Roett, CSPAN

My adviser at Johns Hopkins, Riordann Roett, was on CSPAN the other day being interviewed about Latin American issues. The wide-ranging, 42-minute discussion is worth watching, with Prof. Roett arguing that the ideological diversity in Latin America means the U.S. should no longer attempt to design policies for the entire region. The era of the Alliance for Progress or even the Free Trade Area of the Americas is over, he argues. "We really don't have a policy toward Latin America," he says. "Latin America is so diverse."

Some highlights from the interview:

• The U.S. embargo, Roett argues, is keeping the Castros in power.
• U.S. demand for drugs, Roett argues, is largely responsible for Mexico's drug war.
• "There are three or four governments that work with President Chávez," Roett argues, and "in most cases, they're ruining their country."
  

Costa Rica seminar

I'm speaking on a panel later this month about the Costa Rican elections. I'll have more to say on Small State immediately after (or maybe even before) Sunday's vote, and I'll also be blogging about the way rising crime in San José, where I led a research trip in November, played out as an election issue, the topic I'll be discussing on the panel.

In the meantime, the AP reports today that "Costa Rican voters appear likely to elect the country's first female president, a protege of Nobel laureate Oscar Arias who holds a nearly 20-point lead over two male rivals ahead of Sunday's balloting."

Truth commissions

I was interested to read on Joshua Frens-String's excellent Hemispheric Brief that Honduran President Pepe Lobo's decision to create a truth commission to investigate human rights abuses and other antidemocratic activities since the June 2009 coup came "at the urging of the United States." On Jan. 22, at a panel discussion in Washington, I asked the new U.S. ambassador to Uruguay, David D. Nelson, to react to the failure in Uruguay of a referendum last October that would have stripped human rights violators of immunity from prosecution for crimes committed during Uruguay's Cold War dictatorship. "Each country has to deal with the restoration of democracy in their own way," he replied. "The Uruguayans want to look toward the future."

Now, truth commissions are not the same thing as prosecutions. In Uruguay, despite limited access to official documents, there is ample research and public debate examining the crimes of the authoritarian era. There have even been some prosecutions in cases where the amnesty does not apply. Moreover, Hondurans will be investigating events that occurred less than a year ago, whereas Uruguay restored democracy in the early 1980s. Still, this apparent contradiction makes me curious about how the U.S. (publicly and behind-the-scenes, consistently or inconsistently) regards its role in the difficult debates in Brazil, Uruguay and elsewhere in Latin America over how much energy should be expended grappling with the trauma's of the region's troubled recent history.

UPDATE: Citing the Tegucigalpa-based newspaper La Tribuna, Hemispheric Brief reports that U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, has come out against the proposed truth commission. It's time, Rohrabacher said at a press conference in Honduras following a three-day visit, to "cerrar el libro y caminar hacia adelante."

Toast to globalization

The Latin American Thought blog has an interesting item about the way marketers link "beer and national pride." A new campaign to boost sales of Quilmes in Argentina (watch two examples below) "creatively evokes the tried and true marketing relationship between linking a beer to its country or place of origin."



The ads comically emphasize the origin of Quilmes in a medium-sized city outside Buenos Aires. "As many politicians and political strategists can attest, nationalism sells."



What struck me about the ad campaign was that Quilmes is not even locally owned anymore. As anyone who has followed the beer industry knows, incredible consolidation has put nearly all major breweries in the hands of a few giant multinational corporations. South Africa's SABMiller owns Grolsch, Miller, Peroni, as well as a range of Latin American beers including Costa Rica's favorite, Imperial. In January, Heineken bought the beer operations of Mexico's Femsa for $7.6 billion, acquiring Dos Equis and Tecate. In July 2008, the Belgian brewer InBev bought Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion. InBev now owns Stella Artois, Becks, Budweiser, Hoegaarden and Bass among other global brands. In Latin America, it sells Brazil's Brahma and, yes, Argentina's beloved Quilmes. (In Argentina, where per capita beer consumption is 41 liters annually, InBev controls 74.4 percent of the market.)

In Uruguay, where Pilsen and Patricia lock horns in a cutthroat Coke-Pepsi grudge match, InBev now controls both brands, as well as the ubiquitous bottled water Salus, I'm pretty sure. (In all, that gives Inbev a 97.1 percent market share in Uruguay, where locals guzzle down 23.5 liters of beer annually.) It's a strange phenomenon. Just as Argentines take pride in Quilmes, Uruguayans feel so connected to Patricia and Salus that a visit to the rural, privately owned industrial park where they are bottled has become a popular excursion.





If the revelation that Salus and Patricia are foreign owned discourages a visit you had planned, you may well be better off. When I stopped by Parque Salus in November 2008 with my wife and in-laws, a tour guide sent us on a long, unmarked path through locked fences and across uneven terrain crisscrossed by streams and inhabited by tarantulas.

Photos by Benjamin N. Gedan.

'Quiero dedicarte esta canción'

A friend of mine, the photographer Jacob L. Silberberg, passed along a feature story from Colombia he helped illustrate. It's a haunting profile of "Kidnap Radio," a radio program that gives relatives of FARC hostages a chance to send messages to kidnapped loved ones. At one point, the narrator, New York City journalist Annie Correal, interviews her father about his time as a hostage, when he was held "deep in the jungle" and stayed up all night, desperately adjusting a hand-held radio for better reception, hoping to hear his wife and children call out his name on "Kidnap Radio." "Your heart always pounds," he says.

"These days, the number of new kidnappings is way down, there's just a few hundred a year. And that's a good thing. But it conceals something basic. The fact is that thousands of people who were kidnapped never came back. There are thousands of families who are still waiting for their husbands and fathers to be released."

Listen to the full piece here: http://transom.org/?p=6037.

Central American dignitaries

Just as the U.S. gets ready to extradite Manuel Noriega to France (he has been held since he surrendered in 1990, was convicted in 1992 of cocaine trafficking, racketeering and money laundering and was held beyond the end of his sentence, in 2007, as he fought extradition), U.S. authorities are moving to arrest former Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo for allegedly embezzling tens of millions of dollars and laundering $6.5 million through American banks.

Coincidence? Or is it U.S. policy to always have at least one Central American president in prison at any time?

On the other hand

I read Slate's piece arguing that President Obama, his liberal domestic agenda floundering, may by necessity end up positioning himself as a "foreign-policy president." Then I came upon Walter Russell Mead's "The Carter Syndrome," in Foreign Policy, which makes the case that Obama would actually prefer to pull back the U.S. presence in the world. Obama, Mead says, is "a man struggling to reconcile his worldview with the weight of inherited problems."

I don't fully agree with either argument. As I've blogged previously, all modern U.S. presidents are "foreign policy presidents" for reasons "political, psychological and military-industrial-complex-ial." (In the distant past, it was possible, though never uncontroversial, for the U.S. to look inward. America, John Adams once said, "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.") In his first year alone, Obama sent special envoys to North Korea, the Middle East and Afghanistan/Pakistan, hardly a signal of disinterest in global happenings.

However, if both Fred Kaplan (Slate) and Mead (Council on Foreign Relations) are correct (that is to say, if Obama is compelled to focus on foreign policy despite a natural reluctance) it seems like Latin America, not the Middle East or Central Asia, might be where he seeks greater engagement. At least that's what Christopher Sabatini and Jason Marczak suggest in their controversial but still interesting Foreign Policy piece, "Obama's Tango." Whereas Mead says Obama wants a smaller global footprint for the U.S., in Latin America, some old-fashioned, imperialistic bigfooting may be in order (my words, and wordplay).

Obama's attempt to position the U.S. as a "partner" in the region has a "fundamental weakness," Sabatini and Marczak argue: major regional players such as Brazil and Chile are so averse to leadership roles that the U.S. is creating a power vacuum. "Latin America's leaders, although keen to reap the benefits of a more prominent global standing, have shown themselves unwilling to address crises out of fear of domestic and regional backlash," they write. That means that even though "skepticism and latent resentment of the United States remain potent forces" in the region, "the Obama administration and Congress must strengthen ties with Brazil (cooperating on biofuels and anti-discrimination laws), Uruguay (strengthening commercial relations) and Colombia and Panama (forging free-trade agreements)."

In Latin America, China pays the piper

I was surprised by a headline, on an EFE article on the Latin American Herald Tribune, implying that in addition to mighty Google and Hillary Clinton, little Costa Rica is also standing up to China these days. Turns out, a major presidential candidate, Ottón Solís, from the left-wing Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC), has promised to name a 35,000-seat, $83 million stadium, a gift from the People's Republic of China, after China's favorite hobgoblin, the Dalai Lama. The stadium is a little thank-you present from China recognizing Costa Rica's decision, in 2007, to break ties with Taiwan. Naming it after the Dalai Lama, the Chinese Foreign Ministry says, "is not in line with the common desires of the two countries."

Solís is not expected to win next month's election. (Laura Chinchilla, of President Óscar Arias's governing centrist Partido Liberación Nacional, is the favorite.) But for a serious candidate to cross China is still surprising, given the red carpet treatment that China gets in most of Latin America. In fact, in November, traveling in San José, capital of one of the world's most democratic and environmentally progressive countries, I did not hear a single criticism of China, one of the world's most environmentally destructive and authoritarian countries. "Los Chinos," the political analyst Constantino Urcuyo told me bluntly, "son Santa Claus." René Castro, Chinchilla's jefe de campaña, is similarly unperturbed by what seem to be clashing values between Costa Rica and China. The proposed Free Trade Agreement, he told me, is a "non-issue" in the campaign. By separating human rights and economic issues, he said, "we're copying the United States." To Doris Osterlof, chairwoman of the China and Singapore Committee of the Camara de Exportadores de Costa Rica, closer ties to China are simply "logical." In early November, The Economist Intelligence Unit reports, Costa Rica and China concluded the fifth and penultimate round of talks on the proposed FTA.


By and large, U.S. diplomats have come to accept a bigger role for China in the hemisphere. At a panel discussion on Friday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, U.S. Ambassador to Brazil Thomas A. Shannon acknowledged the "globalization of many of our partners in the hemisphere," saying it was "something we can adapt to." The ambassador to Chile, Paul Simons, even stumbled upon a silver lining, saying Chinese demand for Chilean copper means higher production and greater demand for U.S.-produced mining equipment. Last May, Sec. Clinton said the growing influence of Iran and China in Latin America is "quite disturbing," but last month, she clarified that the U.S. has "no problem with any country, such as China, engaging in economic activities, business, commerce with any country anywhere."


That grudging acceptance reflects the reality that the expansion of China in America's "backyard" is not likely to abate. The Chinese Foreign Ministry recently announced that the Argentine president, Cristina Kirchner, is paying a state visit to China on Monday. Meanwhile, at Friday's panel, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, Liliana Ayalde, said the election of President Fernando Lugo means that Paraguay's relations to Taiwan are "currently being reassessed." Still, for the U.S., it is becoming increasingly clear that the conflict between China's behavior and America's core values is jeopardizing U.S.-Sino relations despite President Obama's best efforts to improve ties (an "astonishingly naive" strategy that the Heritage Foundation defines as "a refusal to take an aggressive stand against despotism"). I wonder, as Latin American nations realize that Chinese investments are primarily in extractive industries and often involve imported Chinese labor, whether Costa Rica's Ottón Solís will be the only one in the region not kowtowing to Beijing.

Photos of the new stadium in Costa Rica, a statue of the Costa Rican rana roja and a Costa Rican tamale by Benjamin N. Gedan.

Foreign policy pick-me-up

Slate's Fred Kaplan on Thursday projected a controversial endgame for (dare I say it, our embattled) president: if the loss of Ted Kennedy's Senate seat undermines Obama's entire liberal agenda, then Obama might just end up being a "foreign-policy president." I don't fully buy Kaplan's reasoning. All U.S. presidents are foreign policy presidents for reasons that are equal parts political, psychological and military-industrial-complex-ial. Plus, for now at least, the Democrats still command a commanding majority of seats in the Senate.

That said, if Obama does start to focus more on foreign affairs (a politically risky move at a time of 10 percent unemployment), there is reason to believe he might find Latin American politics more enjoyable than the domestic health care debate. Sure, the presidents of Bolivia and Venezuela are so implacably anti-yanqui that they have managed to criticize even the Haiti relief efforts. ("Hugo Chávez still needs a foil," Shannon O'Neil, a fellow in Latin American studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Thursday on the public television program WorldFocus. "There's a knee-jerk anti-imperialism, anti-yanqui sentiment that people like President Chávez will always play to and always score some easy political points on," Christopher Sabatini, senior director of policy for the Council of the Americas, said on the program.) Nevertheless, a new poll, VOA Noticias reports, has found that in Chile, Uruguay and Argentina, Obama's first year in office has created "una gran expectativa y una muy buena evaluación del presidente." Specifically, 83 percent of Chileans, 80 percent of Uruguayans and 65 percent of Argentines have a positive opinion of Obama. (In the U.S., Obama's approval rating is around 56 percent.)

In Brazil, too, feelings toward Obama are warmer than you might think given his very public disagreements with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. (Though Obama has called Lula the "most popular politician on earth," he was somewhat less flattering when Lula gave a warm welcome to the Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.) Especially for dark-skinned Brazilians, GlobalPost reports, Obama is "an idol still." In Chile, meanwhile, the election of the center-right presidential candidate Sebastian Piñera, a Harvard-trained economist, is likely to further strengthen ties to the U.S. His win, moreover, is not an isolated departure from the so-called "pink tide," but follows similar developments in places like Panama that are part of what The Washington Post is calling the "rise of the pragmatic centrist."

Down the drain

A friend of mine in Providence, Beth Daley, The Boston Globe's environmental reporter, blogged Monday about an interesting water-saving technique that is apparently being promoted by a Brazilian NGO: peeing in the shower. The unusual strategy, Daley writes on The Green Blog, could save the average household 1,000 gallons of water a year. "Who knew a leak," Daley said, "could actually conserve water?"

'Como Uruguay no hay'

Small State readers know that I'm a fan of Uruguay, but while living there in 2008, I had one major criticism: Too few Uruguayans are fans of the República Oriental. A recent feature by a Montevideo-based Voice of America reporter, Federica Narancio, tackles the subject of Uruguay's "carácter gruñón," quoting Small State as well as a platoon of down-in-the-mouth Uruguayans grumbling about the low salaries, high prices for gas and meat and the burden of Uruguay's geography ("queda perdido entre sus vecinos regionales"). "En el caso de los Uruguayos," Narancio writes, "quejarse es parte de su naturaleza."

"Los uruguayos son de las personas más pesimistas que encontrarás fuera de 'zonas de conflicto,'" observó en julio de 2008 el periodista estadounidense Benjamin Gedan en su blog Small State.

Tiene inviernos moderados, sin tornados, terremotos o maremotos, indicadores socio-económicos envidiables, un carnaval que dura un mes entero, una excelente calidad de carne y balnearios como Punta del Este, fueron algunas de las observaciones de Gedan en ese entonces. "Pero si le preguntas a un uruguayo cómo está lo más seguro es que responda: 'Estoy en la lucha,' y eso te dirá si está de buen humor," aseguró.

2008 photo at the beach in Colonia by Benjamin N. Gedan.

The Bloomberg Effect

I agree, the return of the center-right in Latin America is an interesting trend after years of hearing so much about the so-called "pink tide." But I'm also curious to hear more about what you might call the Bloomberg Effect, with super rich candidates moving from their private mansions to presidential palaces. Billionaire Sebastian Piñera, Chile's next president, is Chile's third-richest citizen, The New York Times reports, with "a financial empire that includes a controlling interest in the country's largest airline, Lan; a major television channel; and a stake in Chile's most popular soccer team." In Panama, the new center-right president is a super wealthy supermarket-chain owner. Now Latin America, like the United States, has never managed to keep money out of politics. But I can't imagine it's good for center-right political coalitions, already vulnerable to the oligarquía charge, to be known throughout the region as the parties of plutocrats.

Obama on Haiti

Escape

Tired of winter? Join me in some Southern Hemisphere daydreaming.

Uruguay's Atlantic coast, particularly Punta del Este, hardly a stranger to celebrity sightings, is all atwitter over a recent visit from la actriz Tara Reid. Montevideo Portal says Reid, fresh from posing for "la nota de tapa de la revista Playboy," traveled to Uruguay and quickly "se hizo fanática de la pizza de José Ignacio y el mate."

"La protagonista de American Pie," Infobae reports, "se hizo conocida por sus borracheras y por sus constantes fiestas con Paris Hilton."

Clubbing with Hollywood starlets not your cup of tea? There are other Punta draws. Last summer, Bon Appetit profiled the food scene in Punta, highlighting among other popular spots Casapueblo, the hotel/restaurant/studio run by artist Carlos Páez Vilaró, whose original pottery I saw the other day on display at the home of a cardiologist friend of mine in Maryland, who treated Páez Vilaró a few years back.

Photo at top by Jacob L. Silberberg.

Yellow blotches

I'm hardly some type of Cassandra, but all the infectious optimism about Latin America going into 2010 seemed a bit naive. Tuesday's tragic earthquake in Haiti and the drought in Venezuela are reminders of how vulnerable the region remains to disasters, both natural and political.

Analysts were right to be impressed with the region's relative resilience during the global economic crisis. Still, economically speaking, some of the bullishness should be attributed to rose-colored glasses. "Just as there has never been a bubble that hasn't burst in the end," analyst Peter Tasker argued in The Financial Times in a piece about investing in emerging markets, "so there has never been an investment boom that hasn't been followed by a bust."

Politically, several Latin American countries have begun 2010 with attempts to learn from past mistakes. On Monday, for example, Chile inaugurated a museum dedicated "to thousands murdered, 'disappeared' and tortured during General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship," Reuters reported. (Here's an interesting piece of Pinochet trivia, courtesy of a recent New Yorker blog post: Pinochet, "an ardent admirer of Franco," was the only head of state to attend Franco's funeral in 1975.) In Brazil, the government appears to be pushing forward with a truth commission "to investigate torture during military rule" even over the fierce objections of top military brass, according to the BBC. (In October, the BBC reported that Brazil is the "only country in Latin America which has not investigated deaths, disappearances and torture" committed by a Cold War-era dictatorship.) At the same time, however, state repression in Latin America persists. Freedom House just released its newest "Map of Freedom," and blotches of yellow cover Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia and Paraguay (all "partly free"), and a purple stain distinguishes Cuba ("not free"). While so-called "social democracy," "composed of a left that is integrated into competitive, multiparty democracies," as Uruguayan Prof. Jorge Lanzaro describes it, thrives in Uruguay, Brazil and Chile, soft authoritarianism rules the day in other parts of the region.

No cause for hopelessness. Not at all. But for sustainable progress, economic and political, Latin American leaders cannot be on commodities autopilot, and the U.S. cannot forever let Latin America play second fiddle to the Middle East (even if, as The Wall Street Journal pointed out in December, speaking of U.S. policy in the hemisphere, "economic woes have also diminished U.S. influence.") (By the by, here is a list of U.S. diplomatic initiatives in 2009 toward Latin America.)

Puente de las Américas

For light reading, I subscribe to the State Department's country "Background Notes." Here are some fun facts about Panama and for comparison, a few tidbits about Liberia.

• 30,000 square miles, about the size of South Carolina (Liberia: 43,000 square miles, about the size of Ohio)
• Population: 3.4 million, Roman Catholic 85 percent, Protestant 15 percent (Liberia: 3.5 million, Christian 85 percent, Muslim 12 percent)
• GDP: $23.09 billion ($11,700 per capita), up 2.5 percent in 2009 (Liberia: $836 million ($205 per capita), up 1.2 percent in 2009)
• Life expectancy: 77.25 years (Liberia: 45 years)