Brasil: Send In The Clowns

RAZIL

Send in the Clowns

Last week, Brazil’s embattled president, Michel Temer, officially dropped out of the nation’s presidential election in October.

Temer, who took over the post in 2016 after President Dilma Rousseff was ousted on charges of tampering with the federal budget, isn’t the only one to step out of the ring in what Bloomberghas called a “presidential circus colorful even by Brazilian standards.”

Newcomers like a Hollywood plastic surgeon of reality-show fame, a former Supreme Court justice, and a millionaire publicist-turned-lounge-singer have all dropped out, too.

And the current front-runner, former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has been jailed on charges of corruption, effectively making him ineligible to run.

With other left-wing politicians languishing in the polls under the scandals that have plagued party heads, the contest is likely to come down to a few centrist candidates, and firebrand right-wing politician Jair Bolsonaro. He, by the way, once said that the descendants of Brazilian slaves “are not even good for breeding anymore.”

The unpredictable political field has made markets uneasy. Investors worry that none of the contenders will be able to curb corruption and address the economic downturn, security problems and poverty that have troubled Brazil since its worst recession in history in 2015.

According to one recent survey of government data, the number of Brazilians living in “extreme poverty,” or on less than $1.90 per day, increased last year by 11.2 percent. In Sao Paulo, extreme poverty increased by 35 percent.

An Associated Press report about a deadly fire in a 25-floor building in Sao Paulo’s old downtown told the story of hosts of families occupying dilapidated structures alongside drug addicts and the city’s homeless. Efforts to renovate aging and unsafe infrastructure have been slow going.

Meanwhile, soaring fuel prices have led to trucker strikes around the country, prompting widespread food and fuel shortages.

That has cast the government in an even worse light, but candidates are unsure where to stand on the issue and divided on how to reform the economy: While many are calling for free markets due to the corruption scandals involving state-owned enterprises in the past, others worry how such firms will fare on the open market.

With so many acts occurring simultaneously in this political circus, the Financial Times reported that Brazil’s middle-class communities, lifted out of poverty by Lula’s generous cash subsidies to families in need, could decide the outcome of the election.

But in a country untrusting of elected officials after a string of scandals over the past few years, the right ringmaster for the job is anybody’s guess.

My Dream Home In Bariloche

https://www.andrearealestate.com.ar/property/77_importantproperty2classcabinsbarbecuehomecarersannexes

A Joyous Surprise On A Brasilian Island

Joy in Paradise In another odd case of an unaware pregnancy, a 22-year-old woman unexpectedly gave birth to a healthy baby girl in her bathroom earlier this month. But the birth was unexpected for another reason: This was the first birth in 12 years on the woman’s native Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, located in the Atlantic Ocean, Newsweek reported. The island, the largest in an archipelago 215 miles off the northeastern coast of Brazil, houses a population of around 3,000 people, an ecological sanctuary and a national marine park. Authorities had closed down the local hospital’s maternity ward, arguing that it would be too costly to operate the unit with only 40 births per year. As a result, island authorities require mothers in the seventh month of pregnancy to travel to the mainland to give birth, which the moms say is traumatic. Despite the de facto rule – and that it was unwittingly broken – locals are overjoyed at the news that the island received a new addition to its community, and have prepared clothes and other gifts for the new islander. “For us it is a joy to have a Noronha born on the island, finally after so much time,” a local resident told the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, according to Newsweek. “We are mobilizing to help the family.”

Buying Real Estate in Bariloche, Argentina

Buying Real Estate in Bariloche, Argentina

Colombia-The Way We Were

COLOMBIA

The Way We Were

The Colombian government’s 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was supposed to help the South American country end a 52-year-long insurgencythat claimed as many as 220,000 lives, and move beyond it.

Now it appears as if tensions over the peace accord could help deliver victory to right-wing presidential candidate Ivan Duque, who wants to reexamine the deal, potentially reigniting the FARC’s insurgency in the country’s remote interior.

“If the FARC read it in a certain way, we could see a lot of members, including mid-level commanders, going back to violence,” International Crisis Group senior analyst Kyle Johnson told NBC News.

With the support of 34 percent of the electorate, according to Reuters, Duque is now the front-runner in the race that begins May 27 to succeed President Juan Manuel Santos, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for the agreement but cannot serve another term due to term limits.

Duque is likely to wind up in a runoff against Gustavo Petro, a left-wing former Bogotá mayor who was a member of M-19, the second largest rebel movement in Colombia after FARC. Petro has the support of around 22.5 percent of voters.

As the Financial Times explained, Petro wants to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, redistribute land, make education free, and increase the government’s involvement in healthcare and banking.

It’s a vision that leftists in Venezuela and Cuba have also pursued with less-than-rosy results.

“He has all these lovely ideas, which would turn Colombia into some sort of beautiful Nordic idyll, but the truth is he would have to do it with the checkbook of a middle-income country,” University of the Andes economist Oskar Nupia said in an interview with the Financial Times.

Duque, meanwhile, has the luxury of criticizing a deal between the government and FARC that is full of holes.

Last month, authorities arrested a former FARC commander accused of conspiring to export tons of cocaine to the US. Notre Dame University’s Kroc Institute, which is monitoring the enforcement of the deal, recently issued a report finding that few of the peace pact’s more than 550 conditions are being followed. Many FARC fighters are also now saying they never agreed to the deal at all.

Other forces could also be conspiring against the agreement. Jacobin, a leftist online magazine, noted for example that many former Colombia military leaders who support Duque also face potential war-crimes prosecutions under the peace deal. That’s a reason to kill it, surely, from their point of view.

A perfect storm of competing interests could plunge Colombia back into turmoil. That’s even though few want to see a return to the way it was.

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Venezuela: Somebody's Watching Me

VENEZUELA

Somebody’s Watching Me

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has expelled two top US diplomats in response to new US sanctions that followed his widely condemned re-election, claiming they were part of a “conspiracy” to undermine his regime.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order limiting Venezuela’s ability to sell state assets on Monday, after the US, the European Union and most major Latin American nations found that Sunday’s vote did not meet democratic standards, Reuters reported.

On Tuesday, Maduro accused US charge d’affaires Todd Robinson of being involved in “a military conspiracy,” and ordered him and another senior diplomat, Brian Naranjo, to leave the country within 48 hours.

The US rejected the conspiracy theory.

Previous US sanctions affected asset sales linked to individual Maduro administration members. The new executive order bars US citizens from being involved in sales of Venezuela’s pending invoices related to oil and other assets.

Venezuela’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that the sanctions violated international law.

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Cuba: Ignored Warnings

CUBA

Ignored Warnings

The Mexican plane company involved in the worst Cuban air disaster in 30 years over the weekend had received prior safety complaints for poor maintenance of its machines, two ex-pilots told the BBC.

The Mexican company Damojh leased both the crew and the Boeing 737 that crashed on Friday about 12 miles south of Havana to Cuba’s state-run airliner, Cubana. Over the weekend, however, it emerged that the leased plane was nearly 40 years old and was barred from being used in Guyana’s airspace due to crews overloading the cabin with luggage, the BBC reported.

Pilots who had previously worked for Damojh also complained about a lack of proper maintenance, and some crewmembers refused to fly with the company out of safety concerns.

Meanwhile, Cuba’s transportation minister announced Saturdaythat five children, as well as 10 evangelical priests and their spouses, were among the victims of the crash, bringing the official total to 110.

Cuban authorities are still combing through the wreckage, but they announced that one of the plane’s “black boxes” that recorded flight data was salvaged in good condition.

Venezuela: Plight of the Weary

VENEZUELA

Plight of the Weary

Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro won a second term Sundayin a vote boycotted by the opposition, and one condemned by the international community as heavily rigged as a worsening political, economic and humanitarian crisis grips the country.

Turnout was anemic – less than half of all eligible voters went to the polls – delivering Maduro a win with 68 percent of the vote. In the past two presidential elections, turnout topped 80 percent.

President Maduro was quick to celebrate the win, but the vote symbolized just how jaded Venezuelans have become with political change in their country, the New York Times reported.

In the five years since Maduro took office, inflation in one of the world’s most resource-rich nations has ballooned to 13,000 percent and a small portion of meat now costs a monthly salary. Hunger is widespread, and medicine and other necessities are scarce.

The United States and other countries have already indicated they won’t recognize the results of the elections because Venezuelan electoral authorities had barred the nation’s largest opposition party from competing, jailed activists and politicians and moved up the campaign season by seven months to ensure that other candidates had little time to prepare.

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Venezuela: Force And Change

VENEZUELA

Force and Change

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro learned politics under Hugo Chavez, the socialist firebrand who served as the South American country’s leader from 1999 until his death in 2013. Chavez was democratically elected, but Canada’s Globe and Mail described him as an authoritarian who brooked little dissent in the media, the courts or elsewhere.

Today, as Maduro faces re-election on Sunday, Chavez’s legacy lives on.

It turns out Maduro has a good chance of winning a second term, but not because of his policies.

The Venezuelan economy is a mess. Famine stalks the nation – a needless tragedy in a resource-rich country. Last year, Maduro abolished the opposition-led Congress with the blessing of his allies on the Supreme Court, but reversed his decision after civil unrest exploded in response to his brazen move to consolidate power. Three-million Venezuelans have emigrated rather than live under a strongman who rules a collapsing country.

“It’s a story of epic mismanagement,” said John Oliver accuratelyon his weekly HBO news-satire show.

Maduro is competitive in an election where he should lose in a landslide for two reasons.

First, he’s rigged the electoral system, argued Washington Post opinion writer Francisco Toro. “Virtually everyone expects him to ‘win’ on Sunday through a combination of vote buying, coercion, blackmail and ballot-stuffing,” Toro wrote.

Second, because the system is rigged, opposition parties are boycotting the election, Reuters reported.

The news agency quoted college student Ana Romano, who saw campaign workers in Maduro’s Socialist Party “assisting” voters in polling booths – allegedly a form of voter intimidation – and Socialist government officials keeping polling places open long after closing time to help their party’s get-out-the-vote efforts.

“I don’t want to have anything to do with this upcoming election,” Romano said.

As a result, Maduro’s main rival, former solider and provincial governor Henri Falcón – also a former Chavez devotee – is working hard to court his own supporters as well as those of Maduro and other candidates. Falcón’s pitch is hopeful: The system is corrupt, but the people will prevail.

“If an avalanche of votes is produced it could swamp any electoral condition,” Vicente Díaz, a government opponent, told the Wall Street Journal.

Amherst College professor Javier Corrales agreed in a New York Times op-ed. “By failing to vote, the opposition will waste the only chance in years to break this dictatorship,” he wrote.

Still, anticipating the worst, the US is already preparing new sanctions on Venezuela’s crucial oil industry, said CNBC. Those would be on top of sanctions that Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama already imposed on the country.

New sanctions may or may not hurt the already hurting Venezuelan people. They would certainly exert even more pressure to force change.

At what cost, is an open question.

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Colombia: FARC And Cocaine Dealing

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/drug-trafficking-threatens-colombias-peace-deal-farc

Venezuela: Seizing Assets

VENEZUELA

Seizing Assets

Venezuela arrested 11 banking executives and announced it would temporarily take control of the country’s leading private bank on Thursday, echoing last month’s sudden arrests of two Venezuelan executives working in the country for US oil major Chevron Corp.

The arrests of the Banesco executives and seizure of the bank’s operations are intended to stop “attacks” against the country’s plunging currency, the bolivar, Reuters cited the government as saying.

President Nicolas Maduro has blamed an “economic war” marshaled by his enemies for hyperinflation and the collapse of the bolivar, but his critics say the problems stem from his incompetence and failed socialist policies.

“We have determined the (executives’) presumed responsibility for a series of irregularities, for aiding and concealing attacks against the Venezuelan currency with the aim of demolishing the Venezuelan currency,” Chief Prosecutor Tarek Saab said in a televised press conference where he announced the arrests.

Banesco’s President Juan Carlos Escotet, who lives in Spain, called the arrests “disproportionate,” while Maduro’s political opponents said they were another sign of his turn to authoritarianism.

An Unforgettable Boss In Sao Paulo

An Unforgettable Boss In Sao Paulo

From 1979 to 1980 I was very lucky to work for an Italian man named Eduardo Dielli. He was a great boss who ran a most-successful company. I learned so much working for this incredible man. He was born in Italy. When World War II broke out, he joined the Italian Partisans. He fought bravely against the Nazis. US General Dwight Eisenhower was impressed with his bravery. He gave him a US citizenship. Mr. Dielli could have lived anywhere in the USA. Instead he moved to Sao Paulo and spent the rest of his life there. His favorite saying to employees was:
"If we have a big disagreement on policy, we will still be good friends. But we won't work at the same company."