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.

Friends will be friends

SanCor is a leading dairy producer in Argentina. It has a long history in this country and has long become a part of our culture. Moreover, SanCor is not some dark corporation owned by a million stockholders, but a cooperative, born in 1938 from the association of many smaller cooperatives in the central area of the provinces of Santa Fe and Córdoba (whence San + Cor), the "milk basin" of Argentina. Like so many other companies, it fell into the trap of getting terribly indebted during the 1990s. It was so easy to get shiny imported machines back then, at low rates propped up by the artificial "stability" caused by a low fixed exchange rate! In 1998, recession hit, and during the nightmarish years that followed, Argentina's internal market went bust and exports suffered. After the depreciation of the Argentine peso by two thirds, SanCor regained some competitivity, but it was burdened by its dollar-denominated debt. It started looking for saviours, and George Soros came into the picture.

Soros has been buying up parts of Argentina here and there for some time. It's not that we don't like him. At least he doesn't seem directly intent on screwing us up, like most of the vultures foreign investors landing here lately. But his group proposed bailing out SanCor in exchange of its majority control, turning it into one of those dark stockholder-owned corporations. Remember this is our milk, our cheese and our dulce de leche we're talking about. Our government didn't appreciate that a flagship Argentine company, made up of smaller local producers, was to be sold to some foreign guy with a strange accent, even one who hates George Bush's guts. This was perceived abroad, and voilà, along came our colourful friend Hugo Chávez.


Chávez's Venezuela is sitting on top a sea of oil, and with Chávez being all nationalist and stuff, its government is getting rich big time. Chávez is overtly conducting a peaceful Socialist revolution in his country and trying to consolidate a Latin American unity along its lines by helping other countries, especially those with left-leaning governments (e.g. Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, and soon, we hear, Ecuador). Venezuela is the latest addition to Mercosur and already has a strong relationship with Argentina; it bought billions of dollars worth of Argentine debt bonds to ease our national debt's restructuring process, sends a lot of fuel oil at discount prices our way to contain our energy crisis (the one that doesn't exist), and has struck a lot of agreements by which Venezuela gets, for example, state-of-the-art Argentine agricultural machinery and good Argentine beef.

Last week, during a visit, Chávez spoke of a loan to bail out SanCor for 80 million USD, in exchange for a ten-year supply of milk powder and some technical how-know on dairies, which Venezuela seems to be missing. As is often the case when there's a degree of trust, things progressed fast, so Chávez and SanCor will be signing the agreement next Monday. Soros withdrew his offer to avoid further exposure.

Now of course, more than a few people have problems with Chávez. Venezuela doesn't have a very free press, the forced nationalization of some Venezuelan key private companies was not nice, and Chávez is, to say the least, a picturesque leader, resembling more a García Márquez character (or a cartoon) than the president of one of the larger countries in South America and an oil power; at the worst, he looks like a big-mouthed dictator, "Fidel Castro's pup" as some have called him. But in any case, Chávez hasn't asked for control of the company, and SanCor already exports one sixth of its total production of milk powder to Venezuela.

So yes, Chávez is not a friend, so why did I title this post like that? Countries are not friends of each other (only people are), and politicians don't have true friends among politicians. But Venezuela and Argentina, despite their differences and mainly because of this kind of gestures from Chávez, have become true allies... and I say cheers to that.