Argentine President Cristina Kirchner tells it like it is

Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner attends the opening session of a summit of leaders from Latin American and Caribbean nations, in the Costa do Sauipe resort December 16, 2008. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker (BRAZIL)

Breaking News

December 30, 2008

President of Argentina Cristina Kirchner, said last night that the international financial crisis would better be described as an international financial scam emanating from the "centers of power," in one of her harshest criticisms of the United States to date.

"So far what we have heard is talk of crisis in the United States, but in light of what you see, we should be speaking of fraud in the major, international centers of power," the President said during a ceremony in Port Barranqueras, Chaco.

The president said, "The great country of the North has been in recession since 2007," but "nobody knew it, because all they were doing was criticizing the populist governments of Latin America."

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Colombia and Venezuela: Testing the Propaganda Model

By Kevin Young

Media Accuracy on Latin America (MALA)

December 19, 2008

U.S. news coverage of parallel political events in Colombia and Venezuela offers an opportunity to test the usefulness of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s “propaganda model,” developed in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, reissued 2002). The model predicts that the news media will look favorably upon the Colombian government of Álvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally, while consistently vilifying the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez, whom the U.S. government frequently identifies as an antagonist. If the model holds, U.S. media outlets will be found to portray the Uribe government as relatively democratic, progressive, and peaceful, while casting the Chávez government as authoritarian, regressive, and militaristic.

Restricting the comparison to the two leading liberal U.S. newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post, this prediction is testable using two sets of similar events revolving around issues of political freedom and democracy:

1. Freedom of speech and the press. In October 2004 the Uribe government closed down Inravisión, a public broadcaster analogous to PBS, calling it “inefficient.” The station, which often broadcasted reportage critical of the Colombian government, was home to a strong labor union. Three years later, the Chávez government declined to renew the public broadcasting license of RCTV, a privately owned Venezuelan network critical of Chávez policies that had supported a brief military coup against Chávez in 2002. RCTV returned to the airwaves seven weeks later via cable and satellite.

2. Presidential term limits. Between 2004 and 2007, both Chávez and Uribe attempted to extend or abolish presidential term limits in their respective countries; Uribe was successful, Chávez was not. Their proposals differed in three respects: first, Chávez included his request within a larger package of social, economic, and political reforms, whereas Uribe did not; second, the Chávez proposal and reforms were defeated by a popular referendum, whereas Uribe’s request was granted by the Colombian Congress and upheld by a Supreme Court ruling; and third, Chávez proposed to eliminate term limits entirely, whereas Uribe proposed to extend them. Nonetheless, both were proposals to expand executive power.

If the propaganda model holds, U.S. newspaper reports and editorials will express outrage over Chávez’s actions while ignoring, justifying, or endorsing Uribe’s...

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VENEZUELA: The Cost of the World’s Cheapest Gasoline

By Humberto Márquez

Inter Press Service

December 29, 2008

Excerpts from report:

"Gasoline is practically given away here for free," said Finance Minister Alí Rodríguez, who has done stints as energy minister, secretary-general of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and president of the state oil monopoly PDVSA.

"It is obscene to sell our gasoline this way. We might as well give it away!" President Hugo Chávez said in a January 2007 speech, when he ordered studies to be carried out into the possibility of raising domestic gas prices. However, such a move would be almost tantamount to political suicide in Venezuela.

...

The low price of gasoline "is essentially a regressive subsidy, because most of the fuel is consumed by private vehicles belonging to the middle and upper classes, while the poor use the deficient public transport system," said [Ramón] Espinasa.

"Eighty percent of the gasoline is used in private vehicles, which transport just 20 percent of the population, while 80 percent of citizens depend on public transport, which consumes 20 percent of the gasoline. It is a backwards case of Robin Hood," said economist José Luis Cordeiro...

(click here to view entire report)

Thoughts on Colombia's old laptop tale

By Justin Delacour

Latin America News Review

December 28, 2008

After posting an excerpt of an article by Calvin Tucker that questions Colombia's old, defunct laptop allegations against Venezuela's government, I have decided to republish my following rebuttal to an anonymous commenter's assertions that (1) "every sentient being... knows FARC and Chavez have the same goals" and that (2) Tucker's article is "transparently idiosyncratic, lacking pedigree, provenance, credibility, and even a whiff of journalistic integrity."

Question posed by anonymous commenter:

If you were Uribe, just how would you go about convicting the president of a sovereign nation of conspiracy under these evidentiary circumstances...?

My answer to anonymous commenter:

If I were Uribe, I'd do exactly what he did and not bother trying to convict anyone because (1) the "evidentiary circumstances" were anything but auspicious for a case and (2) he knew it.

The logic of your argument is extremely poor because you lack basic knowledge of the region. I suspect you don't even really understand the immediate history. Prior to November 2007, Hugo Chavez's relations with the Colombian government had been essentially cordial (with the exception of a short flare-up at the beginning of 2005). Uribe invited Chavez to broker hostage negotiations with the FARC in September 2007.

So here's how the convoluted logic of your argument goes. Uribe --who was on good enough terms with Chavez to negotiate the construction of a binational pipeline with him, to have the Venezuelan leader go so far as to call Uribe his "brother," and to have Chavez serve as a mediator in hostage negotiations with the FARC as late as November of 2007-- suddenly "discovers" some incriminating laptops just in time for the Colombian government to go on a diplomatic offensive against Ecuador and Venezuela in the wake of Uribe's bombing of Ecuadorian territory. So suddenly --only six months after Uribe has invited Chavez to serve as a mediator in hostage negotiations with the FARC-- the newfangled story is that Chavez and the FARC are ideological brethren with intimate military and economic ties.

Now, explain to me this, my "sentient" one. If Chavez was so chummy with the FARC, why would Uribe negotiate the construction of a pipeline with Chavez and invite Chavez to serve as a mediator in hostage negotiations with the FARC as late as September of 2007? Given that you fancy yourself to be a person of high "pedigree," I am oh-so curious as to what undoubtedly stellar explanation you have to offer.

And please tell me this, my dear man of great "provenance." What interest does Hugo Chavez have in providing the United States with a pretext to step up its hostility towards Venezuela? Not even the Cubans would think to run the risk of inviting the wrath of Uncle Sam by aiding another country's guerrillas in a post-Cold War era in which the Soviet umbrella is a relic of history. There is simply no geo-political logic to your argument. Why would Venezuela's president make such a perilous bet, with no prospect of winning anything in light of the fact that the FARC hasn't been within striking distance of achieving power for several years and has negligible popular support in Colombia? What's the logic?

I'm sure that a man of such "integrity" as yourself can dazzle us with his brilliance by answering these questions.

Now, here's what I think. I think Colombia and Venezuela's relations went sour when Chavez started taking his mediator role seriously and talking about negotiating for peace, which was way beyond what Uribe bargained for but was also the primary interest of Chavez and his fellow Colombian negotiator Piedad de Cordoba. While Uribe was only half-heartedly interested in the most limited sort of negotiation (over hostages), Chavez has had a long-standing interest in helping resolve the conflict so as to remove the pretext for U.S. intervention in the region. The problem for Uribe was that Chavez's overtures were putting greater international pressure on him to negotiate seriously at the very moment when Uribe was poised to deal major military blows to the FARC. In other words, the interests of Chavez and Uribe would become fundamentally incompatible once Chavez called for peace negotiations. Since Chavez's efforts at mediation were therefore creating problems for Uribe, the best way Uribe could find to neutralize Chavez was to trump up a whole smorgasbord of outlandish charges against him and to thereby sully the image of Chavez in the international community. In other words, the whole purpose of the laptop ruse was to remove Chavez from any mediary role. In that, Uribe has largely succeeded, but at great cost to the truth, in my view.