Isolation of Cuba hardliners

Via The Havana Note: if you want a sense of how hardliners in Miami are increasingly isolating themselves, then check out their response to a letter from Cuban dissidents.  That letter, signed by such prominent opposition leaders as Yoani Sánchez, supports the right of Americans to travel to Cuba.

This prompted one Miami talk show host to actually call one Cuban dissident currently on hunger strike on the air to harangue him, telling him that he did not understand what he was doing.

This is an excellent opportunity for a policy shift, as this type of incidence demonstrates that there is support for it even amongst those within Cuba who oppose the Castro regime.  The logic of either ignoring them or telling them they're wrong entirely escapes me.

Read more...

Immigration: WWRD?

Peter Robinson, a former speech writer for Ronald Reagan, asks "What Would Reagan Do?" on immigration in the Wall Street Journal.  This is a silly question, because we already know what Reagan did, namely push for and sign the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, then announce the problem was solved.  The amnesty part of the bill made good sense, and he deserves credit for that.  Yet he also supported provisions that let businesses off the hook and thereby created a massive black market for fraudulent documents.  The net effect of IRCA was just to punt and let future administrations try to deal with the issue.

Most of the article is pretty vapid.  Reagan loved people and would done good things.  Nonetheless, it is a reminder to those who consistently invoke Reagan that he was a strong advocate of immigration reform.

Read more...

Elections and horse races in Latin America

There has been a lot of talk in the political science corner of the blogosphere about how the media wants to portray elections as horse races, whereas political scientists show how short term swings matter little to the ultimate outcome--see The Monkey Cage, Christopher Beam, Daniel Drezner, Matthew Yglesias).

This is also relevant for Latin America.  Check out Andres Oppenheimer's really bad article on how the World Cup will affect presidential elections in Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico.  

Read more...

More on why Bush was unpopular in Latin America

At the Weekly Standard, Jaime Daremblum from the Hudson Institute provides a conservative critique of Obama's Latin America policy.  There are two main parts.  First, the definition of a "coherent" strategy is one that pushes hard for free trade:

Unfortunately, the Obama administration still lacks a coherent strategy for the region. Each of the four U.S. presidents who immediately preceded Obama launched at least one major initiative in the Western Hemisphere. Under George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, trade liberalization became the lodestar of U.S. policy, resulting in NAFTA, an expansion of the Caribbean Basin Initiative trade programs, CAFTA, and several bilateral free-trade pacts, including agreements with Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Panama. 

There are, apparently, no other possible coherent policies.


Second, Obama needs to hate Hugo Chávez, and he currently does not hate him sufficiently.  Daremblum offers exactly zero specific ways in which Obama should change his current policies, but in general he should "be standing up" and "confront."  What those would entail is left to our imaginations.  Daremblum basically argues that Chávez is destabilizing Venezuela, so we need to destabilize the country further in order to stabilize it.


I think it is fair to sum it up as "keep doing what George W. Bush was doing and expect different results."  In other words, yet again we get Einstein's definition of insanity.

Read more...

Why Chávez loves what he hates

In an interview, Hugo Chávez blames Venezuela's recession on "rampant, irresponsible capitalism" and asks President Obama to "forget his country's imperial pretensions," without acknowledging that the very high oil prices Chávez depends upon are the direct result of global capitalism and U.S. imperial pretensions.

As Erasure puts it so succinctly, "I love to hate you."  Love and hate, what a beautiful combination.

Read more...

The latest on Venezuela and Mercosur

Venezuela has been waiting four years to be approved for entry into Mercosur.  After considerable delay, Brazil approved it in December 2009 and is now lobbying Paraguay, which is the last remaining holdout.  Mercopress has an interview with the leader of the Senate, who compares Hugo Chávez to Alfredo Stroessner:

“It is very difficult to dissociate Venezuela from Hugo Chavez. It makes us remember our own dictatorship: indefinite re-election, parental authority over children in the hands of the state, elections that are won with 90% of the vote. It all sounds too similar...”

Interestingly, President Fernando Lugo says he will not push the legislature:

The Paraguayan president said he would not lobby for such an initiative since “that is up to Congress and the people, but I have also stated and I told Senator Carrizosa that Paraguay must seriously address the issue of Venezuela’s Mercosur incorporation”.

Considering this is foreign policy, a president is front and center, though I could think of any number of reasons he does not want to stick his neck out.  I went to see what the Paraguayan newspapers had to say, and found the lead story in one (La Nación) was that some opposition governor heard rumors that Lugo was gay.   Not finding that too helpful, I moved on to Ultima Hora, where I found the Venezuelan Ambassador making diplomatic statements in favor of his country:

El embajador Arrúe de Pablo manifestó que fue sumamente positiva la reunión que mantuvo con el vicepresidente de la República Federico Franco, cuya posición personal no está a favor de que Venezuela ingrese al Mercosur porque cuestiona la falta de cumplimiento de las cláusulas democráticas. 

El diplomático fue consultado sobre las críticas que existen contra las medidas tomadas por Chávez, como el cierre de medios de comunicación. Respondió que más allá de los cuestionamientos para conocer a fondo la realidad de su país hay que ir hasta allá. 

"Lo importante es ir a comprobar; no puedo hablar y convencer estando a cuatro o cinco mil kilómetros de una realidad que se vive allá. Les invito a que vayan (a la prensa). El término de realidad es amplio. Yo no digo qué ocurre o qué no ocurre. Lo que quiero decir es que para saber lo que ocurre en Venezuela hay que estar en Venezuela y comprobar; hablar con la gente", insistió. 

I apologize to non-Spanish speakers, as I don't feel like translating all that.  The basic idea is that he met with critics in the Paraguayan legislature and invites them to come to Venezuela and see for themselves.


So this is still developing, with no obvious end in sight.

Read more...

U.S.-Brazilian relations

The L.A. Times has an editorial about U.S.-Brazilian relations, which I found a bit curious.  The argument is that we can't let differences over Iran damage the relationship.  OK, good idea, but who really thought that would happen?

What it demonstrates is that over time we've simply become accustomed to foreign policy that punishes countries who do not agree with us 100% of the time (as a matter of fact, I just blogged about how that pervasive that is).  So when we have a disagreement with Brazil, we assume it will blow up everything else.

Maybe one major goal for the Obama administration's policies toward Latin America is to get everyone accustomed to having allies with differences.  From a strictly realist point of view, it will serve U.S. interests far better.

Read more...

Latin American Policy

There is a new policy-oriented academic journal called Latin American Policy, published by Wiley Blackwell.  Its editorial team comes from Latin America (particularly Mexico and Brazil).  From its initial editorial:

So, why a new journal, and why on Latina America? More information to the Web? More data and signs into the flow of the hypertextual message? Indeed, the birth of this journal will add more buzz to the information stream, but this time the buzz comes from a region that traditionally has spoken through the language of literature and music. Although Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have articulated a sort of modern discourse in the realm of social sciences, most of this discourse remains fragmented in local or national debates, in spite of the fact that many of these countries share Spanish as a common language. Furthermore, the social sciences debate within LAC countries traditionally has been a dialogue with or a criticism of scientific Western thought but rarely among the LAC community of academics and practitioners. In the informational and global age, it is time for LAC academic and policy communities to talk to the world and among themselves. A lot is being written and debated in this region of the world, but it remains fragmented and confined to local or national debates, in Spanish or Portuguese, with few possibilities for building an interconnected, networked community.

To build that transnational community, the Policy Studies Organization—a society of the American, Midwest, Southern and International Political Sciences Associations and the International Studies Association—joined efforts with the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM)—a leading university in Mexico and Latin America—to launch this new journal: Latin American Policy (LAP): A Journal of Politics and Governance in a Changing Region. Marketed and distributed by the famous editorial house Wiley-Blackwell, its main field of research, discussion, or diffusion will be any crosscutting issue situated in the interface between the policy and political domains concerning or affecting any LAC country or group of countries, but LAP's primary focus is intended to be in the policy arena (any issue or field involving authority, although not necessarily clustered on governments), agency (governmental, from civil society or both), and the pursuit or achievement of convenient or specific outcomes.

Very interesting--it does fill a niche.

Read more...

Piñera and the military

Interesting article in El Mostrador about how retired military officers are angry at Sebastián Piñera because he has shown no signs of pushing for an end to arrests and trials related to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.  They are publicly calling for the Bicentennial later this year to be the appropriate time.  Piñera had indicated in rather vague terms during the campaign that he supported such an idea, and now the officers talk in terms of him being a "traitor."  This is further stoked by the firing of Miguel Otero, now former Ambassador to Argentina, who praised Pinochet and said most people didn't suffer during the dictatorship.

Over time, the military has gone from saying the transition was over in 1990 to saying that the transition will not be over until the trials stop.  They figured Piñera, despite his long-standing distance from the dictatorship, would finally be the one to do it.  But he has strong incentives not to, as there is little to gain and much to lose politically because of the controversy it would spark.  He would find it much harder (at least in the short term) to work with the Concertación.

Nonetheless, he will be pressured, from within his own party and coalition, from the military, and apparently even from the Catholic Church, which has been meeting with the retired officer organizations.  Although the military has not been in power for a long time, and is much less politicized than it used to be, we should not underestimate its influence.

Read more...

Colombia interpreter

I recently complained that the State Department needed an interpreter, because no one knew what Rafael Correa had to say.  Apparently they got one for Alvaro Uribe.

Read more...

World Cup diplomacy

One of the more unique, and really fun, blogs I read is by Rengaraj Viswanathan.  He is the Indian Ambassador to Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay (and he is a former Ambassador to Venezuela and Consul General to Brazil as well).  His most recent offering explains his World Cup dilemma, as all countries want him to root for their team:

In this supercharged atmosphere of no-holds barred rivalry, I found the only way to survive is to practise the old-world diplomacy. In the olden days, much before people got into Twitter troubles, there was a saying, “a diplomat is someone who thinks twice before saying nothing”.

He has another observation that I found especially funny:

World Cup time in South America is low season for work and business. My Argentine colleagues in the embassy are converting the office into a sports bar stocking it with the essential liquid and solid necessities to last for a month.

In all, it's a great post.

Read more...

Why foreign policy fails

If you really want to understand why the Bush administration was so unpopular in Latin America, look no further than José Cárdenas at Foreign Policy's Shadow Government blog.

The administration has its work cut out for it in trying to create momentum in the service of the shared interests we still do have with a number of countries in the Americas. But that will not be created in visits to Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and other precincts currently infatuated with the anti-American fad. Instead, it will come with continuing to work with like-minded governments unabashed about identifying with our vision for the hemisphere of prosperity for all through free peoples and free markets. 

The basic idea is this: you should only work with governments that agree with you 100 percent, and any government that is not 100 percent with you should be labeled as "anti-American" and insulted as much as possible.  When that inevitably backfires, blame them.

Read more...

Clinton and Correa

Rafael Correa had some nice things to say to Hillary Clinton, and it seems their three hour conversation might be able to demonstrate that there is no reason the U.S. and Ecuador can't have good relations.  I would like to see the full text of Correa's comments, but am disappointed to see the State Department cannot bother hiring an interpreter.  From the State Department's website:

MODERATOR: (In Spanish.)
QUESTION: (In Spanish.)
MODERATOR: (In Spanish.)
QUESTION: (In Spanish.)
MODERATOR: (In Spanish.)
SECRETARY CLINTON: I will certainly take the material and thank you very much for raising these issues.
PRESIDENT CORREA: (In Spanish.)
MODERATOR: (In Spanish.)

Read more...

U.S. military aid and Honduras

As reported by El Heraldo, U.S. military aid to Honduras is resuming.  The Deputy Commander of Southcom is visiting to celebrate and discuss future interchanges.  One of them will be, wait for it, human rights.  It would be far more useful for the Obama administration to acknowledge the continued abuses of human rights in Honduras rather than engaging in a debate over whether the country should be readmitted to the OAS.

Read more...

Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day

Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day (2008) is a thought-provoking and well-written book.  He is a sociology professor at Columbia, and the book chronicles his graduate student experience at the University of Chicago in the late 1980s and early 1990s as he spent an enormous amount of time in the Robert Taylor Homes housing project in Chicago.  He gets very close to a gang leader, J.T., and studying the urban poor there becomes his dissertation.

There are a lot of great angles in this book, once you get past the author's self-proclaimed "rogue" status and his "who me?" stylized naivete.  Part of the problem is that he published the book a full twenty years after the events occurred, so he has to recreate his "non-tenured, non-Harvard-Fellow-non-Columbia-endowed chair" self.  Yet even two decades ago he was 100 percent establishment, which he sometimes acknowledges behind the "rogue" self-label.

Either way, his basic argument is that to understand urban poverty, you must immerse yourself in it.  Periodically, then, the story moves to methodology as he criticizes social scientists who crunch numbers without even seeing the people they're studying.  For Venkatesh it is not merely an academic debate, because he also argues that such studies end up advocating policies that won't work (though it is worth pointing out that he does not really suggest any policies that would work).  Instead, he spends years examining and probing the complex web of relationships in the Robert Taylor Homes.  Residents, gang members, building leaders, prostitutes, mothers, the homeless, the unemployed, the underemployed, not to mention the police, are all interacting in ways that aren't immediately visible.  They are all, as one woman put it, hustling.

All of them also try to rationalize that hustling.  J.T. is insistent that his gang is really a community organization, providing services that otherwise would not exist.  He would go around trying to recruit teenagers to join, telling them they could become "black businessmen."  That many people in the building are addicted to the crack he sells seems not to bother him.  Ms. Bailey, the building president, demands kickbacks for all sorts of things, yet sees herself as the one person who can get things done when the housing authority refuses to act.  All of those relationships were fascinating--they got beyond the stereotypes and highlighted how tightly bound together all of these people were.

The book ends with welfare reform and the demolition of all the buildings.  Given how long ago that was, it left me wondering how much had changed.  The downside of studying one group of people (really, one building in particular) is that we don't know how generalizable the results are.  Venkatesh notes that not all gangs are run like J.T.'s, so are residents of all buildings--of all densely populated urban poor areas--embedded in the same types of relationships?

Read more...

Cuban oil

Journalist Anne Louise Bardach, who has written a lot on Cuba, guest blogs at the Washington Post and gets a little carried away.  Here is her chain of thought:

1.  The BP disaster has opened lines of communication regarding oil with Cuba.
2.  There will be oil drilling soon in Cuba
3.  Cuba could become an oil exporter
4.  That could make Cuba more independent of Venezuela
5.  So the U.S. should pursue oil diplomacy with Cuba

This is not a particularly persuasive argument.  Does anyone truly believe Cuban oil will "spew forth" (her phrase) to such a massive extent, and quickly to boot?  Just a cursory Google search comes up with stories like how Petrobras can't decide whether it wants to pursue drilling because profits just aren't assured.

Further, the Venezuela reference seems almost like a non sequitur.  The Castro-Chávez relationship is based on ideology, not oil.  If Cuba no longer needs Venezuelan oil, the relationship won't likely change much.

A more reasonable argument would simply be that oil diplomacy could lead to other types of diplomacy that might be beneficial both to U.S. interests and to the Cuban people.

Read more...

Latin American military spending and the U.S.

A few days ago I noted that SIPRI reported increases in military spending in Latin America (7.6 percent from 2008 to 2009) and that in the past decade such spending had increased significantly (72 percent growth since 2000).

Yet in advance of Hillary Clinton's trip to Latin America, Arturo Valenzuela argued the following in a press briefing:

What I said was – the question was – had to do with how we see Latin American in terms – is there an armaments race? And my answer to that was that, in fact, we don’t see this as a problem in Latin America – that, in fact, if you look at the statistics, the data, that there has actually been a significant decline in expenditures on armaments in most of the countries in the region.

This seems patently wrong unless maybe we parse the word "armaments."  Military spending includes many things that aren't weapons, but it is hard to see how a 72 percent increase in that spending can lead to "a significant decline in expenditures on armaments in most of the countries."

Read more...

U.S.-centric blog debate

Very interesting coincidence.  First, bloggers in the U.S. discussing whether political scientists can have any impact on journalists, or whether we're irrelevant.

Here are some links for that:

Greg Marx at Columbia Journalism Review says there is an opportunity to get together.

Henry Farrell responds at The Monkey Cage.

Ryan Powers (blogging for Matthew Yglesias) weighs in.

Jonathan Bernstein brings it up.

The coincidence is this.  Just as this American debate goes on, in Chile the new president, Sebastián Piñera, had a lunch meeting that included political scientists who--gasp--also have written many political columns for Chilean newspapers in addition to their academic publications.  It is taken for granted that political scientists should contribute to public debate.

It seems that everyone who blogs about the issue focuses on American politics, and does not consider looking at it in a comparative context.  Why do some other countries not have the politician/political scientist/journalist divide?  Indeed, what are American political scientists doing (or not doing) to make journalists and politicians to feel some measure of disdain?

Read more...

Defense spending in Latin America

Via MercoPress: SIPRI put out a press release for its annual report on military expenditures, which will come out next month.

Depressingly, the region is spending more on the military than last year and much more than a decade ago.  It is a recession-proof.  At the same time, the increases are by no means uniform.  For example, Mexico accounts for almost all of the increase in the "Central America and Caribbean" category.

Strangely enough, Uruguay had the highest relative increase in spending from 2008 to 2009 (24 percent).  Brazil had the highest absolute increase ($3.8 billion) and now has the 11th highest defense spending in the world.

Probably the most newsworthy tidbit is that defense spending in Venezuela decreased 25 percent from 2008 to 2009, the biggest drop of any country in Latin America.  Meanwhile, Colombia increased 11 percent, and a Santos victory would suggest that won't be going down.

Read more...

Some Latin America blog links

Support Latin Americanist blogger authors by reading Jon Beasley-Murray's new book, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America.

Honduras Culture and Politics on the confusing issue of how Mel Zelaya might return and the legal questions surrounding it.


Luis Ramírez on the sensation of failing your Ph.D. exam and being told you're only going to get an M.Phil.  Yikes! (In Spanish)

Steven Taylor analyzes the Colombian presidential election.

Miguel Centellas looks at pacted democracy in Bolivia.

Sarah Kate Kramer at Feet in 2 Worlds examines how crime has dropped as a result of immigration

Read more...