Why your happiness matters to the planet: Surveys and research link true happiness to a smaller footprint on the ecology.

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff, Staff Writer of The Christian Science Monitor / July 22, 2008
From New York, Reporter Moises Velasquez-Manoff discusses the correlations between happiness, material goods, and ecological footprints.

Overall, people around the world have grown happier during the past 25 years - this according to the most recent World Values Survey (WVS), a periodic assessment of happiness in 97 nations.

On average, people describing themselves as “very happy” have increased by nearly 7 percent. The findings seem to contradict the view, held by some, that national happiness levels are more or less fixed.

The report’s authors attribute rising world happiness to improved economies, greater democratization, and increased social tolerance in many nations. Along with material stability, freedom to live as one pleases is a major factor in subjective well-being, they say.

But the survey, based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research in Ann Arbor, also underscore that, beyond a certain point, material wealth doesn’t boost happiness.

The United States, which ranked 16th, and has the world’s largest economy, has largely stalled in happiness gains – this despite ever more buying power.

Americans are now twice as rich as they were in 1950, but no happier, according to the survey.

Other rich countries, the United Kingdom and western Germany among them, show downward happiness trends. For psychologists and environmentalists alike, these observations prompt a profound question. Rich countries consume the lion’s share of world resources.

Overconsumption is a major factor in environmental degradation, global warming chief among them.

Could a wrong-headed approach to seeking happiness, then, be exacerbating some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems? And could learning to be truly content help mitigate them?

In the past decade, a cadre of psychologists has directed its attention away from determining what’s wrong with the infirm toward quantifying what’s right with the healthy. They’ve christened this new field “positive psychology,” and what they’re discovering perhaps shouldn’t be all that surprising. At the core, humans are social beings. While food and shelter are absolutely essential to well-being, once these basic needs are fulfilled, engagement with other human beings makes people happiest.

For Martin Seligman, director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the problem in the US is not consumption per se, but that as a society we consume in ways that don’t make us happy. He divides the pursuit of happiness into three categories: seeking positive emotion, or feeling good; engagement with others; and meaning, or participating in something larger than oneself.

People, he notes, are often happiest when helping other people, when engaged in “self-transcendent” activities. What does this mean?

Rather than making a gift of the latest iPhone, buy someone dancing lessons, he says. Instead of taking a resort vacation, build a house with Habitat for Humanity.

“The pursuit of engagement and the pursuit of meaning don’t habituate,” he says, whereas trying to feel good is like eating French vanilla ice cream: The first bite is fantastic; the tenth tastes like cardboard.

By definition, happiness is subjective. And yet, scientists find measurable differences in people who describe themselves as happy. They’re more productive at work. They learn more quickly. Strong social networks – a large predictor of happiness – also have health effects, researchers say.

One study found that belonging to clubs or societies cut in half members’ risk of dying during the following year. Another found that, when exposed to a cold virus, children with stronger social networks fell ill only one-quarter as often as those without.

For psychologists, social networks explain one of the seeming paradoxes of WVS findings: While relatively rich Denmark took the top spot, much less wealthy Puerto Rico and Colombias are second and third. In fact, relatively poor Latin America countries often score high on WVS rankings. This may underline the value of community, family, and strong social institutions to well-being.

Scientists say this need for community may be a result of humanity’s long evolution in groups. Living together conferred an advantage, they say. In the hunter-gatherer world, relatedness, autonomy, curiosity, and competence – the very things that psychologists find make people happy – “had payoffs that were pretty clear,” says Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester in New York. “Aspiring for a lot of material goods is actually unhappiness-producing,” he says. “People who value material good and wealth also are people who are treading more heavily on the earth – and not getting happier.”

High consumption fails to make us happy, and it comes at a cost. According to the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) 2006 Living Planet Report, humanity’s ecological footprint now exceeds earth’s capacity to regenerate by about 25 percent.

Furthermore, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, North America accounts for 22 percent of this footprint. The US consumes twice what its land, air, and water can sustain. (By contrast, WWF calculates that Africa, with 13 percent of earth’s population, accounts for 7 percent of its footprint.) America’s outsize footprint results in part from its appetite for stuff – what psychologists now say is the wrong approach to lasting well-being.

“The pursuit of happiness can drive environmental degradation, but only a degraded type of happiness pursuit leads to that outcome,” says Kennon Sheldon, professor of psychological sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in an e-mail. “The standard western focus upon economic utility as the highest good (exemplified by the US) seems to encourage that kind of degraded pursuit.”

Worse, so-called “extrinsic” values (wealth, power, fame), as opposed to “intrinsic” values (adventure, engagement, meaning), seem to go hand-in-hand with more environmentally destructive behavior.

Tim Kasser, an associate professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., has found that people who are more extrinsically oriented tend to ride bikes less, buy second-hand less, and recycle less.

Nations with more individualistic and materialistic values also tend to be more ecologically destructive.

“The choice of sustainability is very consistent with a happier life,” Professor Kasser says. “Whereas the choice to live with materialistic [values] is a choice to be less happy.”

The idea that what’s good for humanity is also good for the planet is central to environmentalist Bill McKibben’s book “Deep Economy.” His prescriptions for lowering carbon emissions – living closer together, relocalizing food production, consuming less – line up with what psychologists say promotes happiness.

In fact, although painful in the short term, high fuel prices may result in happier Americans in the long run, says Mr. McKib ben. This year, Americans drove less than they did the year before – probably for the first time since the car was invented, he says. They also bought double the vegetable seeds this year compared with last. “These are signs of a new world,” he says by e-mail.

For their part, psychologists are advocating that policymakers use indicators other than the Gross National Product (GNP) to make decisions. What’s the purpose of an economy, they ask, if not to enhance the well-being of its citizenry?

“It’s because growth for growth sake” says Nic Marks, founder of the Centre for Well-beong at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in London. It’s got its own internal logic, but it’s not serving humanity. So why are we doing it?”

Bhutan uses Gross National Happiness as a measure of its success. Although small and undeveloped, the largely Buddhist nation is the happiest in Asia, according to BusinessWeek.

Psychologists also have specific recommendations to promote national happiness, based on their findings about what makes people happy. Insecurity fosters a materialistic approach to life, they say. Policies that combat insecurity – universal healthcare, say, or good, affordable education – promote happiness. Many link social policies like these to Scandinavian nations’ consistently high happiness rankings.

Kasser has more ideas: Limit – and tax – advertising, he says. To promote consumption, ads foster insecurity, he says. That hinders self-acceptance, which is another predictor of lasting well-being.

NEF’s Happy Planet Index (HPI), meanwhile, has developed a new measure of a nation’s success. How efficiently does it generate happiness? HPI takes a country’s happiness and average life span and divides it by its ecological impact to measure how much it spent in achieving its well-being. On this scale, the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanatu comes in first place, Colombia second. Germany is twice as efficient at producing happiness as the US, which ranks 150th by that measure. Russia, with its low happiness scores and relatively low life expectancy, is 178th. And Zimbabwe, plagued by poverty and political turmoil, is the least efficient at producing happiness on Earth.

How The HPI is calculated:

The HPI reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of planetary resources consumed.

Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.
The Global HPI incorporates three separate indicators: ecological footprint, life-satisfaction and life expectancy. Conceptually, it is straight forward and intuitive:

HPI = [ (Life satisfaction x Life expectancy) /(Ecological Footprint + α) ] x ß

(For details of how alpha and beta are calculated, see the appendix in the full Happy Planet Index report)

The World Values Survey is available at: www.worldvaluessurvey.org www.happyplanetindex.org

Download the reports
Download the Happy Planet report (2006, pdf)
Download the European Happy Planet report (2007, pdf)

See the Global HPI map:  http://www.happyplanetindex.org/map.htm

The article appeared in The Christian Science Monitor - http://features.csmonitor.com/environmen…

It’s not genetics that makes Danes happy and Russians gloomy, according to the World Values Survey which, for thirty years, has been sending out questionnaires to people in 95 countries to ”know how others experience the world”. (NEWSCOM)

Wednesday, July 30, 2008, NATURAL SELECTIONS  http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fe20…

Climate change in Costa Rica

By ROWAN HOOPER
A couple of weeks ago I was woken at dawn by the booming screeches of the aptly named Howler Monkey. I was in Costa Rica, in the cloud forest of Monteverde.

The author deep in the Monteverde cloud forest of Costa Rica, which gets a whopping 3,000 mm of rain a year.

Among those who know, Monteverde is famous because the cloud-forest reserve is at the center of a crossroads — to the north is temperate America, to the south the Tropics. Animals and plants meet in the isthmus connecting the north and south — and there they mingle.

To the west is the Pacific Ocean; to the east the Atlantic. On top of all that, the country is divided by a volcanic mountain chain — to the east of which lies the Caribbean tectonic plate, to the west the Pacific plate.

It is this unique location and biogeography that gives Monteverde — and indeed the country — its remarkable and unparalleled biodiversity. For anyone with even a passing interest in wildlife, the place is an embarrassment of biological riches.

There are more varieties of butterflies and moths in Costa Rica, for example, than in all of Africa — hardly a continent lacking in jungles or diverse habitats. As well, almost 900 species of birds have been recorded in this small country — more than in the United States and Canada combined.

In total there are more than 500,000 known species in Costa Rica — that’s 5 percent of all the species in the world living on just 50,000 sq. km of land — a place about the size of West Virginia.

Costa Rica, though only the size of West Virginia, is home to more than 500,000 known animal species, inlcuding more varieties of moths and butterflies, such as this Clearwing Butterfly, than in the whole of Africa ROWAN HOOPER PHOTOS

When I visited it was the rainy season, and not long after waking to the Howler Monkeys my friend and I, and a guide, Ricardo, hiked into the forest wearing rubber boots and carrying waterproof jackets and jungle hats.

After all, Monteverde gets a whopping 3,000 mm of rain a year, and even when it doesn’t rain I’d heard that the clouds and mist carry so much moisture that you’d likely be soaked without protective gear.

Not this time. The sun blazed all day. And the next day too, when we hiked for 7 hours in the forest. Well, aren’t we lucky, we said to each other a little ruefully, here we are in the cloud forest and there are no clouds.

We’d seen clouds the day before, driving up the precipitous mountain roads as clouds swept up from the Pacific and over the forest. And from my hotel room, right on the edge of the forest reserve, I saw the mist pushing through the trees. But when we walked through the forest — no clouds.

When I got back from Central America I found some research on a new regional climate model, made specifically to look in detail at Costa Rica.

To predict the effects of climate change, Ambarish Karmalkar of the University of Massachusetts’ Amherst Climate System Research Center used a regional modeling system capable of accommodating the complex topography of Costa Rica.

He tested the computer model using actual rainfall and temperature data collected in Central America between 1961 and 1990, then looked at what would happen if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubled.

The simulation predicts that temperature will rise by 3 C, and that the mountainous Pacific slopes and the Caribbean lowlands will receive up to 30 percent less rain. There will be an overall increase in the height of the cloud base of up to 300 meters.

“We have completed a regional climate model showing that many areas of Costa Rica will become warmer and drier as climate change accelerates, and these changes will be amplified at higher elevations,” said Karmalkar.

As this happens, plants and animals will try to migrate up slope, to conditions where they can more comfortably grow, forage and reproduce. But other species already live in these regions, and eventually they will reach the top of the mountains.

“Central America is a major, emerging ‘hot spot’ in the Tropics where climate- change impacts on the environment will be pronounced, and the loss of species associated with climate has already been identified,” Karmalkar notes.

I should know better, but it is hard not to equate the predictions Karmalkar’s model makes — that mountainous forests in Costa Rica will become warmer and drier as climate change accelerates — with my experience in the cloud forest.

Now, it makes no scientific sense to link single events to global-climate change. So it is not possible to say, for example, that Hurricane Katrina, the storm that so devastated New Orleans in August 2005, was caused by global warming. It was this implicit link, among others, that got Al Gore into trouble with his film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

It was obviously just chance — or our bad luck, which was how we saw it — that there were no clouds when we were in the cloud forest. But neither were there any frogs — none I could see or hear, anyway.

“You don’t see frogs,” said Ricardo, who has worked in the cloud forest for 10 years. “You used to see more, but not now.”

You used also to see, if you were lucky, the Golden Toad of Monteverde. If the Polar Bear has become a symbol of global warming in the Arctic, the Golden Toad has that dubious honor in Costa Rica. The spectacular bright-yellow-orange amphibian is classified as extinct — not having been seen since 1989.

Its demise has also been blamed on global warming. If so, it will likely be only one of many such extinctions. You can argue the point all you like about the causes of climate change, but the fact is that an overwhelming majority of scientists — and now even politicians — agree that it is mostly driven by human activity.

So although it is difficult to pin to global-warming individual examples such as Hurricane Katrina or the demise of the Golden Toad, it is fair to say that Costa Rica — one of the most biodiverse countries on Earth — will lose species as the planet warms up.

The second volume of Natural Selections columns translated into Japanese is published by Shinchosha. The title is “Hito wa ima mo shinka shiteru (The Evolving Human: How new biology explains your journey through life).” It is priced at ¥1,500.

Colombia rescues Ingrid Betancourt
and three Americans held by the FARC

From: New York based Americas Society/Council of the Americas
 cminerlegrand at as-coa.org

July 2, 2008—The Americas Society and Council of the Americas hail Colombia’s rescue of 15 captives, including Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans, held by the FARC (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerilla group. The rescue is a victory not only for all the captives and their families, but also for the institutional strength of a government besieged by the FARC for over 40 years.

The rescue of Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate captured in 2002, as well as of three American military contractors taken in 2003, is a decisive strike against the FARC and an important step toward the continued reassertion of the rule of law and state authority.

“Over time, President Uribe has considerably weakened the territorial control of the FARC. By rescuing four of its highest profile hostages, he has significantly reduced the FARC’s ability to bargain internationally,” said Susan Segal, President and CEO of AS/COA.

The United States must do all it can to support nations such as Colombia, which has proven itself a willing and able partner and a leader in the region. At AS/COA’s 2008 Washington Conference on the Americas, Colombia Minister of Defense Juan Manuel Santos emphasized Colombia’s transition to a model of democratic security, a transformation assisted in part through its partnership with the United States. With this historic event, Colombia has again demonstrated its determination to actively shape its future.

###
Americas Society (AS) is the premier forum dedicated to education, debate, and dialogue in the Americas. Its mission is to foster an understanding of the contemporary political, social, and economic issues confront Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada, and to increase public awareness and appreciation of the diverse cultural heritage of the Americas and the importance of the inter-American relationship.

Council of the Americas (COA) is the premier international business organization whose members share a common commitment to economic and social development, open markets, the rule of law, and democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere. The Council’s membership consists of leading international companies representing a broad spectrum of sectors including banking and finance, consulting services, consumer products, energy and mining, manufacturing, media, technology, and transportation.

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Wednesday, July 2, 2008, a Press Release From The Council on Hemispheric Affairs - The Washington DC based COHA.

BREAKING NEWS: COLOMBIA - INGRID BETANCOURT LIBERATED FROM FARC - FREE AT LAST
FARC Must Now Begin To Think About Its End Game.

In recent weeks, COHA has issued a number of communiqués to the press that have explored various aspects of Colombia’s domestic and regional policies. This material, in addition to that which is available on its website, can be obtained by contacting COHA’s office at  coha at coha.org or calling 202-223-4975. To contact COHA director Larry Birns, please call 202-215-3473.

FARC’s Fatal Blow
In yet another blow to Colombia’s leftist guerrilla group Las Fuerzas Armadas de Colombia (FARC), former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages were freed in a brilliant military operation on 2 July 2008. Betancourt was taken captive six years ago and was, for the duration of that time, the FARC’s highest profile hostage. Among the other detainees rescued are three American defense contractors and members of the Colombian security forces.

According to Colombia’s hardline Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos, whose star is very much in ascendancy in a movie-script fashion, Colombian intelligence forces managed to infiltrate the FARC’s Secretariat and intercept the transfer of key hostages from one area of the country to another. The operation, termed jaque, after the Spanish word “check,” as in “check mate,” was the culmination of a year’s worth of preparation. The rescue of the hostages represents a huge victory for the Uribe government and yet another in a series of crucial defeats for FARC forces. It may also signal the successful impact of the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been pumped annually into the Colombian military by the U.S. under Plan Colombia. Such funds already have been used to persuade hundreds, if not thousands, of FARC fighters to demobilize and certainly provided a strong motivation for the murder of Ivan Ríos (for which his renegade personal bodyguard was rewarded $2.5 million).

FARC’s Precarious Future
With Betancourt’s release, the FARC has lost its highest profile hostage and now is in a very precarious position for negotiation and may have to bow to the demands of the Colombian government. Hopefully, its recent fate will be a clear signal to the FARC that Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was correct when, on June 10 of this year, he urged “Enough of so much war, it is time to sit down and talk of peace. […] The guerrilla has passed into history.”

Recalling the abrupt decline of Peru’s Shining Path guerrilla movement after the 1992 capture of its leader Abimael Guzman, it is unlikely that FARC will be able to survive in its present form given the natural death of its leader, Manuel Marulanda, and the series of crippling blows it has experienced at the hands of the Colombian army. Undoubtedly, Colombia’s military has been assisted by the CIA and the hundreds of U.S. armed forces advisors and trainers now in the country.

Political Implications
Uribe has benefited immensely from the rapid decline in the FARC’s vitality and relevance. Only time will tell how Uribe’s military exploits and his astronomical approval rating will affect the possible de-legitimization of his 2006 run for office. It will also be interesting to see if Betancourt, immensely popular during her run for Senate and the presidency, will present a very strong challenge to the president if she decides to run for office either in a possible re-run election or the official elections slated for 2010.

It is true that Uribe’s hawkish democratic security policy has resulted in significant progress for the country. Homicide and kidnapping rates have fallen dramatically and Colombians have resumed many of their ordinary activities without fear of suffering violence caused by the conflict. His popularity is a result of these advances, however, this success may unfortunately lend credibility to those who have supported Uribe’s iron-fist approach and substantive program from the beginning: members of the Bush administration and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. The danger in attributing Uribe’s accomplishments to U.S. foreign policy achievements in Latin America is that it reaffirms strategies that are overly simplistic and ill-informed. It should not be ignored that upwards of twenty percent of Uribe’s legislature is currently under investigation for its links to paramilitary groups, who are historic human rights violators. Even Uribe himself has been accused of links to the illegally armed groups. Mindless U.S. support of a regime that tacitly allowed such groups to function should not be applauded nor should the hundreds of trade union leaders that have been murdered during the Uribe presidency be forgotten.

Additionally, cocaine’s effect on the trajectory of the conflict cannot be underestimated. In the 2008 World Drug Report, the United Nations reported that coca cultivation in Colombia increased 27% in 2007. Assistant secretary of State Thomas Shannon attributed these statistics to the growing sophistication of coca cultivators. This is certainly true for many aspects of the conflict. For every bit of progress that the Colombian government makes, various actors will try to stay one step ahead, driven by vast cocaine profits which provide an incredibly strong incentive for the continued destabilization of Colombian institutions. No matter what the ultimate fate of the FARC, it will be quite some time before Colombia can claim victory for the quality or depth of its democracy.

This analysis was prepared by Research Associates Erina Uozumi, Jessica Bryant, Elizabeth Reavey, Chris Sweeney, Michael Katz, and Aviva Elzufon.

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But also in the news:

Banana-gate: McCain Backer’s Firm Pleaded Guilty To Funding Anti-FARD Terrorist Group In Colombia.The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States. Former Chiquita CEO oversaw $1.7 million payoff to right-wing paramilitary group.
Posted by Nico Pitney, Huffington Post at 8:00 AM on July 2, 2008.

Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company’s board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University’s National Security Archive as an “illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country’s most notorious civilian massacres.”

Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita’s payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.

According to the Justice Department, the payments “were reviewed and approved by senior executives” of Chiquita, who knew by no later than September 2000 “that the AUC was a violent, paramilitary organization.”

Late last week, Lindner co-hosted a $25,000-per-person fundraiser for McCain and the Republican Party in the wealthy Indian Hills neighborhood of Cincinnati, Ohio. The event raised about $2 million; Lindner also serves on McCain’s Ohio Victory Team.

While Lindner was CEO of Chiquita, the company began sending money to the AUC through its shipping subsidiary Banadex. A report by the Organization of American States states that Banadex also engaged in arms trafficking, helping to deliver 3,000 Nicaraguan AK-47 rifles and millions of rounds of ammunition to the AUC in 2001. According to federal prosecutors, when company officials realized the arrangement was illegal, they switched to making the payments in cash.

“We believe they saved people’s lives,” a Chiquita spokesman told Time magazine last year, alleging that the company was simply trying to avoid violence against their employees.

Chiquita’s funding of violent paramilitaries does not end with the right-wing AUC. The fruit giant “had been making similar payments to the leftist FARC and ELN guerrillas” since 1989, also on Lindner’s watch. Those payments ended in 1997 as “control of the company’s banana-growing area shifted” to the AUC, according to the Associated Press.

McCain, who is currently visiting Colombia to promote free trade, has described FARC as “one of the worst” terrorist groups and accused his opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, of being unwilling to support Colombian President Uribe’s anti-terrorist efforts.

That the Arizona Republican is raising funds from a man whose company once paid that very same terrorist group seems likely to sully his charge.

Aides to the Senator did not return request for comment, though they have repeatedly argued that the campaign does not have direct connections to companies represented by such fundraisers or advisers and, as such, should not be held accountable for their actions or presumed to be persuaded by their interests.

However, in the past, McCain has done favors on Lindner’s behalf. Last May, the Washington Post reported that in the late 1990s, McCain “promoted a deal in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest involving property part-owned by Great American Life Insurance, a company run by billionaire Carl H. Lindner Jr., a prolific contributor to national political parties and presidential candidates.”

Moreover, McCain’s chief political adviser, Charlie Black, lobbied for Chiquita on two separate occasions in 2001. According to records, Black was paid $80,000 to work on foreign trade issues.

Black, as the Huffington Post reported on Tuesday, has represented other controversial clients with operations in Colombia. From 2001 through 2007, his work brought his firm more than $1.6 million in lobbying fees from Occidental Petroleum, a company whose security arm was accused of bombing a Colombian village and killing 17 civilians in 1998.

[ED: The families of the victims of the paramilitary are suing Chiquita for arming the terrorists.]

Washington Revives the Fourth Fleet: The Return of U.S. Gun Boat Diplomacy to Latin America.

What does Ecuador’s President Correa know that Colombia’s President Uribe also knows?

This is What The Council On Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) Asks In an e-mail of June 2, 2008.

 http://www.coha.org/2008/06/02/washingto…
President Correa’s persistence in terms of pursuing the validity of the data found on the laptops seized by Colombian forces during their March 1, 2008 raid on the FARC camp located just inside the Ecuadorian border, raises questions on the motivation for his stand. Is it that Correa feels that he has little to lose if the whole story comes out because the facts will vindicate him? If he felt that Ecuador would be in any way be compromised as a result of full disclosure, why would he drill away at the incident?

Both Colombia’s President Uribe and Venezuela’s President Chávez have exhibited conflicting attitudes over downgrading the exposure being given to the present confrontation between Bogotá and Caracas. At times, they throw gasoline at the fire, while at other times, they seemingly attempt to snuff out the flame. President Correa, however, has never relented on his insistence that Colombia not only make restitutions for the cross border incursion, but also apologize for Bogotá’s current media campaign and allegations against his country.

Relations between the two countries, already strained by the longtime issue of toxic herbicide spraying of Ecuadorian territory along the Colombian border, have been further exacerbated by the bitter mistrust between the Colombian and Ecuadorian leaders regarding the FARC files. Correa claims that the only contact that Ecuador has had with the FARC was of a humanitarian nature, and that guerrilla infiltration across the borders is impossible to totally control by either side. Uribe has countered that Ecuador was harboring terrorists, thus implying that Quito was explicitly protecting the FARC.

Therefore, Correa´s committed campaign against Colombia and his unwillingness to yield in his insistence in obtaining President Uribe’s public acknowledgement of Colombia’s culpability, which would exonerate Ecuador’s good name, raises a specific question. Why would Correa so relentlessly stick with the issue if he were not convinced that he possessed a strong hand in arguing that Ecuador had no compromising relationship with the FARC, that the laptop revealed no embarrassing information regarding that relationship (at least from Quito’s perspective), and that, at best, Colombia’s case against Ecuador is weak and deserves little sympathy either from the region or the international community. Or could it be that the FARC computer scandal has been largely contrived by Colombia to discredit any number of South American left-leaning administrations as part of a larger conservative campaign to isolate these governments and reinforce Washington’s assessment of the situation and the way in which it would like to have the script read?
Prepared by COHA Research Associate Erina Uozumi
• Administration not bothering to conceal implicit threat to the region

• After ignoring Latin America for most of his Presidency, Bush dispatches the Navy

• The steady remilitarization of Panama may provide a safe haven for the revitalized fleet

• FTA with Panama could grant U.S. access to canal zone military facility for Fourth Fleet

• Correa facetiously suggests that Manta be moved to Colombia

The dearth of diplomatic content in the April 24 Pentagon announcement left little mystery regarding the purpose behind Washington’s decision to reestablish the Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American and Caribbean waters. As Washington shifts its attention back to the Western Hemisphere, it will have to grapple with issues that have been on the back burner for more than a decade. The return of the Fourth Fleet, largely unnoticed by the U.S. press, appears to represent a policy shift that projects an image of Washington once again asserting its military authority on the region, coincidentally coinciding with the announcement that Brazil has just launched a military initiative, the Conselho Sul-Americano de Defesa, embracing two of its neighbors with whom Washington has chilly relations.

The Rise of an Autonomous Latin America During a Period of U.S. Neglect:

While Washington has been involved in the Middle East, a number of Latin American governments have been enjoying a degree of de facto freedom from the State Department’s traditionally pervasive influence. This has given regional policymakers the opportunity to implement economic models, trade patterns and ideological commitments contrary to the liking of the U.S. Certainly, Venezuela’s Chavez stands out as the most energized and driven anti-U.S. regional leader, easily outranking Castro’s Cuba in regards to their contemporary influence. Not without his critics, the boldness of Chavez’s challenge to U.S. hemispheric supremacy and his willingness to duke it out mano-a-mano with the most powerful country in the world has aided his ascent to becoming a pivotal hemispheric leader. The surge in crude oil prices worldwide that began soon after Chávez took office, vaulting from $8 in 1998 to over $130 a barrel has today allowed him to implement an aggressive and foreseeing foreign trade and aid policy. Chávez single-handedly upgraded Venezuela’s military by using surplus petro-dollars to purchase large quantities of sophisticated Russian and Spanish military hardware.

In an apparent victory for Washington diplomacy, the socialist Chilean diplomat José Manuel Insulza was elected in 2005 to head the Organization of American States. Initially supporting the State Department’s perspective on trade strategy, he, in practice, asserted himself as a fairly reliable defender of Latin American autonomy. In 2006, Venezuela had fought a determined campaign against Washington favorite, Guatemala, to gain a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. To the dismay of both countries, a relatively “neutral” Panama eventually won the seat. While Washington campaigned to prevent Caracas from being seated, countries with compromised international standing such as Libya and Iran were chosen by their regional caucuses to the Security’s Council’s 2007-2009 term, without concerted U.S. opposition, indicating a lack of consistency in U.S. policy.

The Region’s Array of Ideologies and Balance of Forces:

The most significant legacy for Washington arising from its recent absence from American policy is the rise of ideologically left-leaning governments. This group of often like-minded leaders, sometimes referenced as the Pink Tide nations, is now considered a threat to Washington’s regional supremacy. At the forefront leftward shift are Venezuela’s Chavez, Bolivia’s Morales, Ecuador’s Correa, Cuba’s Castro, and Nicaragua’s Ortega. Comprising a more moderate left are Uruguay’s Vasquez and Paraguay’s Lugo. Brazil and Argentina, generally considered charter members of the Pink Tide countries, continue to deal with matters pragmatically, usually influenced by their status as regional heavyweights.

The U.S. only has two reliable allies in South America, Colombia’s Uribe and Peru’s Garcia. As these two leaders see it, it is in their best interest to not join the Pink Tide. Uribe, whose high domestic approval ratings reflect successes in his combating of the FARC, is receiving financial support from the U.S. Garcia, who tends to engage in “chameleon” politics, has made domestic policy rather than foreign policy his priority. This is in his best interest as he faces waning approval ratings that reflect the divisions within his ruling APRA party and the complex fall out from the trial of former dictator Alberto Fujimori.

The White House Does Not Get It When it Comes to Latin America:
The inattention to Latin America by the Bush Administration has created a debacle in recent years. The White House and the State Department did not place seasoned Latin Americanists at the top of the policymaking ladder. In spite of his Jamaican descent, for example, Colin Powell never demonstrated a strong interest in the region as Secretary of State. During Powell’s term, policy initiatives regarding Cuba were left almost exclusively to Assistant Secretary of State Otto Reich, U.S. Diplomat Roger Noriega, and United States Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte. These Cold War-era hawks continued to center regional policy on a decidedly anti-Cuban bias, while focusing a comparably hostile posture toward Hugo Chavez. Visits to the Latin America by U.S. leaders including Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice from April 25-30, 2005 to Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and El Salvador; President Bush in March 2007 to Brazil; and by then Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to Paraguay in April 2005, tended to be photo opportunities that did little to improve relations in any significant manner..

Recent U.S. policy initiatives in Latin America include the debut of the Central American Free Trade Agreement-Dominican Republic (CAFTA-DR). Gaining the backing of Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, CAFTA-DR will expose signatory countries economies to an influx of cheap U.S. subsidized agricultural produce and the domination by multi-national corporations that may stamp out local competition. Also, the shadowy, coerced ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti in February 2004 had several members of the Caribbean Community upset with the U.S. and France of helping bring about the de-facto coup against the Haitian president.

Navy Prepares for the Fourth Fleet:
The revived Fourth Fleet will be headquartered at the United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) base at Mayport Naval Station in Florida. Rear Admiral Joseph Kernan, current commander of the Naval Special Warfare Command, will direct it when it becomes operational on July 1, 2008. The degree of integration among the Fourth Fleet, SOUTHCOM, the U.S. Coast Guard and other Homeland Security agencies in carrying out discreet operations in the area of anti-terrorism remains to be seen. The precise size of the fleet is also unclear. An April 24 Bloomberg report mentions that the fleet will be lead by the nuclear aircraft carrier, USS George Washington. SOUTHCOM presently has eleven vessels that could potentially be placed under the authority of the Fourth Fleet. The head of SOUTHCOM, Admiral James G. Stavridis, is also a ranking naval officer. The working relationship among fleet commanders in terms of coordinating forces and missions could prove to be problematic.

This past April, vessels from the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina participated in UNITAS Atlantic “a SOUTHCOM-sponsored multi-national naval exercise to enhance security cooperation.” Part of the series of international exercises that are emerging in the region, participating Latin American militaries saw UNITAS Atlantic as a way to train their personnel and gain access to greater military technologies The USS George Washington was among the participating U.S. warships. In March-April of 2008, another military exercise, TRADEWINDS 2008, took place off the coast of the Dominican Republic and involved a number of Caribbean countries, the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Some Latin American and Caribbean military personnel may be excited by the arrival of the units of the Fourth Fleet at their docks with the possibility of obtaining valuable instruction from their U.S. and British counterparts while others will uncomfortably recall the days of the era of U.S. Naval supremacy.

Friendly Ports:

The emerging geopolitical situation in the Western Hemisphere calls into question where the friendly ports will be available for the Fourth Fleet to harbor.

Ecuador’s Correa adamantly insists that he will not tolerate any renewal of the U.S. lease of Manta, a multipurpose facility located on Ecuador’s Pacific coastline, which expires in 2009.

Rumors have been circulating that Peru is the next candidate for the U.S. to negotiate moorage rights, but President Alan Garcia repeatedly denies such speculations.

With the loss of Manta, what other friendly harbors will exist in the region? A close ally of the U.S., President Uribe of Colombia, could invite the Manta base operation to relocate to Guajira, near the border with Venezuela. Although the rumor received some validation by U.S. Ambassador to Colombia William Brownfield, who previously served as ambassador to Venezuela, Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos emphatically has denied the possible move.

Panama instead has emerged as one of the U.S.’s most plausible candidates. Recently, there have been steps taken which indicate that the country is cautiously militarizing.

Panamanian President Martín Torrijos appointed military man Jaime Ruiz to the head of the police force on May 13 even though the country’s constitution states that it should be a civilian post. The Panamanian Minister of Government and Justice, Daniel Delgado Diamante, in reference to Merida Initiative (passed by the U.S. House of Foreign Affairs on May 14th and currently awaiting senate action, its goal is to combat crime and narco-trafficking in Mexico and Central America), has stated that Panama deserves a greater quantity of U.S. monetary aid since it previously seized 70 tons of cocaine, as opposed to Mexico’s 46 tons.

If Panama is militarizing under the cover of its anti-drug efforts, then the government is likely to welcome U.S. economic aid, technology, equipment, and expertise. There is potential for the perfect swap; military aid for a naval haven for the Fourth Fleet.

If U.S. anti-drug and anti-terrorism operations are moved from Manta, the next step could very well be relocating to La Gaujira or the Panama Canal among other possibilities.

The Fourth Fleet from a Geopolitical Point of View:

The revival of the Fourth Fleet may do little more than attempt to introduce a quick fix to Bush’s failed U.S. policy towards Latin America. The Fleet’s rebirth implies that Washington’s gun boat diplomacy represents a new call to arms.

The U.S. may again be prepared to use the prospect of military force if it is found necessary to protect U.S. national interests in Latin America. In particular, the possibility of using the Fourth Fleet already seems to be involved in a calculated and provocative move against Washington’s current bete noir, Hugo Chávez. As Admiral Gary Roughead, chief of naval operations, stated, “this change increases our emphasis in the region on employing naval forces to build confidence and trust […] through collective maritime security efforts that focus on common threats and mutual interests.” The senior naval commander’s ominous words evoke sentiments akin to the collective security provisions of the Rio Pact of 1947, rather than a civic action template that stresses the use of military assistance mainly to provide humanitarian aid and relief. Traditionally organized along other lines, requires a different type of explanation than the rationale given for the revival of the Fourth Fleet.

Left-leaning Latin America has good reason to question the motives behind over the renewal of the U.S. notion that the Caribbean Sea is virtually mar Americanus.

The Pentagon’s aspirations - particularly during the tenure of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, to improve ties with militaries throughout the Americas by regular “ministerials,” could inadvertently encourage its Latin American counterparts to initiate similar scenarios of expansion, modernization, and the revival of their dangerous central roles plagued by past military juntas in their respective societies.

The Dispatch of the Fourth Fleet: A Turn to Style, not Substance - Washington’s Fourth Fleet initiative is mainly not a welcomed development in U.S. Latin American policy relations. While raising apprehensions of covert U.S. military and intelligence ranks to the armed forces of hemispheric leftist regimes, as voiced by Correa of Ecuador in April 2008, the Fleet’s presence could also lead to the diminishment local funding for broad social and humanitarian needs as Latin America’s defense establishments will seek to bolster their budgets in response to the growing threat posed by neighboring militaries which are building up their armed forces.

The return of gun boat diplomacy is only a confirmation to Latin America that the U.S. is unaware of some of the new realities as the region seeks out its destiny without the White House at its helm.

This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns and Research Associate Aviva Elzufon
June 2nd, 2008

nbsp;washingtonpost.com  > World  > Africa - looking at a new mess in the making.

U.S. Africa Command Trims Its Aspirations - Nations Loath to Host Force - Aid Groups Resisted Military Plan to Take On Relief Work.

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 1, 2008; Page A18

The U.S. Africa Command, designed to boost America’s image and prevent terrorist inroads on the continent, has scaled back its ambitions after African governments refused to host it and aid groups protested plans to expand the military’s role in economic development in the region.

Africom, due to begin operations Oct. 1, will now be based for the foreseeable future in Stuttgart, Germany, with five smaller regional offices planned for the continent on hold while the military searches for places to put them.

Nonmilitary jobs, created within Africom to highlight new cooperation between the Pentagon and the State Department, have been hard to fill and will initially total fewer than 50 of 1,300 headquarters personnel. Plans to broaden the military’s more traditional overseas training and liaison responsibilities to include development and relief tasks were curbed after U.S.-funded aid groups sharply objected to working alongside troops.

“I think in some respects we probably didn’t do as good a job as we should have when we rolled out Africom,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said recently, adding that “I wasn’t there” when the command was conceived by his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, and approved by President Bush.

“I don’t think we should push African governments to a place they don’t really want to go in terms of relationships,” Gates said.

Planning for Africom began in early 2006, when the Bush administration designated Africa an area of “strategic concern” and policymakers cited a number of “pre-conflict” situations there. Based on lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. military is deeply involved in civil affairs and economic development efforts, Africom was fashioned as a template for a new interagency structure that would coordinate “hard” and “soft” U.S. power.

U.S. Agency for International Development personnel were assigned to Africom, and a senior State Department diplomat was named one of two command deputies under Army Gen. William E. “Kip” Ward. Not only would Africom help make Africa secure, Bush said when he unveiled it in February 2007, it would help promote “development, health, education, democracy and economic growth.”

Africa has always been an orphan in the U.S. defense establishment, divvied up among the Pentagon’s four regional “Unified Combatant Commands” — European, Central, Southern and Pacific — that manage U.S. military relationships and operations overseas.

Of the four, only Eucom, established in post-World War II Germany, is based overseas.

Pacom handles Asia from its headquarters in Hawaii;

Southcom, responsible for Latin America, and Centcom, in charge of operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, are both in Florida.

There was no Africom - period - probably Nigerian oil was left to be handled by the local ccoperative rulers. That was good until the Chinese showed up. Now the Indians, the Japanese, the Brazilians, are not far behind. www.SustainabiliTank.info comments.}

Under Africom, one command will consolidate military responsibility for all of Africa, excluding Egypt.

Although it encompasses the volatile Horn of Africa and the U.S. Navy’s forward operating base in Djibouti and will take over training tasks on the continent, it has no other dedicated troop components. “There are very few scenarios which would create a U.S. military intervention” in Africa, said one Africom officer who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Arguably, there are no scenarios.”

With its headquarters on the continent, liaison groups of 20 to 30 military personnel established in key countries and U.S. units brought in to help with development and relief tasks, the command was envisioned as an example to Africans of how their own armed forces and civilians could work together for the good of their nations. { ??? }

The trouble was, no one consulted the Africans. “Very little was really known by the majority of people or countries in Africa who were supposed to know before such a move was made,” said retired Kenyan army Lt. Gen. Daniel Opande. Worry swept the continent that the United States planned major new military installations in Africa. { ?!?!}

“If you know the politics of Africa,” said Opande, who has headed U.N. peacekeeping forces in Sierra Leone and Liberia, “you know there are certain very powerful countries who said, no, we are not interested in having a headquarters here.” South Africa and Nigeria were among them, and their resistance helped persuade others.

Over the past seven years, the administration has more than tripled U.S. assistance to Africa, to about $9 billion annually, nearly half of which is spent on prevention and treatment for HIV-AIDS. U.S. military training for African forces has steadily expanded, and U.S. troops have undertaken humanitarian missions in several countries — digging wells, building schools and providing medical care. Africom’s budget request for 2009 is about $400 million.

But despite the promise of new development and security partnerships, many Africans concluded that Africom was primarily an extension of U.S. counterterrorism policy, intended to keep an eye on Africa’s large Muslim population. {!!!}

“I think everyone thought it would be widely greeted as something positive,” the Africom officer said. “But you suddenly have wide publics that have no idea what we’re talking about. . . . It was seen as a massive infusion of military might onto a continent that was quite proud of having removed foreign powers from its soil.” {it seems that the expectation was similar to Iraq -they will embrace the US army as liberators. ?}

The United States “equates terrorism with Islam,” senior Kenyan diplomat Bethuel Kiplagat said, and few African governments wanted to be seen as inviting U.S. surveillance on their own people.

Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations African affairs subcommittee, thought Africom was “something that would show real respect for Africa.” But there was no question, Feingold said, that the concept had “a neocolonialist feel to it.”

The subject was at the top of African leaders’ agendas when Bush visited in February. “The purpose of this is not to add military bases,” he told reporters after meeting with Ghanian President John Kufuor. By Bush’s own account, Kufuor confronted him, saying, “You&