People we should be free of by now

Ah. Just when we Latin Americans thought we had shaken off these kinds of governments for good, up pops Mad Hugo, and not content with subjecting us all to his rambling anti-imperialist speeches, he's now threatening to bring war back to our subcontinent.

It just doesn't get more magic-realist than this. A big faraway country run by a religious lunatic under the command of a huge military-industrial complex orders a small country, half-owned by drug-trafficking terrorists and the other half devoted to coffee and banana plantations, to serve as proxy on its War on Drugs and Terror and Marxism, and said small country sends people into another country to kill the terrorist negotiator while he's at work, possibly about to agree on the release of long-held prisoners, at which a fourth, neighbouring country, full of oil reserves and run by a populist quasi-dictator with a fetish for red shirts, feels threatened, cuts diplomatic ties, and sends ten battalions to the border.

And our intrepid Presidenta, who is very well-spoken and tries to project an image of herself as a true stateswoman and always has something to say, says nothing about the madman in the red shirt.

Mind you, this is not a matter of right or left. Latin America has had its internal struggles, even full-blown wars, but mostly we've been free of that for a long time. Since Chile, belatedly, rid itself of its murderer-in-chief in the 1990s, no major country in this part of the world has fallen under a dictatorship. Strong-fisted governments, governments where Congress and the judiciary are a joke, governments with almost no accountability, yes — but not dictatorships. It's usually only plain dictators who can plunge a whole country into armed conflict these days.

And more importantly, a consensus has slowly emerged — an agreement among all the larger countries that, whenever continental stability is threatened, everybody will step in to defuse the conflict. Like a family where the big brothers don't let the little ones hurt themselves. But then Hugo came along, a big brother on his own right, and started behaving half like a spoiled brat, half like a grown-up on drugs. An intervention is in order, perhaps?

The answer is no

Yesterday, a slight majority of Venezuelans said "no" to a proposal to reform their national constitution. Among many changes intended to further the "Bolivarian Revolution", the proposed reform introduced the possibility of indefinite presidential reelection. Faced with defeat, president Hugo Chávez seemed resigned. He said, obliquely, that he preferred to lose in this manner than winning by a small margin and knowing it after a protracted vote count.

The results were 50.7% for NO and 49.3% for YES, which is indeed a very small difference, but the count was completed very quickly considering more than 9 million people went to the polls. The whole day was surprisingly uneventful. Chávez seems to be one of those guys you either love or hate, and since the reform was plainly intended to turn him into a dictator for life, it must be a demonstration of Venezuelans' maturity that no incidents were reported between pro-Chávez and anti-Chávez people, and that Chávez himself, being a textbook example of magic realism, reacted with such calm.

This result means that Chávez will not be reelected, and though his policies may remain popular with half of the country, the one who takes his place won't be exactly like him and will have to resist the urge to cling to power.

One has to consider how this will impact the whole hemisphere. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the Americas, and Chávez has been using oil money to favour some countries, such as Argentina and Cuba. Having a lot of money derived from one of the most precious non-renewable resources on Earth, coupled with a lot of political power, means Chávez felt like he could say and do anything, from calling George W. Bush the Devil (or more charmingly "Mr. Danger") to graciously provide megatons of fuel oil at discount price to Argentina, from insulting a former president of Spain to parading around with Iran's Holocaust-denying current president.

Chávez has just received the first "no" in his whole political life. And that's a good thing. We don't need a dictatorship, benevolent or not, democratically elected or forcefully imposed, either to the left or to the right, in Latin America. I try to think we've all grown past that. I hope Hugo Chávez will be as smart as he seems to be, and recognize that his time is over for a while.

Something smells rotten in Argentina

Just a few quick notes on politics.

Every time you see the Presidenta meeting with industrial moguls and businessmen to reassure them that the next administration will support them, I get this uneasy feeling that this cannot be good for us, the ones who actually work.

Conversely, every time you hear the leaders of industry and finance praising the economic continuity promised by Cristina, I cannot help but think that the power cards have been dealt, the players are already on their places, and, once again, we the people will just be watching from the outside. And serving the drinks.

I also think that, after being a lefty for most of my adult life, the scandalous displays of mob-like behaviour on the part of unions and government will end up turning me into a supporter of typical right-wing police repression. Did you see what happened yesterday before the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires? I mean, except the part where the policeman beat a defenseless demonstrator with a stick, most of the violence came from the union guys, and then they did an incredible show of victimization, as if they'd been Gandhi vs. the British Empire.

When a union leader can decree a strike that will cripple nationwide public transport for a day, without consulting with the workers at all, it's not a good sign. And when a president can call (has to call?) the top union leader to get him to cancel the strike, and everything's "back to normal" in a couple of hours, that's a terrible sign. Realpolitik is messy, but this is just plain wrong.

When a president tolerates a radicalized ecologist group blocking international roads and making ominous threats, and speaks for his country saying "you've backstabbed our people" to the president of a neighbouring friendly country because said country won't put up with our bullying anymore, that's a horrible thing to happen, especially if citizens stay silent.

When the president of your country makes friends with a president that is well on his way to become a dictator for life, and who gladly consorts with a guy who denies the Holocaust, believes Israel should be erased from the map and is producing nuclear weapons, that's not a good thing. One should pick one's friends carefully, because from outside one's always associated with their faults.

Something's very wrong and it seems like no-one here is reacting.

George and Hugo, sitting on a tree... NOT!

Picture by Beatrice Murch

Everybody surely knows now that George "Lame Duck" Bush was touring South America and that Hugo "Red Danger" Chávez scheduled a tour for himself just to bother the intrepid Leader of the Free World (did you realize already how pathetically obsolete that sounds?). Chávez gathered a picturesque following here in Argentina: a couple of folk singers, the former human rights fighter Hebe de Bonafini, thousands of lumpen after the banners of some radical leftist groups, and possibly a few hundreds of genuinely interested, truly anti-American folks. The Kirchner administration, which is friendly to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, distanced itself as much as possible from this crude display. Everybody likes a little chanting against imperialism or a little American flag burning, but this was a bit ridiculous.

Bush, in the meantime, was being received in Uruguay, across the Río de la Plata, with angry demonstrations. Same as in Brazil and in Colombia. Uruguay is courting disaster, I think, by welcoming G. W. Bush to discuss a free trade agreement. The U.S. is clearly trying to use Uruguay as a wedge to break the Mercosur; the (by now only nominally) leftist presidential administration of Tabaré Vázquez, opposed by part of its own party and its own constituency, must be trying to use the U.S. to ring some alarm bells in Brazil and Argentina.

Uruguay is understandably enraged by the Argentine government's lack of action regarding the outrageous blockade of the international passes over the Uruguay River due to the conflict of the cellulose plants. Signing a FTA with the U.S., however, would violate the Mercosur's statutes, and send Uruguay into the voracious maw of the world's largest economy, with little hope of surviving (as an independent country, that is, as opposed to a cheap-labour agricultural colony).

Brazil's Lula can be all cozy with Bush because Brazil is a huge country with many resources, including a lot of land where sugarcane and corn can be grown, later to be transformed into ethanol for fuel-hungry U.S. motorists, if only the U.S. would lower its import tariffs and drop internal agricultural subsidies. That won't happen — a Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress won't stop subsidizing the American corn farmers.

Uruguay, on the other hand, doesn't have anything the U.S. cannot get elsewhere, which is why most analysts say that Bush's visit was either useless or a provocation. Going to Colombia was simply a political gesture of support to his puppet Álvaro Uribe (when George says that the U.S. send a lot of aid to Latin America, remember most of it comes in the form of weapons for anti-drug squads in Colombia).

Both Hugo and George are gone now. George didn't even say "Argentina" during his tour, and of course didn't set foot here. In the supposedly friendlier countries he visited, he had to send a small army before him, and his presence caused massive disruption. He hadn't come so close to Argentina since the disastrous Mar del Plata Summit of the Americas, in November 2005, and it's quite likely that he won't waste any more of his time this side of the Equator until he finishes his term (unless he visits Australia, maybe, to check whether water flushed in a toilet rotates the other way — though he doesn't seem to have such scientific need for empirical tests of anything).