The Americanistas

With his designated successor Dilma Rousseff facing health problems ahead of 2010 presidential elections, and the lukewarm support of a key allied party (PMDB), the rumor in Brazil is that two-term president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of the Worker’s Party is mulling a third term. (The Brazilian Constitution would need to be changed for this to happen).

One cartoonist, Amarildo, from Rio daily O Globo, is having a field day with this. In the first, the cartoonist has shown Lula in bed with his wife, Marisa Leticia Lula da Silva, but Lula has somehow magically morphed into Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He says to his wife, “Marisa, I swear I’m not thinking of a third term!” Marisa responds, “Sure joker, You get a strange look on your face every time you talk about it!”

Strange face indeed …

Some in Brazil thought it was inappropriate to show Chávez in bed with Lula’s wife.

The next cartoon, published today, is clearer, and shows Lula musing not about one more term, but two more terms. Lula’s reading a newspaper article saying that life expectancy for Brazilian males is 73 years. He thinks, “I’m 64 years old, 9 years to go for 73. Sweet! I have enough time for two more terms!”

clipped from oglobo.globo.com clipped from oglobo.globo.com

Mario Benedetti, poet, short story writer and novelist, died in Montevideo, Uruguay on Sunday. He’s known for his short story collection Montevideanos, the novel La Tregua, and one of my personal favorites: the novella set during Uruguay’s Dirty War: La Vecina Orilla.

Here’s an early appreciation, in Spanish, from Buenos Aires daily La Nación.

(Image: eCMetrics)

I think it’s one of the first quantitative pieces of evidence showing the extent to which Afrodescendant populations in Latin America are viewing Obama’s election as a huge shift in the hemisphere’s racial history.

It’s in a poll that hasn’t received much attention. U.S.-based consulting company eCMetrics surveyed 1600 Latin American Internet surfers in the first two weeks of 2009 on their expectations regarding Barack Obama’s government. Besides revealing a predictable surge of optimism as they looked beyond the unpopular government of President Bush, it did serve up some interesting results.

For one, Brazilians, and especially mixed-race Brazilians, tended to view Obama’s racial background as more important than the fact that he was elected with a huge surge of voter participation.

Overall, 65% of Brazilians said the election was most significant because of the election of an African-American candidate. But among those Brazilians who identified themselves as being of African descent, that number was 72%.

In contrast, in Argentina and Mexico, countries with smaller Afrodescendant populations, the more significant result turned out to be not Obama’s breaking of racial barriers, but his election amidst unprecedented voter turnout (47% and 55% respectively).

A full rundown of the poll can be found here in Portuguese.

Dilma Rousseff (Agencia Brasil)

1. THE CYCLICAL TENDENCY: As anyone who has been around a little while knows, mature democracies, and even not-so-mature democracies tend to be cyclical. Power tends to oscillate from right to left and back again. Incumbents are vulnerable because being in power creates wear and tear. Responsibility means making mistakes, and voters tend to punish those in power by throwing them out whenever they’re unhappy about anything at all. It will be important to keep this pattern in mind when evaluating Brazil’s 2010 election. Brazil’s post-1980s democracy began to strike deep roots with Fernando Henrique Cardoso (PSDB or Brazilian Social Democratic Party), who served two terms. Then it veered slightly left with the PT or Workers’ Party and its boss, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Despite the fears of his critics, who fanned paranoid fantasies that he would be a firebrand, Lula has been a moderate, pragmatic, and unifying two-term president. His great achievement was building a societal consensus around a free market model that acknowledged Brazil’s deep economic inequalities and so built in a relatively aggressive policy of wealth redistribution, social programs and some state-directed economic stewardship, so that the country could grow without aggravating economic polarization and ameliorate it instead. Along the way, Lula drifted a bit from the PT leftist base, and did so while remaining immensely popular personally. The PT, though, took some hits: most importantly a corruption/bribery scandal that’s still playing out in the courts, as well as some bruising elections along the way. Now, the global financial crisis has taken some of the shine off Brazil’s economy, and while it’s largely not the fault of the country’s leaders or business class, the party in power will inevitably be dinged by it. So the PT goes into 2010 facing off with a revived PSDB opposition, which has fielded two strong candidates: governors José Serra of São Paulo and Aécio Neves of Minas Gerais. The cyclical nature of politics means it will be easier for Neves and Serra to present themselves as eligible successors to the presidential palace after the eight year PT grip on power. They’ll present themselves as competent, business-friendly, slightly technocratic, and argue that a change at the top will help cement the foundations of Brazil’s democracy. They’ll say they’re for continuity in terms of Brazil’s general direction, but put more emphasis on reforms: streamlining bureaucracy, business costs, etc. It will be hard for Worker’s Party candidate Dilma Rousseff (now Lula’s chief of staff) to build a clear campaign theme other than riding Lula’s coattails. With Lula behind her on the campaign trail, Rousseff will go far, but her challenge will be to build her own brand and vision, apart from Lula’s that voters can connect with. A final note: a democracy’s political cycles can be brusque or smooth. Argentina is a case in point for the roller-coaster model. Ever since the return of democracy in 1983, non-Peronists and Peronists have alternated in power, but they’ve done so via political crises like the inflation fiasco of the late 1980s and the economic and social implosion of 2001. Brazil can pat itself on the back. The PT’s Lula succeeded the PSDB’s Cardoso without tumult or chaos. Today, the robust consensus in Brazil around a social democracy virtually guarantees that the 2010 hand-off will be just as smooth (and hopefully this time the markets won’t create a scare, as they did in 2002).

Aécio Neves (Agencia Brasil)

2. THE PANAMA PARADIGM VS. THE SOUTH AFRICA PARADIGM: This month’s elections in Panama and South Africa offer contrasting scenarios of a political system renewing itself. In Panama, a right-leaning business magnate succeeded a member of the Torrijos political dynasty, which might be fairly described as a populist strain in the Panamanian  DNA. Martín Torrijos, the son of 1970s strongman Omar Torrijos, is a social democrat, but he  favored some causes with a certain flavor of combativeness, such as supporting Puerto Rican independence and building ties with Cuba. Despite the fact that Panama’s economy has been growing, and that the country isn’t facing any acute crises, voters opted away from his Democratic Revolutionary Party founded by Omar Torrijos and elected a pro-business millionaire president, Ricardo Martinelli. It seems Panamanians, instead of opting for their institutionalized center-left party, decided to give the center-right a chance, which according to the cyclical model is a natural thing for voters in a democracy to do. But there are exceptions. South Africa presents a radically different context, one in which the African National Congress has dominated politics since 1994. South Africa’s parliament elected the ANC leader Jacob Zuma president a few days ago, making him the fourth consecutive ANC boss to lead the country. Whatever the internal divisions inside the ANC, it’s clearly the institution South Africans want in power, a desire that trumps any inclination to let another group hold the reins. Voters gave the ANC 66% of the ballots. Despite Brazil’s obvious differences with both South Africa and Panama, the question voters there face is essentially this: will we give more power to the PT, after eight years in which it existed as the most powerful political institution in the country, and consolidated itself as a major grassroots force with a rock solid base among Brazil’s working poor, because that’s how much we believe in this party and its vision (the South Africa model). Or, are we going to even the playing field a bit and try something else for a change (the Panamanian model)?

José Serra (Silvio Tanaka)

3. BOLSA FAMILIA: As I mentioned above, both the Brazilian PSDB opposition and the PT will wrangle over whether it was their presidents Fernando Henrique or Lula who engendered  social programs like Bolsa Familia (cash payments to poor families who keep their kids up to date on health checks and in school). These programs have proved elemental in helping millions of Brazilians out of the grind of poverty. When opposition PSDB politicians talk about Bolsa Familia, however gracious they might seem, what they’re really trying to do is hammer away at the perception that Lula is the savior of the poor masses. Consider what Aécio Neves said about Bolsa Familia, as reported today by Ricardo Noblat’s blog: “The question isn’t who’s the mother or father of the child. Over the course of Fernando Henrique’s government, there was relevant action on social programs, which later matured into the format of Bolsa Familia. But it’s obvious Bolsa Familia matured greatly over the course of Lula’s government.” It sounds like a generous quote. It isn’t. What Neves is really saying is that Fernando Henrique and Lula are both responsible for the popular program. It benefits Neves’s candidacy to do away with the idea that the PT is the only party capable of acting in behalf of poor Brazilian’s interests. The election may turn on Brazilians’ reaction to this paternity suit. The question becomes, who fathered Bolsa Familia, and if the PT isn’t the sole progenitor, do we trust the PSDB enough to share custody?

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez famously gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America at the recent Summit of the Americas in Trinidad. The spectacle surrounding the gift catapulted Galeano’s book to the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Galeano later thanked Chávez for giving his anti-colonial diatribe an Oprah-book-club-like boost. The Uruguayan writer joked that Dracula and himself shared the honor of creating the vampire genre.

When asked if Obama would read the book, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs replied, “I think it’s in Spanish, so that might be a tad on the difficult side.”

Obama effectively closed that chapter at the recent White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The event is a Washington tradition begun in the 1920s. Every U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the event. The dinner is part comedy roast, fund raiser and tribute. The press likes to call it the moment the president becomes “Comedian-in-Chief.”

About 10 minutes into his monologue, Obama began a joke saying he was fulfilling his campaign promise of turning around U.S. relations with the world, citing meetings with the Japanese and British prime ministers. Obama continued, “But as I said during the campaign, we can’t just talk to our friends. As hard as it is, we also have to talk to our enemies, and I’ve begun to do exactly that. Take a look at the monitor there.”

The jumbo-tron cut to a picture of Obama sitting in the Oval Office with a man dressed as a pirate. (Not sure if the costume was modeled on Captain Hook or Captain Morgan.) The audience laughed.

Obama then added, “Now, let me be clear, just because he handed me a copy of Peter Pan does not mean that I’m going to read it — (laughter) — but it’s good diplomatic practice to just accept these gifts.”

Too bad. Obama would have gained a lot of insights from Galeano’s book.

The full joke sequence can be viewed here (put the cursor at about 3:57):

  

Percy Fawcett

It’s like one of those things that you hear or learn about and then start seeing everywhere. Case in point: The Lost City of Z.

A few weeks ago, remaining curious after attending a lecture about the Amazon, I came across the name Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett. He was a British archaeologist and explorer that came to be known as “David Livingstone of the Amazon.” The South American rainforest became his obsession—and ultimately the cause of his death.

In 1925, Fawcett disappeared in Brazil, along with his 21-year-old son and a friend, while searching for what he claimed would be “the great discovery of the century”: A lost civilization he called “Z.”

Artistic rendition of Raleigh's mythical claims.

The Amazon. A place so exotic in the imagination of European explorers that Sir Walter Raleigh claimed to have seen natives with “their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts.”

The most authoritative account of Fawcett’s life-long obsession is The Lost City of Z, a book by New Yorker contributor David Grann.

In the book, Grann writes: “Fawcett had determined that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas. He had christened this lost world the City of Z.”

Fawcett wrote a letter explaining what he intended to find:

The central place I call “Z” — our main objective — is in a valley surmounted by lofty mountains. The valley is about ten miles wide, and the city is on an eminence in the middle of it, approached by a barrelled roadway of stone. The houses are low and windowless, and there is a pyramidal temple. The inhabitants of the place are fairly numerous, they keep domestic animals, and they have well-developed mines in the surrounding hills. Not far away is a second town, but the people living in it are of an inferior order to those of “Z.” Farther to the south is another large city, half buried and completely destroyed.

It seems that Fawcett expected to find a living, working city lost in the depths of the Amazon jungle. But Fawcett wasn’t some off the wall wack-job.

His more scientifically driven claim that the Amazon had once harbored a sophisticated sedentary even monumental civilizations like the Aztecs, Inca, or Egyptians. Grann explains:

In the last few years, a team of researchers led by the archeologist Michael Heckenberger uncovered 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu region of the southern basin of the Amazon — the very region where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z and where he disappeared. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 AD, included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were causeways and roads, which connected the settlements together. There were plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and roads positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett had reported that Indians told him legends that described “many streets set at right angles to one another.” ) According to the scientists, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

He continues:

Other scientists are fueling this revolution in archeology, which is upending the view of the Amazon as a place that could never sustain what Fawcett had envisioned: a prosperous, glorious civilization. Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, who is an archeologist at the University of Illinois, has uncovered in a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, the remains of a settlement at least 10,000 years old — about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon.

Now, Grann’s account of the doomed Fawcett expedition is being made into a blockbuster film starring Brad Pitt.

Gustavo Faverón takes on Aldo Mariátegui, director of Peruvian newspaper Correo, accusing him of stoking prejudice against bilingual Peruvians who speak Quechua as their first language.

In a bit of sensationalistic “gotcha!” journalism, Correo published a front-page article showing how congresswoman Hilaria Supa included misspellings and grammatical errors in her notes during a recent legislative session.

Faverón takes Mariátegui to task here and here, in Spanish, and explains why it’s not just a tabloidy low blow, but “a transparent example of how the mind of a racist operates.”

The Argentine government believes a perfect storm of factors is causing a growing national epidemic of dengue fever with some 15,000 confirmed victims. The culprits? National Health Minister Graciela Ocaño says it’s the combined effects of global warming, deforestation and uncontrolled urbanization.

But Humberto Bravo, president of a medical school in Chaco province, which has been hit hardest by the epidemic with 8,100 documented cases, adds another factor: “Some people say, and everything appears to indicate they’re right, that the map of dengue coincides with the map of soy.”

The theory that all these factors are related to the epidemic goes something like this: Deforestation is caused by farmers trying to make way for vast soy plantations, which along with global warming is causing the “tropicalization” of the local environment in northeast Argentina, according to Bravo. The warming causes the prolongation of summer seasons, extending the life-cycles of mosquitoes, which transmit the disease, and accelerating the disease’s incubation period, causing dengue to spread much faster. Finally, the soy expansion has also led to rapid urbanization in small and intermediary cities as plantations push small-scale farmers to leave the countryside. These farmers swell the shantytowns, where sanitation is poor (open sewers, no potable water, etc.)

Unprecedented dengue epidemics have also broken out in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay, which are also big soy producers, though dengue is traditionally more common in these countries than it is in Argentina. Still, authorities say they are facing a severe and worsening health crisis. Bolivian health authorities say they are facing the worst outbreak in 22 years, with over 56,000 cases. Brazil reported 114,000 cases in the first 10 weeks of this year alone.

Although a direct link between soy and dengue has yet to be confirmed, to my knowledge, it certainly seems plausible.

If you live in a glass house don’t throw stones. It’s interesting that Republican guru Newt Gingrich has gone on an instant media tour to denounce Obama’s handshake with Hugo Chávez. Gingrich has a history of blocking inquiries into the sanguinary actions of right-wing Latin American dictatorships. It appears dictatorships only earn Gingrich’s P.R. help if they’re right wing and former White House allies.

Not only that, but it appears he’s all for celebrating democracy and its results (Chávez can be accused of many things, but not of failing to win elections), but only as long as the results are to his liking.

In the mid-1990s, Rep. Gingrich tried to limit inquiries into the U.S. role in funding and feeding intelligence to Guatemala’s murderous military dictatorship, which was behind the deaths of dozens of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans during that country’s Civil War.

After Obama’s inauguration, Gingrich eagerly jumped on the Obama bandwagon, writing that the ceremony sent a powerful message to dictators everywhere:

The message sent by the Obama inauguration, Gingrich wrote, “was aimed straight at the heart of all the dictators, theocrats, oligarchs and military strongmen who rationalize their tyranny with the excuse that their people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy: In the course of a single generation, the son of an immigrant from a poor country in Africa rose in America to be the leader of the free world.

Well apparently Gingrich believes Venezuela’s people aren’t ‘ready’ for democracy. They’ve voted for Hugo Chávez in 1998, 2000, and 2006. When criticizing Obama for engaging Chávez, Republicans should be ready to defend their own woeful records on human rights abroad. Chávez has been undemocratic in his handling of many issues within Venezuela, and his record on basic freedoms is at least shaky, but he’s no Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Lula in Mozambique in 2003 (Agencia Brasil)

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva was called the most popular politician on earth by U.S. President Barack Obama, who also has asked him to be the White House’s main intermediary in Latin America. In Brazil, Lula has approval ratings that oscillate around 80 percent. Last Sunday, Argentine newspaper La Nación published a lengthy interview with Lula, in which he reveals his vision for the world as it tries to emerge from the global downturn. Some quotes from the article:

In calling for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to adopt a more collaborative approach and cease dictating policy to borrowing countries, Lula called for an end to bean-counting and a reliance on political consensus to overcome global problems:

“The phase of the technocrats is over. The moment has come for politics.”

In detailing some major investments planned by the government (including via state-run oil company Petrobras) in order to build up Brazil’s internal market and weather some of the drop-off in foreign investment that will result from the financial crisis:

“Petrobras alone has planned investments of 178 billion dollars through 2013. We’ve just announced a plan to build a million homes.”

Why Brazil has decided to reduce its fiscal surplus, in order to invest more in stimulating the economy (Lula’s argument is that the crisis presents an unprecedented opportunity for governments to reshape their societies):

“In Brazil we even reduced the … surplus because we’re convinced that the moment has come for investments, to create jobs and generate a better distribution of income. It’s an exceptional moment to make political decisions. In the last few years, Brazil has earned the right to go into debt a little bit more because we’ve shrunk our public debt to 35% of Gross Domestic Product from 52%. We have the right to work with public debt to finance and create more public works in our country. I see this crisis as the great opportunity that’s showing us how to be more courageous, be more audacious, and prepare ourselves for the end of the crisis. Countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Argentina have greater opportunities to emerge from the crisis, as long as we do things right.”

On Central America and the Caribbean:

“I told President Obama that the Caribbean and Central American economies are all totally focused on the United States. So it’s necessary not only to be worried about the United States, but to also be concerned for those smaller countries.”

More on Brazil’s efforts to weather the crisis:

“In Brazil, because of the crisis, we have various infrastructure projects manned by two shifts of workers. Our worry now is to prevent a fall in society’s consumption habits, to create jobs and not pull back on social programs. That’s the miracle we have to achieve in Brazil.”

On his succession:

“There’s one thing I can say: it’ll be a privilege for this country if there’s a presidential campaign pitting Dilma Rousseff (from Lula’s own Worker’s Party) against José Serra (from the more centrist PSDB opposition party). If the candidates are Dilma, Serra and Ciro (Gomes, from the Brazilian Socialist Party or PSB) that would also be a luxury. Ditto if (Aécio) Neves is there. And that’s because I don’t see anyone from the right there. I see colleagues from the left, center-left, progressives. That’s a huge step forward for Brazil.”

On Marxism:

“I was never a Marxist. Never. That’s one affliction I never suffered from!”

On Bolivian President Evo Morales and his tug-of-war with Brazil over natural gas:

“When Evo Morales began to fight with Brazil, some in conservative spheres wanted me to hit back. I always treated him as a friend and partner. I knew the gas was his and I knew that one day he would learn some lessons and he himself would learn that there were different approaches that might be taken. That’s what’s happening: he’s a lot more mature, he was able to build a team.”

At the end of the interview, the La Nación journalist says he was shooed from the room by Lula’s handlers who explained that the Brazilian president was about to take a call from U.S. President Barack Obama. Lula said that once his second term ends in 2010, his plan is to continue working on Latin American issues and also on helping Africa.