South America has been a special part of my life for four decades. I have lived many years in Brasil and Peru. I am married to an incredible lady from Argentina. I want to share South America with you.
Argentina President Mauricio Macri announced plans to deepen his austerity drive on Monday, but foreign exchange traders remain wary of an apparent disconnect between those plans and the actions of the country’s central bank.
Macri announced a wage freeze for executive branch government employees and said he will eliminate one out of every four “political positions” appointed by ministers, Reuters reported. Eliminating those posts should save the government $77 million a year.
The peso is in free fall as other emerging markets currencies soar against the dollar, however, due to growing concern that Macri is pushing the central bank to waffle in its fight against inflation, Bloomberg reported.
Last week, the central bank unexpectedly cut interest rates after Argentina increased its 2018 inflation target to 15 percent from 10 percent.
Elected in 2015 on a pro-business platform, Macri has scored a few legislative victories. But the passage of his pension reform bill last month badly damaged his approval ratings and the country’s unions oppose his plans for labor reforms.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos suspended talks with Colombia’s last-standing guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), on Monday after three attacks killed seven policemen and injured 50.
The president said the talks would remain suspended “until I see coherence between their words and actions,” according to Colombia Reports. ELN said the attacks would continue until there is an agreement on a bilateral ceasefire.
The talks had resumed briefly at the urging of the United Nations following a similar stalemate. The government and ELN have engaged in on-again, off-again negotiations since February 2017 to end a five-decade war, the Guardian noted.
Meanwhile, peace talks with the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have borne fruit. The rebels have demobilized and turned to politics, with former leader Rodrigo LondoƱo declaring his candidacy in the May 27 presidential election this week, NPR reported.
The FARC will be participating in elections for the first time since it was founded in the 1960s.
Mexican officials said Sunday the government would deploy federal police troops to round up major criminals in a bid to slow drug-related violence that resulted in more than 25,000 murders last year.
The crackdown is designed “to recover peace and calm for all Mexicans,” Reuters quoted National Security Commissioner Renato Sales as saying.
He did not specify how many federal police would be deployed.
Violence is a major issue in the upcoming presidential election, where President Enrique Pena Nieto’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is trailing in the polls.
At least 25 people were murdered in Mexico over the weekend, including nine men who were executed at a house party in Monterrey.
Notably, some blame Mexico’s military-style crackdowns for the uptick in violence, saying that breaking up big cartels and arresting gang leaders has resulted in “smaller, more blood-thirsty groups.”
Opposition candidates in the presidential race have pledged varying reversals of that approach.
The title of the film “Vazante,” as translated by subtitles, refers to a “surge,” but more literally means the very opposite — an ebb, or receding, of the tide. Still, as suggested by the opening scene, in which an unidentified woman is shown dying in childbirth, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Such cyclical polarities — of life and death, dependence and autonomy, rising and falling — inform and enrich this film, directed by Daniela Thomas, the longtime collaborator of Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles. Every frame of its starkly gorgeous black-and-white cinematography — which celebrates the beauty of barren mud as much as the potential of a 12-year-old girl — hints at an inherent contradiction visually, or in the narrative or in the film’s larger themes.
Set in colonial Brazil in 1821, on the estate of a middle-aged Portuguese cattle rancher and slave trader named Antonio (Adriano Carvalho), the story takes its sweet time laying out the premise.
The cinematic foot-dragging, which focuses as much on brooding close-ups as plot development, may initially frustrate viewers, even though the climax, which comes at the last possible moment, is an emotionally devastating corker.
It eventually becomes clear that it is Antonio’s wife who has died, and is replaced by her niece, Beatriz (Luana Nastas), a preteen who has not quite reached childbearing age. While he waits for his bride to reach puberty, Antonio satisfies himself sexually with a slave (Jai Baptista), whose adolescent son (Vinicius Dos Anjos) also finds himself drawn to his master’s new wife, especially during Antonio’s long absences to conduct business.
This is a recipe neither for a happy marriage nor a happy ending, but Thomas keeps things at a simmer for the longest time, forestalling the story’s ultimate boil-over until the final minute or so of the tale.
“Vazante” meanwhile concerns itself with other clashes — between slave and master, slave and slave (some of whom come from different African countries and cannot communicate with one another); and between one notably self-confident free black man, Jeremias (FabrĆcio Boliveira), and the more subservient human chattel over whom he is hired to work.
Women, too, are treated like property in this gathering storm of a yarn, whose subject matter — racism and sexism — is powerfully timely, despite the period setting of the film. The mining of diamonds, which used to be the main local industry, has dried up, and the soil seems inhospitable to farming, despite Jeremias’ insistence that it can be made to yield crops. “Fire stirs up the womb of the Earth,” he says, after clearing a field by burning it to the ground.
If that sounds like both a metaphor for the film’s contradictory themes and a warning about the scorched-earth conflagration still to come, it is. “Vazante’s” explosive denouement — both shockingly sudden and implicitly foretold — suggests that the old ways cannot last, but that they won’t be given up without an ugly fight.
‘Vazante’
3 stars
Unrated (contains violence, sex, nudity and mature thematic material)
Cast: Adriano Carvalho, Luana Nastas, FabrĆcio Boliveira, Vinicius Dos Anjos, Jai Baptista
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva remained defiant after an appeals court upheld his conviction on corruption charges, making it even more unlikely that he will be able to make another run at the nation’s top office.
“I want them to tell me what crime I committed,” the Associated Press quoted Lula as telling supporters after the verdict. “I have been convicted again for a freaking apartment that is not mine.”
All three judges voted to reject the appeal, which related to charges that he accepted a beachfront apartment from a construction firm in exchange for government contracts, Bloomberg reported. They also boosted his sentence to 12 years from nine and a half.
Lula’s Workers’ Party said it would still register Lula as its candidate for president. By law, the conviction bars him from contesting, but he has several more avenues to appeal.
Popular for the social programs he adopted during his two terms in office during the commodities boom, Lula leads opinion polls. He has vowed to undo current President Michel Temer’s market-friendly reforms.
In any other country, Paraguay’s president, Horacio Cartes, would probably be basking in popularity and skating toward re-election. But that’s not the case in this booming country, whose seven million people suffered under a brutal dictatorship from 1954 to 1989.
Cartes delivered economic growth of more than 3 percent a year over the past four years – when other Latin American countries were plunging into bankruptcy. But when a group of senators in April sought to ram through constitutional changes that would allow him to run for a second term, thousands took to the streets to protest. And the presidential primary held in December suggests their anger hasn’t entirely cooled.
Senator Mario Abdo Benitez trounced the ex-finance minister whom Cartes had handpicked as his successor to win the nomination from the ruling Colorado Party on Dec. 17, Reuters reported. The news agency called the election result a “sharp rebuke” to the otherwise successful president. Adding insult to injury: Abdo is the son of former dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s private secretary.
“The arrogant establishment has been defeated today and forever. … We all have scars but are urging unity for the Colorados and later, Paraguay,” Abdo told his supporters following the vote.
The Colorado Party has governed Paraguay for nearly 70 years, including during Stroessner’s 1954-1989 dictatorship, with a brief interruption when leftist Fernando Lugo was elected in 2008 and impeached in 2012. So Abdo is likely to win the presidency in April when he faces lawyer Efrain Alegre, who won the opposition Liberal Party’s nomination.
That’s a stunning change in a year’s time. In April 2017, Cartes looked likely to square off against Lugo amid moves to end the constitutional rule limiting presidents to a single term.
But their backers’ efforts to amend the constitution in the senate rather than through a constituent assembly enraged many citizens, the Economist reported. Thousands took to the streets, police killed a 25-year-old protester named Rodrigo Quintana, and the rule change was scuttled, despite its proponents’ argument that Paraguay is the only country in Latin America that does not allow second terms and needs to modernize its constitution.
The snafu could boost Alegre’s chances, of course. But a bigger concern is whether the interruption in the relative stability that Paraguay has enjoyed under Cartes was just a blip or a signal of greater problems to come.
In part due to the president’s low-tax policy, Paraguay has enjoyed one of the fastest economic growth rates in Latin America. Its economy grew around 4 percent last year, and FocusEconomics’ LatinFocus panel projects 3.8-percent GDP growth each year in 2018 and in 2019. Stratfor also credits Cartes’ business-friendly policies for stimulating a small but robust manufacturing sector.
For the former soft-drink and tobacco executive, that may mean history will look upon him fondly. But for Paraguay’s presidents, the rule remains “one and done.”
The government of beleaguered Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro wrong-footed the opposition by announcing elections before the end of April, after months of refusing to hold fresh polls.
“This announcement sends a debilitated opposition running to find a candidate in a very short time frame,” Bloomberg quoted Carlos Romero, a political analyst at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, as saying.
The government announced the plan shortly after the European Union blacklisted seven key allies of the president, adding to US sanctions on more than a dozen top government officials – including Maduro himself. The sanctions were a response to Maduro’s move to create a constituent assembly in July to rewrite the constitution and bypass the national legislature. He was already facing protests demanding new elections.
That same constituent assembly – composed entirely of loyalists from Maduro’s socialist party – approved the new election. Otherwise, the constitution called for the next presidential polls to be held in January 2019.
“The more sanctions, the more elections,” Maduro said following the announcement.
Venezuela’s oil output plunged to a 28-year low in 2017, and that’s the good news.
Though Opec reported Venezuela’s crude oil production fell nearly 13 percent year-on-year in December, the official figures reported by Caracas showed a stunning 29 percent drop, Bloomberg reported. And that reflects a widening (and worsening) gap since April.
Venezuela needs to sell oil to salvage its failing economy and avoid defaulting on its debt. But Caracas has been unable to stop a now six-year-long production decline due to insufficient investments, payment delays to suppliers and US sanctions, Reuters reported.
The “weird” discrepancy in the figures is also significant. In November, beleaguered President Nicolas Maduro – whose efforts to consolidate power have prompted local protests and international sanctions – replaced both the country’s oil minister and the head of state-oil company PetrĆ³leos de Venezuela SA.
So the massive drop in official output could represent newly appointed Major General Manuel Quevedo’s attempt to overstate the problem and thereby take credit for a modest improvement in January.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Taking on the dirty old menHow young Brazilians hope to clean up politics
First, they must get elected, and the old guard make this hard
Until recently, politics was a turn-off for his generation. The average age of lower-house deputies elected in 2014 was 50, 19 years above the national mean. Brazil’s old-timers are discredited: after more than three years of the Lava Jato (car wash) corruption probe, 40% of congressmen are under investigation. Politicians are unloved. Just one voter in 20 admires them; only 3% approve of President Michel Temer.
Confidence in congress has been sagging for ages. In 2010 Tiririca (Grumpy), a professional clown, was elected to Brazil’s lower house under the slogan “It can’t get any worse.” It did. On December 6th he told his congressional colleagues he would not seek re-election in 2018. “Only eight of the 513 actually show up here,” he moaned. “I am one of those eight and I am a clown.”
Young Brazilians are fed up. “Four years ago someone like me running for congress would have made no sense,” says Mr Oliveira. But renewing Brazil’s congress will not be easy. Independent candidates are banned and parties are unwelcoming to newcomers. In some states seats stay in the hands of well-known families.
Dislodging them may get harder. In 2015, after a series of scandals, Brazil’s supreme court outlawed corporate campaign contributions. In October congress created a “special campaign-finance fund” for next year’s election. But the fund, and airtime, will be allocated in proportion to parties’ current representation. That frustrates newcomers. “Congress is like a cancer,” says Mr Oliveira. “It’s not working in the best interests of the body and it’s defending itself to survive.”
