Brazil & Southern Cone - March 2014 (ISSN 1741-4431)

President José Mujica entered his last year in power on 1 March, having completed 80% of his mandate. He has introduced ground-breaking liberal legislation on abortion, same-sex marriage and marijuana which has grabbed headlines worldwide and even saw Uruguay named ‘country of the year’ for 2013 by The Economist, for implementing policies which were “obviously sensible” and “increased the global sum of happiness at no financial cost”. But one indictment of his term in office is that when he came in he promised “the mother of all reforms” to revamp and modernise the State and, barring a miracle over the next 12 months, he will leave office having made very limited headway despite his ruling left-wing coalition Frente Amplio (FA) enjoying a majority in both chambers of congress.

At the turn of the year, Pedro Bordaberry, the presidential candidate for the right-wing opposition Partido Colorado (PC) in this October’s general elections, blasted the Mujica administration for neglecting issues of national importance, principally public security. Bordaberry accused the government of preferring to focus its attention on dangerous experiments, such as legalising marijuana, and issues of narrow party interest, such as repealing the Ley de Caducidad amnesty law (twice upheld in popular referendums).

Bordaberry concentrated his attack on the government’s failure to arrest a surge in homicides in recent years – security is the main thrust of his campaign, which includes collecting signatures to hold a plebiscite together with the elections on whether to lower the age of sentencing to 16 from 18 for crimes such as rape and homicide [RBS-14-01]. However, it was more intriguing that Bordaberry’s criticism of the FA’s failure to deliver on key national issues should have coincided with Mujica’s call for public sector employees to be rotated in their jobs every 10 to 15 years.

Mujica has been promising a profound state reform since he took office in March 2010, but he has made scant progress. According to figures included in his government’s annual report presented to congress on 1 March to open the new session, Mujica has not only been unable to streamline the bloated state sector, but it has actually grown even bigger on his watch. There were a total of 268,443 public sector jobs at the end of 2012, up from 248,157 when Mujica took office.

Argentina and Aratirí

Unsurprisingly these statistics were not included in Mujica’s introductory message to the annual report, presented to congress exactly one year before he hands over power to his successor (most likely to be his predecessor, former president Tabaré Vázquez [2005-2010]), when he expatiated on a range of issues. Indeed, the message, and the report, was remarkable not so much for what it said as for what it did not say. There was no mention at all, for instance, of Argentina or the controversial Aratirí mining project to exploit 250m tonnes of iron ore deposits within some 14,000 hectares overlapping the boundaries of the three central departments of Durazno, Florida and Treinta y Tres.

Uruguay’s tempestuous relations with Argentina have been well-documented, but the report’s identification of Brazil, Venezuela and even Mexico as the country’s strategic partners looked like a deliberate slight even if it were not intended as one.

The omission of Aratirí from the report was also somewhat perplexing given that the government pushed through congress historic legislation last August allowing open-pit mining in the country, and that elsewhere the report emphasised that the planned deep-water port on Uruguay’s Atlantic coast, which is intimately linked to the mining project, would “re-found the country and the region”. The industry minister, Roberto Kreimerman, said on 20 February that Aratirí, which has been fiercely opposed by the agricultural sector but does not seem to have stirred the imagination of the general public yet (see sidebar), would shortly be agreed with the Indian mining firm Zamin Ferrous, and could net the country US$400m annually over the next 20 years.

Drugs
On the issue of drugs, the national drug council (JND) revealed in the annual report that a total of 2.1 tonnes of marijuana was confiscated in 2013, along with 81.7kg of cocaine and 74.5kg of cocaine paste. The JND said that it had trained 170 border control officials to prevent marijuana from being smuggled out of Uruguay once it begins to be sold by the State in pharmacies later this year, when the law legalising the cultivation and sale of the drug takes effect.

The government expects to have the regulation of the law on marijuana in place by this April. The secretary general of the JND, Julio Calzada, has estimated production of 20-22 tonnes a year to supply the domestic market; the JND is working on measures to prevent its resale. The JND elaborated in the annual report on numerous forums and seminars held in 2013 in one of which, for instance, experts from the Colombian national police helped train Uruguayan personnel in port and airport drug control. But, as things stand, the JND has not furnished the public with any real details on how it will prevent illegal trafficking of marijuana or how it will provide security of marijuana crop plantations.

The JND’s overview in the annual report preceded by three days the presentation of the annual report of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), on 4 March, by Raymond Yans, the president of the UN body. Yans has been an outspoken critic of the Mujica administration’s law legalising marijuana, and he reiterated his comments that it contravenes the 1961 single convention on narcotic drugs, while reminding Uruguay of the need to respect treaties.

The INCB report itself merely “notes with concern that in July 2013, the lower house of Uruguay approved new legislation that would allow the State to assume control over and regulate activities related to the importation, production or acquisition of any title, storage, sale or distribution of cannabis or its derivatives, under terms and conditions to be determined by a regulation, for the purpose of non- medical use.” Yans, however, explained, that the absence of more pertinent criticism was due to the fact that Uruguay’s senate only approved the law in December - after the INCB’s annual report was finished. Yans described the law as “a misguided initiative”, adding that “drug-traffickers will choose the path of least resistance, so it is essential that global efforts to tackle the drug problem are unified”.

Marijuana smuggling

Just as congress was reading in the government’s annual report about the national drug council (JND)’s efforts to train border control officials to prevent marijuana from being smuggled out of Uruguay after the marijuana law takes effect, news emerged of a significant amount of marijuana being smuggled in. A total of 190 kilos of marijuana was discovered in a ranch on the outskirts of Bella Unión, a city in the northernmost corner of Uruguay, after an investigation into the death of a Bella Unión native in a suspected settling of scores in Montevideo on 4 February.

The find confirmed Bella Unión as a strategic location exploited by Brazilian criminal gangs, which traffic marijuana from Paraguay, cocaine from Bolivia, crack cocaine from Brazil, and cocaine paste from Argentina. Bella Unión is located in the northern department of Artigas, 6kms from the Brazilian border town of Barra de Quaraí, linked by an international bridge across the River Cuareim. This is a tributary of the River Uruguay, which separates Bella Unión from the Argentine town of Monte Caseros, half an hour away by boat.

• Aratirí - According to the most recent poll conducted by Equipos Mori in early March, 26% of the population agree with the Aratirí mining project. This has been presented by some opponents of the project as a sign that the public is not in favour of the project. However, the poll also shows that 26% of respondents had never even heard of Aratirí, 15% were unsure, and 10% did not reply. This leaves just 23% who were actually against it. President Mujica stressed the importance of not creating an “apocalyptic” vision of the project.

• Mujica - President José Mujica gave a characteristically straight-talking interview to the Brazilian paper O Globo this month defending his government’s decision to legalise the production and sale of marijuana. “It is not legalisation as people imagine abroad […] foreigners cannot come to Uruguay to buy marijuana. There will be no marijuana tourism. It is a tool to combat a serious crime: drug-trafficking, and to protect society.” Mujica also defended the legalisation of same-sex marriage: “We applied a very simple principle: recognise facts […] gay marriage, for instance, is older than the hills. We had Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great. People say it is modern but it is older than all of us. It is an objective reality. It exists. Not to legalise it would be to torture people uselessly.”