More negotiations in Honduras

As Pepe Lobo's inauguration looms (in three weeks) in Honduras, the question of international recognition remains. If the Tegucigalpa-San José Accord is followed, then recognition from most countries will be forthcoming. At this point, Roberto Micheletti has consistently ignored calls (including from the Obama administration) to honor the accord.

Craig Kelly is now in Honduras talking to all the players about recognition:

''Kelly assured me that his government does not support Micheletti and is seeking the possibility of the international community recognizing the new government'', Zelaya said, referring to Lobo.

Kelly also talked to Micheletti, almost certainly about resigning, while Lobo himself has also indicated his desire for that outcome.

Meanwhile, RNS at Honduras Coup 2009 notes that the Honduran Congress will likely pass an amnesty bill to let Mel Zelaya out of the Brazilian embassy.

Now it comes down largely to whether domestic elite political pressure will be exerted sufficiently on Micheletti to get him to step down. He clearly feels that doing so suggests he has done something wrong, which he adamantly refuses to accept. He wants to preside over the inauguration.

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Pots and kettles

You have to love Fidel Castro's latest article in Granma, which as usual wanders all over, from distant memories to the recent Copenhagen meetings. With no apparent sense of irony, he talks about fighting dictatorship and "the ardent flames of our battles for freedom." But it gets even better when he criticizes Barack Obama for a speech that was a "combination of sweetened words seasoned with theatrical gestures" that for Fidel was "boring." Later he talks about how all this is known on "internet web pages," carefully chosen by the Cuban state.

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U.S.-Brazilian relations

On the heels of my post yesterday on Brazilian diplomacy, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Susan Kaufman Purcell that claims Brazil cannot be "relied on to deal with political and security problems in Latin America in ways that are also compatible with U.S. interests"

In other words, Brazil is not interested in doing what the U.S. wants. This should not be some sort of shocker. However, Purcell's argument goes even further with unfortunate logic:

Several conclusions can be drawn from Brazil's behavior. First, Brazil wants to prevent the U.S. from expanding its military involvement in South America, which Brazil regards as its sphere of influence. Second, Brazil much prefers working within multilateral institutions, rather than acting unilaterally.

Within these institutions, Brazil seeks to integrate all regional players, achieve consensus and avoid conflict and fragmentation—all worthy goals. But these are procedural, rather than substantive, goals.

It seems that a multilateral approach is antithetical to U.S. interests. Yet those procedures are critical to achieving substantive goals. The alternative is alienating everyone and thereby achieving no goals at all.

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Brazil and the Middle East

In November I wrote about how Brazil saw ties with Iran as important for making Brazil a player in the Middle East peace process. Foreign Minister Celso Amorim made that goal even more explicit in a recent interview.

Is Brazil elaborating a strategy to participate in a more efficient way in the conflict of the Middle East, or at least to become a heavyweight player in this question?

We are not going to come up with an entirely new solution to the question of the Middle East. All possible solutions have already been discussed. What is necessary is political desire to implement them. In our case, we would like to contribute to the dialogue. I think that a country like Brazil could do that easily. Due to our history and to the history that Brazil has in this region. Due to the international respect granted to Brazil. We do not want to do this alone, but by joining forces with other developing nations, like South Africa and India, which could have a more positive influence. Confining these talks to the "Quartet" has not generated great results: that is the truth. I therefore believe that a little more representation is necessary in the international community.

Now that Brazil is talking actively to Israel, Iran, and Egypt in particular, the Obama administration would be well-advised to bring Brazil into the equation. We certainly should not overstate the potential effects, but it could inject a fresh perspective into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and also strengthen U.S.-Brazilian relations. Both should be priorities for the administration.

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Invading Venezuela

You can't really start a new year properly until you hear Hugo Chávez say that there is a U.S. plot to invade Venezuela, so here you go.

A Venezuelan Foreign Ministry statement listed no examples of such violations, but it accused the United States of using "the colonial territories of Aruba and Curacao in preparation for a military aggression against Venezuela."

Happy new year!

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Airport security

Starting through security on a domestic flight, I saw a sheet of paper dedicated solely to saying that flights coming from Venezuela should not necessarily be trusted because of poor security. I found this so ironic since the attack on the Detroit flight only a few days earlier originated in Amsterdam, where apparently they don't even bother to look at passports and the airport is full of security holes. Will they replace the Venezuela sheet with a European one?

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Pressure on MEO

The Party for Democracy (PPD) of the Concertación called on MEO to attend a meeting of the party's leadership to discuss the second round. He refused. The Concertación is nervous about the fact that he will not call for his supporters to vote for Eduardo Frei. As I noted before, the coalition is trying to get at his supporters at the grass roots level. Now, however, they are also saying explicitly that MEO should accept his share of the blame if the right wins the election (similar to Democrats blaming Ralph Nader for the 2000 election). Thus far, however, MEO has dug in his heels.

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Evelio Rosero's The Armies

I read Evelio Rosero's The Armies, a novel about a rural Colombian town in the middle of the FARC, paramilitaries, and the army. The back cover says "Gentle in voice but ferocious in impact" and that is a perfect summation. The novel centers on Ismael, an old man in a rural Colombian town that becomes an epicenter of violence. The Colombian army is viewed as unpredictable and corrupt, but at least preferable to the truly insane violence of the guerrillas or paras, which are indistinguishable anyway. At any rate, the government refuses to help.

Ismael is a voyeur, and as the novel begins he stares at his beautiful neighbor. As the novel progresses he watches everyone else but slowly gets sucked in himself. He lives in fear to the point that he laughs at it:

It is fear, this fear, this country, which I prefer to ignore in its entirety, playing the idiot with myself, to stay alive, or with an apparent desire to stay alive, because it is very possible, really, that I am dead. I tell myself, good and dead in hell, and I laugh again (p. 157).

This is not light reading, yet Ismaels' first person narrative keeps a brisk pace. He experiences horror, but keeps moving and thinking. Maybe that is the only way he maintains sanity as the town is engulfed in murder, rape, kidnapping, and sadism.

It reminded me of Sandra Benitez's The Weight of All Things, which depicts a family in El Salvador getting stuck between guerrillas and the military during the civil war. There is the same helplessness, and the same sense of wanting just to be left alone because no one cares about the ideology. They just want all of the armies to leave them alone.

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Planning ahead of ahead

Pepe Lobo keeps talking about moving ahead, not looking back, etc. which is a very common way of saying you don't want to deal with a problematic political past. He is taking it a step further to a point that would make even Soviet planners blush--the 28 year plan for Honduras. Totally free of ego, he will have a plan to guide the next seven presidential administrations.

He will announce the details of this plan the second week of January. He says it should be passed quickly by Congress so that everyone can start thinking about how great life will be in 28 years instead of how bad things are now.

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Elections in Latin America

Abraham Lowenthal makes a great point about Latin American elections in an op-ed:

Elections are worthwhile as a means of popular consultation and participation. They can and should also be important as a means of helping to achieve accountability, by comparing incumbents and their parties with the promises on which they were elected.

Elections are important, and their regular occurrence in Latin America, rarely interrupted now by military intervention, is just cause for regional celebration.

It is nonetheless important to recognize that elections alone -- however free, clean and fair -- are never enough to solve the hard questions that face most countries, questions often ignored or papered over during political campaigns.

I try to hammer these very points home in my classes. U.S. policy, of course, focuses squarely on elections as if they are an end rather than a means. Honduras is just the latest of countless examples.

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Quote of the day: Honduras

Neither Roberto Micheletti nor Mel Zelaya should attend his inauguration because "they are part of the past."

--Pepe Lobo, ignoring the fact that each one of them claims to be president until he is sworn in and is therefore squarely part of the present.

He also said he was not afraid of being overthrown by the military. To make sure, I suppose he will run all his policies by them first.

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Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power (2008)

Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008) has been very widely reviewed (there was a good review in the NYT). I found it a thought-provoking jumble, a book that is perhaps most interesting for the discussions that can ensue from examining its virtues and shortcomings together.

The book's primary virtue is its hard-hitting examination of failure, combined with the utter refusal in the U.S. to accept failures as such. Americans want more and more, and are willing to allow their government to do anything that perpetuates accumulation. They are even willing to accept decreased freedom in the name of freedom. As long as we get more, we don't care.

I enjoyed the first half of the book more, as he explained these problems. The second half wandered, from dislike of Douglas Feith, criticism of high-ranking generals, discussion of the all-volunteer army, etc. He periodically tosses in policy prescriptions, but some (like environmental issues) suddenly appear without clear connection to his overall argument.

The most serious shortcoming is that it is ahistorical. For Bacevich, U.S. foreign policy begins with James Forrestal. Interestingly, he makes brief (and accurate) reference to U.S. policy in Central America in the 1920s as a model for our nation-building wars (p. 135). But he never elaborates, which is unfortunate because a more detailed look would bring out the failures of democracy that ensued, the resentment that built, and the continuity that those Central American occupations represented. Brian Loveman has a forthcoming book, No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776, that delves deeply into that continuity. This isn't new to the post-War II era, or even the post-9/11 era. American exceptionalism, preventive war, and "democracy promotion" have always been there.

As a result, we help create many of our own problems. That has certainly been the case in Central America, where our occupation of Nicaragua in the early twentieth century can only be called disastrous, both for the security of the U.S. and for the Nicaraguan people. It was unnecessary and poorly conceived. We want to bend the will of the world, or even of a region, and very often we just make things worse. That's the book's most important (and pressing) message.

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Lincoln Gordon

Lincoln Gordon died. He was Ambassador to Brazil and a key supporter of the 1964 coup that ended Brazilian democracy for 21 years and ushered in a new era of authoritarianism across Latin America.

Check out the National Security Archive for declassified documents pertaining to Gordon. It is ironic that, given Hugo Chávez's current blustering about Aruba, Gordon had advocated sending US naval tankers from Aruba, along with a naval task force, to provide military support for the coup if necessary. The Johnson administration was even ready to send tear gas and other weapons to deal with public protest.

In a later interview (see p. 16 from this document from the LBJ Library) Gordon talked about how he had helped word the telegram to the Brazilian generals recognizing their government, which was so enthusiastic that--at least according to LBJ--it contributed to Brazilian assistance with the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

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Frei's strategy

CIPER Chile has a great post on the maneuvering to get MEO's votes in the Chilean presidential runoff. MEO has indicated he will not tell his supporters to vote for Eduardo Frei, so Frei's team is looking to go from the bottom up. They are scouring the results of every precinct along with focus groups, determining where people tended to vote MEO for president and the Concertación (or for Juntos Podemos) for the legislature. Those are the people they have to convince. That convincing will involve a two part message: first, we will take on part of MEO's platform; and second, we cannot let the right win.

An El Mercurio poll has Piñera at 46.2% and Frei at 39.7%, with a margin of error of 2.8%. Meanwhile, La Segunda/Universidad del Desarrollo put Piñera at 48% and Frei at 43% (I don't know the margin of error). There are therefore still plenty of undecideds/don't knows.

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