Washington Watch

2 August 2006

02 August 2006 Hits: 235

CUBA: Official US reaction to Castro's illness

CUBA: Miami partys as Castro ails

PANAMA: US revokes visa of chief of police

PERU: Gutiérrez welcomes García

CUBA
While Cuban exiles have been partying in Miami, Washington's official reaction to the operation on Cuban President Fidel Castro has been more subdued. The US government opted for caution in its statements, although the administration did announce that it will be not be changing its policies towards Cuba nor halting the 45-year economic embargo until there is a change of regime in the country. For the time being, the US has not taken any official actions, nor has it activated its Coastguard in preparation for a possible influx of Cuban immigrants.

The US Secretary of Commerce, Cuban-born, Carlos Gutiérrez, issued a strong warning on 1 August that the US “does not want to see any third party...stand in the way of the rights of the Cuban people to elect their government". Gutiérrez refused to clarify if this was a direct warning to the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez .

The US has been reviewing its long-standing plans for the post-Castro era. Since 2003, the Administration has been working on a plan to establish a democratic process for Cuba after the Cuban-leader's death. The 2004 Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba report plans to provide incentives in the form of medical equipment, 100,000 tons of food, water, fuel and assistance in stabilising the economy in the case of a regime change. The US would also provide US$80m to support dissidents and NGO's on the island.

On 1 August the Bush administration dismissed Raul Castro as no more than a “prison-keeper. " The White House spokesman, Tony Snow said: “the fact that you have an autocrat handing power off to his brother does not mark an end to autocracy". Caleb McCarry, coordinator of the Assistance commission, added that “the US and our citizens do not represent a threat to the security or the hopes of the Cuban people. President Bush acknowledges that Cuba belongs to the Cuban people and that Cuba is in the hands of the Cubans".

CUBA
Whilst the streets in Miami quietened today (2 August), political and exile organisations in the city were continuing to make preparations in case of a regime change in Cuba. On 31 July, hundreds of Cuban exiles took to the streets of the city to celebrate the beginning of the end of the Castro regime, even though officially, Castro has only ceded power to his brother Raul temporarily. On 1 August, Miami TV and radio stations interrupted their programming to broadcast the reactions of leaders, while exile organisations started to co-ordinate efforts to start the process towards democracy in Cuba.

Francisco Hernández, president of the Fundación Nacional Cubano-Americano said: “We've called all Cubans both inside and out of the island, to get Cubans to unite in a common effort so that once and for all, and after 50 years, we can start a genuine process of transition towards democracy. Perhaps, for the first time, all the exile community is motivated towards a single effort and a single reality: it is a historic opportunity to realize the dreams of 50 years of fighting, to give liberty to the Cuban people". Others, such as Alberto Hernández of the Consejo por la Libertad de Cuba, emphasised the need for caution. Archbishop John. C. Favalora asked the community “to be calm, to make good judgements and to pray for the good of Cuba so that its people can live in a society where all the rights of the citizen are respected".

PANAMA
The US ambassador to Panama, William Eaton, denounced corruption in the Panamanian government on 31 July. He said there was “a shameful culture of impunity for the powerful in Panama and also officials in government_" Panama's foreign minister Samuel Lewis Navarro appealed to Eaton to elaborate on his comments and to provide “concrete evidence, if it exists". “In the past we have had an excellent cooperation_ in the fight against corruption. What doesn't help is when generalised declarations are made that tend to create more confusion and to create even more conflict at the heart of Panamanian society," he said. President Martín Torrijos said that justice and security issues should be dealt with by Panamanians and not foreigners. Eaton's comments come shortly after Panama's anti-drug czar, Patricio Candanedo, resigned on 20 July, citing lack of support and a climate of hostility. He announced his resignation shortly after the death from poisoning of his right-hand man, Franklin Mauricio Brewster, the head of the anti-drug and counter-terrorism unit of the Policía Técnica Judicial (PTJ). The FBI is helping the Panamanian authorities investigate the death of Brewster.

PERU
The Secretary of the US Department of Commerce, Carlos Gutiérrez, who represented the US at the inauguration of Alan García on 28 July, said that he was confident that Peru's new president would “get on very well" with President George W. Bush. “They both have very similar values; they are interested in their people, growth, job creation, trade, social justice, and I think they will have a lot to talk about. I think they will have a very positive relationship," Gutiérrez said. The US had adopted a wait-and-see attitude with García, whose reckless fiscal policies and social spending and criticism of US foreign policy in Central America during his first administration (1985-1990) had raised some doubts about his suitability for the post. He was, however, seen as the lesser of two evils; his opponent, the nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala, viewed as an acolyte of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez . García, in contrast, has been Chávez 's most vocal critic. Gutiérrez also commented on the free trade agreement between the two countries, which Peru has ratified and the US is considering. “Bilateral relations will be positive for both countries. (...) We are working to have a free trade deal finalized and authorized as soon as possible," he said. He said that Bush would do what was necessary to see the FTA approved.

9 August 2006

09 August 2006 Hits: 211

ARGENTINA: US threatens to abolish preferential tariffs

URUGUAY: Improving trade ties

VENEZUELA: Battle for UN Security Council seat

CUBA: Bush and Rice call for democratic transition

MEXICO: Building the Wall

ARGENTINA
The US foreign trade representative, Susan Schwab, said on 7 August that Washington was considering whether to maintain or abolish various preferential tariffs for certain goods from Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela by December. Argentina's President Néstor Kirchner reacted with characteristic belligerence. He said that “this nation no longer has carnal relations with anyone," a reference to former president Carlos Menem's foreign minister Guido Di Tella's description of relations between the US and Argentina. “I have read various headlines saying that the US is going to punish Argentina (for the failure of the latest WTO round and the frozen Free Trade Area of the Americas talks)," Kirchner said. “This is an independent country_ and Argentina will take its own decisions, let's make that absolutely clear," he added. The US Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), a programme designed to promote economic growth in the developing world, provides preferential duty-free entry to over 4,000 products from 144 different countries. Argentina benefits principally from the export of leather, meat, olive oil, aluminium, cheese and sweets to the US, which amounted to US$616m last year. The Argentine ambassador to the US, José Octavio Bordón, said it was “incorrect to talk of reprisals"

URUGUAY
President Tabaré Vázquez chairs a meeting of the Council of the Americas, a US business organisation whose stated goal is promoting free trade and open markets throughout the Americas, with the assistant US Trade Representative Everett Eissenstat, today, 9 August. The conference, entitled “Uruguay in the global economy" and “Opportunities for Trade and Investment", will also feature the foreign minister, Reinaldo Gargano; the economy minister, Danilo Astori; and the industry, energy and mines minister, Jorge Lepra. Both Astori and Lepra are firm proponents of a trade promotion agreement (TPA) with the US (a free-trade agreement in common parlance), but Gargano, who presides over the Partido Socialista party in the ruling coalition (Vázquez's party) said that he would resign if Uruguay signed up to an FTA with the US. Uruguay's bigger partners in Mercosur - Argentina and Brazil - have made it clear that they would have no problem with Montevideo signing an agreement of mutual trade preferences, but that they would consider a free-trade agreement a breach of the members' obligation not to negotiate separately from the rest of Mercosur.

VENEZUELA
There are signs that the US is beginning to get a bit rattled by Guatemala's failure to win regional backing for its campaign to win a non-permanent seat on the UN security council, for which it is competing with Venezuela. US State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack replied testily to a question on 3 August about whether the US was concerned at the prospect of Venezuela winning a seat. “I will only say that the Security Council is probably the single most international [sic] body that deals with weighty issues of war and peace... So it's a terribly important position and certainly we want to see a country assume - countries assume seats on the Security Council that are dedicated to constructive engagement in the international community and certainly promoting those values which we share with many other members of the Security Council." Guatemala's President Oscar Berger dispensed with his foreign minister, Jorge Briz, on 24 July because of his perceived failure to advance Guatemala's cause.

He is hoping that his replacement, Gert Rosenthal, will use his experience as an executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (1988 and 1997) and as Guatemala's ambassador to the UN, to push hard for a the seat in international circles. Berger claimed that Guatemala already had the support of 102 countries and hoped to gain the remaining 27 votes it requires from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. However, his replacement of Briz suggests that, in spite of US support for Guatemala's cause, Venezuela could be gaining the upper hand.

CUBA
Both President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, responded to the deteriorating health of President Fidel Castro to underline the administration's commitment to a transition to a democratic system in Cuba. "The United States is absolutely committed to supporting the Cuban people's aspirations for democracy and freedom," Bush said in a written statement. "We will support you in your effort to build a transitional government in Cuba committed to democracy, and we will take note of those in the current Cuban regime who obstruct your desire for a free Cuba. It has long been the hope of the United Sates to have a free, independent and democratic Cuba as a close friend and neighbour." Rice said “We encourage the Cuban people to work at home for positive change, and we stand ready to provide you with humanitarian assistance as you begin to chart a new course for your country." She stressed, however, that “Clearly we believe that Cubans should stay in Cuba and be a part of what will be a transition to democracy." She also made it clear that the US would consider the transfer of power from Fidel to his younger brother Raúl as “from one dictator to another".

MEXICO
The US Senate has voted to allocate US$1.8bn of next fiscal year's defence budget to building “the wall" on the Mexican border. An amendment to the defence appropriations bill introduced by senator Jeff Sessions (Republican, Alabama) sets aside US$1.83bn to install 595 km of triple-layered fence and 742km of discontinuous and dispersed barriers to traffic along the border. Senate majority leader Bill Frist said that the deployment of 6,600 members of the National Guard to the border had been positive, reducing the entry of illegal immigrants by 45%.

16 August 2006

16 August 2006 Hits: 102

POSADA CARRILES: No country prepared to take him in

NICARAGUA: US pressure to extradite Alemán?

PERU: Battle for UN Security Council seat

IMMIGRATION: Latin Americans predominate in census

MEXICO: Femicide in Ciudad Juárez

POSADA CARRILES
Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Canada and Mexico have each refused to grant asylum to the anti-Castro militant, Luis Posada Carriles, from the US. Posada Carriles is wanted by Cuba and Venezuela for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jet but the US judiciary has ruled that he cannot be deported there because he might face torture. His lawyer Eduardo Soto said, “All of those incidents, if in fact they occurred, are irrelevant. The only incident with relevancy today is, is there a third country willing, ready and able to take Luis, and there is none." Posada Carriles' legal team is trying to secure his release from custody to stay with his family in Miami until his deportation day comes. His daughter, Janet Argüello, said “Up until now no country wants him. I think this is political. There's a lot of political pressure. No one wants him because of the baggage." Even El Salvador, the staunchest ally the US has in Latin America, has made it clear that it will not grant Posada Carriles asylum. President Tony Saca said there was no place for terrorists in El Salvador. The president was compelled to make a statement after Posada Carriles claimed to have discussed the asylum issue with the interior minister, René Figueroa, and Saca's presidential adviser, General Gustavo Hernández. Figueroa denied any contact.

NICARAGUA
María Fernanda Flores de Alemán, the wife of former president Arnoldo Alemán, claims that the US is putting political pressure on Panama to request the extradition of her husband. She said that Panama's request was old news - it first made it two months ago - but the US had instructed the country to raise the issue again to have a bearing on November's presidential contest. Earlier this year the US ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul Trivelli, announced Washington's withdrawal of its traditional support for the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC) because Alemán continues to pull the strings in the party. PLC candidate José Rizo is struggling in the polls, in which he trails PLC dissident Eduardo Montealegre, who the US is backing, and Daniel Ortega of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN). If Rizo were to pull out of the race (and repeated mention of Alemán's corruption will not help his cause), Montealegre would win the elections. The Panamanian ambassador to Nicaragua, Miguel Lecaro, denied that Panama was responding to pressure from the US. He said that Alemán's family was trying “to explain the inexplicable". Panama's judiciary said that it was also seeking the extradition of Flores de Alemán, Alemán's father-in-law, José Antonio Flores, and the head of his administration's tax revenue agency, Byron Jerez. They are accused of diverting some US$58m from the Nicaraguan treasury to 60-odd bank accounts in 12 different banks in Panama.

PERU
Former President Alejandro Toledo has warned the US to pay more attention to Latin America, the rise of populism and the growing influence of China in the region. “If US policy doesn't change in relation to Latin America, we could fall into the trap again of having to put out fires rather than preventing them in the first place," he said, addressing the Inter-American Dialogue, which focuses on Western Hemisphere policy issues. Toledo appealed to the US to support Latin American countries to fight poverty and to stop the rise of populism, an explicit reference to Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez . “If we don't do something about this we are going to lose more faith in democracy, it will become even more difficult for governments to govern and the temptation to tackle poverty through simple populism, by giving away fish when you have a full wallet, will grow ever stronger," he said in a reference to Venezuela's petrodollars.

Toledo added that he hoped the US Congress would approve the free trade agreement with Peru before the August recess, or else it would not be debated until next year due to mid term elections. Toledo downplayed Democratic party concerns about weak labour protections. “We have no problem at all with complying with the ILO (International Labour Organization)," Toledo said. “But we do it because it's our conviction, not because we want to get involved in an electoral fight between Republicans and Democrats."

IMMIGRATION
Latin American immigrants in the US account for 53% of all foreign immigrants in the country, according to figures released by the Census Bureau, which looked at key demographic and social data for areas with populations of 65,000 or more. Between 2000 and 2005 the number of immigrants in the US increased by 16%. In 1990, the number of “non-Hispanic whites" was 75.6%; last year it was 66.8%. In Hawaii, these “whites" now account for only 23% of the population; in the District of Columbia, 29.7%; in New Mexico, 42.8%; in California, 43.3%, and in Texas, 48.9%. The most common immigrants of all are Mexicans with limited education and a rudimentary grasp of English.

MEXICO
The US ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, has urged the Mexican government to resolve the “vile crimes" being committed against women in Ciudad Juárez, on the US border. “I feel profoundly upset by the brutal murders of women in this town. The US embassy and Consulate continue to underline to the Mexican government the urgent need to investigate these vile crimes," he said. Garza met the relatives of five murdered women, during a visit to Juárez, in the state of Chihuahua. Garza went on to attend the third annual Border Security Conference at the University of Texas in El Paso on 14 August. He said that future security issues, including growing concerns over human and drug trafficking, were pivotal bilateral issues; he stressed that President George W. Bush has long called for comprehensive immigration reform.

23 August 2006

23 August 2006 Hits: 83

VENEZUELA: CIA launches new mission

CUBA: US wants Brazil to help with “transition"

POLICY-MAKING: Democrat senator criticises US policy for Latin America

COLOMBIA: Row over Plan Colombia

PERU: Bush to meet García

VENEZUELA
On 18 August the US director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, announced the creation of a new CIA mission to oversee intelligence activities in Venezuela and Cuba. The new “mission manager" will be responsible “for integrating collection and analysis on Cuba and Venezuela across the intelligence community (and) ensuring the implementation of strategies." The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) did not elaborate on these “strategies" except to say that, “Such efforts are critical today, as policymakers have increasingly focused on the challenges that Cuba and Venezuela pose to American foreign policy." J. Patrick Maher will assume the role temporarily until a permanent candidate is found. Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez , who has long complained of CIA plots against him, claimed that the appointment of Maher was linked to the presidential elections to be held in Venezuela in December. “This shows us that the empire does not rest, that it is hatching a plan for December or a period before December. But whatever it is, we will thwart it," he said. The role of mission manager is new. It was recommended by the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission and endorsed by President George W. Bush. There are now six mission managers: one for counterterrorism, one for counterproliferation, one for counterintelligence, and one each for Iran and North Korea and one for Cuba and Venezuela. The ODNI said that mission managers “will not directly manage operations or analysis, but will instead lead the Intelligence Community at a strategic level".

CUBA
The US assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Thomas Shannon, told Brazilian reporters that the US government expects Brazil to help mediate a “democratic transition" in Cuba after the death of Fidel Castro. The Brazilian government rejected this suggestion outright. According to the Brazilian foreign minister, Celso Amorim, the administration of President Lula da Silva considers that a “post-Fidel plan is for Cubans to decide, not for Brazilians nor the US". Amorim went on to say that the only thing Brazil is prepared to do is to “mediate in US dialogue [with Cuba], as it already does in the case of other countries". Amorim was referring to Venezuela. The new US ambassador in Brasília, Clifford Sobel, made no secret of the fact that his government “relies on Brazil to counter the Bolivarian President of Venezuela". Asked about the US reaction to the first speech by Fidel's brother Raúl as provisional president, the deputy spokesman for the US Department of State, Tom Casey, said, “Well, gee, I guess you're asking me what we think of remarks by Fidel's baby brother. What do we think of them? I guess not much is the answer. You know, we're not particularly fond, as you know, of the Government of Cuba as run by Fidel. I can't say that we're particularly enamoured of the first words we've heard from Fidel Lite."

POLICY-MAKING
The Democrat Senator for New Jersey, Bob Menéndez, declared that the “vacuum" left by the current US policy in Latin America is the cause for growing populism in the region. In an interview with the Dominican newspaper Listín Diario, Menéndez said he will propose to US Congress the creation of a Fund for the Development of the Americas, in a bid to increase understanding between the US and Latin American countries. According to him, improving cooperation with Latin America “should be considered an issue of national security for the US". Menéndez went on to criticise his Republican peers, whom he accused of being “ignorant" about the region for playing the anti-immigration card to win votes in the congressional elections in November. He said that illegal immigration to the US will only halt if Latin American countries can develop; he called for a revision of the US-sponsored alternative development programmes to replace coca production in the Andes and the Dominican Republic and Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) because in their current form they only serve “to upset the region by increasing social differences between the rich and the poor".

COLOMBIA
The New York Times ran a piece on 19 August entitled “Colombia's Coca Survives US Plan to Uproot It", in which it argued that the US counter-narcotics initiative, Plan Colombia, has been an expensive waste of money: “The latest chapter in America's long war on drugs - a six-year US$4.7bn effort to slash Colombia's coca crop - has left the price, quality and availability of cocaine on American streets virtually unchanged. The effort, begun in 2000_ had a specific goal of halving this country's coca crop in five years. This has not happened." The Colombian government reacted angrily. The outgoing interior and justice minister, Sabas Pretelt de la Vega, said that no country in the world had done as much to counter drug-trafficking as Colombia. He said in 2000 Colombia had 167,000 hectares of coca; now it has half that amount, he said, thanks to a “gigantic sacrifice". He said that since he had headed the interior ministry he had signed 502 extradition resolutions and that each year an average of 200 tonnes to 220t of cocaine was confiscated. He added he expected more solidarity as “there in the US they continue to consume cocaine while here we are burying the dead". The guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) also responded to report in The New York Times. In a statement released on the Internet, the Farc said that Plan Colombia had failed because the US had not reduced the consumption of cocaine by 32m addicts. It said that the US used its “war on drugs" as an excuse to interfere in the Andean countries, and that Plan Colombia was a convenient cover to try and stamp out the Farc.

PERU
President George W. Bush will receive his Peruvian counterpart Alan García in the White House on 10 October. “The visit will provide the president (Bush) with an opportunity to congratulate President García on his electoral victory", the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said. It is more significant than this: Bush took some time to congratulate García by telephone after his win because the US was unsure what to make of the new president who vehemently criticised Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez but whose first administration (1985 to 1990) was typically hostile to the US and eschewed neoliberal economics. The invitation to the White House shows that the US has made up its mind: García is one of the good guys. He remains estranged from Chávez , and not afraid to criticise him for interfering in the domestic politics of fellow Latin American countries; and he has shown by his appointments and the policies he is pursuing that he is committed to macroeconomic stability and free trade. García will discuss with Bush the free trade agreement with the US, which Peru has ratified but which is yet to be approved by the US Congress.

30 August 2006

30 August 2006 Hits: 221

PANAMA: Military exercises

ECUADOR: US wants to keep Manta

NICARAGUA: US urges Right to unite

COLOMBIA: Crackdown on illegal activity of paramilitaries

MEXICO: Death toll falls

PANAMA
On 25 August 18 nations began a weeklong series of manoeuvres, codenamed Panamax 2006, off the coast of Panama. The US has been sponsoring the annual military exercises since 2003 when it became concerned at the threat posed by terrorists to the Panama Canal. In the maritime exercises some 3,000 soldiers from Argentina, Brazil, Britain, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the US and Uruguay plan and coordinate a coalition response to a security threat against the Panama Canal. The Panamax manoeuvres involve participating in scenarios such as multiple seaborne threats approaching the Canal from the Caribbean Sea and the Eastern Pacific. To respond to these threats, the multinational task force detects, monitors and interdicts suspicious vessels, and hands them over to the Panamanian national maritime service as the ships approach the country's territorial waters. Airborne units and special forces also take part. "All nations of the Western Hemisphere have a vested interest in safeguarding this vital waterway," Commander Bruce Erickson, of the US Southern Command in Panama City, said.

ECUADOR
The US ambassador to Quito, Linda Jewell, emphasised on 29 August that the US wanted to retain its airbase at Manta. "There is a lot of time to talk with the next government over the continuation or otherwise of the agreement," she said. She was speaking after the surprise resignation of the minister of defence, Oscar Jarrín, who resigned because he felt his outspoken criticism of actions by the Colombian government did not enjoy the full support of the government. The Ecuadorean foreign ministry, in particular, was unhappy at Jarrín's demand for a tough line to be taken with Colombia over a series of border incidents. Jewell said that Jarrín's departure did not have any bearing on the future of Manta, which is used by the US to monitor air traffic in south-western Colombia where both drug gangs and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) are active. The current US-Ecuadorean agreement over Manta expires in 2009.

NICARAGUA
The US ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul Trivelli, said that there is a good chance that one of the presidential candidates representing the Right will pull out before elections on 5 November. Trivelli urged José Rizo, of the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC), and Eduardo Montealegre, of the Alianza Liberal Nicaragüense (ALN), to hold talks to pave the way for one of them to stand aside. Montealegre (25%) currently leads Rizo (13.7%) in the polls quite comfortably but the split in the Liberal vote has enabled Daniel Ortega (32.1%), of the left-wing Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), to establish a seven-point lead and close in on the 35% of the vote required to win in the first round (providing he maintains at least a five-point lead over his nearest challenger). Trivelli failed in his previous attempts to effect a reconciliation and Montealegre has categorically ruled out stepping aside for Rizo. "Some people want me to resign to pave the way to the past, but I am certain that we are going to continue moving forwards," Montealegre said.

COLOMBIA
The US ambassador to Colombia, William Wood, said that there is "reliable evidence" that in certain Colombian regions demobilised paramilitaries are engaging in "illegal activities". Wood made his declaration while presenting an additional US$1.9m from the US government to the Organization of American States' Mission to Support the Peace Process in Colombia (MAPP/OEA). He said the money would allow the MAPP to monitor the security of regions formerly dominated by the paramilitaries. Wood said that the MAPP, "will continue to play a key role in ensuring that the peace process is more transparent_ in building confidence in all areas." Wood has consistently taken a tough line on the paramilitaries. He has said that Colombia should punish any paramilitaries who stray from the straight and narrow by removing the rights granted to them by the peace process.

MEXICO
The US Border Patrol said on 29 August, that the death toll of immigrants crossing the border illegally from Mexico into Arizona had fallen substantially in the current fiscal year. The death toll is 144 in the current fiscal year, which ends on 30 September 2006. At the same period in the previous fiscal year, the death toll stood at 196. The desert border between Sonora and Arizona is one of the most popular, and dangerous, places for illegal crossing. Most of those who fail to cross the border successfully die of thirst. The US Border Patrol said that if the trend continued into the final month, the death toll would fall for the first time since records began. As recently as 1995, before the US government started to make crossing the border more difficult in California, no illegal migrants died in the Arizona desert. In 1996 12 illegal migrants died.

6 September 2006

06 September 2006 Hits: 193

PERU: New ambassador to US appointed; push for FTA

GUATEMALA: US couples adopt 1% of all children born in the country

BOLIVIA: New Bolivian Ambassador arrives in US

VENEZUELA: Lobbying for UN Security Council seat

BRAZIL: Trade impasse with US continues

PERU
President Alan García made a speech in praise of the newly-appointed ambassador to the US, Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos, when they met on 5 September at the government palace in Lima. The appointment of Ortiz de Zevallos, a technocrat who has an MBA from Harvard Business School, is indicative of García's desire to establish better relations with the US than during his first term as president (1985-1990). García's invitation to the White House on 10 October suggests that President George W. Bush already sees him as a potential ally in Latin America against the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez , who is Bush's interlocutor in a very public war of words. García noted that the new ambassador would "raise the level of representation of Peru in the US to a very high level thanks to his knowledge of the world economy and his social, cultural and political knowledge of the US." Ortiz de Zevallos will be working closely with fellow economist, Hernando de Soto, to lobby the US congress to approve the free trade agreement with Peru. The FTA has already been passed by the Peruvian congress, but it will prove a challenge to get it approved in the US before this November's congressional mid-term elections.

GUATEMALA
Adoption is a big and lucrative business in Guatemala that is probably now into its last 12 months. When the US ratifies The Hague Convention on Adoption, the trade in exporting Guatemalan babies to the US is likely to end. The federal attorney-general's office reported that in 2005, US couples adopted 1% of all children born in the country. That is equivalent to 3,748 Guatemalan babies and young children. Josefina Arellano, the head of the children's section of the attorney-general's office, said that lawyers in Guatemala were paid between US$15,000 and US$18,000 for each successful adoption by US parents of a Guatemalan child. The total cost for a US couple of adopting a Guatemalan baby is between US$25,000 and US$30,000.

Guatemala is the third largest source of babies for US adopters, behind China (7,393 babies adopted by US parents in 2005) and Russia (4,652). Earlier this year, Russia introduced new laws that are likely to discourage US parents adopting Russian babies. In Guatemala, adoption is arranged by lawyers between individuals: the government and the judiciary have no roles other than to check the legal paperwork. In Guatemala adoptions go through comparatively quickly, taking between five and 10 months, while in China and Russia they take over a year, usually.

The Guatemala adoption boom is likely to end in the middle of 2007 when the US ratifies The Hague Convention on Adoption. The US consul in Guatemala City, John Lowell, said that the whole adoption business may end when the convention is ratified. The key element in the convention is that the child's national government has to confirm that the adoption is in the child's best interests. Lawyers will have no role in the process.

Other industrialised countries have ratified the convention. This has virtually eliminated Guatemala as a source of babies for adoption: in the first three months of 2006 Guatemala sent only 17 children to nine (non-US) countries for adoption. The US took 1,090 Guatemala children for adoption in that period.

BOLIVIA
Bolivia's ambassador to the US finally arrived in Washington on 1 September. Bolivia had been without an ambassador in Washington since President Evo Morales took office at the beginning of this year. The new ambassador is a journalist, Gustavo Guzmán, who claims to be proud not to speak English. Guzmán said that his first task will be to write a letter to the US State Department asking why the US has not responded, for over a year, to Bolivia's application for the extradition of a former president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Sánchez de Lozada is accused of genocide and other crimes committed in October 2003, just before he was forced to flee into exile. On his orders, the army killed at least 60 people who had been demonstrating against his government and its plan to export gas via Chile.

VENEZUELA
Guatemala's foreign minister, Gert Rosenthal, has criticised the US for its overt support of Guatemala in its contest with Venezuela for a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. "In some countries I have to admit the US has come on too strong in its opposition to Venezuela," Rosenthal said. "We would be happier if they would not promote our cause so much because we would like to be our own promoter." The summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which begins on 11 September in Havana, is likely to provide the backdrop to another round of frantic lobbying ahead of the vote by the UN Security Council on 16 October. In Latin America, Venezuela has the support of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Cuba. Guatemala should receive the backing of Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Almost all 15 members of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) are expected to back Venezuela. Peru, Ecuador and Chile are officially undecided. Haiti and the Dominican Republic, traditionally reluctant to rile the US, are toying with backing Venezuela because they receive cheap oil from Caracas.

BRAZIL
The US government blocked a WTO enquiry, requested by the Brazilian government, into US compliance with a ruling to scrap subsidies to US cotton producers. The Brazilians consider that the scrapping of the "Step 2" programme, in which the US government bought US-produced cotton at inflated prices to help its domestic farming sector, does "not go far enough" to be considered an end to subsidies to cotton producers as stipulated by the WTO in July 2005. The US administration, however, considered the Brazilian request "unnecessary". Susan Schwab, the US trade representative, went as far as to say the Brazilian request was "disappointing" given the "difficult steps taken by the US [government] to implement the [WTO's] recommendations". The next meeting of the WTO's Controversy Solution Office is scheduled for the end of this month. The Brazilian government has already signalled it will present a complaint.

13 September 2006

13 September 2006 Hits: 237

BOLIVIA: García Linera arrives

BRAZIL "Should be more ambitious"

CUBA: Posada Carriles to be set free

MEXICO: New migration figures

VENEZUELA : US closes down military procurement offices

BOLIVIA
Bolivia's vice president, Alvaro García Linera, arrived in Washington on 11 September to lobby US legislators and officials to extend the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (Atpdea) which is due to expire at the end of this year. Speaking to the foreign press on 12 September, García Linera said that he was "moderately optimistic" that the US congress would extend "the trade benefits Bolivia enjoys under the Atpdea". This careful phrasing suggests that García Linera realises that the Atpdea itself may not be extended. García Linera appears to be offering greater drug eradication in return for a continuation of Bolivia's preferential access to the US. As part of the Atpdea, Bolivia eradicates coca plantations. García Linera hinted on 12 September that "next year" (presumably calendar 2007) Bolivia would eradicate 10,000 hectares of coca bushes. This is a substantial increase on the 2006 target and on progress towards it. This year the eradication target is 5,000 ha. In the first eight months just over 3,200ha had been eradicated. Bolivia is the world's third biggest coca-grower after Colombia and Peru.

BRAZIL
The latest WTO meeting to attempt a restart in the Doha Round of negotiations ended in a new impasse. The meeting was held in Rio de Janeiro on 9-10 September and again the US government was blamed for the standoff. The US trade representative, Susan Schwab, however, refused to accept responsibility for the impasse and said that her government's "significant steps" to open access to the US domestic market were not being matched by the European Union and other countries at the negotiating table. Schwab criticised the hosts saying that Brazil "should be more ambitious" when it comes to seeking access to the domestic markets of other countries if it wants fulfil all its agricultural potential. Schwab said that the "formula" proposed by the US government, of scrapping agricultural subsidies in exchange for open markets, is "also beneficial to Brazil".

CUBA
Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban anti-Castro activist, should be set free, a US judge in El Paso, Texas, ruled on 11 September. Posada Carriles will be free within 30 days if a federal district judge upholds the ruling. Quite what will happen to Posada Carriles then is unclear. His lawyer said he would join his family in Miami until the judiciary resolves his deportation details. The trouble is no third country has agreed to accept Posada Carriles' deportation. Even El Salvador, a staunch ally of the US, is unwilling to grant him asylum. The US has refused to deport Posada Carriles to Venezuela or Cuba, which want him for the 1976 bombing of an airliner that killed 73 people, because it says he would face torture there. The US Department of Justice said it was reviewing the court decision.

MEXICO
Newly published figures from Mexico's official statistics agency, Inegi, show that between 2001 and 2006, 3.45m Mexicans emigrated from the country, mostly to the US. This is equivalent to 1,575 people a day. The figures, published on 8 September, show that Mexican immigration is much higher than had previously been thought. This year, Inegi forecasts, net emigration will be 583,000, the highest in the country's history. Virtually all the 2006 migrants are going to the US. From a US point of view the Inegi figures are equally dramatic. Since 1990, 8.6m Mexicans have emigrated. This is equivalent to a 7% increase in the US labour force over this period. The obvious economic point, made by the previous chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan on several occasions, is that immigration to the US has had a massive effect on US wage pressures and helped to keep US inflation low. There are two reasons for this: one, is that immigration has kept the supply of labour flowing - without immigrants, the US labour force would have grown at only 0.5% a year; the other, is that illegal immigrants, typically, get paid only 40% of what legal workers get paid.

VENEZUELA
On 6 September the US government said that Venezuela had until 30 September to shut its military procurement offices in Miami and Ohio. US State Department spokespersons said that since "the last shipment" of equipment for F-16 airplanes had already left from the Ohio base it made no sense to keep the offices open. In May, the US blacklisted Venezuela for not fully cooperating with US anti-terrorism efforts, and said it would stop selling Venezuela arms from 1 October. US authorities estimate that 20 Venezuelan military officers worked at such offices: 14 at the Venezuelan purchase office in Miami and another six at the office in Ohio. The US government had previously decreed a ban on weapons sales to Venezuela, but was allowing the delivery of parts that would keep Venezuelan aircraft airworthy. The US government sold Venezuela US$34m worth of licensed military matériel last year but on contracts that were approved at the end of 2004. In 2005, Washington approved sales of only US$8.5m.

20 September 2006

20 September 2006 Hits: 247

ARGENTINA: Financing terrorists

BOLIVIA: Evo defends nationalisation and drug policy

HONDURAS: Callejas arrested

VENEZUELA: Blacklisted

EL SALVADOR: Bush discusses maras with Saca

ARGENTINA
Argentina should do more to stop the financing of terrorist organisations by cracking down on money laundering, Theo Van Lingen, an adviser from the US Treasury department, said. Van Lingen, who is currently meeting with government officials in Buenos Aires, said that Argentina could face sanctions and economic isolation if it does not comply with standards set out by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international body set up to fight against money laundering and terrorist financing. In response to demands from the US and the FATF, the Argentine parliament approved a law to lift banking secrecy on suspicious transactions in March 2006. Van Lingen said, "It is an important step, but it's one thing to establish a law and quite another to ensure justice is done." Argentine legislators have recognised the need for a more ambitious law, and Van Lingen indicated that Washington would advise Argentina on how to stop suspicious financial transactions so that sanctions could be avoided.

BOLIVIA
President Evo Morales defended his policy of nationalising strategic industries and allowing coca farmers to grow more coca leaf when he addressed the 61st General Assembly of the UN on 19 September. Both policies have been criticised by the US. On natural resources, Morales emphasised that he was not against foreign investment. "My government respects foreign investment," he said, "we need investments but we do not need bosses. I want to address some false accusations: if the Bolivian government is exercising its ownership rights over hydrocarbons or oil, we are not confiscating anything from anyone. Investments are respected and returns on investment will be guaranteed and they will have the tight to make profits, but they will not be making the profits they used to, because, unless this happens my country's social problems will not be sorted out." On coca, Morales alluded to the widespread belief that popular US softdrinks use coca-leaf extract: "It is not possible that coca leaf should be legal for Coca-Cola, but not for traditional medicines. Coca leaf does not do any damage to anybody."

HONDURAS
Former president Rafael Callejas was arrested on 18 September in Miami, where he was planning to catch a connecting flight to Europe. The leader of the Honduran opposition Partido Nacional, Callejas was travelling in his capacity as president of the Honduran national football federation. The Honduran ambassador to the US, René González said that Callejas had problems with his visa and that the embassy was trying to get more information about the case. Callejas was sent back to Tegucigalpa a day later. The "problems" Callejas encountered consisted of his alleged embezzlement of US$20m of state funds during his 1990-1994 term in office. The US Consul in Tegucigalpa, Ian Brownlee, said that public officials suspected of corruption were denied entry to the US under immigration law. This despite the fact that the supreme court exonerated Callejas of corruption charges in 2005.

VENEZUELA
The US blacklisted Venezuela once again in its annual report on nations it considers to be major drug producers and transit points. Released on 18 September, the report said Venezuela had "failed demonstrably" to live up to international commitments to combat drugs. "The United States is very concerned about the continued deterioration of democratic institutions in Venezuela," the Bush administration said, citing "increased executive control over the other branches of government, threats to judicial independence and human rights, and attacks on press freedoms and freedom of expression." Washington said it would keep funding programmes that "aid Venezuela's democratic institutions, establish selected community development projects and strengthen Venezuela's political party system." President George W. Bush was less critical of Bolivia. He said it should concentrate more on coca eradication, rather than focusing excessively on cracking down on drug-trafficking. Significantly, he said the US would set out benchmarks for Bolivia and review its performance within six months. The Bahamas, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru also reappeared on the list.

EL SALVADOR
On 18 September President George W. Bush met with his counterpart from El Salvador, President Elías Antonio Saca, to discuss the problems caused when Salvadoreans with criminal convictions are deported from the US. Since the beginning of the year, 7,874 nationals from El Salvador have been repatriated, of whom 1,704 have been convicted of crimes in US courts. Saca claimed that the arrival of petty criminals and gang members from the US at a rate of five per day had caused a rise in crime in El Salvador. Those that have been deported cannot be tried in Salvadorean courts for crimes which they committed outside the country, and so are let free. During the meeting, which was held in New York, President Bush recognised that the deportations are "causing problems for Salvadorean society" and charged his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, with the task of finding a bilateral solution. El Salvador's interior minister, René Figueroa, suggested a change in the law that would allow Salvadorean authorities to arrest deportees with criminal convictions.

27 September 2006

27 September 2006 Hits: 250

BOLIVIA: Rice stresses importance of Bolivian relations

CUBA: Posada Carriles extension

HONDURAS: Beefing up Palmerola

COLOMBIA: US ambassador apologises

MEXICO: Migrants repatriated in voluntary programme

BOLIVIA
The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, stressed that although there were vagaries in US relations with Bolivia, the underlying tone was good. She was explaining US foreign policy goals to editors at the "Wall Street Journal" on 25 September. Rice said: "As much as the Bolivians stand up and say horrible things about the United States, they also are constantly pulsing to see if they can keep our relationship on track, because they really can't afford to have the United States pull out of Bolivia." The new US ambassador to La Paz, Philip S Goldberg, arrives on 29 September.

CUBA
The US department of justice has appealed for more time to file a formal objection to El Paso federal magistrate Norbert Garney's recommendation on 11 September that Cuba's anti-Castro activist, Luis Posada Carriles, be released from immigration custody. A federal judge in Texas agreed on 25 September to extend the deadline to 5 October. Garney said the attorney general has not classified Posada Carriles as a terrorist and that holding him in detention contravened a 2001 Supreme Court ruling barring indefinite detention for foreign nationals who cannot be deported. The US has tried to no avail to find a third country that would grant Posada Carriles asylum. It refuses to extradite him to either Venezuela or Cuba which both want him in connection with the bombing of an airliner in 1973.

HONDURAS
The Honduran minister of security, Alvaro Romero, said that the US is increasing its military presence in the Palmerola airbase. He said that the US was sending five C-130 aircraft to help Honduran authorities to deal with "natural disasters and fires". He said that if the US wanted to send any more planes it would have to be approved by congress. The future of Palmerola seems uncertain. In June, President Manuel Zelaya sought permission from his US counterpart George W. Bush to convert Palmerola, which was built in the mid-1980s during the Contra war with Nicaragua and still houses about 500 US troops, into a commercial airport. Bush assented. Bush also offered to help Honduras build a new base, which will house aircraft and a fuel supply system, to clamp down on drug trafficking. On 4 October Honduras will propose the creation of a special regional anti-drug school during a summit of the Sistema de Integración de Centroamérica (SICA). Honduras will offer to host the new school, Romero said.

COLOMBIA
On 22 September the US embassy to Colombia posted a warning on its website about a terrorist threat in Bogotá, which advised employees to stay away from various parts of the city. The embassy had received information about a plan by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to detonate several explosives in shopping centres in the north of Bogotá. On 25 September the US ambassador to Colombia, William Wood, held a press conference where he apologised for raising the alarm without first having consulted the Colombian authorities. Wood claimed that "there continues to be a terrorist threat in the country", but made assurances that measures were now in place to prevent such a breakdown in communication recurring.

MEXICO
Over 12,000 illegal immigrants have so far taken part this year in the Voluntary Repatriation to Mexico 2006 programme. This is a joint initiative between the Mexican and US governments to provide migrants who are detained by the US border patrol with a safe way of returning home. The programme was established in 2004, and since then has been implemented in the Arizona-Sonora corridor during the hottest months of the year when the risks are particularly high for Mexican migrants crossing the desert into the US. This year's programme began on 7 July and will end on 30 September. According to Russell Ahr of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona, an average of 180 migrants per day have volunteered to return to their home towns via Mexico City on flights departing from Tucson in Texas. This compares poorly with last year's figure of over 20,000 repatriated migrants, and is a drop in the ocean considering that border patrol agents in the Tucson area detain an average of 1,080 migrants each day.

4 October 2006

04 October 2006 Hits: 223

BRAZIL: Cotton saga continues in WTO

BRAZIL: US citizens involved in Brazilian plane crash

MEXICO: US to consider protest note

NICARAGUA: Craddock fears that US is losing influence in Latin America

VENEZUELA: Trying to ignore Chávez

SOUTHCOM: New leader for Southern Command

BRAZIL
The World Trade Organisation (WTO) established a panel on 27 September to investigate whether the US government was complying with the ruling of a previous panel which ordered the US to stop subsidising cotton production in the country. The decision was taken after the Brazilian government complained that the US still subsidises cotton producers despite the US government having repealed its Step-2 programme on 1 August as stipulated by the WTO last year. Under the programme the US government bought cotton produced by US farmers at higher prices than the market average. Brazilians maintained that the programme distorted global prices and was putting cotton producers in poorer countries out of business. The US government tried to block the opening of the new panel, saying that it was "unnecessary" and "without foundation" as it considers that finishing Step-2 was the end of the matter. If the WTO rules against the US once more the Brazilian government will start to apply trade sanctions to US products.

BRAZIL
Two US civilian pilots had their passports taken away by the Brazilian police after being involved in an airliner crash that caused the death of 155 people on 29 September deep in the Amazon jungle in Brazil. According to Brazilian authorities, Joe Lepore and Jan Paul Palladino caused the crash after turning off the radar of their Brazilian-made Legacy ten-seat jet so they could practise "unauthorised manoeuvres" undetected. As it happens they were flying on the Manaus-Brasília air-route used by commercial airliners such as the Boeing 737 with which their plane collided. Lepore and Palladino were flying at 17,000 feet despite having been ordered to descend 1,000 feet by the Brasília air-traffic-controller. The Legacy belongs to the US company Excel Air and was carrying US journalists in a visit to the Amazon. A spokesperson for the Brazilian Gol Airline said that there were Brazilians as well as foreign passengers in the Boeing aircraft. This is the worst air accident that has ever occurred in Brazil.

MEXICO
The US State Department said on 3 October that it would "carefully review" a diplomatic note from the Mexican embassy in Washington, expressing the government's unhappiness at the US Congress's approval, on 29 September, of 1,226km of walls and fences along the border. Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, has asked President George W Bush to veto the congressional bill. The State Department was neutral about what would happen. "We value our relationship with Mexico and have engaged in a longstanding dialogue with them on immigration-related issues. [We] expect that those conversations will continue."

NICARAGUA
During the Defence Ministers Conference in Managua, General Bantz J. Craddock expressed frustration that the American Servicemember's Protection Act was preventing the US from remaining the "partner of choice" for Latin America's militaries. The Protection Act was passed by the US Congress in 2002, and allows the US government to refuse to extradite its citizens and servicemen to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague. Countries which supported the establishment of the ICC have to sign an Article 98 agreement pledging not to prosecute US troops if they want to receive US military aid. Several Latin American countries, including Brazil and Mexico, have not signed an Article 98 agreement due to anti-US domestic pressures. This means that they have turned to other countries, such as Russia, Spain and China, for their military supplies. For example, Russia recently sold some 100,000 assault rifles to Venezuela. To counteract this trend, the US Congress has made some minor concessions and allowed some countries to be granted waivers so they can receive officer training. These waivers are likely to be granted to all Latin American countries except Venezuela. Craddock said that the officer training was important for maintaining relationships and influence; "It is about engagement. It is about contact. It is about the opportunity to see our culture." However, there is still no sign that the ban on direct military assistance will be lifted.

VENEZUELA
Aware that previous attempts to confront Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez , have helped legitimise his electorally effective persecution complex, Washington is now trying to ignore him. Nowhere was this new strategy more in evidence than after Chávez 's diatribe at the UN. Despite calling US President George W. Bush a "devil" who had left a smell of sulphur, the White House refused to enter into a slanging match. In an interview with The New York Post on 25 September, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spelt out the new policy. "The way that we've chosen to deal with this is to spend almost as little time as possible talking about Chávez and more time talking about our positive agenda for Latin America," she said. The first airing of this new approach came on 14 September, when Tom Shannon, US assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, redefined Chávez as "one of the most vocal and visible challenges to regional consensus" rather than his previous incarnation as a "threat to regional stability". Not all of the US administration appear to have appreciated this shift in policy. At a meeting of defence ministers from Western Hemisphere countries in Nicaragua on 2 October US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld expressed once again his concern that some of the arms Venezuela has been purchasing might end up in the hands of guerrillas in neighbouring countries.

SOUTHCOM
The appointment of Navy Admiral James Stavridis as head of Southern Command was confirmed by the US Senate on 30 September. Stavridis will take charge of Southcom headquarters in Miami later this month, where he will oversee military operations and military collaboration with countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Stavridis, a graduate of the Navy Academy who has been working as a military aide to US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, sees Cuba as a priority for Southern Command; he said that he hoped for a peaceful transition to democracy there, but that he was "not confident of that happening in the immediate future." The current Southern Command head, General Bantz J Craddock, will become NATO chief and head of Pentagon operations in Europe.

11 October 2006

11 October 2006 Hits: 93

COLOMBIA: Growing consensus on US "failure" in Colombia

COLOMBIA: Castaño ready to negotiate with US

CUBA: Crackdown on embargo

MEXICO: Has neo-liberalism failed in Mexico?

PERU: Fallback plan for FTA

COLOMBIA
US academics are now freely declaring that Plan Colombia, the US anti-drugs effort in Colombia, has failed. Arlene Tickner, a US professor and drug policy specialist at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota said on 9 October at a conference in Bogotá: "As an antidrugs strategy, Plan Colombia has been a relatively large failure, given the objectives [it had in 2000] when it was launched." Academics and drug enforcement agencies are now producing statistics, substantiating an influential editorial in The New York Times last month that declared Plan Colombia a failure.

The latest evidence suggests that, despite the eradication of coca plantations, Colombia is producing at least as much coca as it produced five or six years ago. This is because drug-growers' productivity has increased. The deputy director of Colombia's Dirección Nacional de Estupefacientes, Carlos Medina, said that his organisation's latest information was that there were 85,750 hectares of coca in Colombia in 2005 that produced 776t of cocaine. This was, Medina said, 279t more than the local police estimated Colombia's cocaine output to be and 231t more than the US estimated.

Colombia argues that it has, as Plan Colombia demanded, halved the coca acreage from the 160,000 hectares, pre-2000. The government also argues that without Plan Colombia the world would have been inundated with cocaine. Since Plan Colombia began, an average of 230t of cocaine have been seized from Colombians or Colombian territory every year.

COLOMBIA
The fugitive head of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), Vicente Castaño, has said he is willing to negotiate with the US. Castaño, whose capture has been ordered by President Alvaro Uribe himself, told the magazine Semana “the majority of the head of the AUC is trying to negotiate their submission to the US authorities". Castaño, who among other crimes is accused of ordering the murder of his brother, said the paramilitary chiefs were annoyed with the Colombian government's handling of the demobilisation process. He said that he considered the peace and justice law viable but “what is important is who makes it stick […], who guarantees its future, its just application".

CUBA
On 10 October the attorney general of Florida, Alexander Acosta, announced that the US government has put together a team dedicated to ensuring that the sanctions against Cuba are being observed properly. The team, which is made up of members of other government agencies such as the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Coast Guard, will pursue those who breach the embargo. Penalties for violating it include fines of up to US$250,000 (or US$1m for corporations) and prison sentences of up to 10 years.

The timing of the team's establishment is significant; Fidel Castro's ill health, and recent reports in the US press that he is suffering from terminal cancer, have given new impetus to the movement pushing for a transition to democracy in Cuba. Acosta said that the economic sanctions served not only to economically isolate Castro's regime, but also "deprive it of the use of the American dollar, which it so badly needs."

MEXICO
US academics are considering what President Vicente Fox's government has achieved and what President-elect Felipe Calderón Hinojosa might do. One of the most pungent analyses of the state of Mexico was made by J Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at Berkeley. DeLong is a former US Assistant Treasury Secretary during presidency of Bill Clinton. DeLong wrote, in an article syndicated in the second week of October, that six years ago he was convinced that Nafta had been a success. Now he was not so sure.

As a self-confessed neo-liberal, DeLong said that he was no longer sure that neo-liberal economic policies were the right ones for Mexico. He pointed out that since 1994 Mexico's GDP had grown at an average rate of 3.6%. As its population had grown by 2.5%, the average Mexican was now only 15% richer than he was in 1993. Furthermore the difference between average earnings in the US and Mexico had widened since Nafta came into force in 1994.

He noted that although Mexican economic policymaking had achieved great things since 1994 (lowering inflation, increasing exports from a little over 10% of GDP to 28% and providing a long period of economic stability) productivity and wages in Mexico had not risen much. Crime, corruption and emigration had continued, DeLong pointed out.

PERU
The US ambassador to Peru, James Curtis Strubble, said on 10 October that an extension of the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) may have to be negotiated if the free trade agreement between the US and Peru is not ratified by the US Congress before the end of the year. His comments followed a meeting at the Peruvian embassy in Washington between Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, and Alan García, the president of Peru.

Both Rice and President George W Bush had promised to put pressure on the US Congress to approve the treaty, but Strubble's comments reflect the fact that the future of the agreement depends heavily on what happens in this November's mid-term elections in the US. Recent polls suggest that the Democratic party, many members of which have expressed opposition to the FTA, are gaining ground because of the scandal involving Republican legislator Mark Foley.

The ATPDEA, which allows Peru to export many products to the US without paying tariffs, is due to expire in December.

18 October 2006

18 October 2006 Hits: 99

BOLIVIA: US says Goni extradition legal not political issue

COLOMBIA: Farc leader on trial in Washington

MEXICO: Gorbachev criticises US border walls

MEXICO: Mexican union launches legal action against North Carolina

REGION: Craddock leaves office with upbeat assessment

BOLIVIA
The US ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, said on 17 October that the US government was not prevaricating over the extradition of former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. The US ambassador said that the issue was legal not political. Goldberg said that the issue was now being handled by the “appropriate authorities" in Washington. He stressed that the US embassy in La Paz was not involved.

Goldberg said that the US authorities were fully aware of the Bolivian government's interest in this matter and had discussed it with them. The Bolivian government wants to extradite the former president to face charges of genocide: President Goni ordered troops to gun down demonstrators on 17 October 2003. At least 60 people were killed. Almost immediately, Goni fled into exile in the US.

COLOMBIA
The trial of the most senior member of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc) to have been captured in Colombia began on 16 October in Washington. Ricardo Palmera, better known as Simón Trinidad, was extradited to the US in late 2004 and is on trial for kidnapping three US citizens after their plane crashed in Colombia in 2003. A Harvard-educated former banker, Palmera says that he joined the Farc to fight for social justice. He could face 30 years in prison if convicted. The trial is causing tension between the Farc and the Colombian government, who are currently negotiating a prisoner swap.

MEXICO
The former president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev criticised US plans to build walls along about a third of its border with Mexico. Gorbachev was speaking at a conference at The University of Texas of the Permian Basin on 17 October. He said that he did not believe that “the US was so weak and lacking in confidence that it could not come up with a different solution [to the problem of illegal migration from Mexico]". Gorbachev reminded his audience that in 1987 the late President Ronald Reagan had asked Gorbachev to pull down the Berlin Wall.

MEXICO
On 17 October a group of Mexican trade unions announced that they were taking legal action against a decision by the state of North Caroline to prohibit free collective bargaining by trade unions on behalf of state employees. The Mexican unions are acting under the provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta). The Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT) which has 400,000 members, said that this was the first time it had used Nafta against a public sector employer in the US. In the past the FAT has used Nafta successfully in labour disputes with private sector employers in the US. The United Electrical Workers (UEW), which has 3,000 members employed by the state of North Carolina asked the FAT to get involved in the dispute and to invoke Nafta. The UEW said that Nafta could be invoked because North Carolina did US$6bn worth of trade each year with Mexico.

REGION
In a final interview as head of US South Command, General Bantz “John" Craddock gave a fairly positive assessment of the political future in Latin America and the Caribbean. “I know there are many with a pessimistic view of Latin America and the Caribbean basin in terms of fragile democracies, populist movements," he said. “But I think that if you take it on balance and look at the entire region I think there's cause for optimism." Craddock was asked about Ecuador, where one of the presidential candidates through to the run-off plans to kick the US out of its airbase at Manta when the lease expires in 2009. “I know there's been a lot of rhetoric from presidential candidates in Ecuador. We'll have to see how it sorts itself out," he said. The base is used by US surveillance aircraft for anti-drug operations, but is resented by many Ecuadoreans who believe its chief purpose is supporting Plan Colombia, the US-backed military operation to eliminate the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. Craddock will be replaced by Admiral James Stavridis on 19 October, a Persian Gulf veteran with a Ph.D in international relations. He will be the first naval officer to run SouthCom.

25 October 2006

25 October 2006 Hits: 89

COLOMBIA: Burns promises to continue with military aid

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Bush receives Fernández

MEXICO: Bush to sign wall into law

NICARAGUA: US keeps very watchful eye over elections

PANAMA: US wants transparency in expansion project

COLOMBIA
On 24 October the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Nicholas Burns, led a high-level delegation of US officials to Colombia, which included Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, for the first such visit since President Alvaro Uribe was re-elected for a second term. The US's military aid to Colombia, worth around US$600m a year, has come under close scrutiny in recent Senate committees, and may be scaled back if the Democrats win control of the house in November. However, Burns gave no indication of a cut. “We came to give a message that we are going to fulfil all our promises. We want to congratulate Uribe for Colombia's economic growth and the anti-terrorist struggle," he said at a press conference in Bogotá. Nevertheless, he did add the administration was concerned over human rights abuses and was in contact with a number of local NGOs over the issue. Burns also said that North Americans knew they had a responsibility to lower the demand for drugs.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The US President, George W Bush, will receive his Dominican counterpart, Leonel Fernández, today (25 October) in Washington. The two men are expected to talk about drug trafficking in the region, security, immigration and terrorism. The main topic of conversation, however, will be the free-trade agreement between the two countries, which should have come into effect last July. Controversy over intellectual and industrial property have delayed the agreement's implementation. Fernández will be able to give Bush good news, though. The Dominican executive has finally sent to congress several bills necessary for the implementation of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, the so-called Cafta-DR, as recently negotiated with the US Department of Commerce.

MEXICO
On 26 October President George W. Bush is due to sign the congressional bill to build 1,126km of walls along the border with Mexico. President Bush's announcement followed an application from the leaders of the Republican party in both houses of congress. The congressional leaders emphasised that the walls were the product of a “Republican congress". The mid-term elections in the US are on 7 November and the Republicans are lagging badly in the opinion polls. Mexico is still objecting to the walls and is threatening to involve the United Nations. On 23 October, the president of the UN's Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Luis Alfonso de Alba, who also heads the Mexican delegation, said that the walls were “strictly speaking a violation of human rights" because they impede the human right of the free movement of persons.

NICARAGUA
The Atlanta-based Carter Center sent a message to be published in Managua on 19 October asking all countries in the Americas to refrain from intervening in the presidential elections, due on 5 November. However, representatives from the US have shown no signs of such restraint; on 19 October the US Secretary of Commerce, Carlos Gutiérrez, warned in no uncertain terms that a victory for Ortega would jeopardise the Cafta-DR free trade deal with the US and discourage foreign investment in the country. The US ambassador to Nicaragua, Paul Trivelli, who has made his preference for dissident liberal leader, Eduardo Montealegre, very clear throughout the campaign made some controversial remarks on 20 October. Trivelli said that due to "El Pacto", the power-sharing scheme signed by leaders of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) and Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC) in 2000, voting for PLC candidate José Rizo equated to voting for the leftwing FSLN candidate, Daniel Ortega. He emphasised that Rizo, who has flown the US flag at election rallies, was not the US government's favoured candidate.

Rizo responded angrily on 23 October, declaring in a press conference, "Enough foreign interference here!" However, this outrage did not prevent him meeting with former US Colonel Oliver North on 23 October in Managua. North was a prominent figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s in which the US secretly supplied weapons to guerrillas fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Rizo and North claimed that there were no political implications to their well-publicised meeting "of old friends" but it is likely that Rizo was trying to undo some of the damage done to his campaign by Trivelli's comments.

PANAMA
The US government expects the Panama Canal expansion project to be carried out with “total transparency", said the country's ambassador in Panama, William Eaton. He went on to say that US companies are ready to help Panamanian authorities to carry out the project. Eaton said the US government hopes the approval of the expansion project will also help to move forward the free-trade negotiations between the two countries. Negotiations halted some ten months ago because of controversy over the US participation in the expansion project. The US trade department is already preparing a new negotiating round. The US is by far the largest user of the inter-oceanic canal. According to Eaton, “at least 78% of the canal's traffic originates or ends in US ports". The expansion project was approved in a referendum held on 22 October with 78.01% support. The project is estimated to cost US$5.2bn.

1 November 2006

01 November 2006 Hits: 79

COLOMBIA: US goes after Norte de Valle drug gang

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: Fernández visits White House

HISPANICS: How will they vote in the US midterm elections?

EL SALVADOR: US ambassador tackles youth violence

COLOMBIA
The US Department of Treasury arrested alleged leading members of Colombia's Norte de Valle drug gang on 26 October. It had the presumed leader of the gang, Orlando Sabogal Zuluaga, arrested in Spain. Sabogal was one of four people who took over the gang when Luis Hernando Gómez Bustamente was extradited to the US in 2004. The Norte de Valle gang is based in Cauca.

In Colombia the US government imposed sanctions on a Colombia soccer team and a national football federation executive, accusing them of links to the gang. The US accused Colombian Football Federation board executive Oscar Ignacio Martan among others of having links with Carlos Alberto "Beto" Renteria, another senior figure in the Norte de Valle gang. Washington said second division Cortulua football club was a front for Renteria's operations. Martan had been president of the club, based in Tulua in Valle de Cauca.

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
The president of the Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández, met his US counterpart George W Bush for a 45-minute long talk in Washington on 24 October. In a press conference after their meeting, Bush professed his support of Cafta-DR and said that it would be implemented as soon as possible. It is not clear whether they broached the issue of the deadlock between Venezuela and Guatemala for a non-permanent seat on the Security Council but two days later, while still in the US, Fernández received a call from the Venezuelan foreign minister, Nicolás Maduro, proposing that the Dominican Republic stand for the seat. The US are certain to be more open to the candidacy of the Dominican Republic than they are to Venezuela's other favourite to step forward as a consensus candidate, Bolivia. The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has not expressed any opposition to the Dominican Republic's candidacy.

HISPANICS
The Bush government's tough-sounding policies on immigration are a major political gamble by the Republicans in the mid-term elections due on 7 November. In the 2004 elections Bush's campaign attracted record numbers of Hispanics (and according to some psephological researchers, a majority) to vote Republican. What the mid-term elections will show is whether these voters, who by definition like the smaller-government rhetoric of traditional Republicanism, have been put off the party by the strident anti-immigrant rhetoric of several leading Republicans.

Democrats hope that the huge rallies in the late spring and early summer this year to protest against congressional bills toughening the laws on migrants who have settled in the US mean that Hispanics will return to voting Democrat. Pollsters doubt this and forecast that many Hispanics will not bother to vote. What Hispanics do could be decisive in several close elections. Overall there are 17m Hispanics eligible to vote in the US, 7% more than there were in 2004. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Hispanic electoral turnout increased from 5.5% of the votes cast in 2000 to 6% in 2004.

EL SALVADOR
The US ambassador to El Salvador, Douglas Barclay, tried to galvanise the country's government into action when he gave a speech to the Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social (FUSADES) highlighting the gravity of the country's problem with delinquency and gang violence. He said, "Three years ago I said the biggest problem for the country was to increase growth_ but for this rate of growth to continue, El Salvador must put an end to criminal violence. Now." Over the last three years, there has been an average of 10 to 12 homicides per day in El Salvador.

Barclay expressed his fears that the problem was putting off potential investors in the country. His demands were answered a few days later, when a conference entitled "Youth gang violence in the region: a pending dialogue", which was organised by the Coalición Centroamericana para la Prevención de la Violencia Juvenil (CCPVJ) and the US think-tank, the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola), began on 26 October in San Salvador. Wola presented the findings of research they had carried out into gang violence in Central America, which concluded that repressive law enforcement strategies like "Mano Dura" were counterproductive, and that more emphasis should be placed on more conciliatory programmes such as "Mano Amiga".

8 November 2006

08 November 2006 Hits: 80

REGION: How will a Democrat victory in the US affect Latin America?

BRAZIL: Lula assesses relations with US

CHILE: NASA hackers arrested

GUATEMALA: Fears of mass expulsions from the US

MEXICO: Garza comments on Oaxaca

REGION
On 7 November the US went to the polls in the mid-term elections. All seats in the House of Representatives and 33 out of 100 seats in the Senate were up for grabs. For the first time in 12 years the Democrats have gained power in the House, while tight races in Montana and Virginia will decide which party controls the Senate. The results have changed the political landscape in the US, and could mean that the final two years of President Bush's presidential term will differ substantially from his first two, during which the Republican party had a majority in both houses.

One area where a Democratic victory could have a very significant bearing on US-Latin American relations is immigration reform. Bush favours a comprehensive overhaul of the immigration system, which, as well as tighter border security, would involve guest-worker visas and a path to citizenship for illegal workers already established in the US. However, the Republican-controlled Congress, eager to show a tough stance on immigration in the run up to the elections, recently passed a bill to build 1,126km of wall along the US border with Mexico. In the post-election Congress, Bush has an opportunity to pursue his favoured immigration policy, but to do so he will have to craft a bill that relies on the Democrats rather than the Republicans to pass.

Another area that will be watched closely by Latin American leaders is trade. With the Democrats in control on Capitol Hill, the fate of the FTAs with Colombia and Peru, which are both awaiting ratification by the US Congress, is in the balance. Hernando de Soto, a Peruvian economist who was sent to Washington by President Alan García to push for the ratification of the FTA, has voiced fears that a heavily Democratic Congress will be more protectionist. Some members of the Democratic party have already expressed concerns about the FTA, saying that the treaty does not require Peru to meet international labour standards. Bush has also requested that Congress renew the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) which is due to expire at the end of December.

BRAZIL
In his first statement to the foreign press after winning re-election, President Lula da Silva set out his foreign policy objectives. Despite not winning the US's backing for Brazil's bid to win a seat in the UN Security Council, Brazil is now seen by the US government as "the moderate force" in South America. This recognition is fundamental to Lula's plans to develop "privileged relations" with the US, Brazil's single most important trade partner. Last August President George W Bush said that Brazil could lose its partial duty-free status (granted under the Generalized System of Preferences) following complaints from US congressmen that Brazil had not been helpful in efforts to reach an agreement in global trade talks. This tough talk, however, has quickly changed. A friendly Bush was one of the first heads of state to call Lula to congratulate him on his re-election victory, signalling the president will try to renew trade preferences for Brazil that are scheduled to expire later this year.

CHILE
Four suspected computer hackers accused of illegally accessing government web sites around the world were arrested in Chile on 6 November. Members of the “Byond" hacking team, a group of hackers who illegally accessed computer systems for fun, had been under investigation for eight months, according to Chilean police authorities. The group allegedly penetrated more than 8,000 web sites around the world, including the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's site, where they posted protests against Israeli bombing in Lebanon. Along with NASA, the group infiltrated the University of California, Berkeley and Chilean finance ministry's web site, while also hacking government web sites in Argentina, Venezuela and Peru.

GUATEMALA
Rosa Elvira Posada, the leader of the Unión de Guatemaltecos Residentes Migrantes in Los Angles claimed on 6 November that the US government planned to deport 30,000 Guatemalans from the US in 2006. In the first 10 months, the US has deported 13,204 Guatemalans, 60% more than it did in the same period of 2005. Posada was in Guatemala, lobbying congress for changes in the electoral law that will allow expatriates to vote. There are 1.2m Guatemalans living in the US. Posada argued that if this change is made, the government will have to stand up for expatriate Guatemalans. US deportations are still substantially lower than deportations of Guatemalans from Mexico. So far this year 62,000 Guatemalans have been deported from Mexico.

MEXICO
The US ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza, said on 6 November that the situation in the southern state of Oaxaca was “getting worse." This suggests that he does not believe that the Mexican government decision to send in the federal police, on 29 October, has ended the five months of near anarchy in the state. On 30 October, the US embassy upgraded its warning to US travellers in Mexico, advising them to avoid Oaxaca.

Today, the president-elect, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa travels to Washington before his meeting with President George W Bush on 9 November.

15 November 2006

15 November 2006 Hits: 84

CUBA: USAID programme found to be lacking

GUATEMALA: US halts adoptions

TRADE: Latin America's trade surplus with US falls

US: Hispanics turn away from Republicans

US: A Cuban-American is to lead the Republican National Committee

CUBA
A congressional report to be published on 15 November highlights inefficiencies in the way that funds from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which are earmarked for democracy-building programmes in Cuba, are spent and controlled. Some US$65m has been spent since 1996, and President George W Bush has recently announced that US$80m will be spent over the next two years to boost pro-democracy movements in Cuba. One of the main problems is that USAID rules forbid sending the money directly to dissidents in Cuba; groups based in the US therefore buy goods and send them to the island, but shipping costs eat up much of the money. Often those charged with smuggling the goods into Cuba charge between US$13 and US$20 per pound for their services.

The congressional report also carried out "limited inspections" into how the groups entrusted with the money from USAID spent it, and found a number of "suspicious purchases". For example, the NGO Acción Democrática Cubana, based in Miami, had sent luxury items such as expensive chocolates, Nintendo computer games and cashmere sweaters to the island. The director of the NGO, Juan Carlos Acosta, said that he had never been given guidance from USAID as to what he should send. The report was commissioned by two congressmen who oppose the US embargo on Cuba, with the aim of sparking debate about the efficacy of this use of taxpayers' money. According to Richard Nuccio, who was Cuba adviser to former president Bill Clinton, the programme was designed to pander to Cuban-American voters rather than effect real change in Cuba.

GUATEMALA
The US announced on 14 November that it was halting adoptions of Guatemalan children by US couples because Guatemala does not abide by The Hague Convention on Adoption. The announcement came from Catherine Barry, an Assistant Secretary of State as she was giving evidence to a congressional subcommittee on adoption.

Guatemala had become the third source of babies for adoption by US parents after Russia and China. A recent report calculated that US couples were adopting 1% of all babies born in Guatemala. Between 1995 and 2005 US couples adopted 18,298 Guatemalan babies.

The adoption business in Guatemala was unregulated by the Guatemalan government and largely in the hands of lawyers. There have been fears that babies put up for adoption were not always who the lawyers said they were. US newspapers claimed that it took on average just one week to arrange the adoption of a Guatemalan baby.

TRADE
Latin America's trade surplus with the US fell by 17% in September to US$9.45bn. For the first nine months of the year, however, the surplus increased from US$73.56bn to US$86.6bn. All the figures come from the US Department of Commerce. Mexico accounts for 60% of the surplus and Venezuela accounts for 24%. In the first nine months of 2006, Mexico's surplus jumped from US$36.2bn in the same period of 2005 to US$48.4bn.

US
Hispanic groups claim that the Republicans' anti-immigrant rhetoric cost the party votes and seats in Congress at last week's mid-term elections. "We are showing at the ballot box that we can translate our numbers into political power," Angela Sanbrano, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles told the LA Times. A CNN exit poll showed that Democratic House candidates won 69% of the Latino vote across the US compared with 55% in 2004 (other polls show a smaller rise).

Analysts said that Republican attempts to use immigration as an issue to mobilise conservative voters backfired by instead rousing more Latinos to vote. Those results were most apparent in Arizona, where several Republican immigration hawks were defeated, analysts said.

In California, where Latinos or Hispanics make up 12% of the electorate, there did not appear to be any increase in turnout. Antonio Gonzalez, president of Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, said 1.2m California Latinos voted in the mid-terms. This was an increase of 100,000 over the 2002 election. However, he said that fell short of the 1.5 million voters that his group had hoped to register. He blamed funding problems for the shortfall.

US
President George W Bush announced on 14 November that Senator Mel Martínez (Republican, Florida) will take over from Ken Mehlman as the chairman of the Republican National Committee. This very prominent position as the face of the party was given to Martínez, who is Cuban-American, in order to reach out to Hispanic voters after their lack of support for the Republicans in the mid-term elections of 7 November (see above).

The choice of Martínez, who left Cuba aged 15 and shot to national prominence when he fought to keep Cuban refugee Elián González in the US, will go down well with Cuban-Americans but has been controversial among hard-line Republican supporters because of his "soft" views on immigration. His appointment is a clear indication that the Republican leadership has taken on board Hispanic voters' dislike of its "zero tolerance" attitude to immigration, and Martínez might be the man to rectify the damage. After his meeting with Bush on 14 November he told reporters, "Border security only, enforcement only, harshness only, is not the message that I believe America wants to convey."

22 November 2006

22 November 2006 Hits: 82

ANDEAN: Crunch time for Atpdea

COLOMBIA: Mistrial in Trinidad case

STUDENTS: Increase in foreigners at US universities

US: Richardson criticises Republican immigration strategy

ANDEAN
Time is running out to renew the Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act (Atpdea), which allows certain Andean exports into the US tariff-free, before it expires at the end of this year. The US Congress will only be in session for a limited period before the act's expiry date on 31 December and, although House and Senate leaders have promised to begin debating the bill on 4 December, many other items are competing for the attention of Congress. The governments of Peru and Colombia now seem to have given up on getting their free trade agreements with the US ratified this year, and are focusing on lobbying Congress to extend Atpdea. This is a second-best option for them. No opposition has been expressed in the US regarding the extension of Atpdea with Peru and Colombia, although according to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe some of the legislators he met in Washington last week voiced objections about other countries in the agreement. Although he did not specify which countries, the nationalisation of the gas industry in Bolivia and cancellation of the multimillion-dollar contract with US oil company Occidental in Ecuador earlier this year will have worried some US congressmen. Representatives from Occidental have lobbied for the non-renewal of Atpdea with Ecuador.

COLOMBIA
A Washington court trying Simón Trinidad, real name Ricardo Palmera, a leader of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Farc), declared a mistrial on 21 November after the jury was unable to agree on a verdict. Palmera was accused of plotting to hold three US citizens hostage after their plane crashed in Colombia in 2003. Palmera's defence said he was only a middleman trying to negotiate a deal between rebels and the Colombian government when he was arrested in Ecuador in 2004. Jurors heard five weeks of testimony but said that they could not agree even after federal judge Tom Hogan had sent them back twice to deliberate further. Hogan ordered the defence and prosecution to return on 14 December to set a date for a new trial. Palmera also faces separate charges relating to drug trafficking; that trial is due to begin in May.

STUDENTS
The number of foreign students travelling to the US in 2006 was slightly up on 2005, but the number of US citizens going to Latin America and Europe to study has increased significantly. For the school year 2005-2006 the number of foreign students attending university in the US was 564,766. Mexico was the Latin American country which sent the greatest number of students (13,931), placing it seventh in the world ranking, followed by Brazil (7,009) and Colombia (6,835). The number of foreign students at US universities had been in decline since 2002, so the small, 400-student increase this year reverses the trend. Of those US students who travel abroad, 60% go to Europe and 14% go to Latin America. Mexico is the most popular destination among those travelling to Latin America, followed by Costa Rica, Chile, Argentina and Brazil.

US
Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico and a potential Democratic presidential candidate, has made it clear how he would seek to attract the Hispanic vote if given the Democratic party nomination. Referring to the Republican strategy for the mid-term elections of 7 November, in which 70% of Hispanic voters opted for the Democrats, up from 55% in 2004, Richardson said, "Republicans lost the gains they made among Hispanics by the harshness of their tone and policies on immigration, particularly the bill to erect a wall between the United States and Mexico_ it sent a terrible signal, and you could see it specifically in races, in Arizona, in Colorado."

29 November 2006

29 November 2006 Hits: 79

ECUADOR: US reacts cautiously to Correa's victory

INTELLIGENCE: Norman Bailey appointed to Cuba and Venezuela mission

MEXICO: Biden blames corruption in Mexico for emigration to US

NICARAGUA: Signs of better relations between US and Ortega?

ECUADOR
The US has reacted cautiously, but diplomatically, to the victory of Rafael Correa, a personal friend of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez , in the Ecuadorean elections. The US ambassador to Quito, Linda Jewell, telephoned Correa to congratulate him and restate the US's “commitment to the Ecuadorean people". Despite calling President George W. Bush “dimwitted", Correa took pains to visit Jewell twice before the second round of the election.

The US State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, stated that the US was willing to work with the new government, but added that the bilateral relationship will be “dependent on the policies that the government pursues". Although he stressed the US saw “greater trade" as the route to “greater prosperity" for Ecuador - an attitude at odds with Correa's refusal to restart FTA negotiations - McCormack hinted that Ecuador could enjoy a relationship with the US rather like that of Bolivia.

“We're ready to work with any democratic government in the region," McCormack said. “I'll cite the example of Bolivia. President Morales, when he was first elected, talked about how he was going to do certain things and that there was going to be an anti-U.S. tinge to the policies that his government has pursued. And the reality is that while we don't agree on everything, that we have found ways to work together with Bolivia and the Bolivian Government." The implication being that while Venezuela and Cuba were beyond the pale, Bolivia was an acceptable model for the new Ecuadorean government.

INTELLIGENCE
On 27 November the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, announced the appointment of Dr Norman A. Bailey as “mission manager" for Cuba and Venezuela. As “mission manager" for the two countries, Bailey will oversee three to five staffers who will analyse information from 16 US government agencies to spot information gaps, help craft intelligence strategies and track their implementation. The administration has five other mission managers specializing in Iran, North Korea, counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation and counter-intelligence. Bailey, a former Senior Director of Economic Affairs on the White House National Security Council, was special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, a role in which he advised the president on economics and economic warfare.

MEXICO
Senator Joseph Biden, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, said that the “corrupt system" in Mexico is responsible for the increasing illegal emigration from Mexico to the US. Biden, who will be president of the US Senate's foreign relations committee from January 2007 following the Democrats' victory in the mid-term elections, was speaking in Columbia, South Carolina on 27 November. He said that Mexico's enormous disparities in wealth were responsible for the emigration. He added that Mexico was one of the richest countries in the continent but because of the corrupt system, one percent lived very well and there was a small middle class but the bulk of the population lived in abject poverty. In fact, Mexico's poverty levels have been falling consistently and under half the population now live in poverty.

NICARAGUA
The US Assistant Secretary of State, Thomas Shannon, summed up his meeting with president-elect Daniel Ortega on 28 November as "very fruitful". His comments constitute an about-turn, as during the election campaign Shannon openly stated his preference for Ortega's presidential rival, the conservative Eduardo Montealegre. However, Ortega has pledged to follow a democratic, moderate line when he takes power in January 2007, which has placated US officials. Shannon told reporters after the meeting that "We have developed the foundations for an important dialogue between the two countries, always within the framework of democracy. We are going to deepen that dialogue to improve relations between the United States and Nicaragua."

6 December 2006

06 December 2006 Hits: 64

BRAZIL: New ambassador to the US

COSTA RICA: Arias visits Washington

CUBA: Shannon stands firm

US: The Democrats' key man for Latin America

BRAZIL
Brazil is sending a new ambassador to the US. He is Antonio Patriota, who was previously the deputy minister responsible for political issues at the foreign ministry, Itamaraty. The US accepted him as Brazil's envoy on 4 December. Patriota now has to be approved by Brazilian congress.
Patriota replaces Roberto Abdenur, another career diplomat, who did not have the friendliest relations with Celso Amorim, Brazil's foreign minister. Patriota is much closer to Amorim. Patriota worked for Amorim when he led the Brazilian delegation at the UN in the early 1990s and moved with him to the World Trade Organization in Geneva.

COSTA RICA
President Oscar Arias started a three-day visit to the US capital on 3 December. The visit culminates in a meeting with President George Bush today (6 December). Arias emphasised Costa Rica's comparative peace in what he called an “agitated" region. He also told potential US investors that Costa Rica's congress would approve the free trade deal with the US (Cafta-DR) early in 2007. The free trade deal has been approved by the congresses of all the other Central American signatories and the US congress. Arias got a sympathetic hearing from Harry Reid who is the leader of the Democrats in the Senate. Reid said that the Democrats would strengthen links with Latin America which had been ignored for too long by the Bush administration.

CUBA
The US government will not act on Raúl Castro's offer of 2 December to negotiate with Washington until there is "an indication of real change", according to the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, Thomas Shannon. Speaking at Canning House, the UK's Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council, Shannon said that there had already been a transfer of power from long-time leader Fidel Castro to his brother Raúl and a small coterie. He added that Cuba is experiencing a "frozen moment" that limits the actions of the new leaders because Fidel is "neither alive nor dead".

Washington's continued wariness of Cuba stands in marked contrast to its newly conciliatory approach to Venezuela following President Hugo Chávez 's re-election on 3 December. Shannon said, "We have always looked for ways to deepen dialogue with President Chávez and our hope is that perhaps at this time he will show more interest in this." The distinction that Shannon drew between the two countries was that Venezuela elected its president democratically and made clear that changes in US policy towards Cuba would depend on a political opening.

US
Following the Democrats' victory in the mid-term elections, the Bush administration is likely to face a challenge to its policymaking hegemony towards Latin America. Christopher Dodd, (D, Connecticut) is likely to chair the Senate subcommittee on Latin America (or as the US prefers, the Western Hemisphere). He knows Latin America and speaks Spanish. He was one of the main defenders of the 1980 peace plans in Central America and is also an advocate of a less confrontational policy towards Cuba. On the other hand, Dodd opposed the free trade agreements with Chile and the Cafta-DR deal.

In an interview with the Miami Herald's chief commentator on Latin American affairs, Andrés Oppenheimer, Dodd said that his priority issues would be Cuba, Mexico and the anti-drugs policy in Colombia. Dodd claimed that in Cuba the Helms-Burton law which penalises any companies doing business with Cuba was handicapping the US: “if there had been a similar law for Eastern Europe, they'd still have communist governments", he said. On Mexico he thought that the US should be more forthright in its support for the elected president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa. On Colombia he said that the anti-drugs policy needed a new approach because in the US drug prices were falling and the purity of drugs was increasing.

In the same interview, Dodd hinted that a bipartisan approach to improve the US's reputation in Latin America was possible because Thomas Shannon, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department “knew the region, while his predecessor saw it though ideological glasses."

13 December 2006

13 December 2006 Hits: 70

BANANAS: US joins Panama and Ecuador

CUBA: US members of Congress to pay a visit

MEXICO: Dana closes four factories and shifts to Mexico

PINOCHET: White House talks of "difficult period"

US: Oliver Stone is stung for disobeying US embargo on Cuba

BANANAS
The US has joined Panama in seconding the case, brought by Ecuador at the World Trade Organization, over the European Union's new tariff-only system for banana imports. Both Panama and the US have told the WTO that they want to be included as third parties in the complaint Ecuador has lodged against the EU. The EU introduced a flat Ã¢â€š ¬176 per tonne on imports of bananas grown in Latin America. Bananas grown in former colonies of EU members (the so-called ACP, or Africa, Caribbean and Pacific, countries) do not face this tariff.

The EU commission said that it was disappointed by Ecuador's action because its banana exports to the EU have increased since the tariff was introduced at the beginning of 2006. Ecuador said that the new system does not guarantee access for its bananas.

The US interest in the issue derives from the fact that world's biggest banana shipping companies, Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte, are all US owned.

CUBA
In the biggest delegation to be sent to Cuba from the US Congress since 1959, 10 members of the Cuba Working Group are due to arrive in Havana on 15 December. The bipartisan delegation will meet members of the Cuban government and US ambassadors, and have requested a meeting with the acting president, Raúl Castro. According to William Delahunt, one of the founding members of the Cuba Working Group, the visit had been discussed for some time but was prompted by Raúl's comments about being ready for dialogue with the US in his speech of 2 December. Delahunt said that particular attention would be paid to rules which grant Cuban-Americans just one visit to the island every three years. He also wants to abolish the law which restricts remittances sent to Cuba from the US to US$300 every quarter.

The visit seems at odds with comments made by Caleb McCarry, the co-ordinator for the Cuba Transition Committee. Speaking from the Dominican Republic on 12 December, McCarry said, "We believe there must be an internal dialogue. The Cubans must decide their own future. This is out of respect for the sovereignty of the Cuban people."

MEXICO
Dana, a major US manufacturer of components for cars and trucks, is closing two factories in Canada and two in the US, and consolidating their production in Mexico. The company has also announced that it expects to announce the closure of another four North American plants in 2007.

Dana went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March. In November it said that it would close eight of its 66 factories. The company said that its recovery strategy was based on transferring production to countries where labour costs are lower.

The two US plants are highly capital intensive axle plants. One of the Canadian plants makes chassis; the other is a die-stamping facility.

PINOCHET
The US responded cautiously to the news of the death of Augusto Pinochet, whose overthrow of Marxist President Salvador Allende was initially welcomed by the administration of President Richard Nixon. Documents recently declassified by the independent body National Security Archive, affiliated to George Washington University, reveal that the US intelligence services were well aware of the human rights abuses committed after the coup. A memorandum from the State Department put the number of summary executions committed 19 days after the coup at 320, three times higher than previous estimates. Another State Department document expresses both the US government's willingness to work with the military junta but also an eagerness to avoid being too closely identified with the new military government.

After describing the years of Pinochet rule as a "difficult period", White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, "our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families. We commend the people of Chile for building a society based on freedom, the rule of law, and respect for human rights." State Department spokesman Sean McCormack chose not to dwell on the dictator's legacy, describing that as a job for the Chilean people. Instead he praised the country as "a model for many in the hemisphere" and emphasised the US's current good relations with the government of President Michelle Bachelet.

US
Film director Oliver Stone, who made a documentary in 2002 about the Cuban leader Fidel Castro entitled Looking for Fidel, has been fined US$6,322 for breaching the US embargo on the island. According to a document released by the Department of Treasury, “[The Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC)] alleged that IXTLAN and four individuals dealt in services in which the government of Cuba or a Cuban national has an interest incident to the making of a documentary film. The matter was not voluntarily disclosed to OFAC." Stone's producer, IXTLAN Corporation, has agreed to pay the fine.

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