The Venezuelan Scrape

Corina Pons and Charlie Devereux at Bloomberg have an interesting article on the "raspao," or "big scrape," in Venezuela. There is such a shortage of dollars that people go abroad, use their credit cards to get cash advances at the official rate, then come back to Venezuela and sell the dollars on the black market for a large profit (6.3 bolivars per dollar officially and then 29-1 on the black market). Ecuador is the most popular country for this.

The obvious irony here is that the "revolutionary socialist" system is creating significant capitalist incentives, and the rewards are only available to those who a) have a credit card; and b) have sufficient resources/acumen to do international travel and figure out the system. The poor are shut out of a scheme that the government unintentionally created.

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Joseph Frazier's El Salvador Could Be Like That

Joseph B. Frazier's El Salvador Could Be Like That is a memoir by a former Associated Press reporter who covered the country during the civil war. Its value lay in Frazier's descriptions of the people and how both everyday life and politics functioned "on the ground," with what I think is a balanced voice, pointing out inconsistencies or outright lies on both sides (though of course the lion's share of the violence was perpetrated by the right). Some of it gruesome, and all of it is sad. It was no easy job for reporters, who were attacked and, of course, lied to.

We gnawed through mountains of spin and did the best we could. There remained for a short time a 1950s-style naivete that told us if the U.S. government was telling us something, it must be true. 

The facts on the ground quickly educated us otherwise (p. 14).

It is mostly chronological but tends to bounce around a bit (with funny additions like Surfer Bob, a guy from Florida who came to El Salvador for the surfing and then stayed). I noticed that Tim, who writes at Tim's El Salvador Blog, had recently reviewed it and thought the structure made it more important to have some background. I think that's true, but if you're interested in El Salvador and/or the era it's worth a look.

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Study Abroad and Technology

A friend brought this Chronicle article on study abroad and technology from earlier this year to my attention. It laments the loss of culture shock as students are able to connect effortlessly and constantly to home. I am torn. I spent my junior year (1990-1991) abroad at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid and some of this resonates with me:

Although stressful and, frankly, painful at the time, the periods of intense loneliness and homesickness I experienced in Mexico City contributed significantly to core and treasured sensibilities such as empathy, tolerance, perseverance, perspective, and gratitude. In the rush to protect our students and our universities through the adoption of digital technologies, we unwittingly have extinguished the necessary conditions for personal transformation that justify the expense, risk, and sacrifice of study abroad.

I lived in a dorm with hundreds of Spanish undergrads and just 1-2 Americans. On the middle of each floor there was a single phone in a small closet. If someone called you, they first got the dorm's receptionist, who then hit a buzzer that went off in your room. You then jogged down to pick up the phone. It was difficult and expensive to talk to my parents (and impossible for my friends) so it didn't happen often. I believe I ventured out into Madrid more because there was no way to sit and interact remotely. But "shock" should not be the main goal of international experiences. Learning and understanding should, and it can happen even if the level of shock is lower.

Further, I don't like the suggestion that access to technology is inherently negative. Personal transformation comes in many shapes and sizes. Yes, I suppose you can sit in your room and text your friends all day, but I suspect most people don't. But I get the point: the author and I didn't even have the option, so we either sat and stared into space or went and found something new to do.

However, I really do not like the punitive angle:

Likewise, we should adopt policies that check computer and cellphone uses that we know undermine cross-cultural growth and understanding. Just as some academic programs enforce "language pledges" that forbid students to speak English while abroad, we should institute "media pledges" that prohibit television reruns, instant messaging, and music libraries. We should then dismiss from the program those who violate the pledge.

Seriously? You listen to your own music and get kicked out? This isn't military school, so this sort of thing should be roundly rejected. I had never heard of pledges to force kids not to speak English, and it seems a bad idea to me. My Spanish grew by leaps and bounds when I lived in Spain, but I spoke plenty of English to friends I made in the program. It can even be a welcome relief.

Even more importantly, from the website it is clear that the Spanish dorm where I lived is now loaded with technology, as are its students. If I were there now, and someone said they would text me to let me know when people were getting together, or friended me on Facebook, should I tell them I was bound by a pledge that I would remain stuck in the 20th century?

Since technology is real and permanent, I would prefer to think about how to make the study abroad experience as rich as possible without trying to pretend we live in a different era and claiming that what we did in the past was better.

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Chilean Presidential Campaign Narrative

The November presidential election has already been framed in the U.S. press. It is the daughter of an air force general in the junta versus the daughter of an air force general who was tortured and died in prison in opposition to the junta. By any measure it is a powerful and evocative narrative, emblematic of a past that Chile constantly deals with.

I tend to think, however, that this narrative will be much more prevalent outside Chile than within it. Scanning the headlines of papers from different ideological strands shows a lot of focus on unity within the right, but also education, health, and other issues that affect the bottom line for Chileans (and which at times have sparked protests). There is nothing about the air force generals.

There is no bad blood between the candidates, no personal animosity, and not much incentive for Michelle Bachelet to use her father in the campaign (Evelyn Matthei can only lose bringing up hers, and has already said it is irrelevant). Human rights and the legacy of dictatorship are real public policy concerns, but there are many others as well that I think will end up taking precedence in the campaign.

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Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds

"Thank you for your service" is a common phrase, a well-intentioned but superficial greeting, which skates over the surface of complexity. Kevin Powers' novel The Yellow Birds shows how sometimes it is unwelcome precisely because of the superficiality. Private Bartle is the narrator, and he is fighting in Iraq with Private Murphy. It is the powerful story of their efforts to figure out what their proper place should be--what "service" even means--just to stay alive long enough to get home.

It is a tragedy because no one figures it out, not even the hard-nosed sergeant who helps keep everyone alive with his uncompromising focus on safety. Not Bartle, not Murphy, not their parents, and certainly not Iraqis, who hunker down in the middle of devastation. The soldiers fight for the same bit of territory over and over, and nothing much changes. The war itself served no purpose. As the sergeant said toward the end of the novel, more or less to himself, "Fuck 'em, man. Fuck everyone on earth."

Powers writes beautifully. From the reviews I've skimmed the main criticism seems to be his style, which is self-conscious with its poetic metaphors and descriptions. Some find it overdone and derivative (though I bet every war novel is criticized somewhere for being derivative of Ernest Hemingway) but I thought it effectively dug under the surface. He doesn't want to just lay out facts about how the war was fought--you can find that anywhere. He wants to get you into the head of the so-young soldiers while they're there.

I recommend it very highly.

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Immigrant Intimidation in Charlotte

Via La Noticia, here is a copy of a letter sent to immigrants in an apartment complex. The letter, which did not really come from the owners, is simply intended to intimidate people. Very, very sick.

If you can't read Spanish, it tells people that if there any doubt about their legal status, they must move out of the apartment immediately, making up a fake law to back it up.

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Capriles and Chilean Foreign Policy

I disagree with much of Juan Nagel's take on Henrique Capriles and Chilean politics. In short, he got the cold shoulder both from Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera, both of whom refused to get involved in the Venezuelan political controversy.

Nagel argues that Piñera's decision was based on fear of reprisal from Caracas, while Bachelet's was because "when it comes to foreign policy, the radical left wing of her coalition is in command." For this he cites the recent inclusion of the toothless and small Communist Party into the Nueva Mayoría, along with her primary-driven campaign spending promises (in 2005 she also made lots of promises, then quickly went straight back to the center).

Neither of those arguments convinces me, because the clear history of Chielan foreign policy since the end of the dictatorship has been pragmatism and non-intervention, both of which explain the similar reactions by high level politicians of different parties. In fact, the left and the right in Chile have the exact same foreign policy stance.

My hunch is that both Bachelet and Piñera figure there were imperfect elections, but they weren't different enough from a host of other imperfect elections to overcome a strong inclination to avoid meddling. While Venezuela wants to be a revolutionary vanguard and Brazil wants to a global diplomatic player, Chile wants to trade. And it doesn't want to be too distracted unnecessarily by something that has nothing to do with trade. That transcends any other aspect of ideology.

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Obama is Wrong on Higher Ed

President Obama says he wants to get aggressive about the rising cost of higher education. But he's very mixed up.

"Families and taxpayers can’t just keep paying more and more and more into an undisciplined system where costs just keep on going up and up and up. We’ll never have enough loan money, we’ll never have enough grant money, to keep up with costs that are going up 5, 6, 7 percent a year. We’ve got to get more out of what we pay for," Obama said.

This is ignorant and even dangerous BS, at least for public schools. The main reason costs are rising is that every year many state legislatures are reducing their investment on higher education and thereby passing the cost onto the student. The idea that we can slash more within the university without hurting students is naive. Already at UNC Charlotte, dozens of tasks normally done in other offices are now forced on departments--we've been cutting constantly for a decade, but there is only so much you can cut without hurting the quality of education. I want smaller classes, for example, because they are better for students, but the budget will not allow it.

When Obama says taxpayers are "paying more and more and more" he is wrong. The North Carolina legislature passed a budget yesterday that the governor will sign today, and in the next two years it cuts $482 million from higher education. So don't tell me about taxpayers getting the shaft.

Obama is buying the argument that higher education costs have nothing to do with their funding source, which is illogical but pervasive. Now professors are going to be blamed for a problem the legislature has forced onto them.

Unfortunately, if a Democratic president believes this line, then public universities are in even more trouble than I thought.

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Che Guevara's Three One Dimensions

Che Guevara ranks up there as one of the most one-dimensional figures in Latin American political history. Most recently Ileana Ros-Lehtinen breathed fire when UNESCO accepted a collection of Che documents from Cuba and Bolivia. The mere idea of studying him sets her off because he is a "bloodthirsty murderous sadist."

With that as a jumping off point, here are the three one dimensions, so to speak, all of them missing critical facts.

First, Che Guevara is the embodiment of evil. 

This is widely held by the opposition to the Castro regime in the United States. He has no redeeming qualities because he hated people. He did not fight for beliefs but rather only for the sheer enjoyment of killing and oppressing people. He's like the creepy guy with the cattle gun in No Country For Old Men.

Second, Che Guevara is the embodiment of revolutionary good. 

Many in the Latin American left has long held this view. He is a light of inspiration for us all, a model for every child to follow. Hugo Chávez talked about him until the very end. He helped the oppressed as much as possible, and even when resting--which was rare--he looked lovingly at pictures of the oppressed.

Third, Che Guevara is the embodiment of ersatz bourgeois rebellion. 

The sight of teenagers buying Che Guevara t-shirts in malls never fails to amaze me. But his picture is cute, he looks so inspiring, and this makes me feel like I am giving a signal to my parents and my school that I am a rebel. There's no way he would've let his mom take away his Xbox for staying out too late!

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The AHA Flap

I am trying to wrap my head around the American Historical Association's controversial statement that Ph.D. dissertations should be unavailable in digital form for six years. Here is the core of it:

At the same time, however, an increasing number of university presses are reluctant to offer a publishing contract to newly minted PhDs whose dissertations have been freely available via online sources.  Presumably, online readers will become familiar with an author’s particular argument, methodology, and archival sources, and will feel no need to buy the book once it is available.  As a result, students who must post their dissertations online immediately after they receive their degree can find themselves at a serious disadvantage in their effort to get their first book published; it is not unusual for an early-career historian to spend five or six years revising a dissertation and preparing the manuscript for submission to a press for consideration. 

I wish there was some evidence from publishers to this effect. A dissertation is very different from a book, as all scholars know it is much more raw and it lacks the gravitas of a press, thus making it much less likely to be sought out and cited (is there data on dissertation citation?). This article in The Atlantic suggests the evidence does not bear that out. On the flip side, via Raul Pacheco-Vega, here is the Oxford University Press site saying "We will not usually consider for publication any book held in its entirety or in
significant part in an institutional or commercial electronic depository." Is that the norm? The AHA doesn't say. Also, the "presumably" is a bit weird. Is there any evidence for it?
I have no direct involvement in this, though it interests me because I've always been close to historians (in addition to friends here at UNC Charlotte, I had historians both on my M.A. and Ph.D. committees) and some of my work is political history and bookish. So I feel I can relate to a certain extent, though I must say this flap really highlights how different history and political science are.
This may well just reflect an ongoing debate within the discipline about the primacy of publishing a book for tenure. If a book (or what really becomes THE BOOK for an assistant professor) is the only way to get tenure, then there is an incentive to keep everything about your book manuscript secret until it gets published, assuming that presses will ignore you if anyone can look at your dissertation. Unfortunately, this means that knowledge takes second place to process. It's a conscious effort to get as few people as possible to know who you are and what you do.
For junior scholars, this makes perversely good sense because they need that job. However, hiding knowledge cannot be good for any discipline (though here is an historian's take to the effect that if you wrote the dissertation, you should have the right to bury it in a hole if you want). I would hope there would be some other way of providing a viable path to tenure. THE BOOK is deeply entrenched, but need that be permanent?

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Potent Papal Power?

This Wall Street Journal article on the pope makes all kinds of broad claims about his political power without actually providing any evidence. Annoyingly, it also has to bring up Hugo Chávez, claiming that his death opened a political void into which the pope can step--"the Latin America left has no leader" message is unfortunately pervasive in the media. Evidence for papal power includes:

Weeks into his papacy, the pontiff sought to calm tensions in Venezuela after a contested election to replace Mr. Chávez in April started devolving into deadly protests. He issued a statement calling for dialogue.

Giving a statement calling for dialogue does not amount to being a major political player. I don't think anything Pope Francis has done has demonstrated any real political power, if by that we mean truly influencing the course of events and/or prompting political leaders to pursue particular policies.

I am not saying the pope will not have any political sway--though I tend to think it will be limited--but rather we don't yet have much evidence for it. If he does have sway, though, I think the article misses another point. He won't influence leftist presidents who already agree and focus on poverty, but rather will likely be used by those presidents to justify greater social spending. In other words, he won't really be the source of change, but rather will serve as a rationale for change.

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Ignore Academic Advice

Harvard Professor Radhika Nagpal wrote a post at Scientific American about strategies for junior faculty that is very different from the majority you read because its tone is optimistic and positive. I will let you decide for yourself how much you agree--I didn't necessarily agree with everything but found it refreshing nonetheless--and will focus on just one part of the argument that I particularly liked:

Stop Taking Advice

This resonated with me, since I've written blog posts telling people to do exactly that, and I've periodically written posts talking about what I consider bad advice. It is entirely possible that I think it is bad because it just doesn't quite fit me or my department/university, and that's really the point. There is very little universally useful advice.

Over the years I have heard advice about everything imaginable in academia (and there are even posts on advice about academic advice. Oh damn, is that what this is too?). When I typed in "academia advice" in Google, I got over 15 million results. As Nagpal notes, you can end up with lists of things you're supposed to do, and spend too much time focusing on the stupid lists rather than something useful.

I understand the irony of providing advice about ignoring advice, but it doesn't bother me since I am telling you to ignore it anyway if you want. Instead of seeking advice, look for role models and ask them questions about how they do something, but then adapt what they say to your own context without necessarily following it blindly. I still routinely do that now, to my great benefit. I have been department chair one year, and during that time I have talked to my two former chairs (Bob Kravchuk and Ted Arrington) as well as Ken Godwin, who had been a chair before he came to UNC Charlotte, about specific issues I was dealing with. To their credit, none of them offered sweeping advice about how to be a chair. Instead, they explained to me how they had addressed similar things, and I adapted that to my particular case.

Academia is an odd profession in many ways and we all need help navigating it, but we don't need to get too tangled up in how-to lists, no matter how well meaning.

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Threatening Venezuela

The Spanish paper ABC has a source claiming John Kerry called Elías Jaua and went off on Venezuela, detailing the ways in which the U.S. would punish the country if it tried to get Edward Snowden there.

If the report is true, then the Obama administration has truly gone off the deep end. What makes me wonder is the threat to stop refining Venezuelan oil. This doesn't seem like a legitimate threat to me given the economic dislocation it would create in the United States, not to mention the diplomatic disaster abroad. Maybe Snowden is that important to Obama, but I am not totally convinced. I hope he's not.

If it is true, then it is a particularly crude type of threat that reminds me of the Bush administration's counterproductive and self-defeating threats against Chile and Mexico to support the Iraq War.

ABC has periodically published controversial stories based on mysterious "sources," especially about the imminent demise of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. So they're 1 for 2 at the moment.

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Bachelet's Platform

In our book (which we are hoping to get into paperback) Silvia Borzuztky and I--along with our contributors--argue among other things that Michelle Bachelet made tons of campaign promises, then rather quickly found it difficult to keep them because of her focus on consensus. Ironically, then, consensus generated conflict.

So I took a look at her current promises. They are expansive and all over the place. Beyond the predictable, like education reform, there is tax reform, a new constitution, better dental care for women, more ambulances, animal rights, more parks, and enhanced freedom of worship.

Pablo Longueira's sudden withdrawal due to depression leaves the door open even wider for her. But you have to wonder what will happen if she does. Last time she managed to maintain her personal appeal while leaving her coalition in absolute tatters and not achieving much of what she promised. And now she's promising even more.

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Encyclopedia of U.S. Military Intervention in Latin America

I just received my copy of the Encyclopedia of U.S. Military Intervention in Latin America, edited by Alan McPherson, who has written a lot on the topic. I wrote entries on the School of the Americas, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, and Immigration. It is pricey, but if you're at a university you should recommend it to the library.

Encyclopedias, of which there are a variety of specialized kinds, play a varied role in academia. At teaching-oriented schools where peer-reviewed articles are not deemed important, they contribute to a record of scholarship for promotion, raises, etc. At schools with more research demands, they are sometimes looked down upon because they are synthetic and not peer-reviewed. I did not do any until a few years out of tenure, and only then because people I knew were editing them (the other I contributed to was the Encyclopedia of U.S.-Latin American Relations. I couldn't really refuse that one even if my colleague Jurgen Buchenau weren't an editor!). They can be, or at least really should be, time consuming.

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U.S. Image in Latin America

This Pew Research Poll has all kinds of fascinating nuggets about the image of the United States globally. In general, the U.S. is seen pretty favorably in the Latin American countries surveyed (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Mexico, and Venezuela).

The exception is Argentina, where the U.S. is viewed favorably by only 41%, though that is up from 17% in 2007. Argentina also highlights something that you don't hear much about: young Latin Americans view the U.S. in a more positive light than older.

The polls were conducted in March and April 2013, so of course do not reflect the current controversies, especially with regard to Bolivia. We might likely expect the views of the United States not to change all that much, but rather to see Obama's favorability drop. And, in fact, he is less popular than the "United States," which reflects the difference between the U.S. as a country and U.S. foreign policy. At the same time, though, there are interesting discrepancies, such as 51% of Venezuelans believing the United States takes their country's interests into consideration.

Further, Latin Americans tend to see China's economic influence as more positive than that of the United States, even while acknowledging that China protects civil liberties less.

Anyway, it's worth digging around in there.

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Quote of the Day: Iran and Latin America

[T]he absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

--from a Heritage Foundation op-ed

Iran has a very open presence in Latin America. The question, then, is whether this constitutes a threat to the national security of the United States. Even the Heritage Foundation has to admit there is no evidence for that. But, it seems, we should proclaim it to be a threat even though we lack evidence.

The smartest policy position would be to stay aware of what Iran is doing, being careful not to lump every activity into the "threat" category and also being very careful not to confuse fact and rumor. Too many analyses of Iran (including the above op-ed) have too much of the latter.

Labeling something a threat prematurely is definitely a threat to U.S. security. The second Iraq War will always be a prime example of that.

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Pardons in Chile

The Commander in Chief of the Chilean army, Juan Miguel Fuente-Alba, just brought up a recurring issue, namely concern for retired officers still going through trials or in prison for human rights abuses.

“Lo único que nos apena es la situación por la cual atraviesan algunas personas que, habiendo pertenecido a las filas del Ejército y que hoy tienen avanzada edad o situaciones médicas complejas, uno podría darles una mirada en términos humanitarios, ya que viven tanto en lo personal como en lo familiar situaciones muy complicadas”, precisa.

Añadió que “efectivamente nos entristece ver que todavía esas personas permanecen ancladas a una situación de hace 40 años”, y estima que Chile debiera permitir superar estas situaciones “aunque ello no significa dejar de sacar lecciones” de lo ocurrido.

This came up very publicly at the time of Chile's bicentennial in 2010, and even included Catholic bishops. Sebastián Piñera said no.

Fuente-Alba's logic is especially twisted because he says officers should not be "anchored" to the past, but of course the families of the victims--and living victims--are now always tied to that past. The military and the right always want to "move on" (indeed, Piñera based his 2010 decision on not wanting to get mired in the past) and "not look backwards" For them, though, that simply means getting off the hook. Not once do they mention that when your child, father, mother, brother, sister was killed or just disappeared, moving on is not so simple. When the victims asked for mercy, they were given none.

Whether or not to grant pardons is always a touchy issue (just ask Gerald Ford!). In Chile, where dialogue has been gradual and painstaking, that is particularly true.

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Pat Barker's Regeneration

I read Pat Barker's Regeneration, part of a minor World War I kick I'm currently in. It is historical fiction, focusing on Dr. Rivers, a British officers who treats cases of what we would generally now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Siegfried Sassoon, a published poet who has proclaimed himself a pacifist, is one of his patients at a hospital in Edinburgh. Both of them are real people (and you can download Sassoon's book of poems, Counter-Attack, for free because by now it is in the public domain).

It is the first book in a trilogy, and the end of the novel hints at what is to come, namely an examination of the brutal methods many doctors employed in soldiers with neurological problems. They often amounted to torture, as with electric shocks. Rivers is the exception, and he reminds me so much of Major Sidney Freedman in the TV show MASH, who empathizes with his patients yet also understands sometimes to his own dismay that he is "curing" them so that they can go back to the front and face more of the same horrors.

There isn't a plot, really, but it is beautifully written and as with the best of historical fiction Barker makes you not only feel the characters, but learn more about them. It is all so sad. World War I involved unbelievable slaughter but there was too little understanding of how it affected those who lived. Unfortunately, a century later we've definitely advanced but not as much as we should.

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Chávez and Egypt

I agree with Andres Oppenheimer that applauding coups is bad policy, as I wrote in an earlier post. But then he suddenly throw out history and common sense because he really hates Hugo Chávez.

Supporters of the Egyptian coup also dismiss the argument that Morsi’s ouster will set a precedent for a greater tolerance for military coups in Latin America and other parts of the world. They say, accurately, that the latest wave of glorification of coups was set in motion in Latin America more than a decade ago by Chávez.

Before getting to anything else, I have yet to see any indication or in fact anyone arguing that Egypt could possibly be a precedent for Latin America. If anything, it was the opposite because that coup was so similar to other moderator coups in Latin America. Knocking out a president and then installing another without directly taking power is old hat for Latin American militaries.

Oh, and that history thing.

The next time I teach Latin American politics, I will be sure to let students know that no one really supported (or "glorified") coups before Chávez got involved--unsuccessfully--in 1992. I am certain that officers everywhere ignore their own domestic context and think, "If Chávez can fail in a coup, then so can I." The Honduran officers were immersed in their own inglorious history in 2009, and were not acting because they had read about Chávez's failure.

To all op-ed writers out there: I challenge you to write one without referring to Chávez. Often you will end up with a better argument.

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