News links from the past week

09/25/10
Latin America and the Caribbean
U.S. Policy, Politics and Security

  • Venezuela holds legislative elections Sunday to replace a National Assembly that has served since 2005. Opposition parties boycotted elections that year, handing parties supportive of President Hugo Chávez near-total control of the legislature that resulted, removing a key check on presidential power. This time, amid economic crisis and concerns over rising crime, a more unified opposition seeks to make strong inroads. Polls are showing the election too close to call, with the opposition unlikely to win a majority (in part because of gerrymandering of districts), but with a strong possibility of denying President Chávez’s supporters a two-thirds majority of the Assembly.

  • “Even as some governments roll back reform, we also celebrate the courage of a President in Colombia who willingly stepped aside,” noted President Barack Obama in his speech this week before the UN General Assembly. (Never mind that Álvaro Uribe actually stepped aside because Colombia’s highest court prohibited him from running again.)

  • President Obama later met with Colombia’s new president, Juan Manuel Santos, who took office on August 7. Obama praised Santos for the raid early Tuesday that killed hardline FARC guerrilla leader Jorge Briceño, alias “Mono Jojoy.” (This raid came just days after another attack in the southern department of Putumayo killed the commander of the FARC’s 48th Front, one of the guerrilla group’s wealthiest and most deeply involved in drug trafficking.)

  • While the Obama-Santos meeting was very friendly, Colombia’s president was a bit cooler toward the U.S. administration in an interview with the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth:

We want our relations with the U.S. to evolve into a partnership. We were for many years simply aid receptors. We now call ourselves strategic allies, which sounds very pretty but we don’t find the meat.

  • Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Florida) accompanied the commander of Southern Command on a visit to Colombia’s La Macarena region, where “Mono Jojoy” was killed and where the U.S. government is backing Colombia’s so-called “consolidation” plan to retake territory from the FARC. After choppering in to La Macarena’s town center, which is firmly controlled by troops, Sen. Nelson concluded that “the Colombians, with U.S. assistance, have transformed their military into a 21st century counterinsurgency force, and it has been very effective.”

  • Peru’s government on September 13 sought to retract a presidential decree that, in effect, could have amnestied many of the Peruvian military’s most notorious human rights abusers. President Alán García did so in the face of mounting pressure from international human rights groups, and especially a strongly worded letter from Peru’s most famous novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa.

  • Ruling-party candidate Dilma Rousseff may win a first-round victory in Brazil’s October 3 presidential elections, polls indicate. However, an influence-trafficking scandal involving President Lula da Silva’s chief of staff - Rousseff’s successor in that position – may have cost her a few points.

  • Peru holds municipal elections on Sunday. Polls indicate a possibly surprising result in the Lima mayoral race: Susana Villarán, a left-of-center candidate with a human rights activist background, has come from behind and now leads her opponent, former right-of-center presidential candidate Lourdes Flores.

  • More than 6 months before Peruvians elect a new president, the daughter of jailed ex-President Alberto Fujimori leads in a recent poll. 35-year-old Keiko Fujimori, who promises to pardon her father if elected, only has the support of 24 percent of poll respondents, but that is more than any other candidate at this point.

  • Cuba announced on September 13 that it would lay off 500,000 workers in an economy that is almost entirely state-controlled. Cuba’s entire population – not its workforce, its population – is only about 11.5 million people. The impact of firing one out of every 23 men, women and children in the entire country may be difficult for modest market reforms to absorb.

  • Paraguay’s president, Fernando Lugo, fired the armed forces’ high command for the fourth time since he took office in 2008. Lugo called it a “routine leadership renewal.”