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.
Free marketers have long championed the economic success of Chile.
The South American country’s neo-liberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s – cutting public benefits, lowering taxes – arguably set the stage for a renaissance that helped reduce poverty from 26 percent to less than 8 percent between 2000 and 2015, according to the World Bank.
But social upheaval has followed the slowdown of Chile’s export-oriented economy in the past year, especially as trade instability between China and the United States has suppressed the price of copper, a crucial local commodity, reported Al Jazeera. The worst drought in decades isn’t helping, added the Associated Press.
Around 80,000 teachers went on strike for seven weeks this summer, calling for structural changes in a system they said was not working anymore. Chilean law technically doesn’t cover education as a public right, leaving it instead to the private sector through a voucher system that hurts the poorest students, the left-wing magazine Jacobin explained. The teachers ended their strike in July but said they would keep fighting for reforms.
Students are also angry. Even at the elite National Institute in the capital of Santiago, the all-boy alma mater of numerous ex-presidents, students have staged protests against “rat infestations, blocked bathrooms with sewage leaking, cold showers, broken windows, leaking roofs and bullying teachers,” the BBC reported.
Confidence in the political system cratered in 2015, when the oldest son of then-President Michelle Bachelet was implicated in an insider trading and influence-peddling scandal, wrote Americas Quarterly. Bachelet responded by supporting major reforms to campaign finance and other rules governing elected officials.
Such improvements rarely quiet others seeking justice, however.
President Sebastián Piñera, a 69-year-old billionaire, assumed office 18 months ago. Since then, his critics say he has done little to address the many complaints of Chilean citizens about how their country operates. Piñera’s approval rating is now around 34 percent.
Meanwhile, relatives of around 1,100 people who disappeared during the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, for example, have been crying out for more information about their loved ones to no avail. Bachelet launched an investigation that is expected to yield results in two years. Many feel that Piñera isn’t doing anything to speed things up, the Guardian wrote.
Piñera also faces the uncomfortable task of overseeing prosecutions of accused sexual abusers within the Catholic church, Crux reported, including allegations against his uncle, Archbishop Bernardino Piñera.
In the current climate, reported Bloomberg, two young communist women lawmakers have proposed cutting the official workweek from 45 to 40 hours. Critics said the proposal would undermine productivity. The lawmakers, Camila Vallejo, 31, and Karol Cariola, 32, argued it would improve quality of life.
Economic indicators are important. They offer little, however, to those seeking justice and equality.
Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro responded to widespread international criticism of his management of the fires ravaging the Amazon rainforest by sending in the military on Saturday.
Bolsonaro deployed military aircraft and about 44,000 troops to fight the flames across six Brazilian states struggling to contain the fire, Vox reported.
The move came two weeks after the fires began, but almost immediately after French President Emmanuel Macron threatened to stymie a trade deal with a South American bloc that includes Brazil over Bolsonaro’s blase approach to the crisis, the news site noted.
Earlier, Bolsonaro blamed nonprofit organizations for starting the fires and claimed Brazil lacked adequate resources to fight them effectively. Though such fires occur regularly, they’re especially intense this year due to drought, extreme heat and deforestation, drawing comparisons to the large-scale forest fires that have hit Russia, Alaska, Greenland, California, and elsewhere this year.
Meanwhile, Bolsonaro has been busily working to roll back the country’s environmental protection policies, and its main environmental agency’s efforts to fight deforestation reduced dramatically over the first half of 2019, the New York Times reported.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has been under fire for his stewardship of the precious Amazon Basin, the so-called “lungs of the Earth” that filter carbon out of the atmosphere and sustain a remarkably diverse ecology.
Deforestation has soared under the conservative president and former army captain who served under Brazil’s military junta in the 1970s and 1980s. Woodcutters cleared more than 1,620 square miles of Brazilian Amazon forest between Jan. 1, when Bolsonaro took office, and late July, wrote Science magazine. That’s 50 percent more than in the same seven-month period last year and double the amount lost in that period in 2017.
Bolsonaro has denied the veracity of the data, setting off debates in Brazil about fake news, the media and the frequent inclination among politicians to twist the truth. “Mr. Bolsonaro often makes spurious statements,” reported the New York Times in coverage of the president sacking the head of the agency that tracks deforestation in the Amazon.
Meanwhile, the Amazon has experienced a record number of fires this year, according to new data released by the country’s space agency, the National Institute for Space Research. The agency said its satellite data detected more than 72,000 fires since January, an 83 percent increase over the same period of 2018.
Recently, the president offered a novel solution to a dilemma posed by a journalist in Brasilia, the country’s capital. The journalist asked Bolsonaro whether it was possible to simultaneously grow the economy, feed the hungry and protect the environment.
“It’s enough to eat a little less,” the president said, according to Agence France-Presse. “You talk about environmental pollution. It’s enough to poop every other day. That will be better for the whole world.”
Writing in the Washington Post’s letter section, a Brazilian diplomat defended Bolsonaro’s policies, saying the government is developing a better system to monitor deforestation.
German officials weren’t convinced. They intend to stop paying aid to Brazil to fund conservation projects that might preserve trees, Deutsche Welle reported. Bolsonaro didn’t appear to care. “They can use this money as they see fit,” he said. “Brazil doesn’t need it.”
Brazil needs to take action, however. The world is on “deathwatch” for the Amazon, the Economist warned, explaining that ranching and agriculture were transforming the rainforest. “South America’s natural wonder may be perilously close to the tipping point beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down their axes,” the British magazine wrote.
The Amazon continues to educate humanity. Researchers, for example, recently discovered that the Amazon acquires a vital nutrient – phosphorus – from smoke that wafts across the Atlantic Ocean from fires in Africa, the New Scientist reported.
That’s knowledge that makes the pronouncements of presidents seem small in comparison.
Argentina’s economy minister Nicolas Dujovne resigned Saturday in an apparent effort to help President Mauricio Macri sidestep some of the blame for the country’s current financial crisis following the stunning defeat he suffered in last week’s primary election.
Dujovne said in a statement that Macri’s economic team needed “significant renewal,” the BBC reported, noting that the peso plunged 20 percent against the dollar following Macri’s defeat. “I believe my resignation is in keeping with my place in a government that listens to the people and acts accordingly,” Dujovne said.
For his part, Macri has already unveiled income tax cuts, boosted welfare subsidies and frozen fuel prices for 90 days to woo back voters disillusioned with his austerity program.
Meanwhile, opposition candidate Alberto Fernandez – Macri’s nominal opponent alongside former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who is running as vice-president – said Sunday he would seek to renegotiate the terms of the $57 billion stand-by agreement that Macri inked with the International Monetary Fund in 2018.
Friday, August 9, 2019
BRAZIL
The Big Ticket
Brazil’s lower house of Congress on Wednesday approved a bill to overhaul the country’s pension system, setting it up for likely passage in the Senate in September.
Under debate for more than a year, the reform is a key step to reducing the country’s massive budget deficit and an essential part of President Jair Bolsonaro’s plans for revitalizing the flagging economy, Reuters reported.
According to Bolsonaro’s government, the overhaul will save the treasury 933 billion reais ($235 billion) over the next decade by raising the minimum retirement age and reducing some workers’ benefits.
Last month, the government posted a primary fiscal deficit of 12.7 billion reais ($3.35 billion), the agency reported separately. The country’s gross debt stood at 78.7 percent of gross domestic product and its net debt rose to 55.2 percent of GDP.
Under some circumstances, that’s not a terrible ratio, but the eighth largest economy in the world is still reeling from a commodities bust that brought its soaring 7.5 percent GDP growth in 2010 to -3.6 percent in 2016, noted financial website thebalance.com. And its sovereign bonds are rated below investment grade (or “junk”).
Although its cradle is the sparsely wooded savannah, humankind has long looked to forests for food, fuel, timber and sublime inspiration. Still a livelihood for 1.5bn people, forests maintain local and regional ecosystems and, for the other 6.2bn, provide a—fragile and creaking—buffer against climate change. Now droughts, wildfires and other human-induced changes are compounding the damage from chainsaws. In the tropics, which contain half of the world’s forest biomass, tree-cover loss has accelerated by two-thirds since 2015; if it were a country, the shrinkage would make the tropical rainforest the world’s third-biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, after China and America.
Nowhere are the stakes higher than in the Amazon basin—and not just because it contains 40% of Earth’s rainforests and harbours 10-15% of the world’s terrestrial species. South America’s natural wonder may be perilously close to the tipping-point beyond which its gradual transformation into something closer to steppe cannot be stopped or reversed, even if people lay down their axes. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is hastening the process—in the name, he claims, of development. The ecological collapse his policies may precipitate would be felt most acutely within his country’s borders, which encircle 80% of the basin—but would go far beyond them, too. It must be averted.
Humans have been chipping away at the Amazon rainforest since they settled there well over ten millennia ago. Since the 1970s they have done so on an industrial scale. In the past 50 years Brazil has relinquished 17% of the forest’s original extent, more than the area of France, to road- and dam-building, logging, mining, soyabean farming and cattle ranching. After a seven-year government effort to slow the destruction, it picked up in 2013 because of weakened enforcement and an amnesty for past deforestation. Recession and political crisis further pared back the government’s ability to enforce the rules. Now Mr Bolsonaro has gleefully taken a buzz saw to them. Although congress and the courts have blocked some of his efforts to strip parts of the Amazon of their protected status, he has made it clear that rule-breakers have nothing to fear, despite the fact that he was elected to restore law and order. Because 70-80% of logging in the Amazon is illegal, the destruction has soared to record levels. Since he took office in January, trees have been disappearing at a rate of over two Manhattans a week.
The Amazon is unusual in that it recycles much of its own water. As the forest shrivels, less recycling takes place. At a certain threshold, that causes more of the forest to wither so that, over a matter of decades, the process feeds on itself. Climate change is bringing the threshold closer every year as the forest heats up. Mr Bolsonaro is pushing it towards the edge. Pessimists fear that the cycle of runaway degradation may kick in when another 3-8% of the forest vanishes—which, under Mr Bolsonaro, could happen soon. There are hints the pessimists may be correct (see Briefing). In the past 15 years the Amazon has suffered three severe droughts. Fires are on the rise.
Brazil’s president dismisses such findings, as he does science more broadly. He accuses outsiders of hypocrisy—did rich countries not fell their own forests?—and, sometimes, of using environmental dogma as a pretext to keep Brazil poor. “The Amazon is ours,” the president thundered recently. What happens in the Brazilian Amazon, he thinks, is Brazil’s business.
Except it isn’t. A “dieback” would directly hurt the seven other countries with which Brazil shares the river basin. It would reduce the moisture channelled along the Andes as far south as Buenos Aires. If Brazil were damming a real river, not choking off an aerial one, downstream nations could consider it an act of war. As the vast Amazonian store of carbon burned and rotted, the world could heat up by as much as 0.1°C by 2100—not a lot, you may think, but the preferred target of the Paris climate agreement allows further warming of only 0.5°C or so.
Mr Bolsonaro’s other arguments are also flawed. Yes, the rich world has razed its forests. Brazil should not copy its mistakes, but learn from them instead as, say, France has, by reforesting while it still can. Paranoia about Western scheming is just that. The knowledge economy values the genetic information sequestered in the forest more highly than land or dead trees. Even if it did not, deforestation is not a necessary price of development. Brazil’s output of soyabeans and beef rose between 2004 and 2012, when forest-clearing slowed by 80%. In fact, aside from the Amazon itself, Brazilian agriculture may be deforestation’s biggest victim. The drought of 2015 caused maize farmers in the central Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to lose a third of their harvest.
For all these reasons, the world ought to make clear to Mr Bolsonaro that it will not tolerate his vandalism. Food companies, pressed by consumers, should spurn soyabeans and beef produced on illegally logged Amazonian land, as they did in the mid-2000s. Brazil’s trading partners should make deals contingent on its good behaviour. The agreement reached in June by the eu and Mercosur, a South American trading bloc of which Brazil is the biggest member, already includes provisions to protect the rainforest. It is overwhelmingly in the parties’ interest to enforce them. So too for China, which is anxious about global warming and needs Brazilian agriculture to feed its livestock. Rich signatories of the Paris agreement, who pledged to pay developing ones to plant carbon-consuming trees, ought to do so. Deforestation accounts for 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions but attracts only 3% of the aid earmarked for combating climate change.
The wood and the trees
If there is a green shoot in Mr Bolsonaro’s scorched-earth tactics towards the rainforest, it is that they have made the Amazon’s plight harder to ignore—and not just for outsiders. Brazil’s agriculture minister urged Mr Bolsonaro to stay in the Paris agreement. Unchecked deforestation could end up hurting Brazilian farmers if it leads to foreign boycotts of Brazilian farm goods. Ordinary Brazilians should press their president to reverse course. They have been blessed with a unique planetary patrimony, whose value is intrinsic and life-sustaining as much as it is commercial. Letting it perish would be a needless catastrophe. ■
Paraguay’s President Mario Abdo thanked lawmakers for allowing a resolution of a scandal related to a hydropower deal with Brazil “that does not break the democratic process” on Thursday after the legislators backed down from a threat to impeach him.
Facing the threat of impeachment and reeling from the resignations of his foreign minister and three other officials, Abdo scrapped the deal and apologized for the way the scandal had been handled, Reuters reported.
“Whoever has to be accountable for his misconduct will be accountable,” Abdo said in a message to the nation.
Under a deal that was signed in May but not revealed until last week, the two countries had agreed to establish a schedule for the purchase of energy from the Itaipu dam until 2022. But Paraguayan lawmakers were outraged by the terms, which some experts said would cost one of South America’s poorest countries $200 million, Agence France-Presse reported.
The two countries are partners in the hydropower project – which ranks as the world’s largest – but Paraguay’s economy depends upon it.
Costa Rica and Panama teamed up to raid dozens of locations and arrest nearly 50 people linked to an international network of human traffickers Tuesday.
The network is believed to be involved in smuggling people from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean through Central America and toward the United States, prosecutors said, according to Reuters.
Costa Rican authorities raided 36 facilities near the country’s borders with Panama and Nicaragua, arresting 37 people, while in Panama federal police arrested another 12 people allegedly connected to the same network.
Costa Rica has documented 249 migrants who were transported by the smuggling ring, but “there have been many more,” said Stephen Madden, deputy director of Costa Rica’s migration police.
The news agency cited a Costa Rican police report as saying that the smugglers transported migrants overland and by sea via the port of Puerto Soley to Honduras, where other organizations based in Guatemala picked them up for transport into Mexico and as far as the southern border of the United States.
