto's readers are mostly traders and U.S. journalists, and so, actually, I think Otto is doing the right thing. The overall arguments of his blog is: 1) there's more than one way to run an economy; 2) lots of U.S. and Canadian business who have mining operations in Latin America are rapacious bastards without concern for the effects of their operations and/or fraudulent speculators; 3) most people who write about Latin America for a U.S. audience just act like corporate shills. I think all of these things are true, and if I had Otto's audience I think these are the points that I would want to make.

Now, of course, I don't have an audience at all. But if I did, I imagine that it would be a different audience, interested in shaping the future of the political left. And so the sorts of things that I post are different, and the sorts of things that I consider noteworthy are different. I am reminded of the dilemma that faced the anti-Communist liberal (not that that's exactly how I would describe my own politics, but it'll do for the sake of the analogy) group the Americans for Democratic Action in the late 1940s and early 1950s. On the one hand, they made up the intellectual left wing of the Democratic Party, pushing it to adopt an aggressive civil rights platform at the 1948 party convention. But they also wanted to argue against sympathy for CPUSA or the Soviet Union, which had nothing to do with the kind of continuation of the New Deal in a democratic context that represented their ideal form of democracy. At times, the leadership had to take a step back and recognize that if they spent all of their time criticizing Communism, they had a responsibility also to point out that the obstacle to achieving their objectives in the United States was not Communism but the Republican Party. I try to strike the right balance, like the ADA did, but I suppose I might lose my equilibrium from time to time. That's where, again, it might help to have an audience.

Quick updates

2010-02-02T18:55:00.003-06:00

Must...close...tabs:

Carlos Fernando Chamorro and his program of investigative journalism is off the air in Nicaragua. But he wasn't forced off--when the station that aired him was reportedly purchased by ALBAdollars--he resigned. The final words about the purchase have yet to be written, and we may yet learn some important clarifying details. Other stations are going easier on President Ortega, however, in the wake of these developments.
Carlos Salinas Maldonado (a Nicaragua journalist) writes up the story from the (I think probably correct, but pending further information) anti-Ortega perspective. But did El País really have to use that photo of Ortega?
Argentine author and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez has died. I've taught using his books, and I think they are useful for helping students consider the authoritarian personality. He will be missed.
Rich says smart things about Calderón's drug war.
The Christian Democrat in the upcoming elections in Costa Rica is certifiable:

But Jon Chait has an ever better story about political advertisements.

Howard Zinn

2010-01-29T15:10:00.003-06:00

Howard Zinn died yesterday at age 87. I wasn't going to mention anything about his passing. As a professional historian, I don't have a very high opinion of his People's History of the United States. But that isn't the point. The People's History is not a history book - it's a provocation. It's not supposed to displace academic history -- nobody reads that anyway -- it's supposed to displace the piles of Lincoln biographies and Greatest Generation history pornography. No other book has succeeded in providing that counter-narrative. It has been a starting point for a lot of people, and should be celebrated for that.

As a guide to political action the book is a hopeless mess, for reasons that classic (2004!) dissection from Dissent makes clear. See also Yglesias, whose feelings about and personal experiences with Zinn resemble my own.

The Audacity of Technocracy

2010-01-29T15:07:00.005-06:00

Embedding's not working for me, so watch Obama in conversation with Republicans at the link.

I bet you a zillion dollars that the media conversation will be driven by the question 'Will the Republicans all such an event to happen again?' rather than by any discussion of substance. In this sense, while Obama the technocrat is a winner, I don't think he provided a go-to clip that can be used to illustrate the problem with governing the United States - save perhaps in response to the last question.

State of the Union

2010-01-28T00:16:00.003-06:00

Apparently Chris Matthews is being an idiot, and now we're talking about that instead of about the proposals and the constitutional crisis preventing the U.S. government from dealing with the Very Serious Problems that it must confront. I will say, on the matter of race, that every time you see a shot of all white men, you know you are looking at the Republican side of the aisle.

In other news today, the new president of Honduras, Porfirio 'Pepe' Lobo was inaugurated, and he escorted the deposed president to the airport so that he could safely leave the country. Otto at IKN (who hates me something fierce) speaks the truth:

Honduras had a 2009 in the limelight thanks to the coupmonger Micheletti stomping all over its citizens' fragile sense of democracy. And so with today's events done with and some sort of quasi-normality restored, Honduras can go back to its previous role of being a corrupt little country that nobody gives a shit about.

I liked much of what I heard from the SotU speech tonight, but Obama did not speak about foreign policy outside of anti-terrorism operations, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The coup in Honduras was, of course, more than just a failure of U.S. diplomacy, but it was certainly also that. To be sure, if this had happened under the Bush administration Micheletti would have just been recognized as the legitimate president, end of story. The Obama administration agonized and strained and tried to hammer out a deal, but in the end the result was the same, and the damage to democracy in the hemisphere done. On top of that, some people I know who have contact with State Department officials in Latin America say that it may as well be the Reagan administration...there's a kind of "full support for the misguided policies of our hemispheric 'friends'" mentality that, it suffices to say, is less than ideal. Sure, Latin America is way down the list of priorities for this administration. I hope for--but don't especially expect--a bit more progress. Let's say U.S. diplomacy now comes with 30% less imperialism compared with the previous administration. Let's aim for further reductions. Yes we can be only half as imperialistic as the Bush administration!

Three letters just prior to the State of the Union

2010-01-27T20:05:00.004-06:00

Dear Democrats,

Hard-core conservatives took six years to abandon George W. Bush even though he repudiated everything he campaigned on and governed like a (extremely malign and sinister) liberal imperialist. You're going to abandon Obama after one year just because he said "freeze"? To imagine that you would not have been angry with Obama, who is probably less progressive than you are and who in any case does not simply make policy just because he wishes it into creation, was a fantasy. So please take the anger that you have and use it constructively.

Thanks.

Dear Congress,

You mean to tell me that you came within one inch of the most important social legislation in decades and then you chose not to enact it? Tell me that it is not so, and fear for your political lives if it is.

Thanks.

Dear President Obama,

A bone. Throw me one please.

Kthxbye.

RCTV

2010-01-24T21:12:00.002-06:00

RCTV (Radio Caracas Televisión) is the television channel that first attracted the ire of Hugo Chávez for playing an important role in the opposition. When its license to broadcast was not renewed, it continued to operate on cable and satellite TV, which is in fact accessible to many Venezuelans, including some of relatively modest means. Now, RCTV is off cable, after violating new laws that require all channels to broadcast presidential addresses.

Just what constitutes a presidential address is determined by the government. There were two marches today, one pro- and one anti-Chá, and Ch&;aacute;vez required that stations broadcast footage of the pro-Ch&;aacute;vez march. Personally, I find this offensive, but it is true that the very partisan television channels in Venezuela may well have only broadcast footage of the opposition march without such an order.

A showcase for charity

2010-01-24T20:59:00.003-06:00

The Mex Files has a great post that illustrates, as part of a long post, what I was saying in my initial post about Haiti: natural disasters are often used by the United States and its media to advertise its own charity and morality. Meanwhile, lots of other countries are providing aid and are doing a good job of it. The U.S. military is doing some important work in Haiti, and also seemingly obstructing other work. Mex Files:

Notice what’s NOT in the CNN article, but is in the Toronto Sun.

CNN
Port-au-Prince, Haiti (CNN) — Rescue workers pulled a woman out of rubble near Haiti’s national cathedral Tuesday, a week after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck.
The rescue crews believe two other people may be alive under wreckage nearby, in part because of a text message the crews believe was sent from under the rubble, a CNN crew reported.

Men carried the woman, Ena Zizi, who is in her 70s, from the rubble on a wooden board as she grasped its edges.

They took her to a nearby clinic, although it doesn’t have the operating facilities needed to treat her, the CNN crew reported.

Zizi’s right femur was fractured and she was in shock, the crew reported.
Her son, Maxime Janvier, told CNN that he never gave up hope that she’d be found.
“We were praying a lot for that to happen,” he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday that about 90 victims have been saved by 43 international rescue teams, made up of some 1,700 people, in the days after the quake.

The earthquake struck the afternoon of January 12. Its epicenter was just south of Port-au-Prince.
Toronto Sun

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A Mexican rescue team rejoiced Tuesday after finding an elderly woman alive amid the pile of concrete rubble at this Haitian capital’s cathedral.
Salvador Arturo Acuna Rico was one of the Cancun rescuers who found a 70-year-old woman in perfect health after being trapped for a week.

“She was praying,” he said, adding that’s how they heard her in the middle of the collapse building. “She was conscious – really, really healthy. No broken bones.”

Search and rescue workers from Germany believe another person may be alive in the building that once housed the cathedral’s priests. Another two people are believed to be alive in a nearby building, said rescuer Frank Schultes.

Have you read or seen anything in the U.S. media about the relief work of other countries? Other than the issue of U.S.-Cuban cooperation, which is a fine thing but attracts attention for other reasons, I doubt it.

It's a great post for other reasons: read the whole thing.

Democracy in the United States

2010-01-22T10:41:00.003-06:00

The last few days have been among the most demoralizing as I can remember in at least five years. Hendrick Hertzberg speaks the truth:

Meanwhile, the constitutional crisis (and that is what we’re experiencing with respect to health care) just got much deeper, with the 5-4 decision of the Roberts Supreme Court to throw out a century of precedent and throw open the door to the unfettered domination of electoral politics by corporate money. Freedom of speech is now an attribute of aggregations of capital. Pretty soon the Court will decree that the Second Amendment gives corporations the right to deploy private armies and the Fifth Amendment gives them permission to refuse to respond to subpoenas. We wouldn’t want to deprive Halliburton of its God-given right not to incriminate itself, now, would we?
Forgive my inability, ten years later, to “get over it,” but this is nothing but a continuation of the judicial coup d’état that expropriated the 2000 election and thereby gave us Roberts and Alito.

I can only say that many of us worked extremely hard to provide the one party in the United States that is moderately serious about governing the majority it would need to do so. To see the party now choose to not use that power - which is what the House decision not to pass the Senate bill on health care reform - is infuriating. Prove that our work mattered. Prove that it makes a damn difference to have you in office. We restored democracy in the United States in 2008 through popular action. I want some evidence that it was worth it.

Brad Delong, from the archives, asks: "Is it too late to ask to be born on another planet?" and answers, "Yes, but we could fix the one we have." Can we?

Haiti

2010-01-22T10:33:00.002-06:00

I was traveling when the earthquake struck Haiti, and have had much of a chance to respond. Obviously, it's an immense and heartbreaking tragedy. I have little to add to what others have said, but I will say this. I Since I was on the road, I was without internet but with CNN. I saw a roundtable on the issue on Amanpour. One of the guests mentioned that one of the causes of the deaths was rapid urbanization brought about by a free trade deal with the United States that undercut farm employment as poor Haitian farmers could not compete with subsidized U.S. grains. The point here is not, of course, to lay all of the blame at the feet of the United States, as the commentator made clear, but simply to point out that seemingly small U.S. actions often have serious consequences elsewhere. This point was quickly abandoned so that some imperialist from the Council on Foreign Relations could get in a few words about what Haitians needed to do. I worry that the U.S. media have used the Haitian earthquake as an opportunity to run long commercials for themselves as mediators of charity and for the U.S. public as a charitable people, unwilling to confront the dimensions of the crisis exacerbated by U.S. politics and policies. That said, U.S. aid is both wanted and necessary at this time.

Canal 8 Sold

2010-01-15T12:32:00.001-06:00

As per my post about Carlos Fernando Chamorro below, Canal 8 in Nicaragua has been sold. Details of the transaction remain secret, but it seems likely to have been purchased by the government.

Gabriel Orozco

2009-12-29T19:35:00.003-06:00

Mexican artist (not a narco or an illegal immigrant, for your information) Gabriel Orozco is getting a lot of buzz after shows in San Francisco and New York, reaching for the logical terminus of the modern art movement:

Crisp, diagrammatic layouts of exfoliating circles and arcs, on white grounds, the paintings have few fans among critics. I sure don’t like them, although Orozco’s patient remark in their defense gives me pause: “People forget that I want to disappoint."

I love the puzzle of modern art, and I quite like Gabriel Orozco. So I'm not going to be bothered to tear him down in any way. But this post from Letras Libres: Orozco-as-the-artist-of-liberty almost made me yearn for some dogmatic leftist to fulminate about the need for an engaged art. After such praise (NYer, NYT, LL) I expect an Orozco backlash to begin at any moment.

Talking to Yoo

2009-12-29T19:15:00.002-06:00

Torture-enabling-but-just-following-orders John Yoo gave an interview to the New York Times that was published today. I won't judge his sense of humor, and it's a bit difficult to know how slyly he meant the things that he said. I'll just point out this, then:

When, exactly, did you become a conservative?
I’ve been one since I was a kid. I was 9 when Jimmy Carter took office. I can remember him giving a speech in a funny sweater and asking people to turn down thermostats. And then there was the malaise speech. I thought they meant mayonnaise.

I was going to point out that the "malaise" speech didn't feature the word, so Yoo is probably making things up. But Ezra Klein beat me to it, so I outsource. Next:

I see various groups are protesting a decision by a California government lawyer to teach a course with you that starts on Jan. 12, claiming he is legitimizing your unethical behavior.
At Berkeley, protesting is an everyday activity. I am used to it. I remind myself of West Berlin — West Berlin surrounded by East Germany during the Cold War.

Are you saying the citizens of Berkeley are Communists, reminiscent of those on the dark side of the Iron Curtain?
There are probably more Communists in Berkeley than any other town in America, but I think of them more as lovers of Birkenstocks than Marx.

What a bastard. Perhaps by Communists he just means left-hippies, a type that certainly abounds in Berkeley. But that's a trivial fact of life out there, and the university itself isn't as left-wing as its reputation would have you believe. On the other hand, it sounds like he actually means Communists as in members of the Communist Party. In which case he is fantasizing--I'd bet a million rubles that there are more Communists in New York City than in Berkeley. Per capita, I don't know. And you know what, John Yoo? They annoy me too. But then you insult their intelligence, implying that they aren't even serious Marxists. Whatever. At least Berkeley's Communists aren't responsible for anyone's genitals being hooked up to electric current lately.

Carlos Fernando Chamorro and Nicaraguan democracy

2009-12-24T16:31:00.002-06:00

Alas, the world seems to only have a span of attention that can take in one Central American crisis at a time, and Honduras has, for good reason, been it for the last few months. There's a slower-burning crisis of democracy in Nicaragua, however, albeit one that may well be resolved through electoral means. The crisis is in the behavior of President Daniel Ortega, and a sense of the problem can be grasped by looking at the treatment of Carlos Fernando Chamorro, the former editor of the Sandinista newspaper Barricada and now a critic of the presently-constituted Sandinista government. Working as a journalist, Mr. Chamorro has worked to uncover governmental corruption and abuses of power. In November 2008, the offices of his foundation were raided. He has been accused by the first lady of Nicaragua of money-laundering and other crimes, unserious accusations designed to discredit him and his work. Now Chamorro has published a bit of a J'accuse in the Mexican left-wing newspaper La Jornada. I'll translate three paragraphs:

Official propaganda alleges that the "change of model" is based on the programs of social assistance put in place by the government like "Zero Hunger," "Zero Usury", "Streets for the People," et cetera, a local version of the Chávez missions in Venezuela. But, in reality, in an economy that continues to be subject to a program of the International Monetary Fund, the only structural change has been the privatization of the many millions of Venezuelan aid, equivalent to almost 10 per cent of the GDP, that is managed outside of the budget of the Republic. A part of these funds are used to finance state operations of political clientelism, but the biggest piece go to make private deals, without any kind of control or transparency, to swell new concerns linked to the governing family.

In the politicla realm, the model preaches "direct democracy" but practices an authoritarian style that has divided and polarized the country. Ortega does not have the blessing of a plebiscitary majority like the one that has just reelected Evo Morales in Bolivia. Quite the opposite, the novelty of this scheme of family caudillismo resides in a political minority, very well organized and mobilized, governs as if it were a majority by virtue of a prebendary pact made with the ex president Arnoldo Alemán, recently exonerated of corruption charges.

It was thus that Ortega won the presidency in the first round with only 38 per cent of the votes in 2006, and almost three years later mantains himself in power governing exclusively for his partisans, assisted by the division of the opposition. And when his power is challenged in the streets, he has resorted without hesitation to repression, not through the police or the army, but using the shock troops of the governing party.

La propaganda oficial alega que el cambio de modelo radica en los programas de asistencia social impulsados por el gobierno como Hambre Cero, Usura Cero, Calles para el Pueblo, etcétera, una versión local de las misiones de Chávez en Venezuela. Pero, en realidad, en una economía que continúa rigiéndose por un programa con el FMI, el único cambio estructural ha sido la privatización de la multimillonaria ayuda venezolana, equivalente a casi el 10 por ciento del PIB, que se maneja fuera del presupuesto de la República. Una parte de estos fondos se utilizan para financiar operaciones estatales de clientelismo político, pero la mayor tajada se destina para hacer negocios privados, sin ninguna clase de control ni transparencia, para engrosar los nuevos capitales ligados a la familia gobernante.

En lo político, el modelo predica la democracia directa pero practica un estilo autoritario que ha dividido y polarizado al país. Ortega no cuenta con la bendición de una mayoría plesbicitaria como la que acaba de relegir a Evo Morales en Bolivia. Por el contrario, la novedad de este esquema de caudillismo familiar reside en que una minoría política, muy bien organizada y movilizada, gobierna como si fuera mayoría en virtud de un pacto prebendario acordado con el ex presidente Arnoldo Alemán, recientemente exonerado de sus cargos de corrupción.

Fue así como Ortega ganó la presidencia en primera vuelta con sólo 38 por ciento de los votos en 2006, y casi tres años después se mantiene en el poder gobernando exclusivamente para sus partidarios, apoyado en la división de la oposición. Y cuando su poder es desafiado en las calles, ha recurrido sin vacilar a la represión, no a través de la policía o el ejército, sino que utilizando las fuerzas de choque del partido de gobierno.

Read the whole thing if you can. For the moment, Chamorro still has his weekly television program. If he loses it, that will be a sign that things will be getting worse before they get better.

Trade with China and Copenhagen

2009-12-24T16:17:00.002-06:00

Q: Why is Venezuela leading a group of countries following the Chinese lead to take the "willfully-endanger-the-planet" line at Copenhagen?

(Partial) A: Trade with China. Real diversification of trade will be good for these countries, but there are political rents to pay (for dealing with the U.S. too, obviously). (The U.S. is still Venezuela's largest market for trade, China is second.)

ALBA and Copenhagen

2009-12-22T19:00:00.006-06:00

There's no issue more important to future generations across the planet than the outcome of climate change negotiations over the next couple of years. Reductions of 80% by industrialized nations has long been an ambitious goal pushed by environmental groups (of course some have wanted 90%). And they were on offer...the U.S. (!) was willing to make the commitment, so was Germany, etc. So why did the final agreement not include them? An eyewitness report:

To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why – because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.

I have a critical post about Obama's first year in foreign affairs percolating, but on an astounding number of fronts he has made things immeasurably better. George Bush made it so damn easy for the world to blame the United States for so many of its problems (often with justification); it's convenient politically to fall back on.

Hugo Chávez's speech showed his charisma as much as ever; his line to the effect that if the climate were a bank it would have been bailed out by now is fair enough criticism of the priorities of the rich nations of the world. He is also correct that, given a sufficiently long historical view, capitalism will be responsible for the environmental devastation of the 21st century. A form of regulated capitalism, however, might also be capable of mitigating the crisis. Venezuela's socialism, while having little responsibility for the problem on a global scale, may be a different system but it is hardly eco-friendly (nor was the Soviet Union, nor is China, etc.) When Chávez says "change the system, not the climate," he sounds to me ingenuous in the extreme. (The whole video is here, in three parts.)

Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia all opposed the accord in Copenhagen, along with Sudan, which played an especially clear spoiled role for China. EU officials have been complaining that the ALBA countries prevented a more ambitious agreement, over the pleas of vulnerable poor nations. Bolivia's glaciers, for what it is worth, are disappearing, leaving it unclear how great swaths of the country will receive supplies of water. Yes, the United States is still an empire, and has a lot to answer and pay for. As an antiimperialist, I hope--really, with complete sincerity--that by 2050 there is not worldwide nostalgia for U.S. informal empire when confronted with Chinese informal empire. ALBA's countries seem eager to hasten the transition, and it is their right to decide to do so. But if Copenhagen is any indication, I dread the results.

H/t Kevin Drum.

Timerman

2009-12-21T19:56:00.003-06:00

Sometimes, when I'm feeling cranky, I get annoyed that the National Security Archive releases documents that don't tell us anything particularly new, as with the recent release of U.S. documents pertaining to the Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman, a famous victim of that country's "Dirty War." But this interview (good interview, bad pronunciation) is a reminder that I have often really missed the point of such releases. They provide an opportunity to talk about important things again, so that things that matter can be better remembered.

Listen:

Mexico City legalizes same sex marriage

2009-12-21T19:22:00.003-06:00

Mexico City has legalized same sex marriage through a change in law, which ought to be robust in the courts. This is, it goes without saying, good news.

There's no chance that something like this could be come law at the national level, even if Marcelo Ebrard, the mayor of Mexico City, were to become president. (He seems the likely candidate from the left-wingy PRD, but he'd be a long-shot candidate to say the least.) Mexico City is the PRD's showcase, but its social views would find little support in most other areas of the country (though it already is law in the state of "rural" northern state of Coahuila.) That said, Mexico City has been a pretty gay friendly place for some time, and major cities in Latin America often top the lists on worldwide metrics for good treatment for their gay citizens.

The other political wrinkle here is that President Felipe Calderón's proposed set of political reforms would make it easier (if approved in whole or in part, none of which is certain) for laws to be passed via citizen referenda. This would likely be used to advance "defensive" conservative measures, like defining marriage as between a man and a woman, as has happened in many states in the U.S. once the "threat" of same-sex marriage appeared to be a possibility.

Nothing against Coahuila, but if it will help to make Californians ashamed and jealous: California, you are losing the human rights race to a state on the other side of the border.

Yglesias III

2009-12-19T15:11:00.003-06:00

Today in a post about Max Weber, Matthew Yglesias writes:

There’s a whole long essay here, but to boil it down to its essentials the point is that there’s a place for the ethic of ultimate ends but that in politics you need an ethic of responsibility.
And a lot of what goes wrong in American foreign policy commentary, I came to see, was a refusal to adopt the ethic of responsibility. Instead, people would want to orient themselves in a way that expresses a sense of moralized outrage. So if some country is bad, a proposal to do bad things to that regime must be good, because what’s right is to be on “the right side” in some maximal way. Anything less is “realism” and a betrayal of ideals about human rights and democracy. The problem is that what’s needed, from a humanitarian point of view, is a foreign policy that does in fact make conditions around the world better not a foreign policy that expresses high ideals and a grand sense of purpose.

I think this sort of writing is what makes it reasonably clear to his readers that Yglesias falls outside the category of liberal imperialist thinkers, and why I was right to object when the Mex Files tried to take his Ecuador/Honduras mistake (and 100x more significant error of thinking that the Obama administration's handling of the matter was deft) and put him in the category of thinkers who believe that US-residents are more-equal-than-others. The mini-controversy that erupted from my original comment, which I now wish I had worded less personally, did nothing but prove my point, though. In the two-minutes Yamascuma hatefest over at IKN, Bina said:

Yglesias is ignorant to confuse Ecuador with Honduras, AND an idiot to think that it's acceptable (or "deft") to let a coup in Honduras go unpunished once a sham election is held.

And so is anyone else who thinks he should be let off the hook for either error.

An ignorant mistake? I agreed with that. An idiot? This was the nub of my objection. I imagine that Yglesias has done little more than read New York Times coverage of the matter, which tended to flash up in the moments when US diplomacy looked like it was solving problems instead of creating them. This has been one conflict that has been much more thoroughly covered by new blogs (like Honduras Coup 2009), but I guess I just don't expect Yglesias to have that in his blogroll. Don't let him off the hook, Bina, give him the booby prize and explain the error.

If I were pressed to make too much of this and find a larger point buried in this mostly stupid and meaningless disagreement, I think I'd say that it's a tiny reminder of the perils of ideological intolerance. On the left, such intolerance can stem from understandable impatience with an unjust world, but, as one might read the histories of revolutionary Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua, that is not a form of illiberalism that helps make the world more just. More than that: it creates its own forms of injustice.* Tomorrow, if I have time, I'll have a post about a situation in which this sort of thing actually matters--that is to say, it's won't be about me.

* This is not intended as a complete judgment about revolutionary Cuba or Sandinista Nicaragua, extremely complex social and political processes that plainly advanced the cause of justice in some respects and retreated in others.

A defense of a defense of Yglesias

2009-12-18T13:06:00.002-06:00

Well, I got at least two extra hits this week as I unleash a bloggy tempest in a teacup. Rich at the Mex Files takes exception to my defense of Yglesias, and I respond in comments again here. Otto at IKN unleashes his usual megawatt persuasive charm, calling me an "Uncle Tom blogger," which I think is the first time anyone has ever called me a "blogger". I've also responded in comments there, but my comment will have to be approved by the moderator before you can read it.

The major disagreement, as I see it at the moment, is not whether Yglesias made a bad error. He did, and everyone should be free to point it out and draw conclusions from it. What I don't like is the quickness with which the conversations have moved to assert that Yglesias holds neo-imperialistic views on U.S. foreign policy. That, I think, is simply factually incorrect, and even a bad mistake is not evidence of that. I'd rather see the mistake dealt with as a mistake--even a revealing mistake, if you must--rather than the foundations of a shabbily-constructed argument regarding Yglesias' progressive credentials.

Since I am neither an important person nor a particularly acute analyst, this will all surely die down soon. I'll post some thoughts once it does, but in case it goes one more round I'll hold off on that for the moment.

A defense of Yglesias

2009-12-17T15:03:00.003-06:00

A few days ago, Matt Yglesias had a post in which he referred to the Obama Administration's handling of the coup in Ecuador as "deft." Now, of course, there has been no coup in Ecuador. And the Obama Administration's handling of the coup in Honduras, to which he was surely referring, has been well-short of "deft."

Alas, this has turned into something of a minor issue within the Lat-Am blogging community, who have decided that Yglesias is some sort of hopeless idiot. Friends, friends: hate the sin, not the sinner. It was a hopelessly idiotic statement, but one such statement--fortunately for us all--does not a hopeless idiot make. (It takes at least three, right?)

Rich at the usually excellent Mex Files blog is right, of course, on the substance of the coup and its consequences here. But he's wrong about Yglesias, who I've defended in comments at the link.

As always, when intra-left quarreling is taking on greater proportions over issues that don't involve much substance, it's important to take a deep breath and watch this again:

World's most important blogger

2009-11-22T00:37:00.003-06:00

A new Human Rights Watch report about Cuba says the human rights situation there is not improving under Raúl Castro:

Imprisonment is only one of the many tactics the Cuban government uses to repress fundamental freedoms. Dissidents who try to express their views are often beaten, arbitrarily arrested, and subjected to public acts of repudiation. The government monitors, intimidates, and threatens those it perceives as its enemies. It isolates them from their friends and neighbors and discriminates against their families.

Cuba attempts to justify this repression as a legitimate response to a US policy aimed at toppling the Castro government. It is true that the United States has a long history of intervention on the island, and its current policy explicitly aims to support a change in Cuba’s government. However, in the scores of cases Human Rights Watch examined for this report, this argument falls flat.

Yoani Sánchez seems to bear on both quoted paragraphs here: she was, of course, beaten not but a few days ago. And she's also quite interested in US-Cuba relations. After months of trying, she managed to get Barack Obama to respond to a set of seven questions about the US-Cuba relationship. His answers are boilerplate if reasonable, but the very fact that he answered him I think makes Sánchez the world's most important blogger, and surely the most important Cuban dissident. He writes:

Your blog provides the world a unique widow into the realities of daily life in Cuba. It is telling that the Internet has provided you and other courageous Cuban bloggers with an outlet to express yourself so freely, and I applaud your collective efforts to empower fellow Cubans to express themselves through the use of technology. The government and people of the United States join all of you in looking forward to the day all Cubans can freely express themselves in public without fear and without reprisals.

This would all look quite cynical if it were the case that the US government were somehow sponsoring Yoani's website (it's hosted on German servers, and is the only web site completely blocked within Cuba), as some Cuban press have alleged. I had the opportunity to ask an expert about this recently and am passing on the rumor that the Spanish newspaper El País is helping to support her website. That makes sense to me.

Repression and sports

2009-11-20T16:48:00.004-06:00

I quite like the National Security Archive's blog Unredacted, and I quite admire the work that the other NSA does. Occasionally, though, they make a fetish of the original documents that they release. Today, they released a document that shows the U.S. embassy in Argentina's reporting that illegal police actions by the repressive government of General Videla cooled illegal actions during the 1978 World Cup, held in Argentina. Fine and good. But isn't the idea that repressive governments crack down before international sporting events so that they can act nice for the international community during the event (i.e. Mexico 1968, China 2008)?* What this document asserts, then, is totally expected.

* The form of repression varies from state to state. I doubt that Brazil will be shooting people as it prepares for the Olympics, but the poor are likely to get walled off or moved. Something not dissimilar would have taken place in Chicago if it had been awarded the 2016 Olympics.

November 16, 1989

2009-11-16T15:29:00.000-06:00

When bloggers are attacked

2009-11-07T10:06:00.004-06:00

Cuban opposition blogger Yoani Sánchez has been physically assaulted and briefly kidnapped at a rally. Maybe things would look different if I were living in Cuba--I realize there's a serious problem of access bias here--but it seems to me that the the bloggers have become a serious threat to the regime. There seems to be plenty of consensus in Cuba on the need for reforms. But the Party still wants to control that reform, and the bloggers challenge their right to set the constrains on discourse and policy change.

Now with more anonymity

2009-11-06T22:16:00.000-06:00

Testing a little system change I've made here...

Discord over Honduras accord

2009-11-06T21:53:00.004-06:00

I'm not too surprised to see the deal Honduras fall apart, but it is disappointing. The loophole was always there: technically, the existence of the accord gave the State Department a way to recognize the upcoming elections, while the Honduran Congress never technically was required to vote to reinstate Zelaya. And so: Congress (which voted to oust Zelaya in the first place, but might have been swayed to reinstate him to get Honduras off the international pariah list) hasn't and probably won't vote to reinstate him, and Micheletti formed a "National Unity" government without him. Now the State Department doesn't seem to know whether it will recognize the elections or not (via Honduras Coup 2009, a blog that is one of the few good things to come out of this sorry affair.)

Meanwhile, I'm fascinated by the conservative predilection to see in Micheletti a paladin of democracy. During the cold war, conservatives in the United States and elsewhere called anyone democratic who put on some anti-Communist face paint. Now the (invalid) syllogism goes:
1. Chávez is undemocratic
2. Micheletti opposes Chávez
3. Therefore, Micheletti is democratic
Even if you grant the first premise (and regular readers will know that for most intents and purposes, I do), #3 certainly does not follow from premises 1 and 2. No one knows what democracy is, but we (think we) know what it ain't.

XX

2009-11-04T21:53:00.004-06:00

It's been twenty years since the murders of the six Jesuits in El Salvador, their housekeeper, and her daughter.

Mike, a professor at the Jesuit University of Scranton, posts a message from Dean Brackley (who holds the chair once occupied by Ignacio Ellacuria at the University Centroamericana in San Salvador) on his new blog "Central American Politics."

It's as good a time as any to remember the prayer of St. Francis. Secular or not (and secular I am), it's as good a moral code to try to live by as there is.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

Blogotazo

2009-11-01T23:46:00.004-06:00

I don't know if the settlement in Honduras is going to hold or if someone will get caught behaving badly. I do know that when I learned of the agreement one of my first reactions was "Can I stop reading La Gringa's Blogicito now?" and that a possible affirmative answer to this question made me a strong supporter of reconciliation. I have stayed away from taking up my disagreements with La Gringa in this space because it would be a time consuming and useless enterprise. But, in a spirit of what I hope is goodbye, let me point out an important error. Commenting on the accord, she adds parenthetically: "It has been announced that the two international members will be Colin Powell (former US Secretary of State) and Ricardo Lagos (former president and member of the Socialist Party of Chile). How can the OAS be so obvious that they appoint a socialist to this commission?! This could result in a 3 to 1 bias against the true Honduran majority." OK, last things first. There is no true Honduran majority, and public-opinion is not pro-Micheletti or anti-Zelaya. It's quite divided, with Zelaya seen more favorably than Micheletti. Second, it's not Colin Powell, it's Hilda Solis (but that's not La Gringa's error - Powell was the rumor).

The error that interests me, though, is the smear against Lagos because he is a socialist. The lamest definition of political left v. right is that the right is in favor of the status quo, whereas the left wants to change it. (This version from Ambrose Bierce is much better, for its wit: A conservative is a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal who wishes to replace them with others.") I've been amusing myself recently with the thought that a better definition of the right would be that the right consists of the people who don't understand the difference between a socialist and a Communist. The point here is not to say that Zelaya is a Communist (he's not), but that there are different kinds of lefts and the Lagos left is not the Chávez left. It's not something that the right is always keen to recognize.

Penn-sylvania

2009-11-01T23:17:00.006-06:00

Sean Penn, channeling his inner Stephen Colbert (who used to ask Democratic guests: "George Bush. Great president, or greatest president?"), says "Chávez may not be a good man, but he may well be a great one." The relationship between some of the so-called "Hollywood Left"'s and Castro and Chávez is confusing to me. I get it from Castro's point of view -- it's a bit of glamor and publicity and all of the famous writers left you in 1971. But from the Hollywood types? Now Ann Louise Bardach writes in a book that I am more and more excited to read:

The Castro brothers had a motive for periodically broadcasting the trophies of their spycraft. They had a message for both citizens and visitors: Be careful what you say; we may have compromising data on you. One Cuban security official, Delfin Fernández, who defected in 1999, claims that the surveillance of foreign diplomats, businessmen, and even visiting movie stars with sophisticated listening devices and hidden video cameras, is routine. Fernández said he had personally spied on Jack Nicholson, Leonardo di Caprio, and supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss during their visits to Havana…

Kate Moss can be detected on video camera??!?!

More seriously: Jorge Edwards' Persona Non Grata is the place to go for being-spied-on-in-Cuba paranoia.

Less seriously: Yamascuma is not famous but I do have a blog so maybe I can get an appointment with a really good president who is much less popular with Hollywood types.

H/t to Mickey Kaus, whose convincing playing-against-type on the Fox News issue has fooled me into reading him again for a whole week.

Deal reached in Honduras

2009-10-30T08:56:00.001-05:00

Amazing.

El País has a bit more detail. Key provisions include recognition of the late November elections, a truth commission, the possible return of Zelaya to the presidency if it is approved by Congress (that could be problematic), and, interestingly, an explicit rejection of any amnesty.

CIA sells books

2009-10-26T20:29:00.003-05:00

Juanita Castro, the sister of Fidel and Raúl, broke publicly with his brother's regime in 1964. She has now published a book of memoirs, and has given an interview to Univisiòn. Of course that means that it gets the goofy-music treatment, but the big reveal is supposed to be that she collaborated with the CIA for many years.

I don't know how I can convey my lack of surprise adequately in print. If there was one community shot through with CIA contacts, it's was the anti-Castro Cuban exile community. Anyone with political connections who broke with them regime would surely have been approached by the CIA. And, though some got frustrated and stopped working with the agency, it basically makes sense for the Cuban exiles to have cooperated towards their shared goals. I know the CIA is supposed to be spooky and scary (and certainly it's supposed to sell books), but really, in the Cuban exile community, your gardener and your dog are probably both CIA.

You know who else worked with the CIA? Luis Conte Aguero. He has written books too. Buy them! CIA!

(H/t Latin Americanist.)

1950s Mike Wallace interviews

2009-10-24T21:44:00.003-05:00

Fascinating new research for historians, perhaps for teaching, of 1950s era Mike Wallace video interviews of interesting people: Earl Browder, Reinhold Niebuhr, Eleanor Roosevelt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Robert Hutchins, and others.

Via the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

Self censorship

2009-10-22T01:38:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was able to attend a speech by a Cuban social scientist, neither exactly a regime supporter nor a dissident. I described it afterwards like watching a press conference: what was said and not said had to be observed extremely carefully. I've since realized, however, that that might be interpreted as suggesting that the man was giving a press conference for the Cuban government, and that seemed not at all to be so. It was restrained in a way that made it seem like he was giving a press conference representing himself.

That's a socialist mop!

2009-10-16T20:05:00.001-05:00

My new catchphrase.

Carroll

2009-10-13T15:35:00.004-05:00

Quico, who writes at Caracas Chronicles, the most important Venezuela oppo-blog, expresses pleasure and mild surprise at the straightforward reporting on Chavista authoritarianism by Rory Carroll of the Guardian.

I can't embed the video, but Carroll was the subject of a televised dressing-down by Chávez before he had filed his first story from Venezuela, and appears in the excellent Frontline documentary "The Hugo Chávez Show." It doesn't surprise me, given his treatment by the Venezuelan government, that he is doing this kind of reporting. Click to about five minutes in at the link. It's an extraordinary segment.

Obama wins Nobel

2009-10-09T13:18:00.004-05:00

So some chap named Obama seems to have won one of those newfangled Peace Prize thingies. Reaction to the decision is mixed. But lost in amongst the chatter of whether he was deserving or not is the question of how it will affect his governing going forward. Clearly he thinks that, in accepting the prize, he will give weight to his foreign policy agenda and be able to accomplish a few things that will make him really deserve the award. I hope so too.

In the near term, I also imagine that this will make it harder for him to sign off on large troop increases in Afghanistan. So I'm guessing that that was already the plan.

Nobel Prize for Literature

2009-10-08T22:53:00.005-05:00

Herta Müller has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. So congratulations to her. To the prize committee, I just want to point out that Nicanor Parra is not going to live forever. So:

Nobel Prize Committee, Nicanor Parra is not going to live forever. I thought you should know.

Sosa

2009-10-04T10:39:00.000-05:00

Mercedes Sosa has died in Argentina at age 74.

Bardach confidential

2009-10-03T23:21:00.004-05:00

Bloggingheads.tv doesn't do to many diavlogs related to Latin American issues, and those that do look at such things tend to be a bit out of the foreign policy corner. This recent conversation with Steve Clemons and Ann Louise Bardach generated no great controversies but is worth a listen, to near Ann speak about her sources in Cuba, Fidel's recent surgeries, her predictions for the near future (no Cuban Gorbachev), and her vexing relationship with the accused terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.

R-I-O

2009-10-03T23:12:00.003-05:00

Chicago was rejected early and the Olympics went to Rio de Janeiro...so...one city where we can expect corruption, cost overruns, and questionable social practices as a matter of course was rejected and another was selected. Congratulations to South America, I guess; I hope that the self-stereotyping that Brazil will have to engage in for the world audience isn't too painful to watch. Note also that Mexico had the Olympics in 1968, famously, and the weird little ways in which Mexico has been rhetorically isolated from South America in order to be able to claim a first under these circumstances.

It's not healthy to spend too much time thinking about American conservatism, and several people have already observed that, because Barack Obama favored it, cheers erupted at conservative outfits when Chicago lost. "No Chicago-style politics!" they cried, without noting that nothing is more "Chicago-style politics" than the International Olympic Committee, and that victorious President Lula of Brazil is practically Obama avant la lettre, except more progressive on international issues because of the position that he occupies in the world-system.

LAPOP goes the weasel

2009-10-02T20:26:00.005-05:00

The latest from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (Vanderbilt University/USAID) reminds me of why I simultaneously benefit from their reports and find them extremely annoying. The report asks the question: "When the legislature hinders the work of our government, our president/prime ministers should govern without the legislature, how much do you agree or disagree with that view?" Most tolerant of strong presidentialism are Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico. Least tolerant are the United States, Canada, Venezuela, Paraguay, and Argentina. Fine and fine, and a surprising result for Venezuela. (Since the Congress there has basically no autonomy, it's not as clear to me as it is to the LAPOP authors that this means that Venezuelans are unhappy with their weak legislature so much as that the question has stopped making sense there. Could be some of both.)

But conclusions like this remind me of ideological imperialism of US-government sponsored social science:

Similarly, the AmericasBarometer data in this short report suggest that citizens, when satisfied with the incumbent government’s performance in general and who believe that the legislature hinders the power of the president, are more willing to support government without a legislature. Thus, another implication of this paper is that elected representatives need to aim at decreasing the negative perception that people have toward their legislature and increase political knowledge so that citizens better understand that a functioning democracy is possible only through a balance of power of all its institutions. For democracy to work and endure, legislatures need to persist as an institution, and for that to happen, they need
citizen support.

But what if, as in the case of the United States at present, the "balance of power" system has given extraordinary power to an undemocratic minority? "Balance of power" can also be achieved by successive elections, during which the electorate has the opportunity to reverse the actions of unpopular politicians. Regular readers would know that I'm no advocate of excessive concentrated power in the executive, but it seems to me that U.S.-style balance of power models shouldn't be held up as the only way of being democratic, nor should USAID be in the business of telling people to be more like the North American Democratic Superstar (also known to schoolchildren as NADS). Furthermore, you don't want to "aim at decreasing the negative perception", you want to improve behavior so that negative perceptions are unsustainable because they are no longer accurate characterizations of the situation. The best propaganda is "right action" (in the Buddhist sense of right), and this is far too often forgotten by propagandists.

Justice and impunity

2009-10-02T19:52:00.004-05:00

Former Argentine president Carlos Menem is being brought up on charges of covering up a famous 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, believed to be the work of Hezbollah, with Iranian support. This in the wake of former Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori's guilty plea in an obviously separate trial, admitting to illegal wiretapping and fraud and receiving six years in prison. (Fujimori has already been convicted on the more serious charges of ordering a massacre.) Alas, holding presidents accountable for the illegal actions they take during their time in office only seems possible in the utopias of South America; maybe the United States will someday shake off its judicial underdevelopment, but for now we are so hopelessly behind that it may take generations to remedy our backwardness.

Micheletti

2009-09-28T17:39:00.000-05:00

Please put this man on a plane in his pajamas.

Juanes and the G-2

2009-09-28T13:55:00.002-05:00

Video has now leaked of Juanes apparently confronting a Cuban police tail, and threatening to cancel the Paz sin Fronteras concert that took place a couple of weeks ago. The degree of concern exhibited by the Cuban government, and the careful control that it tried to exert over the messages at the concert, suggest to me that it should not be read as support for a more open relationship with the rest of the world in the near future. On the other hand, the thing to remember about the little weepy Juanes/Tañón/Bosé huddle that you see in the video is that they all wanted you to see it. There are a million cellphones recording. Allow me to translate for you: Cuba is still f***ed and we want you to know it.

H/t Erwin at the Latin Americanist.

Even more Juanes

2009-09-24T12:55:00.000-05:00

The meaning of the concert finally revealed.

Liberation studies

2009-09-23T17:57:00.004-05:00

Today I was reading a book of essays by Stephen Schwartz, an ex-Communist who wrote quite a bit for conservative publications in the 1990s and is now a convert to Islam and director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. On Che Guevara, he wrote in the Weekly Standard in 1997:

Still, Che will not be forgotten entirely. The University of Buenos Aires has announced a department of Che Guevara studies, which will analyze the future of “liberation” in Latin America. It would be better for Latin America if Che’s memory were to remain a quaint regional phenomenon, like the cult of Evita. Or the tango.

I found this to be a scurrilous and ill-advised attack on the tango and a dramatic misreading of its exploding international appeal.

Kahlo forgeries

2009-09-23T17:15:00.004-05:00

About a month ago I was speaking to a specialist on Mexican art who insisted to me that the recent exhibitions on Frida Kahlo were full of forgeries. And lo, it seems to be so. But what do the forgeries say?

Kristol

2009-09-21T22:19:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens does the best eulogies of the intellectuals of the twentieth century. Come back, Hitch.

Failed states: Michigan and California?

2009-09-21T22:14:00.002-05:00

I've had the opportunity to spend some time in both Detroit and Northern California recently. It's important to remember that Detroit contains jewels of great splendor, like the Institute of Fine Arts, built in prosperous days. Detroit, largely rust and blight today, was once the fourth largest city in the world.

California, you have been warned.

Zelaya returns to Honduras

2009-09-21T16:33:00.002-05:00

It's pretty clear now that Mel Zelaya is back inside the borders of Honduras, in the Brazilian Embassy. In denying that Zelaya is in Honduras, the de facto government is wrong but technically correct: Zelaya's in Brazilian territory. But in Honduras. If you take my meaning.

Follow the exciting developments at the excellent blog Honduras Coup 2009.

ACORN

2009-09-19T12:01:00.002-05:00

The right-wing guerrilla journalists who pretended to be a pimp and a prostitute and who were able to get many ACORN offices to give them tax advice (including on how to take advantage of child prostitutes) have created considerable excitement in the right-wing blogosphere. A few on the left have stuck up for the organization, like Joe Conason of Salon, while simultaneously acknowledging that "working in the nation's poorest places, and hiring the people who live there, ACORN is not immune to the pathologies that can afflict institutions in those communities." (See also Michael Tomasky.) The employees who gave that advice have been fired, and ACORN will, at minimum, conduct an internal audit of its operations.

I have two things to add. First, this all strikes me as pretty healthy. Precisely because no one is immune to corruption, it's important to have an opposition that will look for wrongdoing among by political opponents. It's why, as someone with feet planted firmly on the left, I would really like a not-insane and responsible right. Of course this investigation is "unfair" to an organization that has done much good work and of course the right hasn't looked at the voter fraud committed by its own side. That's our job, and hopefully this prompts ACORN to improve its operations.

My second observation relates to tax advice. Clearly a lot of very low income people need advice in preparing their taxes, particularly so that they become eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit--an idea which, in better days, would have had bipartisan support. (Milton Friedman was for it, and Jason DeParle makes it look like one of the best government programs in his book about welfare reform American Dream.) Naturally, in communities where there are not a lot of jobs, there will also be people engaged in illegal activity, and I suppose they need tax advice too. I would only note that once you get into the upper-middle class, most people pay a tax professional to prepare their taxes. And the whole point of paying a tax professional to do your taxes is that that person will be able to find ways to get you out of paying taxes that is greater than the amount that you will pay that person for his or her services. Some of this is basically legal, and some of is quite questionable. But no one bats an eyelash at this basically institutionalized form of tax cheating. But the law prevents rich and poor alike from sleeping under the bridge, etc.

More Juanes

2009-09-19T11:55:00.002-05:00

New York Times on the Juanes concert:

The Cuban government, after Juanes visited in June, also signed on. Juanes said he told officials that he was not a Communist and that he would play only if the government’s role were kept to a minimum. “We asked for no meetings, no politicians, no hosts onstage,” Juanes said...Now, all eyes turn to the Cuban government, which, despite its criticism in state media of those in Miami who have opposed the concert, is showing signs of concern. Officials have limited visas for some international news outlets. A handful of high-profile dissidents and independent journalists in Cuba have endorsed the concert, a stance that may have raised hackles in official Havana.

Cultural Cold War in Cuba

2009-09-19T00:38:00.003-05:00

Directed to Cuban magazine La Jiribilla for coverage of the upcoming Paz sin Fronteras concert, I came across an article (really just a summary of a book published years ago) about the old cultural cold war. The politics of scholarship about the cultural cold war are in themselves rather interesting; it's not some kind of mysterious error that Frances Stonor Saunders' book about the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom has been published in a Cuban edition, but not, say, in a Mexican one: ginning up anger about the CIA's omnipresent malevolence is still good politics in Cuba. I'm not going to defend what the CIA did, but really, Cuba? I assume La Jiribilla is a government-subsidized magazine. At any rate, Cuba's Casa de las Américas was a excellent government-sponsored magazine, just like the CIA's Encounter. So stand tall, Cuba, you should be proud of your cultural cold war.

Because the Saunders book says almost nothing about the CIA's role in Latin America, the review doesn't either. But Yamascuma knows a lot about this subject. At this time, he would only like to point out to Cuban that your hero-Foreign Minister, the redoubtable Raúl Roa, was a member of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A pretty important one. That Mario Llerena, a CCF employee, played a significant role in the New York exile office of the 26th of July movement in the late 1950s, making sure that the Matthews New York Times article that proved that Castro was still alive made it back to Cuba. (Llerena later quit the 26th of July Movement, before victory.) And that the Cuban association of the CCF was shut down by Batista and its magazine confiscated; that future UN ambassador Raulito Roa also received training there; and that its offices were in the same building that today houses the Casa de las Américas. Just because the acknowledgment of irony is one of the first casualties of revolution doesn't mean that History stops producing it...

An ethnic minority

2009-09-19T00:18:00.004-05:00

Stunning poll results (conducted by Kos), turned into a nifty graph by Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly:

Joshua Tucker at the political science blog The Monkey Cage comments:

I have no a priori knowledge about the reliability of the Daily Kos poll, but even if it had a generally left or right wing bias, that still shouldn’t affect the variation across regions. While I am not surprised that the Republican party is more popular in the South than other regions, the starkness of this distinction is beyond what I had expected. Moreover, while I would have expected the Republican party to be unpopular in the Northeast, I did not expect such similar numbers from the West and Midwest. Quite seriously, if I saw this type of regional distribution of support for a political party in a country like Slovakia, I would assume the party represented an ethnic minority.

Isn't the obvious explanation that the Republican Party does represent an ethnic minority: Southern whites? Heckuva job, Bushie.

I would also point out if politics were the free market the Republican Party would be out of business, but survives due to what amount to political subsidies given to it by the peculiarities of the US Constitution and the fact that it can serve a useful function to certain corporations.

Mujica

2009-09-18T23:16:00.004-05:00

José Mugica, former guerrilla and likely the next president of Uruguay, in an interview with Argentina's La Nación:

-Usted apostó a la lucha armada para llegar al poder y conseguir cierto tipo de sociedad y ahora está a punto de conseguirlo, pero lo podrá hacer por los votos. Lo habrá pensado más de una vez, ¿no?

-Lo que pasa es que por la vía armada tampoco llegábamos a la tierra prometida. Ahora tampoco. Los dos momentos tienen una cosa en común.

-Ahora está mucho más acompañado.

-Seguro, y es mucho más liviano, pero uno ya no se propone cambiar el mundo.

-¿Qué se propone?

-Subir un par de escalones. Después, otros van a seguir.

-¿Una etapa más reformista que revolucionaria?

-Francamente, sí. Hay que hacer reformas positivas, pero que no se agoten con uno.

-¿Qué es hoy ser revolucionario, a diferencia de los años sesenta o setenta?

-[Se toma unos segundos] Tener una sensibilidad grande hacia los problemas sociales. Me siento apuntalando cosas que son revolucionarias. Lo he hecho tranquilamente en todos estos años. Debe de haber unos 3000 trabajadores que están tratando de mandarse a sí mismos.

-¿Experiencias de autogestión?

-Sí, las he apuntalado en todo lo que he podido. Porque ser jefe de uno mismo debe de ser lo más difícil. Cuando la gente se acostumbró a que le paguen todos los meses, a tener una rutina, a cumplir un horario y después, "chau, a mi casa".

-¿La revolución de hoy es cambiarle la vida cotidiana a la gente, el día a día?

-No se puede intentar agarrar el poder cuando no se sabe lo que se va a hacer con él. Y los trabajadores no pueden agarrar el poder porque son dependientes. Ese es un factor que no lo medíamos hace 40 años. Porque después le sale un engendro que es la burocracia.

That's a pretty clear statement of what has been gained and what has been given up as the revolutionary left has become more moderate (many would say more mature). It works better, but it's not for dreamers.

Two little notes: the introduction says that Mujica would be the first former guerrilla to become a president in Latin America. But that's not so: Daniel Ortega surely has him beat. But is Ortega the first (and the only other one)? That's a pretty poor record of political success...

The other thing is that I wish that more former guerrillas would get themselves on record about their experiences. Somebody should do an oral history project. And I don't just mean, self-servingly, for the people who have become disillusioned, like me. For everybody...

Kristol dead at 89

2009-09-18T17:06:00.002-05:00

Irving Kristol, one of the first neoconservatives, father of Bill Kristol, editor of Commentary, briefly of Encounter, founder of the Public Interest and the National Interest, an intelligent if disagreeable man, has died.

I can't get no respect-able anticommunism

2009-09-18T12:02:00.003-05:00

Why did the US government make alliances with European socialists and other lefties, to which it was supposedly hostile, in the early days of the Cold War? The obvious and correct answer is: shared anticommunism, but of course that's just the beginning of analysis. Here's a tidbit from an interesting Salon article about Glenn Beck's favorite "historian":

When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."

In other words: respectable anticommunism, please. Even from the FBI, which was more conservative than both State and CIA.

Heavy rains

2009-09-16T13:25:00.003-05:00

The flooding in Tlanepantla, courtesy of failblog:

On a more serious note, the drought conditions followed by heavy rains have been terrible for crops in many regions of Mexico, and represent a serious crisis in both human and environmental terms.

Jackass-gate is not a real hotel

2009-09-16T00:53:00.002-05:00

Surely you have all been on tenterhooks for the last few days awaiting yamascuma's opinion about Kanye West/Taylor Swift/"jackass"-gate. Unfortunately I was assiduously ignoring it, but now Wife of Yamascuma wanted to see the videos, and what I can say is the following:

Kanye West may be a jackass but he was sure right; Taylor Swift's video is lousy. Yamascuma is not, however, in the target market of 14-year-old girls who like "country" music and would be hot except their glasses are too big.
I do not understand anything about music videos, but to my eye Kanye had by far the most interesting video (as well as the best song) among the video of the year contestants-- including Beyonce, who won in that category.
President Obama has a pretty good sense of humor but he'll soon learn again not to express it, even in private. Leave President Obama ALOOOOOONE!!

How to think about cultural diplomacy, plus Juanes

2009-09-15T21:16:00.004-05:00

Judging the impact of "cultural"/ideological diplomacy is difficult. Historians agree that, at times, its impact has been significant. But how significant? Does cultural diplomacy influence foreign opinion? There are some clear examples where it has. The the KGB-attributed story, for example, that the US government was responsible for distributing crack cocaine and AIDS in US urban ghettos, has some purchase at the margins of US opinion. But even the impact of that is hard to gauge. I think that the best way to think about cultural diplomacy is not as a way of changing opinion, but as a signaling technique.

We know, for example, that labor unrest spikes not in times of duress, but when political leaders signal that they will use government power to side with labor instead of business. Slave revolts, too, have traditionally occurred when the slaves decide that conditions, including international conditions, are likely to aid in the success of their revolt. (Emilia Viotti Da Costa's Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood contains a nice argument along these lines.) Cultural diplomacy can prove people with these kinds of signals. All of the pro-democracy and anti-fascist propaganda put out by the United States in Latin America before and during World War II probably didn't create new democrats, but it signaled that the United States would side with them, and against authoritarian arrangements, if the democrats came to power. The end of the war saw a great expansion of democratic governance in the continent, which enjoyed US support.

Of course, if a government action's contradict its cultural messages then the actions speak louder than words. When the onset of the diplomatic arrangements of the Cold War settled into place a few years later, the US signaled through treaties and words the primacy of anti-Communism over the protection of democracy. This is used by many governments to lock in repressive actions, and the pro-democracy wave in Latin America was halted or rolled back in many countries. (A more specific example was the Radio Free Europe broadcasts that sent the signal that those who rose up against Communist domination would receive support from the West. The belief was false; the 1956 uprising was crushed, and RFE adopted a more cautious tone going forward.)

That long preliminary aside, I'm interested in the signals being sent by the concert that the Colombian singer Juanes is trying to hold in Cuba for his Paz sin Fronteras program. I haven't found anyone who thinks it is a bad idea. The blogger Yoani Sànchez, a Castro critic, favors it, and so do lots of Cubans on the street that she and other bloggers talked to:
Hillary Clinton seems to support it. So does living legend/relic trovador Silvio Rodrìguez, who represents the old Castrophile cultural establishment (and will reportedly play at the concert). We'll have to watch as the concert unfolds, but I suspect the way to read this is as a signal that Cuba is ready for greater openness to the rest of the world; certainly that how I read Silvio's statement. In any case, we'll learn soon enough.

CCSRWM

2009-09-12T12:29:00.002-05:00

Ex-conservative Mark Lilla writes about Berkeley's new Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements. Which is a fine idea. But one wants to know: why should liberals be the only people taking conservative ideas seriously and learning about their histories? Conservatives don't.

Escape

2009-09-10T23:52:00.002-05:00

Latin America is not just about the drug trade. It's also about the hippos that the drug trade leaves behind.

Hijacking

2009-09-10T00:21:00.002-05:00

Fortunately, the hostage situation on today's hijacked plane in Mexico was resolved without death or injury. It seems to be the work of a disturbed Bolivian pastor, convinced that the the date (9/9/09) was an inversion of the mark of the beast (666), and he needed all of Mexico's help to pray to avoid catastrophe. I don't mean to make light of a very serious situation, but somebody should have told him that the real number of the beast is 616, and either the date 9/1/09 passed without incident earlier this month, or in January, depending on whether God uses MM/DD/YY or DD/MM/YY. (I'm guessing the latter, as the U.S.-style MM/DD/YY seems singularly inappropriate for a deity.)

The other fortunate thing about today's incident was that it was largely pushed off the air by Obama-health-care related news (good speech...thanks brother Obama), and so I hope will have little impact on the willingness of people to fly and around Mexico. Last quarter, the Mexican economy shrank at a 10% annualized rate, and conditions have deteriorated visibly in many parts of the country. Between the effects of the global financial crisis, the housing crash in the United States hitting remittances hard, President Calderòn's war on string, and the swine flu, many Mexicans wonder what else God could throw at them to make life difficult. God's latest messenger of destruction turned out to a nutty pastor (imagine that), but his timing was bad, thank God.

The sectarian politics of Microsoft Word

2009-09-09T23:03:00.003-05:00

Trotsky's supporters are properly known as Trotskyists, but their political opponents, both Communist and social-democratic, called them "Trotskyites." It's an insulting and needlessly political term. But Microsoft Word thinks that "Trotskyist" is spelled in error, and suggests: "Trotskyite." Zombie Stalin strikes again!

Troop build-up

2009-09-07T19:38:00.001-05:00

When considering sending additional troops to Afghanistan, it's important to consider these important insights from General Bonkers.

Pop

2009-09-06T14:29:00.004-05:00

As fast as health care costs in the United States have risen over the last few years, the price of higher education even faster. It doesn't take a degree in economics to realize that this sort of thing can't go on indefinitely. And indeed, the next bubble to pop may be higher education: here's an important article about cheap online education, and one about the high cost of brick-and-mortar. I expect that this will unfold like a slow but accelerating bleed, like journalism, but not really for another ten years or so.

Beck and call

2009-09-05T01:34:00.003-05:00

Glenn Beck has a theory (clearly drawing on the "work" of Jonah Goldberg) that modern progressivism, Fascism, and Communism are somehow all connected (though exactly what they all have in common is left as an exercise for the viewer), and he's going to prove it to you by explaining some murals at Rockefeller Center and the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

If one can set aside the seriously corrosive effect that Beck has on the political conversation in the United States, the most interesting moral issue that remains is whether or not to respond to his "analysis" as if it were some sort of considered logical argument or whether doing so dignifies it and places it on equal footing with real serious thought, thereby lowering the overall level of quality of thought and discourse. Not knowing the answer to that question, I think that the best way to proceed is to make fun of Beck.

Rich at the Mex Files makes a good start, but I am going to proceed by proving that, according to his own style of reasoning, Beck is a secret Communist. First, I will simply note that in GoldbergBeckLand, nothing that happened since the days of the Popular Front is relevant to contemporary politics, but the 1920s and 1930s are highly relevant. Secondly, I am allowed to choose selectively from convenient facts to prove a point. Therefore I will only note that, today's "progressives," the closest thing to social democrats that exist in the U.S. political landscape, were accused of being "social-fascists" by the Communist Party, complete sell-outs to the bourgeoisie (until the rise of Hitler forced an accommodation, but never mind). Q: Who, may I ask, is comparing progressives to fascists these days? A: why it's Glenn Beck, whose reasoning is so similar to the Communist line that if he isn't a Commie, he may as well be one. QED.

Seis veces

2009-09-03T21:10:00.002-05:00

This video, from Argentine humorist Pedro Capusotto, is good for a couple of laughs as he needles Latino barrio culture and its musical forms in the United States and, I suppose, the circum-Caribbean:

It reminds me of a story that I heard about the founder of the New York City/Santiago, Chile business, "Nuts 4 Nuts," supposedly started by a Chilean immigrant to New York who, on making his fortune, adopted the "big gold chains" look that its utterly antithetical to fashion sense in the Chilean working class. (NYT takes a look at a part of that story here, with an eye on Chile-Argentina conflict.) It's also worth mentioning that Santiago-based rivals have spawned a company called "Nuts 5 Nuts" (must be 1 better than Nuts 4 Nuts, right?), and that the reason that I found this so funny was totally incomprehensible to everyone I tried to explain it to in Chile.

Mexico-Costa Rica

2009-09-03T21:05:00.003-05:00

President Óscar Arias of Costa Rica is predicting that his national side, currently the points leader in the division which includes Mexico and the United States, will defeat Mexico 3-1.

Alas, that's about what I would put the score in the "de facto Micheletti government vs. the redoubtable Costa Rican," contest, with Micheletti clearly in the lead. What that means for soccer I cannot guess.

Housekeeping and a correction

2009-09-03T20:44:00.003-05:00

I'm back again in a stable situation after my third move in four months (and what will be five in seven), and normal blogging should resume shortly.
I'm annoyed that blogger doesn't make it easy to produce accents, but I've decided that it's disrespectful not to include them (on names and the like) and so I'm going to make a special effort from now on.
New commenter Paul Escobar points out that one story that I reference below (Hugo Chávez thinks Chomsky is dead before his time) was based on misreporting by the New York Times, and points to this correction. It shows that Cháclearly knew that Chomsky was alive and was referring to the perfectly deceased John Kenneth Galbraith. Thanks for the correction--I'm always happy to hear when I've made an error of fact and see it as one of the great assets of blogging that we can be informed of, and quickly respond, to our mistakes. So thank you to all of my readers.

Aldaily

2009-08-28T00:06:00.004-05:00

Arts & Letters Daily is a must-read for a lot of nerdy humanities types; it posts three links a day to articles and reviews of interest on the web. It editor, Dennis Dutton, has been posting for ten years. These days I subscribe to aldaily in my RSS feed, but probably only click through to a link once every couple of weeks. Although Mr. Dutton and I share one obsession (the history of Marxism), he is also known for being an enviro-skeptic, and so I'm afraid he has posted an extraordinary number of irritating articles over the years.

Today was a green-skepticism trifecta, and so I took the plunge. Alas, the results were not good. This article from the not-as-cleverly-contrarian-as-it-used-to-be Economist observes that computers now generate as many harmful emissions as airplanes (2% of the world total each). Yes. But. Not. To. Belabor. The. Obvious. But. Computers run off...of...electricity. Projecting forward, it's not too hard to imagine cleanly-generated electricity. No one really knows how to address jet exhaust except through better plane design (which can really help--up to 50%!), in addition to which jet exhaust emissions are particularly damaging because they are released so high in the atmosphere. If even I can debunk this argument, it must not be a very good one. And that, I'm afraid, is typical.

Chomsky goes to Venezuela

2009-08-27T23:54:00.003-05:00

Remember back when Chavez publicly lamented the death of Noam Chomsky, only to learn that Chomsky wasn't in fact dead? Well let's hope Mr. Chavez has remembered that, because otherwise he must believe he is talking to a zombie, as Chomsky has apparently paid him a visit.

At the link, you will also learn that when Chavez was a candidate for president oh so many years ago, he buttered up a Spanish audience by telling them how much he admired Ortega y Gasset's The Rebellion of the Masses. In all likelihood, that was nothing more than a superficial pander. But because of the existence of a common misconception due to almost everyone not having read that book, it's worth pointing out that the The Rebellion of the Masses is not the left-wing book that it sounds like it should be from the title. In fact, Ortega y Gasset is incredibly alarmed by the rise of mass politics and basically spends the course of the text defending what we would today called elite culture against the incursion of mass taste. Writing in the 1930s, he's obviously worried about the rise of populist fascism in Europe, but his fear of the masses has some undeniable anti-democratic overtones as well. That is all.

UPDATE: Remember back when Chavez publicly lamented the death of Noam Chomsky, only to learn that Chomsky wasn't in fact dead? Turns out it never happened, and was based on misreporting and a garbled translation by the New York Times. Thanks to commenter Paul Escobar for the correction.

A military coup

2009-08-27T23:50:00.002-05:00

The U.S. State Department finally clears that technical hurdle of calling the coup in Honduras a "military coup" (there are legislative coups, for example, which are different), and that comes with sanctions. About damn time.

Greg Weeks thinks State may have been running upstream against Mrs. Clinton, who has some unpleasant former colleagues working for the de facto government. Now would be a fine time to remember that during the Democratic primaries, the main difference between the Obama and Clinton camps was supposed to be on foreign policy, where Obama had some fresher ideas and represented more of a break with the past. (On domestic policy they were roughly equivalent, and, as we knew at the time and see now, what gets done domestically is largely the result of what the 60th most conservative Senator wants to see happen.) Then, Obama got elected and put Clinton in charge of his foreign policy. Oh well.

War on drugs fail

2009-08-25T21:28:00.000-05:00

Why we still need journalism, Ben Wallace-Wells edition:

"If you had asked me at the outset," Everingham says, "my guess would have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source countries in South America" — that it would be possible to stop cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market, it turned out, was drug treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, "but it works." The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.

Read it.

Nelson interview

2009-08-25T21:16:00.002-05:00

An interview with Brian Nelson, who wrote The Silence and the Scorpion. The interview is an excellent summary of his major arguments.

Extremism in the defense of vice is no liberty

2009-08-20T22:10:00.004-05:00

A few years ago, Adam Hochschild wrote a searching and intellectually serious work of extended reportage about Russians and the memory of the gulag. In one particularly memorable passage, he goes and talks to a woman who is the head of the what is, effectively, the Stalin fan club. What kind of a person would hold Stalin as a misunderstood hero, with all that is now known about his crimes? This is the comparison that Hochschild makes:

Although she may be a specimen of a mind-set from the Russia of fifty years ago, Kornienkova reminded me greatly of people much closer to home: John Birch Society members I had spent time with in Southern California. One similarity was her obsession with Jewish conspiracies. Another was her pursed-lips distress at the rise of pornography. But the most striking was her constant, exultant, voluminous references to all sorts of written sources. Anyone who has read the outpourings of the American paranoid right will recognize this curious, pseudo-academic style of argument. Its practitioners assume that you can prove any point by the massed weight of citations to documents, no matter whether the document is fact or opinion, applicable or irrelevant, a statistic or a wild charge by another raving Bircher. Kornienkova, too, practically spoke in footnotes.*

It's a surprising and illuminating comparison. I thought of it this week because of all of the rantings of the paranoid right that the United States has been dealing with in the health care debate. But the implications of Hochschild's comparison are clearly that this sort of thought is not confined to what is conventionally referred to as the right. What seems to be necessary to animate these sorts of patterns of behavior is a deep sense of grievance, which then accompanies an unwillingness to empathize with the sufferings of others. Seen in this way, the gangs of Chavistas committing assault against Venezuelan journalists, operating in an environment of official demonization of the opposition(s), are the Venezuelan equivalent of the U.S. town-hall screamers. Both groups cannot accept that the sufferings of others has become more legitimate than their own increasingly imaginary sense of victimization.

* As a footnote to the mention of the lady-who-speaks-in-footnotes, I will say that this isn't a new phenomenon. In the late 1940s, the Soviet "anti-cosmopolitan" rhetoric was both anti-Jewish and anti-American, identifying America with "Chicago": gangsters, crime, vice, and cultural trash. Conservatives in the United States were voicing similar complaints about U.S. culture; both critiques were based on a fear of liberalism.

Private assassins

2009-08-19T22:20:00.003-05:00

The New York Times is reporting that the CIA used private contractor Blackwater in a secret program to hunt down and assassinate Al Qaeda leaders. The CIA lied to congress about this program. Apparently no one was ever captured or killed.

When the last row over CIA misconduct led to congressional hearings, in the mid-1970s, President Ford forbade the CIA from carrying out assassinations. But presidents since have largely ignored that order, although I suspect there haven't been any attempts to assassinate foreign heads of state. At the time, the CIA's most serious assassination target had been, of course, Fidel Castro, and several failed attempts were made to kill him (poisoned milkshake, exploding conch shell, really crazy stuff). The CIA also subcontracted with the Blackwater of its day, the Mafia, to do the job. One reading of this at the time was that the CIA didn't have any professional assassins, which was supposed to be comforting. I'm not sure if I feel better or worse that instead of the Mafia, these days there's a for-profit business that you can hire to do this sort of thing.

Had in Honduras

2009-08-19T22:07:00.004-05:00

I've been pretty bullish in this space on the Obama administration's response to the coup in Honduras and the chance that it would lead to a resolution that would result in a reversal of the illegal action. I think that it's time to admit that I've been had. First, by the Obama Administration, which seems to have all but given up on the issue (there are no State Dept. press releases in almost a month). Two, by the de facto government of Honduras, which successfully used the talks and sent out enough signals that it was negotiating in good faith to delay any transfer of power. If I had to make a prediction now, it would be that they continue this pattern up through the expiration of Zelaya's term. Meanwhile, whether or not he said what he said in the title of the article ("Help me, Empire!"), Zelaya is arguing that real U.S. pressure could see him restored in "five minutes." So, for the record, I was wrong.

Greg Weeks is still doing a good job with day-to-day-ish coverage.

Inappropriate thought of the day

2009-08-18T21:19:00.002-05:00

The similarities between Hugo Chavez and Lazaro Cardenas tarnish the latter's legacy. Discuss.

H/t to my reader.

Democracy and municipal corruption

2009-08-17T22:24:00.002-05:00

AmericasBarometer has a slightly tautological paper out on democracy and municipal corruption in Latin America. It's slightly tautological because democracy is measured by Freedom House standards of grades of political rights and civil liberties, which sort of just stands in for effective state functioning, which makes the conclusion (people who live in effective democracies are less likely to be asked to pay bribes at the municipal level) unsurprising. That said, I don't mean to be too critical because I do think it's an important result, and there's a related issue which is something that I've changed my mind about.

I used to think that there was a case for thinking of low-level corruption as a form of wealth redistribution (cops who augment their salary from traffic ticket workarounds, for example, are certainly a form of "progressive" redistribution of wealth.) But I was wrong to think that way. Because corrupt officials are almost by definition government employees, corruption of any kind has the effect of reducing confidence in government efficacy. This can happen "even" in democracies (Cuba in the Grau-Prio years is a great example) and the political systems that emerge when people have lost faith in democracy to solve problems are worth doing quite a lot to avoid. Like it or not, the state remains the backstop guarantor of social justice in the modern nation-state arrangement, and we need to fight to keep the state as effective as possible to achieve greater justice in the future.

Malign intentions

2009-08-17T21:37:00.002-05:00

Everybody's all over the document release from FRUS today, via the National Security Archive, in which Nixon and Brazilian dictator Medici plot to get rid of Salvador Allende in Chile. On the one hand, this is a sterling reminder that Nixon and Kissinger were evil men who put U.S. foreign policy to evil ends. But that's old news. As a historical matter, I think that the degree to which foreign intervention led to the downfall of the Allende regime is usually exaggerated in the U.S., since we often look at things from the perspective of U.S. involvement. But just because the U.S. was involved on the side of evil doesn't mean that it played a large role in making evil happen. (The Chilean policy of import-substitution-evil was quite successful in creating native Chilean evil, so yanqui evil was not required.) And I have to say these released documents do nothing but spread the blame around even further, now to include Brazil--although there's not really anything there that indicates that Brazil actually did play any significant role either. Most of the blame belongs in Chile, of course, and Arturo Valenzuela's book on the breakdown of a democratic regime is still the best account of what happened in those dispiriting years, even though we've had lots of U.S. declassifications in the years since it's been published.

FLACSO

2009-08-17T20:59:00.002-05:00

Bad news for social science in Mexico as it turns out that Flacso-Mexico's pensions were invested with mega-fraudster Sir Allen Stanford. On top of that, Jorge G. Castaneda was working for as an advisor to Stanford...so...um...I guess that's a first for a former Cuban spy.

His basic proscription for the left (internal democracy, so it can contribute to democracy in the hemisphere) is still correct, though.