Ibero-American Politics

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

14 hours ago, matias93 said:

Well, things in Paraguay definitively escalated quickly:

Protestors put fire to the Congress building after polemic vote on presidential reelection

See? So now South American politics are literally on fire

[SecretMbr_735754 2,157]

Venezuela  down. The largest remaining oil reserve on Earth. 

[Edvarz 1,984]

As it's often the case, it's hard to make clear-cut judgements about the situation in Venezuela, that's not to say we can't condemn what's happening however. Seems to me that the reason why the takeover of the congress was reversed was not only international pressure, but rifts between 'chavismo' itself.

The saddest part about it all is that whatever social gains were made under Chávez (there were reductions in poverty and inequalty, more so than under right-wing capitalist governments like we have here in Mexico) they are now being reversed by the Maduro government's sheer ineptitude and corruption. And don't get me wrong, ineptitude and corruption are bad enough by themselves, and they have brought Venezuela dangerously close to becoming an actual dictatorship. But, if I'm assesing the situation correctly, there is still a national and international counterbalance to prevent that from happening. The thing is, you don't need to have a dictatorship to have absolute control of a country.

Democracies can be corrupted, you can have one party ruling a country for 75 uninterrupted years if it manages to play it's cards well. Let me use my own country as an example, during the 75 years of the PRI regime (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or Institutional Revolutionary Party) we have had many forms of party control ove political life, they range from use of social programs and welfare for electoral control, union corruption and corporativism, strategic alliances for media control (the Televisa network), satellite parties (the Mexican Green Party, which is only nominally green) to the most extreme measures: forced dissapearances (the 'dirty war' of the 60's and 70's) massacres (Tlatelolco '68 and the '71 'Halconazo') and outright electoral fraud (the 1988 'election' of Carlos Salinas)

All of these methods (and many more, I'm sure) were used by the PRI; and yet, during all that time, elections were held every six years, there was a bicameral legislative power, and since the 1917 constitution, we've always had freedom of assembly, even if freedom of speech was only nominal during that time, all of that made us a 'modern democracy' in the eyes of the international community. This is why Mario Vargas Llosa called Mexico 'the perfect dictatorship'. Curiously enough, Mr. Vargas Llosa hasn't been so categorical about the PRI's return in 2012...

The thing I want to note here is that there are many aspects of political intervention, and we can have one entity controlling them all if we are not careful, even in a democracy. It's these circles, however, that allow us to fight back against an overbearing power, whatever it's ideology may be. Regimes know this; often, the actions in the highest spheres are the ones that grab all the headlines (and with good reason, since it's where power is most concentrated) but we still can't ignore the many aspects in which these entities can maintain their hold on political life.

.....

As a corollary, this is why I concur to a degree with Diego's hopeful vision about the future in Mexico, I feel most hopeful about independent candidacies, especially if they come from young people who are not members of the established parties, case in hand: Pedro Kumamoto. We must take back the political spaces that the parties, especially the PRI, still control. I also trust people in the US will keep doing the same to resist Trump's fascistoid whims, preventing him from overreaching and grabbing their political lives by you know where...

[matias93 7,535]

Once again, it's Venezuela where the most upsetting things are happening: on his discourse of Workers' Day, president Maduro announced the convocatory to a Constituent Assembly, a policy he is constitutionally authorised to do (so there is no mandate breaching here).

While conventionally, constituent assemblies are only called to the task of deliberating and writing a new constitution, the current Venezuelan legal frame gives this instance the status of an State Power (equal to the Executive, Legislative, Judiciary and Electoral), thus opening the possibility that the C.A. could be called upon to override the currently opposition-dominated Legislative, the similarly called National Assembly.

As with previous Executive initiatives, the opposition legislative leaders have diagnosed the will of the government to impose a dictatorship, while Maduro has given signs that the purpose of the measure is to avoid the congressional lockdown, pointing that the call to the constituent was a heavily studied option, that was took after all negotiations with the oppositional Board of Democratic Unity (MUD, by its Spanish acronym) were exhausted.

*  *  *

Considering that the measure is completely legal under the current Venezuelan Constitution, and that only depends on the will of the president, it is almost sure that the Constituent Assembly will be convocated. But, just as on the previous iteration of extraordinary measures between government and opposition, the result is not as clear-cut as the headlines suggest: the conformation of the Constituent could determine the course of it, and which of the conflicting parties will be able to use it to advance its agenda.

And while the 1999 Constituent Assembly was overwhelmly pro-Chávez, it only was possible due to the almost absolute disarticularion and discrediting of the opposition, this is, the traditional parties that had carried the country to the economic crisis and fiscal austerity. Nowadays, is the chavista government the one that bears the responsability for the economic situation of the country, and the opposition is firmly coaligated on the MUD [this sounds overly silly in English]. It is very probable that the current election will give the government and the opposition almost equal shares of the Constituent, unless some esoteric counting method were used (something that wouldn't be very surprising, in any case).

Whichever the case becomes, this new manoeuvre will surely produce much more agitation on the country; and while is heavily improbable, I hope that this new instance gives the Venezuelans the chance to overcome their differences and to adopt a less confrontational way to resolve their political conflict.

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

Changing the subject a bit.

Some minutes ago the conservative group Direita São Paulo was doing a pacific small protest in the city of São Paulo against a recent approved immigration law by the congress - which makes extremely easy the citizenship to immigrants - when another group threw a home made grenade (I don't know it's composition) and attacked them with brass knuckles and hammers. There were injured people and a big clutter, thankfully the police was near to the local and was still able to arrest some of them. After going to the police station it was informed by the police officers that they were all muslins Syrian immigrants, they don't even speak portuguese. So far a complete silence of the press, but it doesn't really surprises me. If I see any news I post it here.

I think this is the first time on my life I see Brazilians being attacked by immigrants, that's so weird.

[TekindusT 3,809]

For the first time in the democratic Spain, a Prime Minister is declaring on the National Court regarding how he had "no idea" about the generalized corruption his party is sunk on: http://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20170726/4399095643/rajoy-gurtel-caja-b-testigo.html

The PP is so corrupt that they can't even tell the difference between corruption and real life. 

[matias93 7,535]

Well, while it's still feasible to imagine an scenario in which Rajoy wouldn't involve himself on the party finances, to me it sounds clearly false: even if dedicated to a completely different matter, a high party official would always know the basics of the party financing, and would have cause to suspect if the campaigns counted with more funds than the ones possibly coming from legal sources.

In any case, to make a difference, the accusing side now will need to demonstrate that Rajoy lied on this audience, and he was vague enough to make that very difficult.

* * *

I haven't been keeping this thread as intended, but some interesting things have happened on the region lately:

Lula gets jailed, corruption accusations extend in Brazil

Former Brazilian president Lula was formalised on corruption charges and sentenced to a 3 year jail term, rendering impossible his candidacy to a re-election. His adherents are trying to reverse the judicial result, as virtually their only chance to get back to the presidency is with Lula on the ballot.

Meanwhile, high officials from the provisional government, including the current president Michel Temer, are also being investigated for charges of corruption, depleting the opportunities of traditional politicians and parties.

Jair Bolsonaro, a far right deputy and former paratrooper, is rocketing on the polls, as his relative political isolation has keep him out of corruption charges.

Amidst legal changes, chilean parties ahead the polls divided

In Chile, presidential and legislative elections will be held in end October, with a new cohort of political parties, a new election system for the legislature, and the same fragmenting of candidacies of the past election. While on the right the mainstream parties managed to select the former president Piñera as their candidate on a conflictive but not close primary, the left-of-centre Nueva Mayoría is still negotiating a common legislative list, as the rightist wing of the NM, represented on the Christian Democracy, is carrying their own presidential candidate, the senator Carolina Goic. The other candidate, Alejandro Guiller, is a journalist and sympathiser of the Radical Party, but chose to inscribe his candidacy as independent, forcing itself to collect 36.000 signatures of independent voters.

And while an important part of the left has coalesced onto the Frente Amplio, headed by the journalist Beatriz Sánchez, several small parties have been able to inscribe candidates, as the neo-stalinist Unión Patriótica last week did.

In 2013, the last presidential election was contested by nine candidates, a record, but some estimations suggest that this year it will be surpassed.

The Spanish left takes the Portuguese example: PSOE, Podemos and IU negotiate a coalition

 

Slowly, Uruguay keeps its economy growing on a recessive region

 

Former Peruvian president Humala is formalised on corruption charges

 

After demilitarisation, FARC leaders negotiate their arrival as a political party in Colombia

 

Venezuelan opposition conducts an alternative referendum on constitutional assembly, government keeps campaigning for the official one

 

 

[Ocram's Razr 963]

http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/31/news/economy/venezuela-whats-next/index.html

The US should put sanctions on Venezuela. Preventing imports of Venezuelan crude would raise gas prices while helping Canada and Arabia while preventing exports of Light Crude to Venezuela would barely cut into profits of American petroleum companies. I recommend going after Maduro's inner circle combined with preventing US exports of light crude to Venezuela. I'd prefer it if we also embargoed Venezuelan exports of oil but some people prefer low gas prices.

 

Update: http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/31/news/economy/treasury-venezuela-president-sanctions/index.html

So far, the sanctions did not go nearly far enough.

  Edited July 31, 2017 by OcramsRzr  
New News

[matias93 7,535]

On that proposal, what's critically lacking is a clear and coherent explanation of how economic sanctions will incentive the regime to allow legitimate opposition and democratic institutions to work, or how will enable the opposition to do more through peaceful ways, or at least, how will help to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis, giving poor people access to food or health care.

The idea of economic sanctions is based on a short sighted approach, that identifies the entire nation with the will of the regime's leaders, and makes the former to post for the evils of the latter. It's a particularly absurd option when the main victims of the regime are the very people of she country.

A real solution depends on the will of the conflicting parts to find an alternative exit, where procedural democracy is restored and the current officials can abandon their positions without the risk of a full fledged trial and punishment. It's not a nice solution, nor an heroic one, as both parties have to surrender their biggest objectives, but is the only option that preserves the peace and avoids an imminent civil war, in which no side can really win, as the entire country and its population will pay the costs with their lives.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

1 hour ago, matias93 said:

1) how will economic sanctions incentive the regime to allow legitimate opposition and democratic institutions to work,

2) how will enable the opposition to do more through peaceful ways,

3) how will help to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis, giving poor people access to food or health care.

4) The idea of economic sanctions is based on a short sighted approach, that identifies the entire nation with the will of the regime's leaders, and makes the former to post for the evils of the latter. It's a particularly absurd option when the main victims of the regime are the very people of she country.

5) A real solution depends on the will of the conflicting parts to find an alternative exit, where procedural democracy is restored and the current officials can abandon their positions without the risk of a full fledged trial and punishment. It's not a nice solution, nor an heroic one, as both parties have to surrender their biggest objectives,

6) is the only option that preserves the peace and avoids an imminent civil war, in which no side can really win, as the entire country and its population will pay the costs with their lives.

[edited to format for response]

1) If the regime is weakened enough, the democratically elected opposition can take over.

2) Money is more powerful than violence. That's why English is the language for international deals.

3) An abrubt crisis gets things done; people grow used to poverty and oppression in a slow decline. If there is sbsolutely nothing on government shelves, there will be no reason to go to bread lines and every reason to revolt.

4) If the sanctions are lifted as soon as the regime changes and is combined with (humanitarian and infrastructure) aid to the new government as soon as feasible, sanctions can get things done as part of a strategy that ends up doing more good than harm.

5) The preferred solution has not been feasible for over a year and is now impossible.

6) There is no peace to preserve; the civil war has already started. Maduro cannot win the civil war but the opposition can if a full on revolution gets enough members of the military to defect. Venezuela's neighbors can mitigate the crisis by allowing Venezuelans to flee until the crisis ends. They can even profit off of Venezuelan immigrants through a swelling workforce and/or interest off private debt. Once the crisis is over, Maduro and his cronies will pay for their crimes against humanity, chavismo will die out, and Venezuelan diaspora will be able to return to their homeland and rebuild it, with the help of Russia, China, or the USA (nations that Venezuela is indebted to that can benefit more from [favorable] trade [deals] than from debt repayments), hopefully the USA because we are closer and have the most Venezuelans.

[matias93 7,535]

I'll try not to sound offensive, but may the linguistic barrier betray me. Also, this will result on an unpleasant wall of text; sorry for that.

I think you are seeing this events through a tunnel vission, as if you were playing an strategy game: you got an end objective, a set of tools with stated abilites and disadvantages, and you are free to do anything, without caring a lot about the context, the people or the after-effects. 

But the reality is that you are operating with real, living people, whom not only have material needs and some vague entitlement to democracy, but a concrete right to self-determination. To pretend to exacerbate the ills of the country politics and economy to the point people revolts against their government is basically to render the venezuelan people as a tool to be used by their political elites to advance a game of positions, and in the greater scheme, to consider the whole country as an entity that can be meddled with to keep things going according to an external plan.

If the events are simply furthered on the same direction they are now by reinforcing the crisis (that's what economic sanctions are for), it is very probable that the opposition will be able to get the central government, but it will happen either because of a coup orchestrated by them, or because a revolt will make the office vacant, and they will be the only group able to get a hold of it. In any case, the prospect is grim: after a coup a purgue is a mandatory step, and for whichever reasons the chavistas destroyed the country' economy and institutions, they don't deserve to be hunted or annihilated, for they are human beings (and more than that, to persecute a well organised group frequently drives it underground and galvanises it to become a guerrilla, further extending the conflict); and if the case is a revolt, nothing assures that the opposition will be able to deliver the demands of the mob, and will surely be its new prey: they would need to be impressibly skilled negotiators and populists to reverse the massive anger on a glimpse, convincing the mobsters to collaborate with a weak government.

And all of that is assuming that people don't know nor remembers the last time a similar situation happened on the country: on the 1990s, the current opposition was the one incapable of controlling the debt and the inflation, and the one that repressed increasingly empoverished people. Why should the venezuelans trust on any of two groups that had demostrated their utter inability to govern fairly?

 

On humanitarian aid, just look at the countries that are heavily indebted and on the recieving end of charity aids: they can stay by decades trying to establish trustable institutions and don't being able to do so. Haitians, for example, don't look to their government when looking for health care, they look for the Red Cross; for security, to the UN Peace Corps, not the Haitian Police or Armed Forces, and not even to the internal market for food or basic goods, but at NGOs; hence, their State and their economy have become superfluous. Politics, on a country internationally intervened, is an unncesssary spend of time, as policies are dictated by foreign bureaucracies out of control by any local citizen. To keep their substantive independence, countries need to have consequential institutions, need to be able to take decisions, to success and fail domestically, for their politics to matter; otherwise, all their citizens become allienated stateless people, with no political rights and only depending on the good will of international entities and charities.

 

What Venezuela now is experimenting is not a civil war, clearly; there aren't roughly symmetrical armed forces warring on the country territory to establish control of it. It can happen if the situation worsens, but what we are seeing now is an economic crisis aggravated by the suspension of democracy. And is not the first time it has happened on the region. Alternative exits exist and have been applied before, as a pacted truce or the rising of a new populist leadership could be.

2 hours ago, OcramsRzr said:

Venezuela's neighbors can mitigate the crisis by allowing Venezuelans to flee until the crisis ends. They can even profit off of Venezuelan immigrants through a swelling workforce and/or interest off private debt.

Sorry, but on this I had to stop. Latin American countries are really corrupt and treacherous, and we drag a long history of conflicts between us, but to deliberately exploit refugees and to subsume a broken country to abusive debt conditions? No, we don't do that. Venezuelans, as other refugees on the region, will surely confront harsh conditions on the countries they are fleeing for, even discrimination, but no State will give itself to a policy of actively use them as economic cannon fodder. We have a long history of foreign interventions, and are acutely aware of the risks of sacrificing autonomy: if one country falls on the trap, all the others will be on the list, and the world powers will deploy all their measures to get them. It's a learnt lesson.

 

So, TL;DR: Venezuela needs its own exit to the crisis, and to be able to keep internal control of the situation, even if that control points to an apparently worse alternative to the one guided from the outside, because is the only way of preserving the fragile autonomy of the region. Venezuelans are the only people entitled to determine their government, and is not to ours to intervene.

[Ocram's Razr 963]

I'm sorry. You're right. I was looking at real life as if it were a strategy game and I mentioned an option that was unethical (though I was thinking more along the lines of employment and microloans, it did come off as suggesting usury).

[Ocram's Razr 963]

http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/09/news/economy/venezuela-sanctions/index.html

10 more of Maduro's cronies sanctioned

 

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-bonds/venezuela-sets-high-profile-location-for-monday-debt-talks-idUSKBN1DB0S7

Venezuela likely to negotiate bankruptcy on Monday at the White Palace

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/08/562954354/venezuela-constituent-assembly-cracks-down-on-media

Maduro's hand-picked replacement to the democratically-elected legislature has destroyed free speech

 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-41918907

The D'ump reverses Obama's openness with Cuba

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lt-general-jeffrey-buchanan-leading-military-effort-in-puerto-rico-explains-departure/

Federal aid and military assistance in Puerto Rico withdrawn

 

Everywhere else in Latin America seems to be business-as-usual. However, Venezuela's default could hurt the Chinese economy, which could burst the Chinese credit bubble, which would burst the secondary housing bubble, which would plunge the global economy into a 2nd dip recession

Venezuela's problems are unsolvable without a regime change and the longer that takes, the worse the outcome for those remaining in Venezuela and the more suffering incurred in the meantime.