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Thursday, March 29, 2018

Panama: The Devil Is Green

PANAMA

The Devil is Green

It’s easy to be ambivalent about Panama.
The nation exists because Europeans and Americans wanted to build a shipping canal through the isthmus that separates the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. There are few better examples of late imperialism in the Western Hemisphere.
But the canal, of course, was a springboard to making Panama one of the most competitive economies in Latin America. The country expects growth of 5.6 percent this year, Reuters reported. Not shabby.
Then again – here the ambivalence becomes clearer – that dynamism has unfortunate side effects, to say the least.
“Panama has long served as a hub for money laundering in Latin America, serving criminal groups who inject dirty money into legitimate institutions, as well as corrupt elites attempting to hide their wealth,” wrote Victoria Dittmar in InSight Crime.
In addition to the illicit activities described in her article, Dittmar was referring to the Panama Papers scandal that broke two years ago when an unidentified tipster sent documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to news organizations that banded together to report the story around the world.
“As soon as we had received the first bunch of data, we saw that this was explosive because we saw that there were several heads of state mentioned in this document,” Frederik Obermaier, one of the German reporters who worked on the project, told WPLF in Kentucky.
Mossack Fonseca recently closed down after Panamanian authorities raided its offices to investigate its links to Odebrecht, a major engineering firm implicated in bribery scandals throughout Central and South America, the Guardian reported.
The recent experience of a Trump-branded hotel in Panama City is another example of the bizarre way business is conducted in Panama.
In early March – after court hearings, shouting and shoving matches in the lobby and other contretemps over claims by the building’s majority owner that US President Donald Trump’s company was mismanaging the property – a workman used a hammer and crowbar to pry off the president’s name from the Trump International Hotel and Tower.
Afterward, the owner, a 39-year-old Cypriot named Orestes Fintiklis, “strode to the lobby’s baby grand piano and played and sang ‘Accordeon,’ a popular Greek song about the fight against fascism,” the New York Times reported.
One can assume Fintiklis doesn’t agree with Trump’s politics.
On Tuesday, Trump’s company lost a bid to regain control of the hotel, when an arbitrator ruled that the eviction was wrong but declined to reverse the status quo. “The facts on the ground now militate against forcibly undoing the steps that have been taken,” arbitrator Joel Richler wrote, according to the Associated Press. Trump’s firm could still regain control, but Tuesday’s decision dashes hopes of a swift resolution, the agency said.
Around 50 miles from the gleaming towers of Panama City, meanwhile, residents of the port city of Colon staged riots recently in protest of plans to regenerate the city. They argued that the plans would price them out of their homes.
Observers say it’s sad when gobs of foreign investment lead not to happiness and prosperity but international scandals, fisticuffs among the rich and fears of homelessness among the poor.

Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Puente del Inca Lujand e Cuyo, Argentina

LUJƁN DE CUYO, ARGENTINA

Puente del Inca

A brightly colored natural bridge formed by mineral-rich hot springs high up in the Andes. 




























































































































Brasil: Will He Won't He?

BRAZIL

Will He, Won’t He

A Brazilian appeals court rejected former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s final procedural objections to his conviction on corruption charges, increasing the likelihood he’ll be heading to jail rather than the campaign trail.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Henrique Meirelles said he’ll decide next week whether to resign his post to run against incumbent President Michel Temer for the nomination of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) party, Reuters reported.
Lula won’t go to jail until at least April 4, when the Supreme Court is set to rule on his request that he be allowed to exhaust his appeals process before being imprisoned, a move that would reverse a 2016 decision that convicts should begin serving their sentences after the failure of their first appeal, the agency reported separately. In any case, the conviction makes him ineligible for the election this October – where he’s still polling ahead of the legit candidates.
With an approval rating in the single-digits, Temer, on the other hand, may not even have the backing of his own party.

Friday, March 23, 2018

Mexico: Bombs On The Beach

MEXICO

Bombs on the Beach

Spring breakers were avoiding Playa del Carmen in Mexico after the US State Department issued a security warning about the popular Caribbean resort.
“Passengers are definitely steering away and concerned,” Olga Ramudo, who runs a Florida travel agency, told USA Today.
Mexican tourism officials said the warning – which has since been lifted – was overblown. But American authorities issued the alert after a ferry exploded in February, injuring 25 people, and police found undetonated devices on another tourist boat.
Bombs on the beach are the last thing that Mexico needs these days.
Politically and economically, the country is facing twin threats, MarketWatch explained.
From without, negotiations with the US and Canada over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) could destabilize its economy.
From within, crime and corruption are major issues. Read this fascinating BBC story about Ciudad NezahualcĆ³yotl, a Mexico City suburb that is the most densely populated place in the country, to see the enormity of the problem.
Mexico and Canada have stuck to their guns in NAFTA negotiations, securing exemptions from US President Donald Trump’s recently imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum so as not to muddle one trade issue with the other, wrote Bloomberg.
But those changes also came amid what the New York Times described as a “marked increase in hostility from Washington” toward Mexico and other Latin American countries.
The multiple currents are likely to come to a head in July, when Mexican voters elect a new president.
Leftwing candidate AndrĆ©s Manuel LĆ³pez Obrador of the four-year-old National Regeneration Movement is currently in the lead – polling at 42 percent compared with 24 percent for former finance minister Jose Antonio Meade, the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Reuters reported. Many American pundits describe his potential victory as a populist nightmare, but according to the New York Review of Books, those threats are imagined.
PRI and President Enrique PeƱa Nieto, who cannot seek reelection because of term limits, have delivered economic failures and scandals.
As Reuters reported, Mexico’s attorney general, a PRI member, recently released a video that was clearly designed to besmirch Ricardo Anaya, a presidential candidate with the main opposition National Action Party (PAN). In the video, Anaya or someone in his campaign calls law enforcement officials “sons of bitches.” He dropped four percentage points to 23 percent in recent polls, Reuters noted.
But polls also indicated the video made the PRI candidate Meade look bad, too. People wondered why the attorney general possessed the footage in the first place, Bloomberg said.
That could turn the election into a contest between LĆ³pez Obrador and Anaya, meaning a PRI candidate would not be a serious contender for the first time in Mexico’s modern history.
It’s clear Mexicans want change. Once they secure it, maybe they and those north of the border will be able to more easily enjoy a margarita together.

Thursday, March 22, 2018

Peru: "You Can't Fire Me!"

PERU

You Can’t Fire Me

Peru President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned Wednesday on the eve of an impeachment vote, ending months of political turmoil.
Kuczynski is expected to be replaced by Vice President Martin Vizcarra on Friday, Reuters reported.
The outgoing president denied any wrongdoing and blamed the opposition for tarnishing his reputation. Elected two years ago on promises to boost the economy and root out corruption, Kuczynski himself fell victim to corruption allegations, the latest of which included audio and video recordings that appeared to show Kuczynski’s allies offering government contracts to lawmakers in exchange for political support, the agency said.
“I’ve worked for nearly 60 years of my life with complete honesty. The opposition has tried to depict me as a corrupt person,” Kuczynski said in a pre-recorded video message to the nation.
In December, Kuczynski had narrowly averted impeachment over allegations that his company received money from Brazil’s Odebrecht construction firm, which has been at the center of various corruption cases around the region.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Peru's Impeachment Vote Does Not Mean Much

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/why-perus-impeachment-vote-wont-rock-boat-Kuczynski?id=743c2bc617&e=1bd154cf7d&uuid=7b23680d-9d13-4b75-b872-722601350874&utm_source=Topics%2C+Themes+and+Regions&utm_campaign=ffbec99927-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_03_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_743c2bc617-ffbec99927-53655957&mc_cid=ffbec99927&mc_eid=[UNIQID]

My Wife Elena And I Are Survivors Of South American Military Dictatorships And Death Squads-Here IS The Harsh Reality!

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A poster asking about kidnapped children in Buenos Aires in 1998.CreditRafael Wollmann/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images
MEXICO CITY — The man who sent my parents to their death, along with thousands of other people, died while under house arrest a few weeks ago. He was 90 years old and serving 14 life sentences. Death has died, and yet it brings me no joy.
In CĆ³rdoba, the Argentine province where I was born, death was named Luciano BenjamĆ­n MenĆ©ndez. I saw him on the street on a winter afternoon in 1996. I was 18 years old, studying at a friend’s house, when my friend’s mother announced, “MenĆ©ndez is out on the sidewalk.”
I peered through the window and watched as he stepped out of a car and walked to a house across the street, where his daughter lived. Old age had slowed his stride — he was close to 70 at the time — but he retained the arrogant demeanor of a military officer. His family came out to meet him. No hugs were exchanged.
I was gripped by fright, and for the remainder of the afternoon we stayed far away from the windows.
Running across a person who had committed genocide was always a possibility in Argentina in the 1990s. The dictatorship had ended, but many people had walked free, thanks to the laws, pardons and cunning of later governments that refused to pursue full justice. Murderers bought groceries at the supermarket, torturers waited in line at the bank. I learned that Mr. MenƩndez went to the same cardiologist as the mother of a friend.
I had always been afraid of that man with those eyebrows, wide and black like coal. When I was a little girl I was terrified by the stories I heard of the torture and thousands of murders he ordered and oversaw at La Perla, a clandestine detention camp. There was one image of him in particular, clutching a knife in a gesture of rage, that always filled me with horror. That photograph was etched into the collective memory of Argentina, taken just when he tried to kill a group of protesters in 1984, a few months after the military junta lost power.
Mr. MenĆ©ndez acted as if he owned the lives of others, and from 1975 to 1979, he did. He was the commander of the Third Army Corps during Argentina’s last military dictatorship, with 10 provinces under his charge. His cruelty was such that he regarded Jorge Rafael Videla, the dictator who had led the charge in the coup d’Ć©tat of 1976, 42 years ago this week, as “soft.”
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Mr. MenĆ©ndez was not a lone madman, though. The Argentine armed forces carried out genocide because they were hired guns at the service of economic and military powers that fleeced the country (the foreign debt went to $46 billion, from $9.5 billion, under the junta). And for that reason they exterminated the people who irked them, like my parents: Ester Felipe, a psychologist, and Luis MĆ³naco, a journalist. Both were members of the People’s Revolutionary Army. My mother was 27 at the time, my father 30, and I was 25 days old.
When I lived in Argentina I always dreaded the possibility of coming face to face with the people who had murdered my parents and so many other opponents of the regime. Other children of the disappeared, though, wanted to confront them, insult them. And every time they did, we would celebrate over our little moral victory.
My generation grew up seeing these killers not being brought to justice. We felt vulnerable, frustrated and angry. This may sound like an exaggeration, but this frustration seeped into everything. What, we asked, was the point of democracy?
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Former Army Gen. Luciano Benjamƭn MenƩndez at his trial in Cordoba, Argentina, in 2010.CreditNatacha Pisarenko/Associated Press
Our frustration gave way to an idea: If the authorities were going to let criminals walk the streets, we would turn the streets into a prison. In 1995, the children of people disappeared, murdered, exiled and imprisoned for political reasons founded the Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice, Against Forgetting and Silence, or Hijos. We would find out the home addresses of these mass murderers, photograph them, then walk through their neighborhoods in a peaceful protest. The idea was to alert the neighborhood: “Watch out, there’s a murderer living here.” We called it “escrache,” which means “exposure.” It was our way of fighting impunity.
We didn’t have to investigate anything about Mr. MenĆ©ndez, because we all knew where he lived. Calle Ilolay, 3269, in CĆ³rdoba. A one-story house, with white walls and a tile roof. He entered and exited at his leisure, attended official events and traveled around the city without protection, just as he had that afternoon in front of my friend’s house. None of us, however, the tens of thousands of families whose relatives had been disappeared, chose the path of violence.
In 2013 I saw Mr. MenĆ©ndez again: in a courtroom, during a trial — the La Perla “mega-trial,” with 52 defendants and 716 victims. I was witness No. 167. When the judge called me to the stand, I stood there facing Mr. MenĆ©ndez. His hair, totally gray, was slick with gel, and his eyebrows were still black. What once had been large under-eye circles were now large bags of hanging skin. His eyes were glassy with an icy, pitiless stare.
I testified on behalf of my family, those who were living and those who had died along the way. We, the survivors of a bloody dictatorship, were the ones who pushed the government to prosecute the murderers with the legal guarantees that they had denied our dead.
“Lots of people will be happy if I die,” Mr. MenĆ©ndez once said in an interview. But he was wrong. We do not forgive him, nor do we cry for him, but we are not happy, either. We don’t celebrate death. When he died he left cloaked in cowardly silence, never revealing where he hid the remains of our loved ones. His family, however, was able to bury him because he died in a very different Argentina from the one he terrorized. He died in a country that was more just, which was what our parents had wanted.
Mr. MenĆ©ndez went to his grave with more life sentences than anyone else in the history of Argentina. And though there are days when I feel that no conviction will ever be enough, the day that he died I felt proud, because I was able to say to my 7-year-old son that his grandparents’ murderer died a convicted man, that the struggle is worth it, that justice is something that can be built.
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